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.

Tired of filling application forms!

I'm applying jobs now. In fact, I hate filling out all those kind of forms online. They look familiar, and I still need to copy information from my profile and paste them into forms. Why they don't apply some open standards and APIs? For example, they can use hResume, which is a microformat.

I really want to implement my own open resume standards, and let those job application sites just crawl my website in order to get my information. Then I might have my resume done once for all.

Joining IfGoGo.com

Ok. I haven't written anything in this blog for a long time, but recently I have joint an English team blog. That is IfGoGo.com, which is an English blog written by Chinese.

I still have no idea about what I should post here and what I should post there. There's no theme for both blogs, so maybe I'll just post English stuffs randomly. Anyway, remember to check out what's on IfGoGo.com, because it has a wonderful team, and great posts will appear soon.