Since I’ve started at Microsoft I’ve made it a point to stay on the Interns email discussion list. Guess I’m still a little bit of an intern at heart, but it’s a sheer fact that Interns are closer to my age and do more stuff. (It’s a running theory that the salaries of MS interns is practically social irresponsibility. :))

Anyway, one of the major hot topics of discussion is the censorship of blogs in China. In particular, MSN Spaces has started automagically blocking words like “freedom”, “democracy”, etc from their user’s posts. This has sparked quite a bit of a dicussion on the list, where we debate the rights and responsibilities of a corporation and the ethics of doing business in China.

I’ll quote myself off some of the emails I wrote in the discussion today.

Microsoft wants to do business in China. Great. Now the Chinese have a certain set of rules that they want their businesses to play by, just like we do in the US. In the Chinese case, this involves censoring certain words.

Now I don’t necessarily agree with this from an idealist standpoint. However, the realism is that China is China and we’re doing business in their country. They have every right to tell Microsoft what sort of content they want provided. Microsoft, on the other hand, has no right to force American civil rights on them, nor is it within the scope of our business to do so.

For those of you curious to learn more about about the issue of censorship in China, I’d like to make a plug here about a segment of NPR’s Open Source which aired last Monday night, where they had a very interesting discussion about this issue and the sort of actions the Chinese are taking.

http://www.radioopensource.org/2005/06/13/the-great-firewall-of-china/

So the big question I’ve been asking myself for the last three weeks—what the heck am I going to do with the 3900 photos that I’ve accumulated? Where to begin?

Some of you may have noticed that a few new banners up top have appeared from Egypt and China. It’s a only a start.

Time has been an extremely limiting factor in the last couple weeks. Between starting a highly engaging job, trying to get my life in order, and catching up with my friends, photos get pushed further and further off. But I’m happy to announce that I’m making some headway on them now.

The major undertaking that I’ve envisioned is producing a pair of custom-made photo albums—one for story telling and one of just cool photography. With the help of ACDSee, I’ve gone through all my photos, sorted them, and categorized the better ones into which book I’d like to use them for. I had planned on using MyPublisher.com to print assemble and print my books–I’ve seen a couple books that they’ve printed and I’ve been extremely impressed with the print quality. However, when I started to use the provided program to assemble my book, I was sorely disappointed by it’s lack of capabilities.

I mentioned this to Dave M, who’s a serious Mac fan. He asked me, “have you check out iPhoto?” Hey, that’s news to me, I didn’t know iPhoto did books. The very next day, I found myself at the U Village Apple Store killing time, so I went and loaded up iPhoto’s book capabilities. Holy moly! Those are beautiful!

Well, I don’t have a Mac, but the quest was on to borrow one. The Microsoft Interns weren’t much help and by virtue of being a Mac, I didn’t know many people that had one. My salvation came from my friend Amy L (lilsquishy on LJ) who responded to my email and has been gracious enough to let me borrow her iBook for a few days. We loaded on iLife ‘05 (with iPhoto 5) last night and now I’m cruising here in my room in Kirkland, immortalizing memories.

I was doing some catch up reading of Benita’s blog today, where she often talks about cultural oddities and interesting ways the Chinese are adopting western culture. Benita has been teaching English in Shanghai for nearly a year.

Some fun excerpts:

I was walking to pick up the big-ass cake for my farewell party this afternoon when a guy biked past me wearing a T-shirt that read

Help save American boobs.

For one, I’m wearing these wacky pink and baby blue thong sandals. They have all kinds of funny fish drawings on them with captions like “Knitted Fish,” “Polka Fish” and “Submarine Fish.” Five yuan a pair, ladies and gentlemen. Get ‘em while they’re ugly. I figure that if locals feel comfortable wearing shirts that read “I LOVE COLLAGEN” and buying fresh produce in their pajamas, I can wear some dumb-looking capri pants and garish footwear.

I was walking down Nanjing Xi Lu yesterday and saw a woman wearing a shirt that read “Everlasting Orgasm.” I’ve been noticing a lot of teenagers wearing T-shirts with Christian slogans on them like “Repent and Sin No More” and “He He WAY The TRUTH The LIFE.”

Speaking of which, I went to the movie theaters last week and copied down the English translation of the concession stand menu for y’all. Check it:

TENWOW (15 yuan), CHURROS (12 yuan), VINAMIT (10 yuan), DRIED BEEF (10 yuan), ROASTED SQUID (10 yuan), RICE SNAKE (8 yuan), SAUSAGE (6 yuan)

A waiter at the Chinese restaurant around the corner wore this great shirt yesterday that read: “I’m not LESDIAN. I Am GAY.”

And just to keep things straight, those probably aren’t spelling mistakes on Benita’s part. As I can also attest, the Chienese-Chinese often have a talent for mis-spelling English with disasterous and/or humorous results.

It’s been a hectic couple of weeks since I’ve gotten back and I’m started to get hounded about not updating, so…

The last time I wrote I mentioned that I had a relatively light dose of culture shock. Things quickly changed that same day as I drove out on my own to run some errands and get caught up with my old life. One of my major culture shocks—driving everywhere. I’ve been a near-exclusive patron of mass-transit for the last 4.5 months and returning to a society where everyone has a car, especially with our gas prices of $2.35-2.53, was a hit. I’ve also really missed being able to walk to the grocery store, local mini-mart, and (especially) bakeries. In fact, is there such a thing as a good bakery somewhere in Kirkland?

Another one of my big shocks was opening up the storage unit which contained my old life. Moments after I raised the door and took stock of what was immediately in front me, I realized that I had no want or need for nearly everything inside (my computing equipment and beloved chair were stored elsewhere). I lived out of a 45 liter bag for the 130 days. How much of this stuff do I actually care about? I came to realize that a fair amount of what I own falls into three categories: a) At some point I paid good money on this for some now-obscure reason, b) it might come in handy someday, and c) I’m simply being materialistic. But I had no choice than to move everything out of storage, so one of these upcoming weekends I’ll be going through and attempting to shed some of my pocessions.

I’ve moved into my new place now, which is a room in a townhouse in Kirkland (3 blocks from Costco!). I’ve got a couple of really awesome housemates that I’m just getting to know but I can already tell we’re going to have a great time. My bedroom is small as far as bedrooms go, but since I’m still sleeping on a twin, I’ve been able to fit all my essentials in, including a new gynormous desk.

Spent last weekend down in the area of Vancouver, WA for Andrea’s graduation/going-away party. Andrea is leaving soon for a coast-to-coast bike trip for the next 2.5 months. I’m always down for a weekend at the Anderson’s…does this family ever NOT have a good time? The party was about 20 people strong, but we had enough cake to feed 80—Kathy, the person who did the baking, refused to believe that there could be such a thing as a 20-person Anderson party, and showed up with a huge carrot cake. No complaints from me! Kathy’s carrot cake was out of this world and I was more than happy to take home my share of the leftovers. Outside of the cake, we had all the classic American BBQ food. Even though it’s not the parilla of Uruguay, I ate until I was stuffed solid. Closed out the night with a bonfire and slept in a geniune teepee in the backyard (more like back countryside)–no place like la casa de Anderson!

Came back in time to start my new job at Microsoft, which put me through 1.5 grueling days of New Employee Orientation for full-time employees. What really should be a half-day deal, 1 day max, is streched into an trying ordeal that leaves me wondering if I’m living a corporate nightmare. Which, I guess, I was, especially since this was my 3rd NEO when you count my internships. With NEO aside however, I’ve gotten back into the swing of things quickly. The dusty file lockers in my head that contain all my experiences and knowledge from my internships have gotten unearthed and cracked open—it’s all coming back to me! There’s a lot of runway and opportunites in my group right now, I’ve got a great manager, and it also looks like I’ll be doing quite a bit of traveling this summer too. I’m stoked.

And now–back to sorting through all the 3800 photos of my adventures. Stay tuned, they’ll be posted soon!