If you know me, you’ll know that I really enjoy watching table tennis videos on YouTube. Over the past couple years, I’ve immersed myself in this sport that is little known in the USA. This is not the same game that is played in garages across our country, and a lot of people don’t know about the finesse, intricacies, and sheer awesomeness that is exhibited by top table tennis athletes. Of course, the primary reason for this is that the USA is no where near challenging the rest of the world.

With that in mind, the best way to introduce people to a professional sport is to show the top players and how they go about playing the game. So, without further ado, I present you the top 10 men’s table tennis players.

10. Joo Se Hyuk (Korea)

Joo is the only defensive player in the top 10. Defenders aim to take consistent and safe shots, waiting for their opponent to make a mistake. Joo’s style is what’s called “modern defense”, because he will attack if he sees a good opening.

From the video, you’ll notice that the ball floats back every time he hits it. This is because he has what’s called a “pips out” rubber on his backhand, which basically reverses the top spin from his opponents, giving back tricky and heavy backspin shots.

Here, Joo is seen in the green jersey:

9. Jun Mizutani (Japan)

Mizutani is a relatively new and young addition to the top ten. His style is a shakehand all around looper, meaning that he relies on heavy top spin shots to overwhelm is opponents. However, many times, he’ll fall back into an active defensive position, relying on consistency and patience to wear down his opponents.

8. Vladimir Samsonov (Belarus)

Samsonov is known in China as the “Tai Chi Master”. He’s an offensive shakehand looper that uses his opponents strength against them. In essence, he uses a combination of tricky blocks and quick misdirection to win. He’s an older player that is on the decline.

7. Xu Xin (China)

Xu Xin represents the next generation of Chinese players. In the past ten years, the Chinese have dominated table tennis, leaving the rest of the world behind. Xu Xin is a very aggressive penholder player that uses a lot of speed and power. In terms of power, he probably has the most powerful forehand stroke on the planet.

Here, we see him in the black jersey:

6. Wang Liqin (China)

Wang Liqin is a 3 time world champion aggressive shakehander. He represents the ideal for all aggressive looping shakehanders, and his form is perfection. Even though he’s getting older, he’s still very competitive on the world class scene.

Here, we see him in the green jersey, playing against Samsonov:

5. Zhang Jike (China)

Zhang, like Xu Xin, is also a young new player from China. His forehand topspin is unparalleled. He is known for his deadly combination of spin and speed.

Here, we see Zhang in the red jersey:

4.Wang Hao (China)

Wang Hao represents a new generation of penholders that uses both sides the paddle. Traditional penholders will only use one side, which leaves their backhand weak and vulnerable. Wang, however, is able to keep up with the best shakehanders with his reverse penhold backhand. He is a well rounded all around attacker.

Here we see him in the blue jersey winning the world championships:

3. Ma Lin (China)

Ma Lin is a penhold master of trickery. He has one of the most deceptive serves, coupled with deadly 3rd ball attacks and unpredictable variations of returns. Coaches, after measuring his hits with high speed cameras, have said that he is able to generate more spin on the ball than any other players they have seen.

2. Timo Boll (Germany)

Timo Boll is one of the only europeans at the moment that can challenge China. He’s a very consistent all around shakehand attacker.

1. Ma Long (China)

And at the top, we have Ma Long, probably the most aggressive shakehand player on the scene. He’ll typically try to cover a lot of the table with his forehand, preferring to step around to make finishing shots. Usually, his opponents are quickly overwhelmed by his speed and consistency.

During our time in Bologna, we took a cooking class from Bluone Cooking Tours. It had always been my dream to learn from a Bolognese family how to cook. Bologna, after all, is one of the centers of the culinary world, giving the world Bolognese sauce and mortadella (Americans are more familiar with the bastardized version of this: bologna — don’t ever mistake the two).

Our guide was the wonderful Raffaella, who has been teaching for over 15 years. She took us under her wing, bringing us to the local food markets and explaining all the local ingredients. Then, after deciding on a menu, we went back to her charming home to make a traditional Bolognese meal. Needless to say, it was the one of the most memorable moments in our time in Italy.

After coming back to California, I decided to try my hand at the two simpler recipes we learned: Veal Scallopini and Eggplant with Olive Oil.

Veal Scallopini

This is a tender and deeply flavorful dish, and it’s quick and easy to make too. I managed to do this recipe from memory, so I did my best to guess the amounts.

Ingredients

• 1 lb pounded veal, in about 3 inch long pieces (you can usually find this already flattened and ready to cook, otherwise, you’ll need to pound it)
• 4 cloves garlic
• 1 fistful of parsley
• 1/2 cup fresh (or dried) oregano
• 1 cup good quality olive oil
• 3/4 cup tomato sauce
• 1/2 cup flour

Directions

1. Finely chop the parsley, garlic, and oregano together.
2. Heat a heavy skillet over medium low heat, add the olive oil.
3. Sweat the chopped garlic and parsley in the skillet for 7 minutes.
4. Add the tomato sauce and stir. Continue to cook for another 7 minutes.
5. One by one, lightly coat each veal piece with flour and drop into the skillet.
6. Cook for about 7 minutes or until the veal pieces are cooked through. Don’t overcook, or the veal can get tough.

Eggplant with Olive Oil

Raffaella kept describing this recipe as “stupid” because it’s just so simple. But what you’ll come to learn after doing enough Italian cooking is that all the dishes relatively simple. It’s really the quality of the ingredients that shine through in each recipe.

Ingredients

• Good quality olive oil
• Italian eggplant, sliced thin
• Parsley, chopped fine

Directions

1. Heat the slices of eggplant in a heavy skillet, without any oil, for about 10 minutes. The point is to dry out each piece of eggplant. The pieces should shrink about 50% and start to shrivel and slightly brown.
2. Set the slices on a plate and cover with the parsley. Drizzle a generous amount of olive oil on top.
3. That’s it! There’s no 3rd step. It really is stupid.

It was really nice to cook a meal that instantly transported me back to Bologna. It’s funny how aromas and tastes can evoke such intense memories of a place and time. Perhaps that’s why many first memories are about food.

After traveling in Italy for the past two weeks, I learned a lot about how digital devices and various other tools can help with travel logistics. This was the first big international trip where I made a significant effort to use digital tools; it’s stunning how much easier it is to get oriented when you’re not only relying on static offline tools.

Jailbroken iPhone
All of Italy (and most of Europe) is blanketed in fast 3G, making the iPhone one of the most useful tools. You’ll need to jailbreak your iPhone first. iClarified is the easiest way to do this.

After landing in Italy, all you need to do is go to a local wireless provider and get a prepaid SIM card with data plan, which will run you around €15. I went with TIM, which provided 3GB of free data and great coverage even in the most rural areas of Italy. I also hear good things about Vodafone and Wind.

Once you get this setup, you’ll also be able to tether your iPhone 3G connection to your other devices. This is useful since many hotels in Italy still charge highway robbery fees for WiFi. If you have an iPad without 3G, you can grab the MiWi app to create a WiFi hotspot using your iPhone. As far as I know, this is the only way to share your internet connection from your iPhone to your iPad.

Evernote
I made heavy use of Evernote throughout the entire trip. It’s the perfect tool to throw all those random bits of information like receipts, reservations, and itineraries. It’s also an easy way to share information between your iPad, iPhone, and laptop.

Language Apps
In bigger urban areas like Florence and Rome, you can get by with English. But, in smaller towns like Bologna, you’ll have more problems. It’s a good idea to get the basic phrases down, and rely on a full dictionary for more difficult situations.

I recommend these two apps for Italian:

Italian Phrase Book – The best “phrase book” app. It allows you to easily build phrases for various different situations, with clear audio pronunciations.

WordRoll Italian/English Translation Dictionary – Quick and easy to use It/Eng dictionary.

Google My Maps
Google My Maps is the best way to create and manage itinerary of places. You can access it by going to http://maps.google.com and clicking on “My Maps”. The UI isn’t the most intuitive, but I’ve found it’s really the best way to manage a bunch of locations you want to see. Also, it’s the best app to get a “feeling” for a place, especially since you can easily see nearby places, zoom into street view, and add google search results to your maps.

Once you make your map, you can access your map on the iPhone by going to http://my-maps.appspot.com/. This is a 3rd party solution, since Google doesn’t yet offer a native solution. From here, you will be able to browse all your maps, and see all your mapped points at once in the Google Maps interface on the iPhone. Very handy.

Using this, I was able to easily navigate the streets of Rome and Milan. And trust me, the streets can get very hairy, with many street names ending and starting at the most unpredictable places.

Here is a list of my maps that I’ve created:
Milan
Florence
Bologna

TripAdvisor
Yelp may rule the roost for reviews in the US, but TripAdvisor is king internationally. As always, you should take reviews with a grain of salt, but I’ve found TripAdvisor to be pretty reliable, especially for hotels and restaurants.

Food Books
Okay, so these aren’t digital, but if you’re into food, and want to taste traditional Italian cuisine, I suggest taking a look at L’Osteria Italia and Fred Plotkin’s Italy for the Gourmet Traveler. Many people don’t know that it’s actually easy to eat badly in Italy by falling into tourist traps.

Understand the food, the traditions, and prepare a list of restaurant options before heading out! The last thing you want to do is to duck into a restaurant that cooks Americanized Italian food just because you were to hungry to look for anything else.

I spent the last two weeks traveling through Italy, eating my way through various provinces. Along the way, I was floored by the quality of food Italians enjoy. You can check out my photoset to see a glimpse.

Eating in Italy is both liberating and intoxicating.

Americans are afraid of food. We scrutinize our diets, contemplating levels of saturated fats and questioning the origins of every ingredient. Italians simply eat. And eating simply is eating better.

Italian food is the most loved food in the world. Whether you’re in New York or Norway, you’ll find people dining on some form of spaghetti or pizza. There are three factors to the success of Italian food: freshness and locality, simplicity, and umami. Yes, I’m using a Japanese concept to describe an old world European cuisine. I’ll explain soon.

Freshness and Locality

When you eat in Italy, you are eating locally. The Italians have an unparalleled level of respect for their ingredients. Each morsel of produce encountered is the best it can be.

During my trip, I’ve tasted impossibly sweet tomatoes, deeply savory slices of prociutto, and rich creamy scoops of gelato. Each bite was bittersweet, because no matter how you slice it, Italian produce is just better than the rest of the world. The produce in California, arguably the best in America, even pales in comparison.

So what’s the secret? Some say it’s the air, others say it’s the water. Italy is just naturally the best place to grow many types of produce. Whether it’s tomatoes from Napoli, milk and cream from Emilgio-Romagna cows, or olives from the Amalfi coast, Italian cuisine has an advantage even before heating up the skillet.

But more important than the quality of the local ingredients is the Italian philosophy of eating fresh and local. Chefs in Italy are fiercely dedicated to using local, fresh, and in-season ingredients. Through this commitment, the foundation of Italian cuisine is firmly rooted in quality. This is the reason why simple dishes like bruschetta are sublime when the ingredients are right, and disastrously dull when they are not.

Italian chefs, wherever they are, will turn to using local ingredients. One thing to remember is that even the tomato, which we strongly associate with Italian cuisine, originated from the New World. Only after pioneers brought back the plant did Italians incorporate it into their cuisine. It turns out tomatoes grow exceedingly well in the Italian climate. It’s a real testament to the Italian philosophy of incorporating local ingredients that grow well.

Simplicity

Italian food is simple. It’s an honest cuisine that let’s the produce and ingredients shine. You’ll be surprised to learn that a lot of Italian dishes only comprise of three or four ingredients. Bruschetta is tomatoes, olive oil, garlic and bread. Bolognese sauce is chopped root vegetables, beef, pork, and wine, slowly simmered.

In the US, we like to overcomplicate Italian food. We overstuff, oversauce, and overdo classic Italian recipes. For example, a typical lasagna in the US explodes with thick layers of mozzarella, meat, sauce, and other random ingredients.

In contrast, the classic Bolognese lasagna is comprised of Bolognese sauce, bechemel sauce, spinach sheet pasta, and parmesan cheese. Each layer contains a balanced and spare amount of these ingredients. Italian chefs understand that one component of a dish should not drown out all the other flavors. After tasting how delicate a lasagna could be, all the other versions I’ve tasted before felt heavy and overburdened.

Umami

Italians are masters at lacing their food with umami, the delicious savory fifth taste that is associated with the presence of glutamates. This is different from MSG, which is basically artifically injecting glutamates into foods.

The foundational Italian ingredients naturally contain very high levels of umami: ripe tomatoes, parmesan reggiano, prosciutto, porcini mushrooms, ragu. The aging process in parmesan reggiano in particular produces one of the highest levels of glutamates found in any naturally made ingredient. This is the reason why parmesan is a staple in pantries across the world.

With this trifecta, there is no surprise that Italian food is revered, eaten, and imitated across the world. It is said that Italians, even at their poorest, eat better than the richest countries in the world.

After my trip, I’m hoping to emulate as much of their philosophy as possible. You don’t need to be in Italy to cook great Italian food. You just need to remember to use the freshest ingredients around you to create an honest meal. Any Italian grandmother would approve of that.

This past weekend, my credit card was declined at various venues. It turns out, there was a fraudulent charge made on my card.

The problem with verifying fraudulent charges is that they make you do it over the phone. All online access to your account is locked. This can make it difficult to remember exactly which charge you made, especially if you’re the kind of person who forgets the various places you’ve been in the past few days. A lot of context is lost.

As I was on the phone, trying to remember exactly what I did, I remembered my foursquare account. Foursquare is a fun little location aware app I recently started really getting into. They make it a game to check-in online whenever you arrive at a new venue.

With the super secret check-in history page, I had in hand all the places I’ve been in the past few days, and could easily spot the fraudulent charges.

In essence, foursquare has now become my very accurate location memory. There are definitely fun social aspects about using the service, but what I find compelling is that diligent users of location aware services like foursquare will find lots of situations where location data is a logistical gold mine.

Now, if I only I can figure who’s been making those big online retail purchases.

It’s the Medelco Glass Whistling Kettle. Minimalistic yum.

Glass Kettle from James Yu on Vimeo.

There was a great article on Time.com about Auto-tune last week. It talks about how Auto-tune touches all pop music you hear over the radio, making silent and not-so-silent tweaks to songs. Basically, it applies autocorrelation to make any singer sing in tune.

There was also some great discussion on Hacker News.

I decided to fire up GarageBand and apply its version of Auto-tune (Enhanced Tuning) on my voice. It’s actually incredibly easy to sound just like most modern pop artists, sans the great audio equipment. Here I present you the first verse of Kanye West’s Love Lockdown, as sung by me. Please keep in mind I did this in 5 minutes on my Macbook Pro mic.

With Auto-tune (.m4a)

Without Auto-tune (.m4a)

I’ve recently been getting really into table tennis, a sport I’ve played for most of my life, but never seriously. My father taught me when I was just tall enough to reach the table, and I was hooked ever since.

As I began to study table tennis (or more casually, ping pong) in depth, I realized it’s one of the best sports for hackers. Here’s why.

1. Table tennis is easy to install in any office

Just order a table, some balls, and few paddles and you’re in business. No complicated setup is necessary.

2. Table tennis exercises the brain

A simple game of table tennis works wonders for the reflexes and brain. The ball moves fast, and studies have shown that the game keeps your brain sharp. It’s also especially refreshing to play a fast reaction after a complex coding session, and can get your mind to drift off of a problem long enough to work out the solution.

3. Table tennis is strategy

Table tennis is one of the few sports that has a wide variety of play styles. Just like programmers have various languages to choose from, there is a multitude of table tennis playing styles. And, just like programming languages, these styles are continuously evolving. Throughout the decades, many styles of play have had their moment in the limelight.

It’s really up to you how you’d like to play. Maybe you’re an aggressive player that uses the handshake grip. Or, maybe you’re an attacker that uses the Japanese penhold grip, utilizing extremely fast footwork. Or, maybe you’re a defensive lobber (a rare type, but perhaps you program in Haskell? Don’t think lobbing works? Witness the power of the lob below.)

There really is an essence of “hacking” in table tennis as well. Each style has particular strengths and weaknesses. Much of the challenge is to discover your opponents’ weaknesses and change the way you play to exploit them.

4. Table tennis doesn’t require you to be in super tip-top shape, but it’ll get you in shape

Table tennis is an easy sport to pick up (but as the cliche goes: very difficult to master). Most importantly, for casual games, you don’t need to be super athletic to play. This encourages everybody in the office to get involved, no matter how fit your are.

On the flip side, the game does offer the rare chance for many hackers to exercise during the day. A game is ideal for any hacker who has been sitting in a chair for the past 4 hours. Get up and move around. A healthy hacker is a productive hacker.

5. Table tennis is social

A game of table tennis encourages conversations, especially if you play doubles. It’s a good way to get the team together and participate in something fun and interactive after a day of staring at a lifeless screen.

6. It’s just damn fun.

Go out there and get a table, review the rules, and start playing. Trust me, it’ll boost productivity.

I’ve gotten very jaded about taking photographs at tech events. It’s the same people, in the same types of rooms, all standing in a similar fashion. Thus, I will no longer just blast all my event photos up, as most of them will have been already taken by numerous people.

On the other hand, there are always those few select gems that end up with at the end of the night. I’ll only be posting those. Armed with my spy lens, I discretely took shots around the crowd. I particularly liked this photo of Ed, senior developer on the Scribd iPaper team.

New York 2008 from James Yu on Vimeo.