Posted 11:32 PM by Blah blah

Blogspot Blues

First my old site was down a few days, and now Blogspot can't load. Not having your own host sucks. I tell ya, I am fed up with how slowly this page loads. The administrators of my old host, alumni.eecs.berkeley.edu, told me they reinstated FTP in response to my protests. But for a month at least, I still wasn't able to get in. Turned out they had left out something for my account from the configuration. Damn it.

I am thinking of leaving Blogspot and either returning to my old site, which now works (if they ensure me permanent FTP access), or moving someplace like Diaryland. The writers are much better on average at Diaryland, while more likely to be anonymous, and I like the tighter-knit community there.

Imagine if we actually got paid for writing journals and drawing in an "audience in the prized 18-49 year old demographic." Like the whole David Letterman flap between ABC and CBS now, where each is offering him over $30 million a year to go with their network. Online advertisers would sponsor us with cash. Someone really popular like Winnie would be in salary negotiations right now like this...

Corporate suit from Blogspot: Good morning, Mr. Gan, how are you?

Me: Could be better. Haven't seen you guys since the virtual Christmas party, when I got stone drunk in that chat room. Do you need me to reduce my bandwidth or something?

Suit: Not at all, Mr. Gan, we just wanted to see how you are feeling in general here at Blogspot. It has been going on six weeks now, and headquarters has gotten lots of satisfied mail from the 18-49 demographic.

Me: Well it's about time I got some feedback. Hell, I guess you guys have been nice to me. The simple domain name I like. The ivory cigar trays were a nice touch. I can smoke like a Boy Scout campfire again. Was even thinkin' of starting a blog just about smoking, called "Bronchitis Blog."

Suit: Well we are really pleased to hear that, sir. Would you also like to try an assortment of Blogspot silk slippers, monogrammed with your initials? They are a hit with our executives, who tell me they look dashing wearing nothing but the slippers and the cigar.

Me: I hadn't thought of that. Good point, kid. Sure, just call the Defense Dept. and get one of their parachute drop boxes. You know, the type they used to drop food and medicine to the Afghan people. Fill up one of those with the slippers. That should be big enough.

Suit: Right away, Mr. Gan. Everything else to your satisfaction? The one thousand blog templates, the deluxe digital camera for those lucious hi-res shots of what you had for lunch...?

Me: Welll...tell ya the truth, kid...

Suit: Yes, sir?

Me: I'm...I'm kinda unhappy here.

Suit: NO...WE ARE...we're shocked, sir!

Me: Ya. I mean I am grateful for everything you guys HAVE done for me...

Suit: We try our best, sir. Evan Williams is always saying good things about you.

Me: I'll bet. You know I do a damned good job here.

Suit: Yessir.

Me: I bring in thousands of visitors and tons of ad revenue to Blogspot each month.

Suit: We are well aware of that, sir. And we are starting to target more ads at the top of the blog to your predominantly female audience.

Me: Oh really? Ok, but keep it subtle, all right? No feminine hygiene products above my blog.

Suit: Yessir, we'll talk to marketing about that. They just approved a Maxipad banner ad, but I'm sure they'll see your point. Not a problem.

Me: Hell, you're making this hard for me. I mean, I even LIKE you, and who usually likes the suits at his company?

Suit: Well we are hoping for many more years of happy blogging from you...

Me: Let me be straight with you, kid. Your page loads too slowly.

Suit: What???

Me: Let me qualify that. Your site loads too FUCKING slowly.

Suit: It's hard to imagine sir. But we will call customer service right away. We'll have a conference call this afternoon, we'll...

Me: I mean sometimes I wait one, two minutes for the damned page!!! I am having a fit, pounding the keyboard, hitting Reload. I just wanna hit somebody---the wait is so excruciating. In LA they
have "road rage." Well here in the Valley we have "page load rage." Even women. Just last week this granny had to wait two minutes for her bingo site to load. She just pulled out her Uzi and blew her computer away.

Suit: Good heavens! Well sir, we are deeply sorry for the inconvenience. Lots of people have complained to us about the page load speed. But we tell them to admire the contours of their blog while they wait. Or to have a window open on the side and play Solitaire.

Me: Look, bud, not me! Do I look like a Solitaire guy? Huh??? I was a chemical engineer. I prefer to blow things up. I'd rather play Minesweeper. But I can't stand it here. And my readers, too. I mean they trust me.

Suit: Yessir.

Me: They are used to the speed of my old Berkeley site. No ads. No fuss. No thousands of other people jammed on the server with me.

Suit: Yessir.

Me: Look, kid, I'm sorry about this...but I am having lunch with Diaryland today.

Suit: NO WAY!

Me: It's too bad, but I'm thinking of leaving you guys.

Suit: But DIARYLAND? That wimpy place? Forgive me sir, but for a tough-talking guy like you who can do his own coding, I am appalled. Sir.

Me: Ya well, that's what I thought at first.

Suit: C'mon, sir. What can they give you that we can't here at Blogspot? Diaryland is filled with these sensitive people ranting about breaking up with their boyfriends. Forgive me, but it's not you, sir. You are a Blogger-man. Not a diary girl. You write a "journal," not a "diary."

Me: I know I know. But what can I do, bud? Blogspot sucks. I told ya.

Suit: What can we do to sweeten your stay here? You are very important to us. Did we mention that our Christmas party was funded with your ad revenue?

Me: NO! I had no idea.... Well Diaryland has made me an offer, though...

Suit: My God! Don't say yes! Did you tell them anything, yet?

Me: Well no...I told them I'd think it over...

Suit: Good! What did they offer you? We'll double it.

Me: Well make my page load fast.

Suit: Look sir. Anything but that. Evan's orders. He doesn't want to buy new servers till we get more members.

Me: What the hell? Don't you already have 300 zillion members?

Suit: Yessir, but Ev doesn't think that justifies spending more money on servers.

Me: Well then, I gotta go. Lunchtime is coming up...

Suit: Wait!!! What is Diaryland offering you, sir?

Me: First of all, fast page loads. Then no ads. And a tight community of people who really like to write. And...

Suit: Ok, besides the page load issue, we'll double everything else. We'll double your ad size. We'll add twice the number of Bloggers who can't write.

Me: Oh my God...what a disaster.

Suit: And there's always the corporate jet.

Me: The WHAT???

Suit: The jet, sir. A refurbished Concorde. It used to belong to British Airways, but Ev got it and repainted the "ritish Airways" part to "logspot" and kept the "B."

Me: Wow...

Suit: Yessir, Blogspot reserves it for its top Bloggers. You can fly to Hawaii for lunch if you wish. And get back in time to blog about it before prime time.

Me: "Prime time?"

Suit: Yessir, between about 6 pm and midnight. The time when most people check their friends' blogs. Excuse me, sir. We're just used to the media jargon here.

Me: Okay... But what the hell do I need a jet for?

Suit: Just thought it would be a nice perk. I mean, Arnold Schwarzenegger got one as payment for one of his movies.

Me: Ok, but I'm not Arnold. I'm Raymond. I have no use for a jet. Now an Uzi, on the other hand...

Suit: What will it take to make you happy, sir? Please don't go to lunch before giving us a chance to show you what we can offer...

Me: Ok, you got it. Hmmm...well first I want a raise.

Suit: Yessir. Would 10% be satisfactory?

Me: I'd say 20% would cut it. And start paying more of my Blogging buddies a salary, damn it.

Suit: Yessir. Just name them and we'll talk to HR about that.

Me: I mean, they pour their heart and souls out into their blogs, no?

Suit: Yessir.

Me: They bring in tons of ad revenue for you and lots of the 18-49 demographic. Lots of young Asian professionals.

Suit: Yessir. Kikkoman is very happy, sir. After we placed their ad above Min Jung Kim's blog, sales of soy sauce tripled. Finance was very happy about that.

Me: You betcha. That girl could raise the hairs on a kiwi fruit, ya know.

Suit: Yessir. I agree sir.

Me: Anyhow, I'd like a 20% raise, plus a cut of the ad profits.

Suit: Well, SIR, that's rather unprecedented...I mean...

Me: Look, kid. I'm late for lunch. Either gimme or I'm outta here!

Suit: Okay okay, Mr. Gan....please control yourself. We could add those lines to your contract.

Me: And you know what? I'm starting to get carpal tunnel syndrome from typing so much.

Suit: We're sorry sir. Would you like the services of our on-site masseuse? Her name is Birgitta. She's a Swedish blonde and very experienced.

Me: Oh that's just PEACHY! Ya, please schedule her around 5 pm today. I have golf after that. A little charity benefit with some fellow Bloggers, y'know. Sigh. Obligations obligations...

Suit: Right away sir. Birgitta is a specialist in wrist and palm massage. She starts with the shoulders and neck and moves on down to your fingertips. Our top Bloggers give her very high ratings for curing their wrist fatigue.

Me: Hey, NOW we're talkin' here! You should have told me this at the beginning! I gotta ask Diaryland if they have a masseuse...

Suit: Well sir...

Me: Another thing. I am just TIRED of typing in general. It's so slow and hinders my creativity. Y'know what I'd really like?

Suit: Yessir?

Me: A personal secretary. 100 wpm dictation. I'd rather talk than type my blog.

Suit: Ok sir, that's easy to do....

Me: Make sure she has long silky hair. Asian preferred. Perky, goes to the gym, y'know...

Suit: Not a problem, sir. We'll try to find one who also knows massage.

Me: You guys aren't half bad, y'know? Now yer talkin' my language!

Suit: Well we are most happy when you are happy, sir. Now about that lunch with Diaryland...

Me: Okay okay....I'm still going, but I'll just tell them I'll think about it. Don't worry.

Suit: Well sir...we'd like to see you sign your new contract.

Me: Hold on...one more thing I ask.

Suit: Yessir?

Me: Give my new secretary some cash.

Suit: Oh I see. You want her to shop for some sexy clothes, right?

Me: Well no. First thing I'll do is have her go shopping...

Suit: Yessir?

Me: For another server.

Posted 2:31 PM by Blah blah

Soulmates

I added more thoughts to the RBJ Discussion Boards. Amabelle started a thread about what people thought of the whole idea of soulmates. Here's my view:

I agree with the married folks on this board (Cyn and Scott). And Paul_J, you are an awesome writer.

I think the idea of one and only one person for us is a myth. In regular life, we meet all kinds of people who would have a wonderful chance of satisfying us and being satisfied by us.

It's not a question of "are they the ONE" but of
1) how mature and grounded we are to deal with them, and
2) how hard we are willing to work to make the relationship blossom and last.

I have met many girls where I think, "yes, maybe we have a chance..." Several things between us do click. We are not exactly the right color or shape, perhaps, but we have some clay we can work with. Unfortunately, they tend to be already taken or far away. :p

But I'm not discouraged. In fact it's ENCOURAGING. Knowing you have so many potential choices, knowing that you do not lose the world when you leave your hometown or make a big career change and leave your current "soul candidate." Knowing that you have the skills within you to build a successful relationship wherever you go and knowing you can coax your partner to be his or her best. That's what we should strive to become and that's what will give us security.

I think throwing relationship problems into the category of "well we just aren't meant to be" is a cop-out. For anything to flourish, and not just a relationship, we need to put 90% of our time into unglamorous, routine tasks. Maintenance is not sexy, but that's what lays the foundation to make the remaining 10% of our experience so sweet that we can imagine we have met a "soulmate."

I've often wondered what makes people fall in love. For instance, why do mothers all love their babies? Why do they consider their cheeks and chins the most handsome or beautiful they have ever seen? To us, maybe one baby to another looks the same. But to a mom, she has run the whole show from the beginning. She has been the director, producer, and janitor of her personal stage. She's suffered the agonies of morning sickness and the joys of ultrasound scans. She has put in 9 months of suffering and hard work.

After all of that, how can she help NOT falling in love with her baby? It's like that part of The Little Prince by Saint-Exupéry, where he is talking to a garden of stuck-up roses:

"You are not at all like my rose," he said. "As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world."

And the roses were very much embarrassed.

"You are beautiful, but you are empty," he went on. "One could not die for you. To be sure, an ordinary passerby would think that my rose looked just like you — the rose that belongs to me. But in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose."

So once we get the superficial stuff out of the way, we settle down to cultivating the garden of our relationship. And with our sweat we infuse each other with our uniqueness and gradually BECOME soulmates.

Posted 7:58 AM by Blah blah

Sorry my old website is down now. It sucks and makes this page load incredibly slowly. Ok, Carlos and the rest of you Rice Bowlers, I've finally broken down and posted more on the Rice Bowl Journals Discussion Boards. Some personal stuff. Please be discreet with this info. (Yeah right.)

Living & Lifestyles / Love & Romance
Hot Crushes... That were never to be...

High school. These two beautiful girls who played piano in my orchestra (I used to play violin). I was so shy and nervous around them I almost seemed like I was ignoring them when they talked to me.

They'd say "Hi Raymond."

I'd say "Bah ba yab ba..."

Maybe they thought I was an ESL student! :p

One of them got married soon after high school This actress from China, Zhao Wei, really reminds me of her.

Living & Lifestyles / Love & Romance
The most romantic thing.....

Life is full of romantic possibilities. You guys have been talking about S.O.'s but how about romantic gestures from friends?

Here's something a Japanese friend did for me that I'll never forget. (She had a bf at the time.)

We hadn't seen each other for a long time, and she wanted to thank me for being a friend. She invited me to her beautiful place she was renting in the Oakland hills and said I could stay as long as I wanted. She made a delicious dinner for me one night and took me to Rivoli, this fantastic French-Californian place, another night. Introduced me to their portabello fritters!

When it was time to sleep, I was going for the sofa but she insisted that I sleep in her bed! She took the sofa instead. In the morning she woke up early as usual and made this special vegetable and fruit shake. In the evening we played with her cat and just had very open, honest talks.

I stayed 3 days and was just overwhelmed with how caring she was.

Living & Lifestyles / Love & Romance
Your first *kiss*

On the beach in Monterey.
She was more experienced than me and wanted to teach me.

Oh boy, did I learn FAST! I came back for extra homework.

Arts & Entertainment / Leafing Through The Pages
Leafing through the pages

Gosh, it's so hard to name just a few favorite books in my life. I guess I'd have to lay them out by the periods in my life.

As a kid some of the books I loved the most were Pinocchio and Alice in Wonderland. I musta read each of them at least 10 times. Then I discovered Mark Twain and just laughed myself silly with Huckleberry Finn. And J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. For sheer adventure and romance, I could not put down The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers.

Did you guys have a favorite kids' series too? I just devoured the detective series The Three Investigators. God, how I loved to play detective then and pretend I was Jupiter Jones. And remember Encyclopedia Brown? Another series I just loved and read and reread was The Great Brain books (Me and My Little Brain, etc.) I would be so immersed in all of these characters.

Other favorites were Around the World in 80 Days, Lord of the Rings (when I was 13 in bed with chickenpox), and something I love so much, Norman Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth.

In high school, my all-time favorites were Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Orwell's 1984, and Emerson's Essays. King Lear is my favorite Shakespeare play. Oh, and I love biographies. I had a book with bios of Albert Schweitzer, P.T. Barnun, Helen Keller, and Winston Churchill that I just treasured.

In college, I liked books like Peter Ustinov's The Old Man & Mr. Smith (very funny, about God and the Devil returning to Earth).

Now as a grownup, all I have time to read are Dilbert cartoons. I think up next for me is The Cat in the Hat. :p

[I wrote about my favorite children's books last year.]

Arts & Entertainment / Leafing Through The Pages
The Story about Ping: an Allegory

Hey Sophia! HAHA... I read this book when I was a kid!!! Still remember the story. :p If you guys start a forum on favorite children's books, I'm there, man.

For some reason books are much larger-than-life and bigger to us when we are kids. At least to me, when I see old stories I loved as a kid, I feel this rush of familiarity and warmth, like I'm greeting a long-lost friend! How about you?

Arts & Entertainment / Les Cinema
Lord of the Rings

I've been a LOTR fan ever since I read the novels when I was 13 in bed with chickenpox. LOTR can whip Harry Potter in a Deathmatch any day! Salon.com has a bunch of articles comparing the two as well as LOTR with Star Wars.

If you loved the movie, you've GOTTA listen to director Peter Jackson's wonderful talk with Charlie Rose! (RealPlayer)

Believe it or not, barely any studio would fund Jackson originally and his original studio (not New Line Cinema) had wanted him to make only ONE movie for the whole series, not three.

So we're all blessed and very lucky. Jackson almost scrapped the whole thing after two years of working on it.
____________________
Ok, YOUR turn! I'm tired of doing all the talking here...

Posted 7:43 AM by Blah blah

$150,000 an Hour Is O.K., but Hey, It's the Night Shift (NY Times):

"Actually, Mr. Letterman was the main reason for the worrying. It's hard to sleep while the mind races over the poor fellow's plight. How is he ever going to resolve the terrible dilemma that he faces?

Should he stay at CBS, where he is said to be making only $30 million a year, which translates into $150,000 per on-air hour, give or take? Or should he jump to ABC and make Ted Koppel the biggest martyr in television journalism since Fred W. Friendly? (Mr. Friendly walked out on CBS 36 years ago because it broadcast an I Love Lucy rerun instead of an important Senate hearing on the Vietnam War. You didn't think that television news reached its present state without some history, did you?)

In fairness, money does not seem to be the real issue here. As best as one can tell, Mr. Letterman feels unloved at CBS. Breathes the worker who doesn't know what that's like, even if most of us manage to feel unloved for a lot less than $150,000 an hour?

Here's how unhappy Mr. Letterman is. Last month, his boss at CBS, Leslie Moonves, called to congratulate him on his 20th anniversary as a late-night star. What did Mr. Letterman do? He refused to take the call."

Posted 7:30 AM by Blah blah

Posted on Wed, Mar. 06, 2002

Slain scientist mourned
MOTIVE STILL MYSTERY IN DEATH OF GENETIC RESEARCHER
By Sean Webby
Mercury News

When Tanya Holzmayer signed a contract four years ago to lead a Silicon Valley biotech company toward its search for new anti-cancer drugs, it surprised no one that the pioneering scientist spent her bonus on a Steinway grand piano.

Holzmayer would often sit at her gleaming black instrument and lose herself in a passionate Russian prelude, her beloved son and dog as an audience. She was an old-fashioned romantic, her friends agreed -- brilliant, driven, equally elegant as a person and a scientist.

In the week after she was gunned down at her own front door, her brother played one of her favorite Rachmaninoff recordings as family and friends gathered at her Mountain View home this week to mourn her, remember her and to wonder why she died.

Holzmayer's killer was a fellow genetic science pioneer. Matthew Huang's motive remains mysterious to investigators. Her contact with Huang was limited to a past job from which she had to fire him. In their final encounter at her doorway, Huang leaped from behind a pizza delivery man to fire the fatal shots, and then took his own life.

Yet Holzmayer and Huang shared similar life stories: Both were foreign-born scientists who came to America seeking intellectual and personal freedom. He was from China. She was from the former Soviet Union. About all they brought with them were their brilliant minds.

The Holzmayers were a family of intellectuals and artists, exiled by Stalin in the 1930s and finally settling 20 years later in Petrozavodsk, a cultured city filled with museums and statues of Peter the Great about 300 miles north of St. Petersburg. Tanya was a precocious girl, entranced by music, literature and art and science. By 17, she was fluent in French and English and could play Rachmaninoff with ease. That year she was accepted to Moscow State University to study biology and music.

Moscow nights

Elena Budrene-Katz, now a research assistant at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, met her in Moscow as a young student. She recalled that they once signed up for night research so they could spend their day attending a Tchaikovsky festival.

``We had lived on three hours of sleep a night,'' said Budrene-Katz. ``But we were so happy. She was always like that. So much energy. She did not have enough time to do everything she wanted to do.''

Holzmayer married a fellow biologist in Moscow in the early 1980s. In 1989, as the Soviet Union was beginning to crumble, the young couple and their baby boy, Alex, left for Chicago.

``When I said goodbye to her, we both thought we would never see each other again,'' said her brother Andrew. They would reunite, however. He now owns an art studio and collectibles business north of Chicago.

In Chicago, Holzmayer worked in the labs of fellow Russian Igor Roninson at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

She was destined to make a name for herself in the burgeoning field of genetic research, Roninson said. Scientists around the world had begun mapping the human genome, looking to identify many molecular targets for new medicines. To harness that information, Holzmayer knew she had to find a way to focus on the most critical targets -- the places where drugs are most likely to work. So Roninson and Holzmayer created a new technological approach called GSX.

It was her hope that GSX technology would improve the productivity of bio-pharmaceutical research by directly identifying particular genes that are involved in diseases such as cancer, heart disease and viral infections. Once these genes could be identified, they could be used as tools to kill disease-causing cells, she said.

Holzmayer and her husband divorced in the early 1990s.

Soon afterward, she moved with her son to the Bay Area to work on the GSX approach for a start-up company called Ingenex. She was equally entranced with the work of Silicon Valley's biotech firms and the sunny, verdant environment. She loved, her friends said, the smell of lemon trees.

In 1994, PPD, an international company, bought Ingenex. Holzmayer was hired as a vice president, heading the biotech firm's genomics research.

Holzmayer was almost ferocious in her interests, those who knew her said.

She would fly around the world like a teenage groupie to see her favorite pianist Mikhail Pletnev play or conduct his repertoire of the great Russian composers.

Tireless concentration

Last year, Holzmayer, 46, quit her job at PPD. She wanted to start her own company and was beginning to gather a small group of scientists and friends to help her.

One of these was Jan D'Alvise, president of NuGen Technologies in San Carlos.

Holzmayer, she said, was trying to create a company that would further streamline the complex process of finding treatments for cancer and HIV.

``She had a way of looking at a problem in a new and creative way,'' D'Alvise said. ``I believe she was onto some exciting ideas, ideas that one day could have become potential cures. I hope that people will carry on her work.''

But perhaps as much as her brilliance as a scientist, D'Alvise was touched by Holzmayer's warmth. D'Alvise had dinner at Holzmayer's a week before she died. After she cooked and served a grand Russian dinner, Holzmayer ushered her friend into the living room.

She announced that she had taught her springer spaniel to play the piano.

``Oh Tanya!'' D'Alvise said, laughing.

Then they sat and listened as the brilliant geneticist, seated at her prized Steinway and holding the paws of the dog in her lap, played ``Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.''


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

IF YOU'RE INTERESTED

A fund has been set up to take care of Holzmayer's son. Checks can be sent to:

The Tanya Holzmayer Memorial Fund, c/o Comerica Bank Palo Alto Branch, 250 Lytton Ave., MC 4359, Palo Alto, Calif. 94301

Posted 3:21 PM by Blah blah

My website referral logs show the trail of lives that Tanya Holzmayer and Guyang Huang leave in their tragic absence. From Santa Cruz, Hong Kong, Massachusetts, Washington, Connecticut, New York, and Shanghai, people are seeking whatever info they can on these two. If you are someone who knows Tanya or Matthew, you have my deepest condolences. If you want to get in touch with someone else who knew them, feel free to leave a comment and your email here.

Posted 1:55 AM by Blah blah

Guyang Huang/Tanya Holzmayer shooting/murder/suicide

More on the tragedy of Guyang "Matthew'' Huang, the seemingly mild-mannered top genetic scientist from China who shot and killed his former boss, Tanya Holzmayer, a top scientist from Russia. Huang had a wife and young daughter. Holzmayer had a teenaged son. The San Jose Mercury News showed Huang's picture and he looks like the typical mild-mannered, overachieving guy from China who gets his PhD here. Huang had been active in helping the Chinese-American community and also in the pro-democracy movement for China. Very very sad when even a man like this---who dedicates his life to helping save lives---can snap.

Now I am one of the top search results on Yahoo for this Guyang Huang story, so I will try to put links to the articles as I find them for ya. Amazing how a blog like this can be a faster and more durable source of news than the original newspaper, especially since it removes the original article after seven days.

Stories about missing/dead scientists. Gruesome.

The SF Chronicle's report on the tragedy. Here is a followup article from the Mercury, in full:

Posted on Sat, Mar. 02, 2002

Shootings bewilder biotech colleagues
THEY SAY SUSPECTED GUNMAN WAS WELL-LIKED, BRILLIANT
By Sean Webby, Truong Phuoc Khánh and Lisa Krieger
Mercury News

The scientist who police say killed his boss and then took his own life had been fired from his job at a Menlo Park biotech firm because the company thought he was working for someone else on the side, a friend and one-time academic adviser said Friday.

On Wednesday night, Guyang ``Matthew'' Huang shot and killed Tanya Holzmayer, a respected genome scientist who had fired him months before. He then drove from her Mountain View home to Foster City, where he called his wife, told her what he had done and what he was about to do. He then turned the gun on himself.

``It just doesn't make any sense,'' said Maurille Fournier, who was Huang's doctoral adviser at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and oversaw Huang's groundbreaking genome research from 1986 to 1992.

On Friday, Fournier replayed in his mind two conversations -- two moments that might provide clues, that might offer some explanation for something so unfathomable.

Fournier said he met with Huang in August, two months after Huang had been fired from PPD Discovery. During their conversation, Huang insisted he had done nothing wrong. He had intellectual irons in many fires -- he always had, both here and in China, where he had a relationship with another biotech firm.

Huang's voice echoed his despair, Fournier recalled. I just don't understand, Huang told him. Huang said PPD knew of his outside work and did not disapprove. PPD has refused to comment beyond confirming that Huang and Holzmayer were former employees.

Sharing successes

Months earlier, Fournier had sat down to dinner at a Silicon Valley restaurant with Huang and Holzmayer, whom Fournier knew by reputation in the biotech community.

Fournier recalled the pair of scientists -- one born in China, one born in Russia -- spent much of the dinner cheering each other's tales of immigrant struggles and scientific success.

Nothing about that dinner, Fournier said, remotely foreshadowed what happened Wednesday night.

Police believe that Huang lured Holzmayer to her door by ordering a pizza delivery to her home. When the Domino's deliveryman rang her doorbell, the scientist answered. Huang then shot her dead.

What remains is the search for elusive answers. Most notably, did something happen in the eight months that elapsed between Huang's firing and Wednesday's violence?

Fournier said Huang had been traveling to and from China, continuing research and teaching at the elite Fudan University in Shanghai.

``He certainly could have found another job, but it could be that he has not been able to find a job that suits his brilliance,'' Fournier said.

Huang, 38, was a well-respected scientist, husband and father of a young daughter. He and Holzmayer, 46, had spent their careers mapping and studying genetic code to unlock the mysteries of such things as disease and growth processes.

Huang was known for his ambition to make life better, through both scientific research and social activism.

Huang was from Shanghai, where he stood out even among the already distinguished students at Fudan. To get there, he had scored 11th out of 230,000 students on his college entrance exams.

Wei Mao, now working for IBM as a visual designer, studied with Huang there.

``He studied very, very hard; he never played,'' Mao said. Mao recalled physical education classes when he would glance over and see Huang in a corner studying a book of English vocabulary, oblivious to the exercising students around him.

One of Fudan's top students, Huang came to the United States to pursue genomics, the study of human genes. Fournier said he was dazzled by the young man's brilliance, by his hunger for knowledge pursued with almost tireless energy and enthusiasm.

One time, the professor recalled, Huang asked to go deer hunting with another student. He didn't particularly like the thought of killing a deer. He just wanted to know how it was done.

Huang also began working with Chinese-Americans, at first informally by helping a Chinese family arrange a traditional funeral for a student in Amherst who had been killed in a car wreck. Later, he helped develop a communication network for Chinese-Americans and raised money for pro-democracy reformers in China.

New work in Seattle

After graduating, Huang and his wife, Penny, an equally brilliant scientist Huang had grown up with in Shanghai, went to Seattle for a rare and exciting opportunity.

From 1992 to 1997, Huang worked as a senior fellow at the University of Washington School of Medicine's Department of Molecular Biology in Seattle.

``He was very well-liked, always on top of stuff,'' said Amy Dao, who works in the department. There Huang was mentored by Leroy Hood, leader of the California Institute of Technology team that invented the DNA sequencer used to complete the Human Genome Project. Huang was part of a team created by Hood in 1992 that used $12 million from Bill Gates to establish an institute to identify genes in major diseases and determine how they work.

``This is a total shock to me. It is hard to imagine. They are loving people. I never saw a mean or hurtful side of him,'' said Tawny Biddulph, assistant to Hood at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle.

Huang later worked for a series of companies including Pangea, now called DoubleTwist, in Oakland -- a company that produced systems using genetic data to identify sites in the body for targeting drugs.

In 1998, Huang began work for the Beijing Genomics Center. And in 2000 he was employed as director of microbiology for PPD, where Holzmayer was a vice president.

Fournier and others said PPD may have been concerned that Huang violated the company's intellectual property rules for employees. Like many other industries in Silicon Valley, biotechnology firms guard their secrets carefully and jealously, industry experts say.

By the end of 2001, Holzmayer also had left PPD, to begin her own company, according to Igor Roninson, a genome scientist with the University of Illinois-Chicago and a consultant for PPD.

Wednesday night, Holzmayer was at her apartment with her teenage son and his friend, according to neighbors.

Micheline Brogan, who lives six doors away from Holzmayer's home, said her family heard shots and then saw the pizza deliveryman ``hysterically'' running down the street.

Brogan, who is a nurse at El Camino Hospital, said the deliveryman said to call the police.

``He was in shock,'' she said. ``He kept showing me the pizzas.''

Brogan and Evan, her 15-year-old son, ran to their neighbor's home to find Holzmayer prone and bleeding in her doorway. Bullet shell casings lay around her.

The nurse checked for a pulse. There was none.

On Friday, a half-dozen flower vases rested near the front door with a burning candle. Members of the Holzmayer and Huang families have not spoken publicly since the shootings.
________________________
Here's the first article from the Mercury:

Posted on Fri, Mar. 01, 2002

Man ambushed ex-boss, police say
PIZZA MAY HAVE BEEN RUSE; SUSPECT LATER FOUND DEAD
By Sean Webby and Lisa Krieger
Mercury News

Dr. Tanya Holzmayer, a pioneering scientist, was surprised Wednesday night to find a Domino's Pizza deliveryman at the front door of her Mountain View home.

Moments later, a former colleague appeared out of the dark, shot her dead and ran off, police said.

Guyang ``Matthew'' Huang called his wife in Foster City with the news: I just killed my ex-boss. Now I'm going to kill myself.

Within an hour, a jogger found Huang's body off a path near the San Mateo Bridge. A cell phone was in Huang's pocket and a .380-caliber handgun lay near his hand.

Investigators on Thursday were just beginning to put together the details of the deadly nexus between the two immigrant scientists.

``It looked like an ambush,'' said Mountain View Police spokesman Jim Bennett. ``He may have used the pizza to lure her out.''

A former colleague of both Holzmayer and Huang thinks he knows the motive: Holzmayer fired Huang from his job at PPD Discovery, a biotech company in Menlo Park, according to Dr. Igor B. Roninson.

``She told me she got orders from senior management to fire him,'' said Roninson, a genomic scientist with the University of Illinois-Chicago and a consultant for PPD. ``She had to fulfill those orders, but was very upset. She had no choice, no options.

``But this is a year later!''

A company spokeswoman said Huang left PPD in June, but she wouldn't confirm that he was fired. Neither Huang nor Holzmayer were still with the company. Holzmayer had quit in December to start her own biotech venture.

Both Holzmayer, 46, and Huang, 38, were highly regarded in genetics.

She was a Russian-born genomic scientist who had co-invented a tool that has helped find hundreds of molecular targets to combat cancer and HIV. He was a brilliant scholar -- scoring 11th out of 230,000 students on his college entrance exams in China -- and an activist who fought for reform in his homeland once he came to the United States to study in 1986.

Outside of the company's Menlo Park office on Thursday, puffy-eyed employees gathered in small groups but shook their heads when approached by a reporter.

On Wednesday, just past 8:30 p.m., the Domino's deliveryman had pulled up to Holzmayer's home on Windmill Park Lane. Holzmayer and her teenage son were inside when the doorbell rang. She told the deliveryman that she hadn't ordered a pizza, according to Mountain View police.

Huang appeared from behind the deliveryman. He shot Holzmayer several times at close range in the chest and head, police said. As Holzmayer fell in her doorway, Huang ran to a Ford Explorer and drove away.

Police said the deliveryman witnessed the shooting but was not involved. A Domino's spokeswoman said the driver wasn't hurt, but would be offered counseling and time off.

Just a few doors away, the Brogan family heard the shots, then the tires screeching, and saw the deliveryman running in a panic. After calling 911, Evan Brogan went with his mother, Micheline, a nurse, to their neighbors' home. Holzmayer was lying in her doorway with no pulse.

``We were just trying to help. But she was gone,'' Evan said.

Less than an hour after the shooting, Huang called his wife, according to Foster City Police Capt. Craig Courtin. He told her about the shooting and that he was going to kill himself, police said. He told her he was near their home by the bay. Then he hung up.

Huang's wife called 911, and Foster City police used search dogs to comb the area. They ran into a jogger who had seen Huang's body lying off the walkway that locals call ``The Levee.'' He had fired a single bullet into his head, according to Robert Foucrault, San Mateo County's acting coroner.

Soon afterward, police interviewed Huang's wife, whom they wouldn't identify. She said she believed that her husband had killed Holzmayer and told them where they both had worked.

People who answered the door Thursday at Huang's apartment declined any comment.

Holzmayer and her family came to the United States in 1989, according to Roninson, a classmate of hers at Moscow State University in Russia.

She was an intellectual, he said, torn between becoming a classical pianist or a scientist. She chose genomics over her beloved Chopin, focusing on helping create new drugs that interfere with replication of the virus that causes AIDS.

Until December, Holzmayer had served a four-year tenure as senior vice president of genomics for PPD Discovery, a division of PPD Inc. of Wilmington, N.C. It was at PPD Discovery that Holzmayer met Huang, who began working as the firm's director of molecular biology and bioinformatics in early 2000.

Roninson said Huang ``gave a perfectly normal, charismatic impression.''

Holzmayer told Roninson two weeks ago that she had just received funding for her new start-up venture to use modern methodologies to develop new drugs.

``She said she had never felt so happy in her life.''
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contact Sean Webby at swebby@sjmercury.com or (650) 688-7577. Fax (650) 688-7555.

Posted 7:32 AM by Blah blah

Make sure to check out Min Jung's new, stylish, and totally redesigned website. Its new address: minjungkim.com! Funny, bold (posted her high school yearbook photos---egads!), real, and utterly seductively human---that's Min Jung! Hers is the first online journal I ever saw in my life. MJ is the one who opened my eyes to you, the whole universe of writers. She sets a pretty high standard with her writing. Especially now that I don't write as much as one year ago, I feel the gap between her standard and mine.

Bottom line: take another look at MJ---a beautiful mind with beautiful lips.

Please leave some comments, guys. This page is deader without your input!

Posted 5:22 PM by Blah blah

Today was a crucial day (CBS MarketWatch) for Hewlett-Packard here in the Valley, and CEO Carly Fiorina can now take her fingernails out of her mouth. HP management, exhaustively responding to Walter Hewlett's campaign against the HP-Compaq merger, managed to convince Institutional Shareholder Services, which advises more than 700 clients on how to vote on corporate-governance issues (and thus may affect 23% of HP shares), to vote "YES" on the merger. Today in the Mercury News, both Fiorina and Hewlett placed full-page ads in the business section pleading their cases. This drama grows more and more fascinating because Hewlett is, of course, son of William Hewlett, co-founder of HP, and on the HP board with Fiorina. Last week news leaked that Hewlett approached previous CEO Lew Platt, who had chosen Fiorina as his successor in the first place, to take over HP temporarily in case the merger fails and Fiorina is given the boot. Platt sides with Hewlett against the merger.

ISS's statement sounds fair to both sides, and I like it:

In its decision, ISS thanked Walter Hewlett for challenging management at H-P and Compaq to prove how their merger will succeed when other large tech mergers have failed.

But management met Hewlett's challenge, according to ISS. The advisement firm's analysts wrote in their decision, that H-P and Compaq's teams presented "meticulous and exhaustively detailed" integration plans.

"Half a million manhours of work have thus far been devoted to integration planning, which surely makes H-P-Compaq one of the most exhaustively planned combinations ever," according to the ISS recommendation.

The advisory firm also wrote that the merger provides a way to make use of all of H-P's assets. Hewlett's plan, on the other hand, involved spinning out the company' s profitable imaging and printing business, while short-changing personal computers.

"We strongly disagree with the ISS decision," Hewlett said in a statement. "We believe ISS has missed the point -- we believe that the HP-Compaq merger will destroy stockholder value."

In a minor victory, the ISS recommendation seemed to chide H-P's management in its report for painting Hewlett as a, "dilettante who placed casual pursuits above his duties as a director.

"We regard most of management's arguments along this vein as so much noise - whether Mr. Hewlett is a dilettante or not is hardly relevant to the legitimacy of his very serious arguments," the report said.

The ISS analysts went on to praise Hewlett for making public details of discussed compensation arrangements that would have paid Fiorina a total of $63.2 million in the event the merger is completed.

Listen to Carly Fiorina make the case for the merger, on Charlie Rose.

Posted 1:37 AM by Blah blah

Unshaven

More pictures, finally! Monday morning I happened to have my camera in my office. And I didn't shave this weekend. Here's the result...

Me in my office on a typical Monday morning---unshaven and unawake and cranky. I call this work of modern art: "Unshaven."

Waking...



Cranky...


Ah well! Face the day...

Posted 7:25 PM by Blah blah

Thou Shalt be Christian Mothers (LA Times):

"I do not blame Andrea Yates. Although I don't purport to understand all the pressures she felt, I do know what it feels like to believe that you are a bad mother.

There was a time in my life that I, too, believed I was a bad mother to my four children. As a young 20-something, I married. I wanted nothing more than to please God and my husband, not necessarily in that order.

We joined a small church: Jesus was preached, God was glorified, pastor and wife modeled familial propriety and righteousness. I left my job and rose to a higher calling: Christian mother. One baby came, then two, then three, then four. Blessed rewards! I kneaded and baked bread; soaked and simmered refried beans; blended mayonnaise from oil and egg with just a dash of dried mustard; purchased flats of half-rotten strawberries and plucked stems, pared away soft spots, mashed, mixed, boiled and "put up" jar after jar of strawberry preserves, with my toddlers at my elbow.

We--my husband and I--were 'in' but not 'of' a materialistic world, covenanted before God to thrive on one income, to share one car....

But instead of feeling fulfilled, following 15 years of never 'getting it right,' I felt frustrated: four shabbily dressed siblings bickered, tract-home paint peeled off finger-printed walls, the ceiling lining in the car drooped and the dichondra lawn resembled a wasteland."

I found this fantastic contest from Sun's Java page:

TopCoder: structured a bit like Yahoo Games, this is an international online collegiate programming contest that tries to find the top programmers in the nation. You are presented with a set of problems you try to program in the fastest and most accurate way possible. Getting points increases your rating. You also may "challenge" your fellow competitors' code. Finding bugs or inefficiencies in it will boost your rating. Jason Woolever, a senior at MIT, won last year's first ever TopCoder Collegiate Challenge. He won a grand prize of $100,000!

For all coders and aspiring coders---this is a must-see! Intellectual challenge, sport, money, and professional connections. You can't beat that!

Posted 1:54 AM by Blah blah

I installed this awesome program, Trillian, which lets you log into all of your instant messengers (AOL, Yahoo, ICQ, MSN, etc.) at once. It puts all of your buddy lists together and integrates all of the popular IM systems. Try it. I just signed up for MSN Messenger too (for those folks on Hotmail), so now I have 3 ways to be reached: the main way---Yahoo Messenger (rayning), AIM (rayning4), and MSN (rayning2@hotmail.com). The only thing is it doesn't seem to archive chats. But now I hope to reach almost everyone!

On the heels of Am I Hot of Not? is Am I Annoying?

Posted 1:52 PM by Blah blah

I'm listening to this lovely song from the Disney movie, Mulan, called "Reflection." In the movie, it was originally sung by a Filipina girl, Lea Salonga. But in America, they asked Christina Aguilera to do the single, which became a hit. I find the version by Coco Lee, however, more hauntingly beautiful. This song sounds sweeter in Chinese than in the original English. Here are the MP3s of both Christina's and Coco's songs. Try them yourself:

Look at me
You may think you see
Who I really am
But you'll never know me
Every day
It's as if I play a part
Now I see
If I wear a mask
I can fool the world
But I cannot fool my heart
Who is that girl I see
Staring straight back at me
When will my reflection show
Who I am inside

I am now
In a world where I
Have to hide my heart
And what I believe in
But somehow
I will show the world
What's inside my heart
And be loved for who I am

Who is that girl I see
Staring straight back at me
Why is my reflection
Someone I don't know
Must I pretend that I'm
Someone else
For all time
When will my reflection show
Who I am inside

There's a heart that must be free to fly
That burns with a need to know the reason why

Why must we all conceal
What we think
How we feel
Must there be a secret me
I'm forced to hide
I won't pretend that I'm
Someone else
For all time
When will my reflection show
Who I am inside
When will my reflection show
Who I am inside

Want to see some male Taiwanese eye candy right here in San Jose? Look no farther than Mr. Thomas Kuoh, web designer and "international model."

Thomas Kuoh, International Model.
His blog.