The Dreams Fight Back

I have this lucid dream ability, or maybe I used to have. The ability grew gradually since high school, but it seems I started losing it since last year.

Before I had this ability, I would wake up (or not) after a nightmare. Then I found out I could continue the dream after waking up. When I wake up, I can clearly remember the last part of the nightmare. Because I’ve woken up, I can reconsider the situation and rewrite the dream as I like. If I was chased by enemy, I can give weapon to myself just like typing a cheat code in an FPS game.

Gradually this process became more and more smooth. Suppressing waking up became not waking up at all. As soon as I feel I’m unreasonably threatened, I know it’s a dream and I can turn the table around. After several years of practice, I can enter a state like god mode in a game. Chased by enemy again? Freeze the time and fly up to the sky. From there I can reduce the number of enemy and increase the number of ally. Then I can come back to the ground and resume the game. If it’s unbalanced due to the enemy being too weak, I can pause the game and rebalance it. It’s just like balancing a custom RTS map.

I also gained the ability to wake myself up if I’m aware of being in a dream. It’s like the opposite of suppressing waking up. If I go to the bathroom for three times, no matter whether I manage to use it, I know it’s a dream. Then I can tell myself I really need to leave the dream and use the bathroom. All I need to do is trying to feel my sleeping body and open my eyelids. That’s enough to kick me out of the dream.

The ability isn’t perfect. It’s based on pattern recognition as far as I can understand. Unreasonable threat is the easier one. After that, I observed the repeating bathroom pattern and set up the rule of three for myself. However there are situations that I’m aware of being in a dream but I can’t do anything about it. One example is when I feel I really miss someone while I manage to keep contact with that person in my dream.

There was one time I recognized that person I miss doesn’t exist in real life, so it must be a dream. However I can only alter dream content but I can’t suppress feeling from the outside. It’s just like the need to use bathroom, but the result is the opposite. Instead of waking myself up after realizing it’s a dream, I chose to cling to that feeling and refuse to wake up as long as possible.

That wasn’t the weirdest case, as my dreams started to fight back and take the ability from me. Like I said, feeling being threatened can make me recognize it’s a dream. So my dreams started to steer away from that pattern. Now I stopped dreaming about I’m being chased. Instead, I dreamed about city being blown up. It’s just like immersive gaming experience. I watch unreasonable things happen, but I don’t feel getting hurt thus I don’t recognize being in a dream.

The weirdest thing is I started to use in-dream ability without realizing it’s a dream. There was a recent experience like this: I felt somewhat threatened. I closed my eyes and tried to think about me being in another location. I opened my eyes to see if I’ve been teleported to that location. I knew that I don’t have the teleportation ability all the time and I couldn’t tell when I have it. This strange understanding tricked me into not recognizing the dream, but I managed to teleport myself anyway.

In the end, I can’t tell whether the recent experience is a step forward or backward. It can be explained as a step forward. The explanation would be I can recognize and alter my dream so smoothly that I don’t consciously recognize my dream and it happens unconsciously. The opposite is also obvious: My dreams try to fight back and stay away from the pattern that I already can recognize. I don’t know which one is true, but it’s an interesting experience.

Pencil from FiftyThree

I just received my Pencil from FiftyThree today, and here’s how it looks like and how it feels like.

It comes within a nice paper tube. When you open it, you will notice the packaging is really nice. You would first pull out the Pencil, and then you would see the quick start manual. The plastic wrapper around the Pencil says you have to charge it first, so I pulled out the battery and plug it into an USB port.

It took maybe an hour to charge, and then the light turned from yellow to green. I don’t know how long the battery will last, but I think Bluetooth LE shouldn’t use a lot of energy. Now let’s start the Paper app.

I picked the walnut version. My piece of walnut wood doesn’t look as good as advertised, with less wooden color strips but more of those small cracks on the surface. I wouldn’t say it’s ugly, but just not as polished as I imagined. I tried to smell it. It was a silly idea because it doesn’t smell like wood at all.

Establishing connection with the app is much easier than Pogo Connect. You don’t need to install another app (of course), and you don’t need to click a button on the stylus to initiate the connection. Just use the Pencil to touch the pencil icon in Paper for a few seconds and it’s connected. Then you can start drawing without worrying about how it recognizes the Pencil (including the eraser), your fingers and your palm.

During my drawing, I noticed that Paper might recognize the Pencil (including eraser) as my finger. I guess it’s because I was not pressing the Pencil hard enough, so Paper received a touch without receiving Pencil down through Bluetooth. I tried to press harder when I use the Pencil and it seems that fixed the issue.

Drawing with Pencil is quite comfortable to me. It’s easier to control where the tip goes compared to Pogo Connect (or maybe my control over stylus has improved). The erasing area is not as big as the eraser, so I’d rather use undo if possible, because erasing a large area needs a lot of movement. Overall, I like drawing with Pencil more than with my previous styli, and $60 seems like a reasonable price to me.

W/Me - health tracker or notifier?

If you don’t know what W/Me is, here’s its Kickstarter introduction:

It’s the fastest Kickstarter project delivery I’ve ever seen. It’s funded on 7/2 and shipped on 8/26. That’s less than 2 months. I don’t know if they’ve secured funding and built the thing then used Kickstarter to get some early adopters. This speed is really amazing to me.

I got mine a few days ago. It came with a Kickstarter limited edition wooden box. Inside the box, there’s W/Me plus 3 color bands. (I grabbed the last early bird spot at the last moment. Maybe somebody got cold feet?) There’s quick start guide, alcohol pad and a small note that says “the device may not be functioning perfectly in some particular individuals”. (Hope I’m not that special!)

Before I received my W/Me, I noticed some Kickstarter backers said that it’s too small for them. However it’s obvious that W/Me is too large for my wrist. That made me wonder whether I should wear it around my wrist or around my forearm. (Later I found out I have to wear it around my wrist.)

Setting up the Bluetooth was easy, but starting the first measurement was rough. It kept saying that it couldn’t get good signal. I tried to touch it with different positions and my first measurement was still ended with a time-out. So I cleaned the sensors and tried again. The measurement wasn’t easy. It needs 3 minutes of data and any interruption requires at least 5 seconds to resume. At the end of the measurement I got 3 numbers: Agility, ANS Age, BPM. The problem is I don’t know their accuracy and I can’t verify them. (I can verify BPM with another app.)

After a few measurements, I started to learn how to do it properly. The best position to measure is above my wrist bone. Touching that area of the skin will give me stablest signal. However that only means no interruption. It doesn’t mean anything in terms of data quality. When the app shows a line that doesn’t look like a normal pulse line or a BPM way beyond 100, it’s collecting garbage. (Garbage in, garbage out.) So the real goal is to get data that makes sense to me.

(As you can see, when I tried to touch two buttons at the same time in order to take this screenshot, the pulse line went awry immediately.) I have to say that collecting the right data takes determination plus a little bit of luck. That discourages me from taking more measurement and makes coaching really hard to follow. Without the right data there’s no feedback, and without feedback coaching is a useless feature.

Besides health tracker features, W/Me has some small utility features. For example, in flashlight mode it turns on all its white LED lights and that’s actually brighter than my iPhone screen when in dark. It can be used as a remote control to iPhone camera, but I wish it works with Camera+. (Update: It actually works with Camera+ but in a weird way. I need to turn on find-my-iPhone and that signals Camera+ to take one photo.)

It vibrates when there’s new email or Facebook notification, but the unread number disappears so fast that I usually only get to know that there’s unread email or there’s unread Facebook notification. I wish they increase that delay (or allow me to adjust it) in next update. It can signal the iPhone to start playing W/Me theme music, which acts a find-my-iPhone feature. However when my iPhone was connected to a Bluetooth speaker, that music was played through that Bluetooth speaker, which makes the feature useless.

In conclusion, W/Me is a cool gadget but it’s not something that “just works”. If you just want some reliable health tracker, go back to Fitbit. To me, as long as it doesn’t break like Jawbone UP, I’m okay with it.

JAMBOX from Jawbone

JAMBOX is my second purchase from Jawbone. I bought UP, and because a lot of people found hardware problem with UP Jawbone gave everybody $150 credit without asking it back. I didn't want to buy another headset so I got a JAMBOX.

The first JAMBOX I received was broken. It was frustrating. I tried my best to fix it because I don't want to give it a round trip to the US. The problem is the battery. It never charged. Updating firmware didn't help. There's no fix. When I talked to Jawbone, they sent me a new one after they confirmed my purchase and allowed me to ship the broken one back after I received the new one. That's convenient.

When I got the new one, I found that it sounds good! When I watch a movie on my iPad, I connect JAMBOX and it makes the surrounding sound more real. When I need to play Diablo III on my MacBook Pro, I also use JAMBOX to enhance the sound effect. It's a really good companion if you have several device with just okay speakers.

I also use it when I make conference call. I know it has a microphone but I think it's more convenient to use my computer's. I might put my JAMBOX at any place but I don't what to yell at my JAMBOX, so speaking to my computer feels more comfortable to me. (Maybe I should test JAMBOX's microphone range in the future.)

The only problem of JAMBOX is that it falls into sleep when it's connected but no sound is played. Sleeping is not a problem indeed, but waking up is. For instance, when you resume a movie that you paused, JAMBOX will wake up but skip a few seconds. Your computer doesn't know that and wouldn't wait for that, so if you pause during a conversation you will miss a few seconds of that conversation when resumed.

Maybe sleep is designed to save battery life, but I think the battery life is so good that it shouldn't sleep when idling for less than 5 minutes. I have fully charged my JAMBOX once, and it's still half full after two weeks. Why not allowing me delaying sleep while giving me better experience?

My overall experience with JAMBOX is good. If the price could be lower, I think there will be more people buying it to enhance their portable devices' sound.

Posted via email from Cat Chen's Posterous

iOS Simulator disables system location services

When I wanted to make a change to my iCloud settings last night, I noticed that Find My Mac had a problem. The problem was location services was turned off, so I turned it on and went back to iCloud settings. However that annoying exclamation mark is still there.

Then I went to Security & Privacy panel and enabled it again and checked if it's reset when I left. The result is positive. Whenever I left this panel it's reset. That means there was something broken with my MacBook Air. Its mother board was just replaced and I don't want to visit Apple Store again. I wished it's just software

I googled it and found the answer. It's not the time zone. It's the iOS Simulator. I was experimenting something with jQuery Mobile and thus running iOS Simulator.

So does it mean if you lost your Mac when iOS Simulator is running you are not going to get it back by using Find My Mac? No. The location services toggle just appears to be off but no change actually happens to your Mac. I guess iOS Simulator's fake location just affects Mac's system level settings.

UP to 72 hours

Since I care more and more about my health, I started looking at health gadgets. Fitbit looks popular but Jawbone UP got my attention. It's new and the concept looks great: a bracelet that you don't need to be aware of. Unlike Fitbit, you don't need to remember clipping it to your clothes because you don't take it off.
After its launch, most reviews were positive. Then something just went wrong. People started reporting their UPs are dead after several days of use. I doubted if I should buy one but I still wanted to take the risk, so I bought one.
Now I've been using my UP for 72 hours and luckily it's not dead yet. I love using it though there are minor problems.
The good parts are it does encourage me to take more walk and track my meals. These two are very important to me. I'm spending too much time sitting and I'm eating too much, which make me uncomfortable. Reminding me every 30 minutes of sitting makes me leave the seat and refill my cup. Tracking meals helps me understand in what situation I might eat more than I should.
The sleep tracking satisfies my curiosity but that's all of it. I can do nothing to improve my sleep quality. I don't have an experiment plan to explore what affects my sleep yet.
The bad parts are it only tracks arm movement and it's not accurate in all circumstances. Workout tracking only tracks activities involve arm movement. Push up tracks nothing while brushing my teeth looks like some intensive workout.
Overall, I still like my UP and wish Jawbone could make it better in the future.
P.S. Because Beijing is covered by hazardous haze I only do indoor workout. That means GPS tracking is meaningless to me. I'll try that when I get back to Guangzhou.

Posted via email from Cat Chen's Posterous

Unboxing Xiaomi Phone

Just photos. No test. Maybe next time. Because my friend wants this phone really bad, I will give this one to him and try to get another as my Android test device.

Posted via email from Cat Chen's Posterous

Unboxing Shengda Bambook

I should have posted this two months ago. I can't comment on this product because I don't use it by myself. I got it by giving a speech in a Shengda sponsored event and then I gave it to my parents. It seems my dad enjoys its Chinese text-to-speech feature a lot.

Posted via email from Cat Chen's Posterous

Unboxing Sennheiser PXC360BT

I just received my new gadget today. It's Sennheiser PXC360BT headphones. I bought it for its active noise canceling. I want to know if it's effective on a plane. I will field test it on my way back to Canton.

The box is not big, and you can see the headphones inside with a paper box underneath. The headphones come with a removable battery, a Micro-USB connector, audio cable, and all kinds of adapters. They are put in the traveler's bag inside that paper box.

The battery was empty, so I charged it with my MacBook Pro over the Micro-USB connector. I didn't finished the charging within an hour long lunch, so I need to measure the charge time in the future. I tested it via Bluetooth with my iPhone and also via audio cable with my MacBook Pro. The sound quality is good to me and it feels comfortable to wear.

Pairing the headphones with iPhone is simple and straightforward. Press and hold the Bluetooth button and you can connect it on the iPhone. The iPod app treats it like an AirPlay device so you can easily switch between internal speaker and Bluetooth headphones.

After lunch, I've tested it on the subway. Wearing the headphones will reduce the noise. Enabling active noise canceling will further reduce low frequency noise. With both Noise Guard and Talk Through enabled, you will hear people on the train shouting to each other in front of you. In their perspective, it's just talking. With low frequency noise canceled, it sounds like shouting.

So far, I've noticed two small problems with Sennheiser PXC360BT. One is that when charging and listening over the cables at the same time, static is noticeable. The other is that when Bluetooth is interfered sound will jump. If it's interfered for several seconds, iPhone treats it as AirPlay device disconnected and then pauses the music.

Posted via email from Cat Chen's Posterous

Merging Two English Blogs

I have two English blogs now. One on Blogger and another on Posterous. I wanted to post different things on different blogs. Posterous should be more light-weight and photo driven. However, I don't post often so I can't differentiate two blogs.

I just (eventually) started my Cantonese blog. For Cantonese input convenience, I type on my iPhone and then post it to Blogger via Posterous. That means I have the same Cantonese content on both Blogger and Posterous. (I will hide one in the future to avoid duplicated content.) so I think using the same method for my English blog should be feasible.

After merging two blogs, I don't have to worry about differentiation any more. I don't have to think about which blog to post depending on the type of content. I can focus on writing instead of tools. If I'm with my Mac, I will use MarsEdit; If only my iPhone is available, I will use Posterous. No matter what I use, all content merges to my Blogger's stream.

Posted via email from Cat Chen's Posterous

Moving Blogs to New Domain

I bought catchen.me last year and point it to my old domain catchen.biz. Now I want to use catchen.me as my main entrance. That means I need to migrate all sub-domains under catchen.biz to catchen.me.

Why did I use catchen.biz at the first place? I wanted to register a domain from Google Apps in order to make sure that my domain is associated with Google Apps. Neither catchen.com nor catchen.net is available so I picked catchen.biz. However, I found out that people don't respond well to .biz domains. When I say "you can find me on catchen dot biz", they will ask "catchen dot what?" Then I understood that I needed to get a easily recognizable domain. That's why I bought catchen.me.

I let catchen.me point to catchen.biz for several months and it works well, but the content stays on catchen.biz. Now I want to move the content to catchen.me and make catchen.biz a simple redirection. I wanted to do this long ago but I'm too lazy to set up an Apache for the redirection. I don't want to touch all those configurations so I kept postponing this task.  Recently I found out that I can do this with pure JavaScript and that's a language I'm comfortable with, so I decided to give it a try.

I wrote a less than 30 lines JavaScript file and push it to Heroku. Then it's done. And it's free! I don't need to maintain my own server. Heroku's free plan should be enough to handle a few request to my old domain. I don't need to know anything about Apache configuration.  All I need to learn is Node.js, but I want to learn it for fun anyway.

So far, I've migrated three sub-domains: english, cantonese, and dotnet. If the solution is stable, I will move chinese, which is the sub-domain with most content.

Blogging with Wacom Bamboo Special Edition

I bought a Wacom tablet last month. This is the first blog post I try to write with it in English. (I've tried that in Chinese.) It's nice to write instead of type, though it needs some training.

Writing in English on Windows 7 requires little training. The initial accuracy is not bad. In contrast, Snow Leopard couldn't recognize my handwriting at all. Experience of writing on Windows 7 is smooth. I can write in my way, which doesn't look good, and Windows 7 can recognize most of them. With some training, Windows 7 can do it better. Less correction is needed after writing several training sentences. And the correction works in a smart way. Windows 7 can remember what you have written even after you inserted them to the editing area, and it provides meaningful options if you want to correct a word. Space will be inserted if needed during correcting and editing. Windows 7 knows what words and sentences are.

Writing in Chinese doesn't include many features in English counterpart. You can't write freely on the baseline. You have to write one Chinese character in one box, and write them one by one. Correction is based on character instead of word. The good news is Windows 7 knows Chinese words and it recognizes Chinese characters by seeing it as part of a word. Snow Leopard doesn't supports Chinese recognition at all. I can only wish they do a better job with Lion.

See My Posterous

I haven't updated this blog for a year. I just don't have enough incentive to write in English. iPhone gave me the incentive to write in English as Chinese input method on it doesn't fit its smooth experience. And Posterous gave me the platform.

It seems Apple doesn't pay much attention to iOS input methods. Chinese input method on iOS doesn't have any intelligence like its counterpart in English. There is no guessing on correction based on dictionary or statistics model. No matter what you type, iOS just pretends that you won't hit an adjacent key. But the fact is you can't avoid making mistakes while typing in such a tiny keyboard. So the process is really frustrating. You need to keep correcting minor mistakes and that interrupts you flow of writing. That's the reason l avoid typing Chinese on my iPhone.

Since I switched to Mac, I tried to find a substitute for Windows Live Writer and then started using MarsEdit. MarsEdit isn't as friendly as Windows Live Writer, but I can have a better control over the source code. Then I started looking for a blogging client for my iPhone and couldn't find any in 2 years. Then Posterous's official client came out last month and I'm impressed by its design and philosophy.

Blogging on a mobile phone shouldn't be too serious. I wouldn't want to spend a lot of time within this small screen adjusting details, so the blogging process should be easy. Posterous has made it so easy to blog on your iPhone. Write some text, add some attachments, and then click "Send". No rich text editing, no photo arrangement, its as easy as writing an email within the built-in Mail app. In fact, sending an email from your iPhone was the recommended way for posting to Posterous prior to the release of the Posterous app.

So I started blogging on Posterous in English since last month. Here is the address: http://posterous.catchen.me. It's updated several times a week and I recommend you subscribing to it.

Twitter Account Suspension

My Twitter account (@CatChen) was suspended for half a month.



I woke up in the morning and found my Tweetie stopped updating. I thought Twitter was down, but it didn't recover after several hours. When I check out my Twitter web page, I saw that Account Suspended message:

This account is currently suspended and is being investigated due to strange activity. If we have suspended your account mistakenly, please let us know. See Suspended Accounts for more information.

What kind of strange activity did I have? I don't know. A lot of Chinese Twitter user got suspended for no reason, and I can only guess that using Tor might lead to strange client IP activity. No matter what was the real reason for my account suspension, I got to get it recovered first.

I tried to request on the web, but I saw nobody actually processing my request. The request stayed open for two weeks, and Twitter support didn't give me any update. When I saw no hope of getting my account back, I saw a tweet from a someone who had successfully rescued his/her account from suspension. He/she said that contacting suspended@twitter.com might help, and I tried. One day after talking to suspended@twitter.com, I got my account back.

This experience is awful, but at least I got some information to share: contact suspended@twitter.com ASAP, if your account got mistakenly suspended.

Graduation & MVP

My commencement was on July 1st, and I receive my second MVP award on the same day!

I was so nervous on June 30th, because I knew that there's an important day coming. I was ready for the ceremony, but I was not sure about the MVP award. I didn't know whether I could get it for a second time. I knew that one certificate from my university was coming, and I was still looking forward to receive another one from Microsoft.

My dad came to my commencement, with a Sony H7 camera, but he didn't manage to take picture of me, because I was too nervous and walking too fast while I was on the stage. After the ceremony, we started taking picture all around the campus. I just kept pulling out my phone from time to time, to check whether I received email from Microsoft.

That email came really on time. It was around 11:00 at night, the same as what happened last year. I was watching TV with my parents, and I told them that I managed to get it twice. They all felt happy and proud.

Atteding the Microsoft MVP Global Summit 2008

I got my first visa last month, and bought my first international airline tickets two weeks ago. And I will be flying to Seattle tomorrow.

Getting a visa seems easy to me. I don't know why. Maybe because I'm in the last year of my university study, and there's no reason for me to give up my degree at this point. During the interview, the visa officer just read my invitation letter and MVP recognition letter, and asked only 5 questions, then said "have a nice trip" to me.

The airline tickets from Beijing to Seattle and then back to Guangzhou cost me about 800 dollars, and that seems cheap enough to me. Since Microsoft will cover accommodation and transportation fees, I just need to spend around 1000 dollars for the whole trip.

Anyway, I got to sleep now, for I need to rush to the airport tomorrow morning. Good night guys.

Unlocking My iPhone

Finally, I have unlocked my iPhone with a pure software approach. Now I can make phone calls, and send out text messages. I can fully experience how good or bad an iPhone is.

I have spent a whole night on unlocking my iPhone. I had my iPhone worked in 1.1.1 as an iPod Touch before unlocking it. So I installed the unlocking software, and wanted to continue using 1.1.1. But then, I found that it had no signal. I read through the unlock tutorial, and found that I must upgrade it to 1.1.2 in order to fix the no signal problem.

I upgraded my iPhone to 1.1.2 for three times. The first time, I forgot to install OktoPrep, so I had to downgrade it again. The second time, jailbreak.jar failed to kick my iPhone out of recovery mode, so I considered that as a failure and downgraded it again. The third time, I used AppTappInstaller.exe to kict my iPhone out of recovery mode, and finally got it done.

Chinese New Year in Beijing

As I will go back home at the end of February after finishing my internship at Baidu.com, I will just stay at Beijing during the Chinese New Year. This let me avoid the horrible Chunyun. I had decided to stay before I came here. It has proven that I made a wise choice, since the storm made all kind of transportation stuck.

Internship at Baidu.com, Inc

My web development engineer internship in Baidu.com officially started last Wednesday. So far, I have been in this city for 12 days. Right! 12 busy days!

I flew to Beijing last Tuesday morning, took a lunch at McDonald's, and visited the company as a guest at the afternoon. Process of checking in was scheduled on Wednesday, and it took the whole morning. And then, I became a member of technical support group of service operation division under technical department. A web development engineer under technical support group sounds weird, right? At least I think so.

That is caused by a so-called historical problem. Before the company has a portal search, which means when it was still a search solution provider to other portals, technical support group wrote web pages for consumers and helped them consuming the core search service. The group played the role as consumer technical support, and ran under service operation division.

Nowadays, technical support group mostly acts as template support, which means writing templates for all kind of products. We also do front-end researches, in fields like web standards and JavaScript programming. There are many talented people in our group, and we share all information and knowledge we have freely via emails, blogs, and internal magazines.

So far, I enjoy working here, as I can take projects that I feel passionate with. I think Baidu.com would be a passionate start of my career.

P.S. My CV has been updated, for my TOEFL score was out and my internship started.

Exactly 300!

I wrote exactly 300 words in my TOEFL writing test second essay! It just reaches the minimum word count of so-called qualified essay.

In fact, I have done little preparation for my TOEFL test. From time to time, I think I need to do something about my TOEFL test, but I just don't want to do anything around it. So, I didn't use any strategy during the test, and spoke and wrote without any so-called pattern. I don't know what kind of score I might get for doing this. Anyway, it will just reflect my true level, I think.