mike's web log

Roundup

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 17:49:18 GMT

Happy belated Father's Day to me.

Flight patterns. Beautful. "Data from the U.S. Federal Aviation Adminisrtation is used to create animations of flight traffic patterns and density." (Quicktime version) [via Kent Sharkey]

Bad Names. Smells like bad design spirit. Eric Lippert cleans up a lot of "crufty old code" in the .NET C# compiler and comes up with a list of function names that "smell bad" and "which could use some serious thought." Do you have any functions with these names?

The existential angst of Ichiro. A collection of quotations from Ichiro [Suzuki] of the Seattle Mariners. Sample: On how to break out of a slump: "If I'm in a slump, I ask myself for advice." [via Seattlest]

How to Clean Up a Windows Spyware Infestation. Jeff Atwood shows you (in pictures!) tools and techniques for removing spyware, including the nasty kind that keeps coming back.

Congressional hearing: tense and moody. Colleague David links to Jon Carroll, essayist for the San Francisco Chronicle, who today is delighted that the term [more]

China -- Sunday (2nd)

Tue, 18 Apr 2006 22:08:08 GMT
Sunday found us feeling a bit queasy, due both to the previous night's quaffery and the distinct lack of coffee or suitable substitute caffeine beverage. We opted out of breakfast next door and set off with Li Xian Dong to visit his village. Twisty roads on an empty stomach, oy.

But soon enough we arrived. Li Xian Dong is part of a partnership that's developing the area surrounding his village and several more. They rent (can't buy) the land from the local cooperatives and are putting up facilities for tourists. They have a modest hotel already, plus a restaurant, and are working on creating an upscale resort in the area. This is all good news for the local inhabitants. Although the development takes land away from agriculture -- a charged issue in China -- the income for the locals is so much better from tourism than from farming that they're quite happy to lease their land.

Here's the hotel, carved out of the mountain.

Bob said that the business climate in China right now is like the Internet boom -- the place is bursting with ideas and plans and deals. There are some issues, primarily governmental, in how business can be transacted, but ambitious and hard-working people (which would include Li Xian Dong) stand to do very well for themselves in the coming years. To paraphrase Coolidge, at the moment (and perhaps always) the business of China is business.

We had lunch at the Li Xian Dong's restaurant, where if we had wanted to, we could have fished part of the lunch out of the little pools out front:

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China -- Saturday

Tue, 18 Apr 2006 21:42:03 GMT
You don't go to Beijing and skip the Great Wall. I had some small apprehension about this, as in, just how Disney-fied would this turn out to be? The guidebook warned about hordes of tourists and uber-aggressive vendors and Starbucks and KFC. Sounded like something that would be endured rather than enjoyed.

But Bob came through for us. He has a friend who is doing development work in a village close to the wall, and who has a set of cabins there. Would we like to go up Saturday and stay overnight? We would.

Arrangements were made. A car appeared on Saturday morning and we headed north. It's an excursion and we spent better than two hours on the road. The drive itself was worthwhile for being able to move out of the city center, through the growing suburbs and into the countryside. The outskirts are sprouting tall tower blocks of apartments and Bob noted that the government is planning several more ring roads that circle Beijing in ever-larger concentric circles. Some of this is in anticipation of the world's attention for the 2008 Olympics, but most of it is just growth.

As I've said, this is dry country. There had been a dust storm the night before, and we noticed that cars were covered in a thick layer of reddish dust. Man, that must get old. As we moved out into the countryside, we began to see agricultural fields -- human-sized, not machine-sized -- and they, too, looked brown and dry.

The roads were good, even when we got to the end of the highway (soon to be lengthened) and got onto ordinary roads. Before we left, I had heard someone say that an impediment to economic development as yet in China was the comparatively undeveloped infrastructure, as in roads, but this close to Beijing, things are in good shape.

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China -- Friday

Mon, 17 Apr 2006 23:09:41 GMT
When you go visit someplace, you go have a look at their big religious architecture -- cathedrals, temples, pyramids. Short of tombs, perhaps, and maybe the Taj Mahal, people have historically put their best efforts into religious buildings, which explains why so many of them are so spectacular.

Today's goal was to visit the Lama Temple, which is the best-known Buddhist temple in Beijing. It's also where Buddhist monks -- lamas -- live, and therefore is also known as a lamasery, a word I find unaccountably delightful.

I never quite got clear on whether the Lama Temple was spared by or simply recovered from the Cultural Revolution, a period that was hard on religious architecture. In either event, it is a beautiful, well-kept compound that houses a succession of elaborate Buddha statues, including a giant, 60-foot representation that -- as is inevitably pointed out -- was carved from a single tree.

(No photos of the Buddhas allowed, but this is what the compound looks like.)

I don't know much about Buddhism, so when I read that the temple is part of the Yellow Hat sect of that religion, I think "Huh, I wonder what that means." But it occurred to me later that if I were to visit a major shrine of, say, the Methodists, I wouldn't know significantly more about that particular sect, either. So my ignorance of theology is cross-cultural, at least.

The temple is a working facility. We saw monks, or at least, guys walking around in monkish robes. And the temple still functions actively as a place of worship. People bring or buy incense, and in front of each of the five halls, there are stands with a fire going and a place to offer incense and pray. People were doing this as tourists strolled around, which was just as incongruous to me as wandering around a cathedral while people are kneeling and praying.[ [more]

China -- Random

Fri, 14 Apr 2006 16:36:20 GMT
Various things of note.

We haven't encountered many American tourists. Germans, yes (of course), French, Englishmen, Spanish speakers, Japanese (duh), all sorts of Russians, and others whose languages I don't recognize. Not sure if Americans are here and clustered in tours, or whether they're just not here to be encountered.

There aren't many dogs, and virtually no big ones. The dogs we do see are almost always -- this makes me laugh -- Pekingese. We've seen a total of three cats. There's some history here that we can skip lightly over, but you'd think that by now the pet population might have been restocked. So perhaps there are other cultural factors at work.

I was flipping through Bob's collection of pirated DVDs and noticed something amusing. The covers often have pullquotes on them from reviews -- you know, stuff like "A must-see!" -- except that the quotes they use are, mmm, perhaps not ones you'd find on legal copies. Some examples:

Movie: Be Cool
Quote on box: "A real chore to sit through."

Movie: My Boss's Daughter
Quote on box: "... a movie so thoroughly cretinous the people who made it couldn't get even the punctuation in the title right."

Movie: The Weather Man
Quote on box: "If you liked Crocodile Dundee, you're going to love Crocodile Dundee II." (WTF?)

Theory is that these are selected by people with an imperfect understanding of English. So, "chore" and "joy", kinda the same, right? That word "cretinous," dunno, sounds like that's probably a good thing, right? Heh.

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China -- Thursday

Fri, 14 Apr 2006 16:27:44 GMT
Our plans for the day had to be scuttled due to a logistical difficulty. We got two guidebooks and have been alternating between them. The plan for today originally was to follow a suggestion in Guidebook 1 to go to the end of the subway line and then go a little further to some picturesque place. But Guidebook 1 seems to have stayed behind at a restaurant or in a taxi, so ... Plan B was to peruse our remaining and less favorite guidebook for ideas. They have a section on "wanders", and after reviewing their offerings, we just picked one, which consisted of a tour through one of the better known hutongs, or old-style narrow, twisty, alley-like streets.

To get there, we took a leisurely ramble through Ritan Park, which is between us and the subway. Parks here are cool. There's playground equipment of various types -- for kids in the "pleasure grounds" aka playground, and regular gymnastics equipment, where I saw some well-aged guys doing giants on the high bar. Most surprising to me was exercise equipment like elliptical trainers, weight-lifting rigs, and log-rolling things that serve the same function as treadmills. All heavy-duty metal. The funny thing is that they're all used by old folks.

The equipment includes a backscratching thing that an old lady was using like a bear with a tree trunk:

Then the subway. That worked fine, except when we were buying tickets and simply could not understand what they wanted. But a nice lady behind us, a Westerner, leaned over and said "3 yuan each," and was kind enough not to add "so can we all get moving?" But that hurdle overcome, the subway was fine -- pretty much like every other I've been on.

The first part of the hutong [more]

China -- Wednesday

Thu, 13 Apr 2006 16:40:55 GMT
The agenda today was to visit the Summer Palace. This is about 7 miles from Beijing, set on a lake that, we read, provided some relief from the summer heat of Beijing. (I've mentioned, I believe, that Beijing is semi-arid? Like, not far from the Gobi Desert, and a question I keep asking myself is why people would site a capital here.) We took a taxi there, thereby surely making some cabbie's lucky day.

I loved the Summer Palace because, let's face it, who wouldn't want a nice lakeside place that covers 700 acres? It's a seemingly endless series of lawns and pavilions and bridges and temples artfully arranged around a lake and a series of inlets. To my surprise, the grounds are in somewhat better shape -- that is, better restored shape -- than the Forbidden City. But perhaps not surprising. It was built for the first time only in the 1700s and has suffered some razing since then at the hands of foreign troops, thus obliging the Chinese to rebuild it. Even so, some of the more popular attractions are, what else, undergoing restoration in preparation for the 2008 Olympics. One such attraction is the Long Corridor, a lengthy covered walkway that runs along the lake connecting various pavilions, which we saw but one or two courtyards of before seeing, well, a lot of scaffolding.

Story has it that a lot of improvements were made to the Summer Palace under the Empress Dowager Cixi, who was regent for the last emperor. Specifically, she diverted funds from the navy to her pet project, a move that pissed off her contemporaries but that the Chinese recognize today as having been a better expenditure. Deriving a lesson from this is left as an exercise for the reader.

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China -- Tuesday

Tue, 11 Apr 2006 08:14:33 GMT
Today is supposed to be a down day after yesterday's full-on touring. Only two excursions are planned. The first is to the so-called Russian Market, which is a few blocks away. (The sign in English over the door called it the "Alien's Street," but the signs inside were all in Russian, like "Escalator this way," for which I surprised myself by being able to read the Cyrillic.)

Like the market we were in the other day, it's a building full of stalls, but it's lower-key in every way. The greater number of stalls sell clothing and shoes, with one floor also containing electronics, toys, and teas. The story seems to be that the Russians come on junkets down to Beijing looking for bargains, which explained why the clothing was a bit on the garish side and why there was less effort than we'd seen on Sunday to make the knock-offs look authentic, as in, spelling brand names correctly, for example. The sales techniques were noticeably less aggressive. We were wondering whether it might not have been because the Russians are so damn hard-headed that there's not much point in trying to browbeat them into entering your booth. But we did have one satisfying incident where Bob drove a hard bargain with a vendor who accepted his price, but swore that he was driving her into poverty and she would have to return to her ancestral village. Yeah, as if.

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China - Monday

Tue, 11 Apr 2006 08:07:18 GMT
Woken up early again today by youngsters who haven't made the time adjustment, though the clock is definitely creeping in the right direction. After a little fortification with coffee, I made a first venture outside, this time to a little fruit and vegetable stand that sets up in the alley around the corner from the apartment building. The goal was some fruit and maybe eggs. The eggs are piled (stacked?) in what we know as milk crates; you pick out the ones you want and put them in a plastic bag. I didn't have the slightest idea what this might cost. From the way that she wouldn't look at me, I guessed that the girl in the little hut either wasn't used to dealing with foreigners or didn't particularly want to. But she did take the produce and weigh it, and told me (in Chinese, of course) the cost. I took out a 100-yuan bill (about $12.50), handed it to her, and hoped for the best. She counted out change and handed it back to me: 95 yuan. So four apples and two oranges and half-dozen eggs had come to about 65 cents US. (Bob added later that even so, that was the almost certainly a special foreigner price.) Two lessons, though, which we hope will carry us through: one, you can transact business with people without sharing so much as a word with them; and two, you can trust most people to be honest with money, such as for example handing them in your ignorance 20 times the price of a purchase and having them make change.

Check with me in a week about this.

Today's all-day goal was the Forbidden City. Short of the Great Wall, this is the big one of Beijing tourism -- the guidebook says 2 million visitors a year. Our plan went like this. We learned to sound out the name of the Forbidden City in Chinese (Gu Gong [more]

China - Sunday II

Mon, 10 Apr 2006 09:50:30 GMT
After we managed to get it together on Sunday enough to actually do something, Bob (our host) came up with the unexpected suggestion that we go out for Western-style breakfast. Agreed. We might be suffering jet lag, but in whatever mid-Pacific time zone our stomachs had been left, they were hungry. The Western thing surprised me a little, though. Beijing is a great town for eating, he explained, but they drop the ball on breakfast.

Bob lives in an area where Westerners are clustered, being in the vicinity of a lot of the embassies. (Actually, Bob's block is a kind of Little Russia, where shop signs are both in Chinese and Cyrillic.) On our way to breakfast we walked past a few of the embassies, guarded by Chinese soldiers in good-looking olive uniforms with bright-red trim. I noticed that they were not armed, however. Bob thought that these were often kids from the provinces doing Army duty, and how odd Beijing must seem to them.

Our walk to breakfast took us through Ritan Park, a pleasant greenspace that was apparently once the site of imperial sacrifices for one of the seasons. We don't have parks like these at home exactly -- there were winding paths around tended gardens and ponds, with various gazebo-like pavilions around the place.

For breakfast we ended up in a place whose name, if I remember right, was "Steak and Eggs." It's sufficiently oriented toward the Western community that they don't bother with any Chinese on the menu. So it was eggs and all that for us, pretty competently done -- I had grits, too. Bob held up a bottle of pancake syrup: "Not so easily come by in Beijing," he said. I'll bet.

Then it was time for some serious touristing. We headed to the Silk Road, a slight misnomer. This is a six-story building crammed with stalls selling t-shirts, shoes, luggage, leather goods, suits, and so on.

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China - Sunday

Sat, 08 Apr 2006 19:07:45 GMT
Here we are in Beijing. It's an epic journey -- 10 hours from Seattle to Tokyo, an hour layover, 4 hours to Beijing. As I have been known to say in the past, truly we live in a miraculous age, given that we covered half the globe in that time.

Basically we lost Saturday. We left Seattle at 2:30 on Friday afternoon, and by the time we got "home" from the airport, it was midnight Saturday. And we're still trying to wrap our minds around the idea that we'll leave here next Monday and arrive home Monday morning.

Not much to report yet. The airport looks pretty much like every other airport, with perhaps a slightly higher than normal number of people fulfilling some sorts of desultory roles. We went through a Ministry of Health checkpoint, where the entire drill consisted of us handing them the questionnaires we'd filled out on the plane about having coughs or "snivels." We (well, I) had wondered about customs and how carefully they would look at our stuff. There was not much to worry about other than that we had brought Bob a suitcase full of books, and as I say, I wondered. When we posed this question to him in email beforehand, he'd said that if we wanted the customs guys to look at anything, we'd have to wake them up first. And so it proved.

As with other airports, the place is plastered with advertisements for all manner of products. For example, one prominent set of ads was for MasterCharge. I noted to Sarah that the Chinese seem to have gotten the hang of commericalism again. Oh, they'd just had a brief interruption in an otherwise long history of business, was her reply. True. I stopped into the men's room and the attendant handed me a wad of Kleenex as a towel, followed immediately by the international gesture for "tip, please." No money, I said, which was true. Cheapskate foreigner, I imagined him thinking.

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