Blog Archives 051222 to 051124

Old pointless chatter instead of new pointless chatter.

 

051222 Raleigh, NC, USA
I just finished up my Christmas shopping and my packing for my trip out to be with my sister and her family for the next few days. This is probably my last post before Christmas this year, so I just thought I would wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Or Glædelig jul og godt nytår! Or Hyvää joulua ja onnellista uutta vuotta! Or Joyeux Noël et bonne année! Or God jul och gott nytt år! Or Frohe Weihnachten und ein frohes neues Jahr! Or Buon Natale e felice anno nuovo! Or Feliz Natal e próspero ano novo! Or 聖誕節和新年快樂 Or ¡Feliz Navidad y próspero año nuevo! Or 圣诞节和新年快乐 (shèngdànjié hé xīnnián kuàilè)! Or クリスマスと新年おめでとうございます (kurisumasu to shinnen omedetō gozaimasu)!
Note: Bonus points awarded if all languages were correctly identified.
And here is a random link to the Gen Con So Cal 2005 Anime video programme

051218 Raleigh, NC, USA
I find the latest volley in the US culture wars interesting. Er, perhaps I should explain: the culture wars to which I am referring are the back and forth push between a largely secular nation and people wanting religion to have a greater role. Anyway, the latest volley is the yearly appeal to remember the "true meaning of Christmas". It is interesting this year because we are not just hearing the usual appeals to avoid crass commercialism; this year, perhaps more than in previous years, Santa Claus is being taken on. In addition to the usual argument "Jesus is the reason for the season", there are attempts to explain the other elements of Christmas (the fir tree, the wreath, etc.) as symbolic of Christian themes.

So, what is the "true meaning of Christmas"? As it has been celebrated for many many years now, Christmas has both strong Christian roots and strong northern European pagan roots. The symbols of the fir tree, the holly, a magical old man who lives with the elves, the exchange of sweets and presents, the sled, and flying deer, none of these are Christian symbols and no amount of reinterpretation changes the fact that these are leftovers from old faith winter solstice celebrations. Still, these are good symbols, with messages of charity, family, and hope.

Since the very earliest days of the Christian Church, there have been old faith additions and trappings that have come to be associated with the main holidays of the church. If you wish to purge your Christmas of all "non-Christian" elements, then you have quite a task on your hands. Most likely, you will find yourself forced to, like the Armenian Orthodox Christians, skip Christmas entirely in favor of celebrating the birth of Christ on 6 January of the Julian calendar. Then, with the celebration of the birth of Jesus firmly separated from the pagan-admixed Christmas, you are still facing the annoyance of the Easter Bunny and a dozen other pagan symbols tucked around the other holidays.

The other option is to simply accept Christmas as it is, pagan symbols and all. Rather than taking a strident stance and attempting to "Christianize" Christmas for the nation as a whole, you can stress certain teachings and set the focus within your own home. After all, whether or not the tree and such is particularly Christian, it is not a bad thing for there to be a yearly widely-celebrated holiday stressing good will and charity. Most people, whether highly religious or not, do not mind the bit of magic and wonder that is provided by stories of the jolly old elf and his flying deer.

Perhaps this latest trend is just a particularly strident attempt to remind everyone not to forget the birth of Jesus amidst the pagan trappings of Christmas and perhaps it is a divisive attack on perceived secularization of Christmas... I don't know. I do know that I wish peace upon mankind during this season as well as the rest of the of the year and I hope I will not see Christmas-time becoming a time of cultural clashes.

(PS. I think the whole "Happy Holidays" thing is kind of silly. I look forward to the day I hear stores wishing people "Merry Christmas" as well as "Joyous Diwali", "Blessed Ramamdan", "Peaceful Passover", etc.)

051211 Raleigh, NC, USA
I ordered a few presents for people on-line about a week and a half back. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of having the present orders sent to me here, with the intent of wrapping them myself and adding and handwritten card for the personal touch... I've not received any of the things I'd ordered and I'm no longer sure the presents will make it to their destinations in time. Anyway, I spent Saturday on Christmas shopping. A tour of the two malls near me followed by a 50 minute drive out to Chapel Hill, followed by wandering the shops and malls of that area. I did not succeed in locating any of the things I'd set out to buy, but it was a nice day anyhow. Some of the stores I remembered from when I had lived in Durham (~7 yrs ago) had moved or gone out of business, but I found several little hole-in-the wall places were still around. The minuscule used music shop was still in business, tucked under a corner of a parking garage, etc. Taking a false shortcut across the back of a strip mall I did not remember ever visiting brought me to the Massè Lounge, a greasy little pool hall with great tables for both billiards and pool, half hidden between the dumpsters and loading docks of the strip mall.
This touring around is great, but now, when I see something I remember from long ago, I get nostalgic at the drop of a hat. In this current life, seeing something new is not so unusual. It is seeing something familiar that is unusual.

051205 Raleigh, NC, USA
I have not had much luck with my purchases of late. First, there was the glasses mess (see entry 051125) then there was the watch problem. I had to buy a new watch after my old one died (it had a long life, but eventually water moisture had gotten in and corroded things a bit). At the same time as the glasses mess, I went to a nearby store and got myself a new Timex. After working for a week, it stopped working. The battery was fine, but the back had popped off the watch and something had come loose on the inside, making the watch stop and start at near random intervals. I went back to the store and exchanged the broken watch for a new one, same make and model. The new one did not last as long as it took to reach the parking lot; it was possible to set the time on the watch and cause the face to light up, but the watch did not actually turn it's hands. So much for Timex reliability. Back I went and got that watch replaced by an Armitron of the same basic style. Let's see how long this one lasts.

In other news, I have gotten rid of my old Utah cell phone number (801-244-8534). I had originally planned on keeping it active for the foreseeable future, but three things changed this plan. First, most of my friends and family have been updating their information to my latest number, rather than attempting to rely on the old number, so there is little need to maintain it. Second, unlike I had originally been told by my phone service provider, my service plan does not extend overseas. Third, as Cingular has more completely taken over the old ATT services, they increased my plan price by $20/month, ended my ability to suspend service for my overseas periods, and increased the costs of the most basic plan. Essentially, Cingular made it financially wise to default on the contract and pay $175 in contract-defaulting fees rather than continue with them. Oh well. I've now updated my information on these pages to show that the number is defunct. The only person who will notice is my friend Ed, who is the only person who has used the old number at any time in the last few months. For everyone else, you can be assured of the latest contact information on the right column of this page or on the travel details page.

Random tidbit: At Gen Con So Cal was one booth manned by a pair of women desperate to get people to look at the game they were attempting to sell; "Wreck the Nation, the game of political misbehavior". The political commentary is about as heavy-handed as you can get, containing game cards like "Support our troops: Show them how much you care by slashing their hazard pay during war-time. Collect Savings of $1 Billion." I may be a leftie, but I'm not a huge fan of this sort of propaganda. Besides, it is not at all clear if the game was well designed or fun. It certainly was not in the running to win Spiel des Jahres any time soon. Anyway, the poor ladies were ignored by me as well as most every other person who walked by their booth. It must have been very demoralizing.

051204 Raleigh, NC, USA
Work is keeping me very busy of late, but I'm also needing to look into things for the next leg of the journey; the move to China. So, besides looking into vaccinations and trying to remember some Chinese from long ago, I'm thinking about what will be useful to take with me and what I should leave behind. Rather than looking for Chinese-power supply-compatible stereo speakers or even laptop speakers, I'm thinking of just getting some high-quality (non-earbud) earphones for use with my laptop or iPod. Earphones are lower weight and far more portable than speakers. I was thinking of non-earbud earphones because of a report that earbuds are slightly more likely to give hearing loss than earphones and earphones come in noise-canceling versions for use in noisy environments like airplanes. The other thing I was thinking about is a vest, one of those massively multipocketed ones, like the ones for hunting (e.g. the Columbia Sportswear Omni-Dry Venture Vest). The reason for the vest is purely for modern airport travel. Before travel I could move everything metal from my person into the vest pockets and only have to take off the vest and shoes when going through security. A many-pocketed vest would also let me carry all the random electronics easily (PDA, cell phone, cell phone charger, iPod, iPod charger, camera, RSA security key, etc), along with a bit of food (a banana and granola bars because many airlines have stopped feeding travelers) and a note pad, all without having to bring an extra bag. It makes so much sense, I'm just surprised companies haven't already produced the "Executive Vest for the Road Warrior", you know, something designed for all those business people who are constantly flying. Hm. I guess most people use their laptop carrying case for all that stuff, instead of choosing the oddball option of a vest. Eh, I still like the vest idea.

051203 Raleigh, NC, USA
Today, you shall be receiving the fruits of random thought theater... In other words, here's some unrelated bits of info.

A recent article (which mentioned Taiwan) reminded me of something. When I was in Taiwan, I found some white lightning that had been brewed from sorghum; Gaoliang (高梁). It is an acquired taste. I brought some back with me to the US and passed it around for people to sample. My father described it as "like falling face-first into a swamp, with your mouth open... but in a good way". I think the flavor is more like a bog than a swamp, but it is somehow a taste that grows on you.

Oh, speaking of foreign visits, I should mention Youth For Understanding. This was the program that gave me the opportunity to travel to Japan and stay with a host family when I was in high school. Anyway, I occasionally receive a mailing from YFU... I suppose that, if I had gotten married and had kids at 22, I'd have a young teen by now and be the sort of host family they could use. As it is, I'm clearly in no position to act as a host family, but I like the organization and figure I ought to advertise it a little. Have any of you thought of being a host for a foreign teen?

I am still occasionally receiving NRA ads for my father at my old Davis home address. I just to receive bridal magazine ads for my sister at my Utah home address. It's kind of creepy; that advertisers have enough information to correctly identify my relatives and target advertising at them. I don't know how the advertisers are able to match up the information, but at least they don't have all the information; they don't know that these relatives do not live at my address. Still, I wonder what sort of records are kept and passed around.

A coworker had the opportunity to attend the Skip Barber Racing School, as a birthday present from her husband. It is a car racing school where they give you some training and the opportunity to go really really fast around a track. Apparently you can sign up for 1 day, 2 days, or 3 days. According to my coworker, it was way cool. Sounds like something fun to try one day.

Thanks to personal computing power really increasing and unix / linix spreading from supercomputers / mainframes to personal computers, it is now possible to get lots of cool academically developed software as free downloads you can run on a laptop. There's a linux distribution that comes with a whole pile of biochem / bioinformatics tools delivered as part of the distribution: http://envgen.nox.ac.uk/biolinux.html. There's even a "live CD", i.e. a CD which you can boot from and have everything available and up and running with no installing of programs: http://www.vigyaancd.org/. According to my father, who pointed the live CD out to me, the applications on a live CD are generally highly compressed, so you get slower loading, but then again you get the full OS and about 2 Gig of preinstalled applications all fit on a 700 Meg CD. Now that is cool technology.

Speaking of science, the Europeans like pointing to the various Evolution-related school and court cases in the US as evidence of the US citizenry being backwards, ignorant, and bible-hysterical. However, scientific ignorance is not a US trait... One recent study found that 50% of Europeans believed that genes are only in GM-tomatoes. Sigh. There is a lot of educating to do.

I don't know if I mentioned it before, but I really like the song "John Barleycorn" by Traffic (I heard it on the album "Feelin' Alright: The Very Best Of Traffic"). It is a good sparse arrangement, with single male voice, acoustic guitar, and flute, but that is not the only reason why I like it; I like it because I got the reference. I would not have understood what the song was about (the sacrificial killing of the man who cuts the last stalk of grain), if I had not read "The Golden Bough" by James George Frazer. It you haven't read "The Golden Bough", give it a look. It is the central work on early European pagan mythology and ritual. So, good interesting book, good interesting song. Go read the one and listen to the other, in that order.

051127 Raleigh, NC, USA
At Gen Con So Cal, a games convention I just went to in LA, they had an art show. One artist who was there had some really interesting pieces; cool three-tone prints of what might be stylized dragon bones in flight or might be abstract geometrical forms. The artist had named them in French, with names that meant things like "The Rise of Man" or "Passion Ascendant". He'd written the French name in Japanese phonetic script down one side of the picture and had Chinese characters down the other side. The Japanese characters were well formed and the Chinese characters were beautifully done, following no proper stroke order, but done as artistic forms with the lines depicted as interlacing bars or branches. The only problem was that it was wrong. The French had been incorrectly phonetically transcribed in some and in others he'd used the wrong script (hiragana is for Japanese words, katakana is for Foreign words) or a mix of scripts. That beautiful looking Chinese down the other side was also wrong; it had no meaning. The (non-Asian) artist said it was his name in Chinese, but it was this massive thing because a character had been used for every phoneme of his European name. The characters didn't contain the radical which indicated phonetic use, and they were not chosen for meaning either. You have to pick well with Chinese characters or else instead of having something with positive meaning (e.g. "powerful spirit"), you have something that is meaningless, silly, or negative (e.g. "cutting wind"). (Oh, the examples I gave were from a tattoo some poor girl had on her ankle; she thought it meant "powerful spirit" when it was actually "cutting wind". Since it was too late and permanent, I did not tell her.) Anyway, I did not buy the art. I just couldn't. The picture was cool, but I'd never be able to look at it without getting the urge to use some whiteout to fix the mistakes.

I've slowly been putting a few more things away in an effort to cut weight. My rule has been to put away whatever I've not used in the last year. Today marks the day I finally went ahead and put away my various party games, mostly various assortments of card games. I've been hauling around various games in hopes of getting people together for a card night (for Poker or Chez Geek or Rage or Bohnanza or Chronauts or Once Upon a Time or ...), but I've only dusted off each game once in the last year. That's not a high enough use rate to justify the weight. I'll be keeping one regular deck of playing cards with me, but the rest goes into storage. Oh, well.

051125 Raleigh, NC, USA
Before I type in my bits and pieces of notes from when I was traveling (a lot), I'll give you something new. Just before I took my first trip to California this month (a business trip), I had my eyes checked so that I could get up-to-date prescription safety glasses through my home office (in Davis CA). So long as I was getting my eyes checked (at a place here in Raleigh NC), I decided to get a nice pair of new glasses. My prescription had not changed that much, but I thought it would be nice to have a new pair of glasses, so that I had my current glasses as a back-up pair, instead of just having a pair of dorkey safety glasses as the back-up pair. Anyway, I decided to treat myself and get a pair of expensive glasses, with expensive frames, and the ultra-wonderful, UV reflective, anti-water, scratch resistant coating. It was not cheap. Anyway, time passes and eventually the glasses are ready. I put them on and something does not feel right. The guy doing the fitting explains that it can take an hour or two to have your eyes adjust to a prescription change. My prescription is not that different, but I toddle off mollified anyway.

By the end of the day, I am certain that the left lens is incorrect; I have very slight double vision in that eye when wearing the glasses. So, back I go, with all the paperwork in hand and I return the glasses for their inspection. Two minutes after handing over the glasses, the guy returns reporting that, as I suspected, the lens is incorrect; instead of having an axis of 158, it has an axis of 15. Bad, but at least the prescription I gave to the safety-glasses people in Davis CA was correct even if the lens grinder in Raleigh NC made a mistake. Don't worry, says the glasses-fitting guy, "we'll grind a new lens for you and have the glasses ready for you in an hour or two". Away I go and back I return to pick up the glasses again. I wear them for that day, but I'm feeling paranoid about the glasses. Still, they seem fine. Then I notice that the right lens has a faint bluish tint and, when looking in the mirror, perfectly reflects the surroundings. The left lens has a comparatively brownish tint and does not reflect the surroundings half so well. I compare this with my old glasses (which were made of the same material but were not coated) and I find that the left lens and the old glasses look the same (uncoated), but the right lens has the blue tint and higher reflectivity I expect out of the UV reflective coating. Now I'm pissed. This is a very subtle difference that I was lucky to notice, but I paid $90 per lens for the fancy coating and it does not appear to be present on the replaced left lens. That's the second mistake by these people on expensive glasses I was buying as a luxury. I don't need this and I don't need them. Back I go, with all paperwork and glasses in hand.

I ask to speak to the manager and I explain my problem to her. She explains to me that coating is baked onto the lenses and that different batches of lenses have slightly different appearances. I nod; she is persuasive and seems to know what she is talking about...
Then I think "Hang on a second! Is she saying that their coating process is so uncontrolled that it ranges from blue to brown and from highly reflective to not very reflective at all? Isn't that like claiming you have no quality control? Is this really a reason that I should now accept this product?". So, I ask if they have any way of verifying what coating is present on the lenses. She explains that this brand of coating does not include any laser marks to allow verification of coating. She then notes that my records clearly indicate that they are coated lenses, assures me that the difference in appearance is reasonable, and passes me the glasses back. Again, she seems reasonable and convincing, but I realize that my records had also clearly indicated that I was supposed to have an axis of 158, not 15. I also realize that no matter what she thinks the situation is, she has not bothered to check with the guy who ground me a new lens. She's just feeding me a convincing-sounding line, without making any effort to make sure things were done properly.

The happy ending is that I got my money back and they were stuck with the messed up glasses. Still, the thing that gets to me is that, since I was nearly convinced to accept shoddy work, I wonder how many of their other customers have been convinced to accept messed up glasses or contacts.

051124 Raleigh, NC, USA
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Amongst the things I'm thankful for is that my family forgives me my 15-year refusal to travel on Thanksgiving weekend and that for all 15 years (except one) I have had great local friends who have had me over for dinner on Thanksgiving. Today was spent with a good set of coworkers and their other friends. I hope all of you had a good Thanksgiving yourselves.

Page Last Modified: 2006 04 21, 09:50:52

 

 

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