Dan's Moving to the 6th Floor

I believe I just figured out that one of the best uses of the blog space is to document the people I met and worked with, those who impressed, touched, helped and influenced me in one way or the other. I've seen a great many blogs publishing interesting thoughts from talented individuals. However, very few times a blogger talks about someone else or the ideas they learned from others. I am seriously wondering whether we are entering a new era of egotism or just because egotists blog the most...

Yes, I should switch to the main topic. It's all about Dan, my officemate who's gonna move to a new room at the 6th floor. Dan is our technical writer. And without a doubt, I like his writings a lot, even his emails are just way better written than anyone of us.

I've always been a language lover since I was kid. I remembered one of the first English learning programs on TV in the 80's at China is called "Follow me", a British show that we imported. I watched it and never quite enjoyed it because, I guess, the dull plot and lackluster characters. However, I recalled there's another show made by our own people which really caught up the heat and won the hearts of kids, coz it's a mix of cartoon and true man shows. And it had a nice companion booklet full of images that I really loved. Most other English shows made by our Chinese are insults to TV programs, they usually went like this: "where's the banana?” And then an actor who's real occupation is a high school English teacher, would show up and grab the banana for the girl/boy whoever asked the question, “here you are.” Then there's this huge pure blue screen with one word "banana" in the middle. Of course, a side voice would creep in pronouncing it three times. okay, you got the idea... then a few years later during my high school, Chinese have obviously improved the relationship with the US and we imported the American show known as the "Family Album USA". It was much better acted and had attractive characters and plots. I watched every episodes.

Until today, I am still an apprentice of the English language. My adviser at grad school had helped me a lot. I still remembered how many the's he added and how many words he axed for me in my papers. Wise is the only word I would use to describe him. After having started at Amazon for a few months, I went back to visit him at his San Francisco studio, he talked about the studies he did for the government on software industry and his model on software product flow. He seemed to have a thoughtful answer for anything, long before you ever ask.

Dan is another person who helped to correct me in my writings. I guess he would most probably frown at my blogs, coz there must be errors caused by my incompetence than mere sloppiness. One thing is for sure, I'll bug him more later even though it means I have to go two floors down ;-). To end this entry, I'd like to put down his recommended books before I forget: "On writing well" and "Bugs in Writings". I'll ask him more about the reasons he dislikes "The Elements of Style" and his opinions on Stephen King's "On Writing", which I took time to read a couple of years ago.