A lesson with Crystal Huang: structural reform

This is the first of a long series of posts about improving my table tennis. This is not about beautiful technique. There are plenty of videos on youtube for that. It's about my struggle and probably quixotic quest for better technique. More precisely, it's about structural reform. In other words, engineering out already-learned but ultimately flawed and limited strokes. Undo, then redo. The goal is to override muscle memory and replace with better programming.

Structural reform is a term I hear a lot nowadays: especially, with respect to the current eurozone crisis. Old habits die hard but countries have to change their ways. Growth, if possible, is the preferred way out. If not, austerity to shrink the economy is the only option left. Seems like it's either grow or wither away and lose maybe decades.

The same seems to be true in table tennis. We have a few tenths of a second (usually around 1/3 of a second) to react to the incoming ball and do something about it. Therefore, a lot is dependent on muscle memory. Human muscle memory is reliable and responses can be deployed almost without conscious thought. This is all and good given proper training and conditioning.

Unfortunately, some amateurs such as myself, without someone to nip flaws in the bud so to speak, spent years hitting balls incorrectly. This not only looks bad but also limits performance. After improving muscle memory through repetition, the amateur improves until he/she plateaus, unable to break through to the next level no matter how often they practice.

The next logical step then is to employ a professional coach who can highlight weaknesses and point the student in the right direction. A good coach can both demonstrate proper technique and explain why and how to execute the proper stroke. Unfortunately, the amateur has spent considerable time "grooving" his strokes and that subconscious muscle memory that enabled him/her to respond in 1/3 second is now a huge barrier to change. Reprogramming muscle memory is incredibly difficult.

The amateur then rues not employing a proper coach from the first day he/she picked up a paddle. Short of being reborn and learning proper technique under close supervision as a child, the amateur faces a long and frustratingly difficult road in overcoming his initial self-learning or natural programming. Watching videos of world champions with beautiful technique doesn't really help. The gap is too large. Even seeing what seems like humanly possible proper technique up close and live, subtleties escape the observer and attempted replication results in just a pale and unreliable facsimile of what he/she just saw.

The amateur may be missing crucial knowledge. But even possessing the correct knowledge doesn't seem to help as much as he/she thought. Low level programming seems unavailable or strangely elusive to conscious thought processes.

On this beautifully sunny past weekend in Los Angeles, I decided to spend 15 hours indoors at the LATTA to take lessons with Crystal Huang, a professional who went to the Beijing Olympics on the USA national team. Retired from competition, she is a coach. (I've blogged about the club before here.)

I decided to get more serious about structural reform, so I recorded a lot of video over a weekend. Just merely taping a coaching session doesn't really do much. So I started editing the videos into clips to remind myself of what to do (as well as what to not do). It became a labor intensive process because I found myself adding captioning as an aid to understanding. So I thought I might as well share. Perhaps some of these may be of use to others, spark a change or two, or at the very least make the reader feel thankful their game doesn't include my huge set of flaws.

Next time, we'll look at how Crystal tries to point out and correct my many flaws. This time, I'd like to show how even the warm-up (before the lesson truly begins) can be very revealing.

This first video is of my forehand block. Crystal is gently topspinning (or looping) the ball to my forehand. The rate is almost exactly 1 ball per second. I know precisely which quadrant the balls will fall in. In fact, I only have to worry about blocking that ball diagonally back to her forehand (she is a lefty). I block the ball back 33 times consecutively in the following clip but, as you can see, I still manage to screw things up.

Link: here

The fundamental problem is I'm not constantly moving to track the ball. I'm reacting too late (ball is about to arrive), and having to move off-balance and attempt to correct and rebalance in record time. By block #34, I've lost track of my center of gravity and clearly it looks rather ugly.

Slow motion of block #15 is rather revealing and will make the problem clear. See captions in the clip below.

Link: here

Tellingly, because I had to lunge I was unable to block the ball back to her forehand corner. Instead, notice the ball went to the middle of the table. You may not have noticed that she smoothly moved across and still looped the ball to my corner so I could continue.

Here's what went wrong.

(a)	(b)	(c)

In (a), the ball is looped. I haven't yet noticed the ball will end up out of reach. (I should have observed the angle of the paddle and reacted by shuffling to the right. In fact, it's critical I do so.)

In (b), 0.26 seconds later, the ball is landing on my side. Too late, I realize it's out of reach. I've wasted 0.26 seconds without moving my feet.

In another 1/10th of a second, I lunge with my arm as the ball arrives. Although I get to the ball and return it, it's just a mere band-aid. Actually, the situation is quite dire.

As a result of the lunge, I'm way off balance as shown in (c). Instead of sensibly moving sideways to the right earlier, now I've created an unnecessarily enormous backlog of work for the next 0.6 seconds.

I have to land away from the table, regain balance, push off again and hop back towards the centerline, rebalance myself and hope I get there before the ball arrives again. Despite the leisurely 1 second interval between balls, I barely got back in time.

And of course, my mistake is actually deadly in practice. Had the drill been not just to my forehand, the ball could have been looped to my backhand corner. In that case, there is no way in hell I could have gotten back in time of course.

A keen observer will notice there are other systemic problems that I haven't mentioned. For example, notice I automatically drop my arm after each block. This is another very bad habit that will cost valuable tenths of a second.

Hong Kong wishes

There is a certain beauty and a romantic feel to Hong Kong, especially in the relative cool of winter. I can't be sure I'd ever want to live there, but a visit can be simply sublime. Tonight and every night Let's go walking down this empty street Let's walk in the cool evening night Wrong or right, be at my side The downtown lights...

I need a good walk after dinner; this is from an uncrowded Avenue of the Stars (星光大道) around 10:45pm. I was very lucky indeed; I had just seconds to compose this as one of the few (fake) junks still in existence came into view and made a brief stop.

(Handheld pictures at night can be tough to nail. You need a fast lens (here, wide-open at f/1.7) and as slow a shutter speed as you dare: a potentially blurry 1/30s was used here. Fortunately, the Olympus E-P1 has in-body sensor stabilization. Still, this exposure required a speed of 3200 ISO! No EV compensation. My EP-1 is truly marginal at high ISO. Hmm, a good excuse to get that new world-class Olympus OM-D.)

Not being much of a tourist, my ideal day in Hong Kong would revolve around guilt-free food and exercise. The idea being to pay one's dues before taking in a calorifically significant repetition, for example, of this:

Add in some shark fin soup beforehand, and ahem, you see the need to walk it off a bit before I can fit in that relaxing drink, maybe at the nearby and classy Intercontinental Hotel Lobby Lounge (Link: here)?

Or for a view from on high and a different ambiance, maybe the inside/outside Cocky Bar up on the 18th floor at The One? (Link: here.)

Of course, to ensure that one should be feeling absolutely guilt-free about the after-dinner Mojito, I'd suggest sweating a bit for a few hours before dinner: for example, I'm partial to exercise of the kind shown here. Your mileage may vary.

Win a few, lose a few, don't play too hard and make some friends. And, before that, if I manage to catch up on a few hours of work on the laptop in the early afternoon, then Life with a capital L is good (at least for today).

Unfortunately, there is a different kind of price to be paid for those sublime evenings.

The problem with travel across time zones is jet lag. I wake up early. There's nothing I can do about that.

Since I'm up early, I might as well take out the iPod and running shoes that I've brought along.

Hit the hotel gym for a light 30 minute workout before first light, as the city is still sleeping. If I time this right, by the time I finish, dawn's light has transformed my view of the cityscape from 45 floors up.

It's 7:30am and I'm 450 kcal to the good already.

A cooldown swim in the deliciously deserted 20m long roof-top heated pool. I can concentrate on my technique as I swim slow lazy laps:

I skip the whirlpool for the (Japanese-style serious) 43C water temperature of the indoor spa:

It's not onsen (温泉) water with mineral content, but as my leg muscles warm back up, I feel them slowly unwind. I may also use the steam room. In the USA, they may use peppermint in a plastic spray bottle, in Hong Kong it's Cassia bark bundles on the heater in the steam room. (Therapeudic effects are claimed. Balances ying and yang. Restores energy, improves the digestive system and eyesight. Or so it says. I'm sold. It feels good.)

(Nearly perfection, much classier than what I'm used to normally, I do wish they had laundry service for my running gear while I swam and unwound in the spa.)

By the time I shower, it has been an indulgent two hours since I got up. But hey, the silver lining with jet lag is that time is on my side in the mornings. With additional good timing, I'm ready for dim sum breakfast as soon as a decent restaurant opens.

I love to be first in a nearly empty restaurant. You see, near emptiness and tranquility is at a premium in Hong Kong. Congee (粥) accompanied by deep-fried, and slightly salted breadstick (油條), aka colloquially as 油炸鬼 (oil-fried devil), really hits the spot after the run.

Plus my favorite char-siu steamed rice flour rolls (豬腸粉) beautifully presented, and I'm good to go (back to sleep).

It's okay. It's only 9am, even if I nap, I've accomplished something today even if I'm feeling deliciously decadent.

Ping Pong in Hong Kong

I've never played ping pong in Hong Kong before: basically because I don't know anyone there. Instead, I've always gone into Shenzhen next door to play and get coaching as documented elsewhere in this blog.

(I know there are private clubs and municipal gyms for those who can book tables in advance, but I'm not plugged into the Hong Kong table table community.)

Well, all that changed this winter. Through networking, I managed to visit facilities at two universities in Hong Kong. In future, I'll definitely be playing at these locations whenever I get the chance.

City University

As the name suggests, this is in the "city" so to speak. Easily reached by MTR train (East Rail line) or subway (Kwun Tong line, 觀塘綫), Kowloon Tong (九龍塘) station, I played here twice.

My contact and generous host was Prof. Leon Zhao, head of MIS at CityU (pictured here on the left). Incidentally, I have met Leon previously in a professional capacity as we served together on a Ph.D exam committee, though I never knew he was a ping pong player. It's a small, small world, isn't it?

You need a guest pass and someone affiliated with CityU (in my case, Leon) to get into their sports centre. Cost is HK$20. There is a dedicated room for ping pong and nice new-looking tables.

They have a club and CityU team. Plus a semi-professional coach, Eddie Wei, standing to the right of me below:

(From left to right: Ye Liu (Ph.D student), Yikshing Yeung (CityU TT team member), me, Eddie Wei (coach), Haibin Yang (Professor), Wansan Lee (high school student who trains there, seems like 2500 level player) and Enyu Zhuang (Ph.D student).)

I had a lot of fun playing there playing with as many people as possible. Very cool bunch of guys.

Chinese University of Hong Kong

I also had the opportunity to play at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. With a large uncrowded campus up on a hill, this is not in the city by any means. It has a MTR train (not subway) station, simply called University (大學), on the East Rail Line.

So it's not surprising they have a larger gym with very high ceilings and good lighting. 6 tables.

Very spacious by Hong Kong standards, it's a nice facility with room to back up and lob a bit.

I played a bunch of professors but this guy pictured below is the staff champion. He's a PE instructor at the university. I tried hard but he beat me 3-0 convincingly.

You need to be affiliated with the university to play here. My contact and host here was Jimmy Lee, professor of computer science.

Like me, he is a computer science professor. We both play ping pong and train to run marathons. I even own the same exact ping pong shirt he is wearing. Obviously, a great guy with the right set of hobbies! :)

MacOSX Lion

Come out of things unsaid
Shoot an apple off my head and a
Trouble that can't be named
A tiger's waiting to be tamed

Only now, right at the end of the semester, have I dared to upgrade to the latest operating system (Lion) for my Macbook.

One reason is that it basically takes an entire day or two. And if everything is working fine, why disturb what ain't broken?

And as a university professor, I'm always working on slides, talks and papers. My life seems to revolve around show-and-tell, from teaching to academic conferences. Plus as a software developer, I hate instability. So downtime is not acceptable until the very last class is done.

Nevertheless, our high-tech world moves forward rapidly, and we must keep up if we are to enjoy new software functionality. Plus as older systems are deprecated, security and other bug fixes won't be available.

However, as any experienced professional knows, upgrades sometimes have unforeseen consequences. And some old software won't run anymore (here; anything that requires Rosetta). And upgrading those rarely used packages, e.g. Adobe Illustrator, sometimes will cost major bucks.

So I'm never an early adopter. I wait at least a minor revision or two until the cost/benefit ratio decidedly tilts in my favor. I'll let others be the guinea pigs. Being slightly behind the curve also means I can Google any minor issues I run into during the upgrade, and chances are, someone has documented and had a chance to work around them.

Even then, I commit only one laptop at a time to the upgrade, so I can punt the entire process without downtime.

MacOSX 10.7, aka Lion, literally takes gigabytes. Then there are gigabytes of incremental updates that Software Update will download after the initial install. Plus the Xcode software development environment.

Let us not do things by halves. I may hesitate and wait and see, but once I'm committed, I'll jump in with both feet. So I might as well go all in and upgrade all the applications as well. It makes sense to install the very latest versions of Apple's iLife and iWork software suites since they probably take advantage of any new functionality provided by Lion. And I'll upgrade to Microsoft Office 2011 also while I'm at it.
(Fortunately, due to site licensing arrangements, those packages I've mentioned above are freely downloadable for me.)

We still need a large and fat pipe to the internet. So I did this from my office. I achieved an impressive 1Mbyte/second download rate (equivalent to about 10Mb/s) when simultaneously downloading MacOSX Lion, iWork, iLife and Office 2011:

Even at this (sustained) speed, it still took hours. There's 8Gbytes of software to be downloaded before installation can begin. Those without fast broadband must have the patience of Job.

And although, we are downloading each package at around 250 KBytes/s, even when it's down to a single package, the download speed doesn't scale linearly. So it makes sense to download everything simultaneously. For example, at one package left to go, I'm only up to 440KBytes/s, see below:

Here is a graph of the bandwidth I experienced during the download orgy:

I also decided to purchase and install Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended. This is professional grade software and normally goes for $1000.

The university edition goes for $200. I'm using it more and more, so I think I can justify spending the money.

After a few more rounds of updates, we achieved fixpoint and I'm done.

Do I notice many changes to the operating system? Not really. Some user interface elements are different, when I hit F3, I see Spaces has been redone (see below).

Other changes, e.g. the scrolling direction and squared-off buttons, seems rather gratuitous.

Actually, I'm much more excited with the useful enhancements to application software. For example, Powerpoint has a neat new Presenter mode for talks. It also has a broadcast function now. And the full version of Photoshop does HDR (High Dynamic Range) images and also has content-aware fill/replace. Can't wait to try those out.

I notice the upgrade has nuked some of the license keys for other packages I own, e.g. AutoPano Pro, which now won't start. Fortunately, I have all keys saved in a special mail folder. And I notice I might as well grab the latest version of that application.

After 2 days of upgrading, am I up-to-date? Unfortunately, not. I notice Apple wants me to transition off MobileMe onto iCloud soon. But that requires iOS 5, and for various technical reasons, I'm not yet ready to upgrade to that on my iPhone.

Doha: CMU Qatar

After the social robotics conference in Amsterdam (see here), I spent a week at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Qatar.

I last blogged about CMU Qatar back in 2009 when I took a bunch of spherical panorama pictures (see here). This time I also brought my equipment but unfortunately had no time to take more of those special images. In particular, I had hoped to get a 360° shot of the following open seating area inside the building:

Unfortunately, this time half the space was set up with regular chairs instead of those awesome cushions. Maybe next time.

The building itself is quite opulent and certainly impressive, more reminiscent of an investment bank than a university. It has huge atrium-like open spaces that I find too big to be friendly. Designed to awe, I find it lacks human scale.

(I think of grand entrances on Arrakis designed to reduce the human to a mere mote, as described by Frank Herbert in perhaps the book God Emperor of Dune. It has been really many years since that read that series. Who has time these days to read a few thousand pages?)

My favorite room was the faculty lounge, not only because of the espresso machines but also because it has a nice friendly yet contemporary feel with proper wood floors instead of the echo of polished hard marble, artfully concealed indirect lighting and absolutely wonderful proportions. I'd love to have a house with a central living area like this. Dream on.

(Actually, if you look at houses like this one in California, you could make it work.)

Despite the luxury of having uniformed waiter service at my office, I often preferred to make the trek down to the faculty lounge myself.

The infrastructure is important, but in the end it's the personal touch that matters. My hosts made me feel supremely welcome.

For example, one of my sponsors drove me from the hotel to the university each morning until he got sick. After that, I rode in on the QIA Hummer H2:

I even met a ping pong enthusiast from Brazil, Prof. Marcelo Castier, a chemical engineer from Texas A&M University. An extremely busy man, but he managed to find one hour to hit a few balls with me at the brand-new student center the day before I left Doha.

They have three KillerSpin tables there:

Unfortunately, the polished floor is extremely slippery, the pool tables get in the way, and one is blinded by glare from the wall of windows from one end. But hey, these seem to be the only available ping pong tables.

Custom-welded furniture at a coffee shop

I do a lot of work after hours and weekends at a local coffee shop.

I grab a nicely decorated cappuccino (or three). Plug in my earphones to block out the music and distraction. And concentrate hard. The hours pass. I barely look up. Before I know it, it's closing time.

I'm not sure why but for certain kinds of non-creative work, somehow I am significantly more productive at a coffee shop than at home or in my office, where I'm more easily distracted. Instead, I get things done.

By far my favorite coffee shop for this purpose is the Cartel Coffee Lab. Not only is the cappuccino pretty good, but it has great custom-designed furniture that feels just right for working. Made of steel and wood.

This is my favorite location in the entire place. (Unfortunately, it's usually taken and there are only two of them.)

It looks like a simple one-piece desk and bench seat. And it is. But the proportions of this setup (despite the bare metal) just feels like it was designed for laptop use. It also has a footrest bar. In other words, ergonomically speaking, it hits all the right spots for me. Despite its non-adjustability, it simply feels right.

In fact, sometimes I've been able to sit at this desk for 6 to 8 hours without lower back, shoulder or neck trouble. Makes me want to learn how to weld up my own furniture.

A picture of the counter from my vantage point. (Notice the custom-welded iPad-based register.) So much cooler than a generic Starbucks:

Finally, a picture of the outside. I believe they're going to be moving soon to larger premises (a sign of success).

It matters where you sit (part 2)

Into the distance, a ribbon of black
Stretched to the point of no turning back
A flight of fancy on a windswept field
Standing alone my senses reeled
Fatal attraction is holding me fast,
How can I escape this irresistible grasp?

Back in October, I said it matters where you sit on a plane with respect to noise (see here).

Bombardier makes a regional jet, the CRJ700, with twin engines at the rear. So, more precisely, it matters where you sit in relation to the engines.

If you're someone who can sleep on a flight, it probably doesn't matter.

However, I was desperately jetlagged on the way back from Qatar (a brutal 10 hour timezone difference), tired but wired, utterly unable to sleep, and even listening to that mellow Pink Floyd album A Momentary Lapse of Reason (from which those lyrics above are drawn) couldn't help me, I took the opportunity to pace the narrow aisle with Etymotics' free iPhone App, which has a sound pressure meter. I took samples every two seats (which must have drawn strange glances from my fellow passengers) and in the only toilet at the back. Here are the results:

There is a large 20dB difference in sound pressure level depending on where you sit. The noise right at the back is seriously deafening, plus I notice the last row of seats are right up against the wall and do not recline. Do not take row 17.