Right now, on the plane, about 1500 miles away from my arrival in Shanghai at the Pudong airport.  It has been 3 weeks since I have been in China, so I am a little antsy to get back to some reasonable form of common lifestyle (a bit ironic that living in Shanghai is my current form of common lifestyle).

I had a great time in the U.S. though.  Besides all the obvious facets of visiting, (seeing my family, enjoying the food, nice weather, fresh air), it was nice to just talk to people and be in an environment that I have never really been in, in an entirely official manner at least, which is the company setting.  The guys I am working with are all great, they all seem to bring different elements of personality and experience to the table which hopefully should pan out to be a success in the coming months.

Other than work, I am also looking forward to house number two in Shanghai, since I literally slept in it one night before coming to San Francisco.  I treated my previous apartment in Shanghai like a hotel and never really did anything with it.  This apartment is going to be different.  I have some master plans, and since it is so large, I think we can do some fun stuff with it.

I am curious to find out what happened with the election.  The last I heard, there was some talk about Hillary backing down and giving the nomination to Obama.  Who knows, is it possible that this thing could actually be over and we can move on to kicking  the hell out of McCain in the general election.  I feel like the election is turning more and more into a reality show that lasts forever.  ItÕs like a game, and the worst part of it all is that the media knows its getting to a point of ridiculousness, and yet they still go along with it.  For example, there have been times again and again when the candidates have been playing the ÔgotchaÕ game.  One in particular was that last and final Democratic debate.  Well if the media was smart, they would not have let that happen in the first place.  But once it does happen, or while its happening, they donÕt shun the tactics.  In fact, they reward the tactics and make them worthwhile from the candidates to use in the first place (this is presumably the reason they do them).

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We have about an hour before we arrive at the airport.  This is actually the first time I have used my new MacBook on the airplane and I must say its quite convenient, especially I got the new 13Ó screen.  With my old laptop, it was just too big to use on the plane.

The timing of the flight ends up being perfect for jet lag.  Although it is essentially an 8 hour time change, it feels like 1 AM for me right now and it is actually just 5PM.  The nice thing though is that I have been sleeping for a good part of this flight, so although it should feel very late, I have at least a few more hours in me before my body gets real tired.  I think if you arrived in Shanghai earlier in the day or later at night, it would be a different story.

After this trip, I have sort of organized my mind a bit about what I am going to do over the next several months.  I want to start being more disciplined about certain things, so maybe mentioning them here will be the first step towards doing that.

regularly study Chinese
in 6 months, I want to be able to carry a full conversation in Chinese over the phone, which in my opinion, is a good measure of your language skills
eat more regularly and stay fit
exercise at least twice per week
continue writing in this blog at least every other day
also, I want to make a new design for the blog, make it more interactive, more interesting
finish one or two projects of my own that I have been thinking about, just fun projects
i have been doing work stuff for a while, i want to relax my brain on the side and do something fun (maybe learn a new programming language?)

Alright, those are fine for now.  I say if I manage to achieve 3/4 of those, I will be happy.  I especially am keen on continuing my Chinese study.  IÕve come to the realization that being in China at this very moment is probably hurting my career, especially working for a company in California.  So at some point, I am going to have to look back on the time I spent in China and ask myself ÔWhat did I do during that time that was useful?Õ  At the current moment, I think the only good answer to that question is that I studied to the best of my ability, the Chinese language.  So this is my way of counter-balancing this negative effect of being in China and working for a Silicon Valley startup.

By the way, I got this new MacBook in the States.  So far, it is fantastic.  I am very happy with it.  The funny thing about it now is that I am so inexperienced with using a mac that I feel like a total idiot when it comes to doing anything.  Even things like the names of applications that come default with the operating system are totally new to me.  I had to be explained how Ôinstalling an applicationÕ is entirely different on this machine.  SO I have a lot to learn but hopefully through normal use, I will come to b e a mac user, so far its been fantastic.  Why didnÕt I do this earlier….

Arriving in supposedly 30 minutes.  Closing up now but hopefully, I will be back to the blog tomorrow.  Ciao