Ganesh Swami

I just came back from an awesome 10-day trip to China. We visited 5 cities: Shangai, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Xi’an and Beijing. We drove to Suzhou and Hangzhou from Shangai, flew to Xi’an from Hangzhou and took the overnight train to Beijing from Xi’an.

Only a part-time job

The highlight of the trip was The Great Wall. I was completely blown away — it was nothing like I expected!

The Great Wall

The experiences are far too many for me to write about, so I’ll let you see my photos instead.

Not. Dead. Yet.

A couple of months back, I got a chance to go to Stanford for a conference. I took the opportunity to visit a couple of my friends in the area. It was a blast!

Though I doubt if they’ll continue to remain my friends: I put almost 400 miles (ugh…metric units) on his car in two days! Living in Mountain View, we visited San Francisco twice, Berkeley once, Stanford twice (or thrice?) We went around almost all major tech companies in the valley.

I’ve heard about a lot of tech companies being in the same area, but I didn’t expect them to be so densely concentrated. As my friend says, “you can change your job without really changing where you park your car!” So true.

One of the things I really wanted to do is to have authentic Mexican cuisine (none of that Taco Bell crap.) We went to two places: La Fiesta in Mountain View and another one I can’t recall in San Francisco (it’s by the beach.) My friend remarked that he has had better, but I’ll have to start somewhere. I’ll be in San Diego and Austin (i.e., closer to the Mexican border) later this year, and I guess I can re-fulfill that wish again.

One of the things that really irked me was how often people pull out their car. Here in Vancouver, I always walk a couple of blocks to the corner grocery store or for breakfast or anything for that matter. For breakfast, we pulled out the car, drove on the freeway, and landed at House of Pancakes. For lunch, we pulled out the car, drove on the freeway, and landed at a restaurant. For buying a razor at Safeway, we pulled….you get the picture.

Day five started out with a visit to the rehab department at Mount Sinai Hospital. One of my previous projects Voiceture used a glove that could be used for rehabilitation purposes as well. The most impressive project was the use of a new kind of polymer that shows an effect opposite of piezoelectricity, ie stretches or compresses based on electric pulses. This could then be hooked onto the nerves to make artificial limbs. Lots of cool ideas to think about.

The second half of the day was spent at the Much Music broadcast station. This building broadcasts about 50 television and radio stations. Lots of cool technology being used here.

All of day six was spent at a biomimicry session. I’ll make a separate post on this later.

Day seven was time to pack up and go home. By this time, my brain was being overloaded with information. That is all.