Blog Archives 060515 to 060418

Old pointless chatter instead of new pointless chatter.

 

060515 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
I have repeatedly fiddled with the site, using CSS to add fancy effects, multiple little artsy graphics, etc. However, none of these changes has been posted to the server for display; with every iteration, I took a look at the result and had to admit that it was "goat socks". "Goat socks" is my mental short-hand for the effect: putting socks on a goat may make it look "prettier", but ultimately it serves no purpose and will probably annoy the goat.

If this were a promotional site of some sort, then it might make sense to add some flash and flare. Instead, this site is meant to be read. Because of that, white space is used to define the logical sections and distracting graphics are to be eschewed. Only minor additions, such as the country flags which aid in rapid scanning from entry to entry, can be justified from a utility/readability point of view. Oh, well.

Anyway, I was thinking about decoration and art and taste recently because I can finally afford to invest in some decent art, to be displayed when I finally stop moving. This gives me pause because I don't know if I have good taste or not. If you think about it, the person who has a wagon wheel table and a bunch of "sad clown" and "dogs playing poker" pictures has looked around his or her place and said to themselves 'this looks good'. Yeah, I know that if you like it then that is justification enough to get it; I'm just curious is all. Anyway, I have bought a couple of small paintings (not spending much yet; if you know where to look, art is pretty cheap here). Eventually, I'll be able to hang them in a stable location.

Er, I hope you like political rants, because I wrote another one. Don't worry; my information control rant is safely off the main page and you don't have to read it if you don't feel like it.

060512 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
Random thought theater: Modern business slacks need to learn from jeans and add a small coinpocket to one of the main pockets. Yeah, I know the little pocket on jeans is an anacronism, decending as it does from it's origin as a watch pocket. Still, it is darn handy to have for storing change and it is the main thing I miss when wearing business slacks instead of jeans. Since I have nothing super exciting to talk about today, it is a good time for a pop quiz! What do the following have in common?
1) The 12-hour (instead of 24-hour) clock system.
2) The old English units of pennyweights, gills, hogsheads, drams and feet.
3) The old Chinese system of naming hours (the hour of the Snake, etc) instead of using numbers.
4) The Japanese system of naming years by Emperor instead of having a consistent advancing calendar year.
5) The American month-day-year date system.
Answer: They are all anacronisms that should pass into history rather than continuing into the future. Isn't it about time that we all switched over to the 24 hr clock, the 4 digit year 2 digit month 2 digit day date system, and metric units?
Oh, pity the poor English: one of these days, as infrastructure links increase, they may have to switch the side of the road they drive on to match the European standard. This will be harder than the minor change of going metric.

060510 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
Fixed some spelling mistakes and shifted some more old posts to the archives instead of letting them continue to take up bandwidth on the front page.

I walked home from work today. Actually, it started as more of a flat-out sprint, but as the bus continued to gain speed I slowed to a walk. I could have headed over to the subway station or taken a cab, but I decided to walk in order to finally really see the places I have been driven past. The walk did answer a number of questions I had (along the lines of "What's that?"). It also let me know that it takes just over an hour and a half for me to walk from home to work or vice-versa. Considering that it takes the bus an hour on very busy mondays, I now know exactly how close to walking speed is the worst of the rush hour traffic. My other discovery is that even really comfy dress shoes just are not designed for an hour and a half of brisk walking... The shoes are fine, but my feet aren't that happy.

Oh, I asked a coworker and found out why traffic is terrible on Monday morning and Friday evening, but not so bad on other mornings or evenings: Those are the times when vast numbers of Chinese parents are taking their kids to/from boarding schools. It is apparently quite common (at least in Beijing) for kids to stay at school all week and spend just the weekends with their parents.

One last bit of information: When I first started making international phone calls from my apartment, I had no idea what the rates were. One massive dent in my wallet later, I know that I'm paying about $1.30 per minute. Ouch. I think I'll be limiting myself to rather short chats from here on out. I'll have to save lengthy conversations for people who are paying a whole lot less and who choose to call me back. Sorry.

060509 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
It took me a long time to learn to like Beijing. I think I finally figured out why: I'm not a big fan of big modern cities. If I'm in a city, I'm most happy if I can find someplace with a bit of old character and history. When touring Portugal, I liked Lisbon (I was staying in the old city), but I initially disliked Porto. After one night in a nice hotel in the sterile-feeling commercial north side of Porto, I shifted to a slightly run-down hostel in the old quarter of Porto and liked it a whole lot better.

Here in Beijing, it has taken me a long time to find the older sections that I like. I'm living in one of the newest areas in the whole city, an area that was nothing but dirt lots a few decades back and is now covered in brand new skyscrapers. Another problem is that Beijing central authority has no respect for anything old. Beijing has been the subject of ongoing modernization campaigns for the last 56 years and is one of the cities most heavily affected by the Cultural Revolution's "Smash the Old" campaigns. Even now, the preservation efforts are purely focused on those things that are likely to improve tourism revenues. One example of this is the decision to rebuild Yongdingmen Gate. Built in 1553 (during the Ming Dynasty, 1368 - 1644) and then torn down in the 1950s, it was the largest gate tower in the Beijing's Outer City. In order to offer Yongdingmen Gate as a tourist attraction, it is being rebuilt. Of course, that makes it a modern reproduction being built in a slightly different location, since there are already modern buildings where the gate once stood. No matter: Beijing has decided to destroy a whole bunch of the historic old buildings that still remain in the area in order to put up the reconstructed, "old" Yongdingmen Gate.

Anyway, I finally did find a section of Beijing that seems to still have survived the years without becoming either a protected museum piece or the foundation stones for another skyscraper. It is a windy old maze of a hutong area a bit to the southwest of Tiannamen square. It is filled with art shops and stores selling "antiques" (I'd be surprised if they are any older than I am), but it is also a mixed residential area, with people still living in houses that are clearly quite old. It's really nice to wander around a portion of Beijing that feels like it has some history to it.

060507 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
Well, after two weeks away from it, I need to really return to my attempts to gain some sort of Chinese capability. One week was the business trip to Denmark and this past week were the shows: the "Cavalcade of Mucus", an educational piece entitled "This is how your joints will feel when you are 297 years old", and the percussion piece "The Jackhammer and Your Skull". By Friday, I was winding down with a children's science piece (part of the "learning by doing" series) entitled "Do your lungs have to stay internal? Cough harder and find out!". But that is now (thankfully) in the past (along with "Golden Week" the Chinese week-long holiday) and it is time to return to work.

060504 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
My parents will come for a visit in about a month. Before this recent trip, I was trying to decide between meeting them at the airport or simply sending them an address and directions (in Chinese) that they could print and use to get to my hotel. Anyway, on my way home from the airport this time, the taxi driver took a detour. I had wanted him to take 4th ring road west and get off on Zhongguangcun road to go south. Instead, he got off on Zhonguancundong road (i.e. Zhongguangcun East road), putting us off course by several blocks. I tell him that this is not right, that we need to go more west, and he insists that this is Zhongguangcun road, so it is OK. We then merrily drive south for a time, while I attempt to convince him that I do know where we are going and we need to go west for a few blocks. After a short time, he looks around, shrugs, says he doesn't know where we are, and then heads west like I requested. Unfortunately, I don't know where we are either by this point. I had not brought my map of Beijing with me to Denmark, so there we were, driving in circles, mapless, and hoping to recognize something.

Fortunately, I had the address of another hotel that I knew was in sort of the right area, so I pulled that out and showed it to the driver. It is an older hotel, not brand-spanking-new (like mine), so the driver recognized it. We drove there and then I was able to direct the driver the handful of blocks north and west to the streets I'd wanted to go to in the first place. This is a lesson for anyone arriving in Beijing: the taxi drivers don't have maps and often don't know the city. My map of Beijing travels with me whenever I'm heading out across the city and I recommend all tourists get one, if only so you can loan it to your taxi driver when he is lost.

Bringing a map with you is no guarantee of getting where you want to go either. On the way back from another failed shopping expedition to Dashazi Art Zone (more on that at another time), I ended up lost again, despite having the map with me. I had told the taxi driver to take the 4th ring road and he wanted to take the 3rd ring road, saying it was faster. The traffic did flow pretty well on 3rd ring road, but we were far enough south that the names of the roads had changed. The north-south running road Zhongguangcun is called something else by the time it hits 3rd ring road (it also changes names, to Xinxi, well north of 4th ring road, but that is besides the point). At least this time we didn't stay lost very long: I recognized a park and was able to direct the driver from there.

So, me and my map will be going to the airport to meet my parents when they arrive. While the "lost-cabbie-took-me-where?!?" experience is part of the whole Beijing experience, I think I'll do my best to save that for later in their visit rather than having it be their first experience while they just want to find someplace to stow their luggage and wash up.

060503 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
Still sick and hoping for some sort of sign that I've turned a corner with this cold. Between the recent travel over a weekend and across time zones, as well as staying at home and sleeping a lot, I'm kinda confused about what day it is... It feels Sunday-ish, but it is actually Wednesday. Anyway, it appears that I am going to spend most of this vacation-week sitting at home sick. Oh well. At least I'm not feeling this lousy and feeling guilty about missing work.

Oh, I sorta typed up a bit of info for those of you who have been wondering about the history behind China's claims of dominion over Tibet, Mongolia, and Taiwan. I probably ought to pretty it up some, with bold and underlines and such, but I'm going to go take a nap instead.

060502 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
Well, I'm back from my trip and I'm sick. Bleah. Anyway, today let's talk about censorship. Upon arriving in China, I noticed that a number of bookmarks no longer worked. At first, I thought it was just a matter of connection speed; a large number of sites are only occasionally available and then give connection time-outs most of the time. This site is one of those. (This has made it a bit hard to update.)

Western blogs (anything at blogger or blogspot, etc.) are inaccessible as are open source encyclopedia or dictionary efforts (e.g. Wikipedia) and most sites with topics like freedom, democracy, or independence. Other hot-button topics are Taiwan, Falun Gong, protest, Tiannamen, Tibet, etc., where the only information allowed through are Tourist information sites. The censorship is "moral" as well as political. Therefore, the totally innocent webcomics "Girl Genius" and "The Devil's Panties" are inaccessible, due to the suspect words "girl" and "panties" I guess. Why "Zogonia", a D&D-themed webcomic, is blocked is inexplicable.

Keep in mind, the censorship here is well known and the censors are publicly lauded as heroes. Their work is discussed as a natural police function, guarding the people from criminals, moral pollution, and spiritual pollution. It is maintained that private speech is free, but regulation of public speech is a duty of any responsible government: after all, shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater, organizing terrorist actions, etc., is damaging to public safety. The average citizen agrees with this interpretation.

The trick lies in definitions. All web content is deemed "public speech". Also, criminal action is defined as anything that harms "public harmony" or causes "spiritual pollution". Therefore, reporting on the many peasant protests, any form of dissent, or any expression of critique or negative report falls under the heading of "harmful to public harmony" and is a criminal action. Under the heading of "spiritual pollution" comes both things you would expect, like pornography, but also things you might be surprised by, like mention of "superstitions", including Falun Gong or Catholicism or traditional spirit worship.

The interesting thing is that the official reporting is unrelenting in it's positive spin, reporting positively about any authority structure. I was surprised that the news stories about foreign governments are quite positive regardless how friendly the foreign power is towards China. The reporting is heavily in favor of any government over any non-governmental group.

060425 København, Danmark
Sometimes you don't realize that you really value something until it is gone. And sometimes you do not know how much it is valued until it has not only been lost, but then returned to you.

In this case, I am talking about clean air. I mean, I know that I value clean air, and that I was mildly obsessing about the air in Beijing, but I didn't quite expect my reaction to landing in Denmark. I was standing by the road traffic of København and sucking in deep lung-fulls of moist cool air, marveling that it felt good rather than causing a coughing fit. I just had to take a run around the lakes to feel more of that lovely, clean air getting sucked deep into my lungs.

Skipping on to another topic (before I belabor the air thing too much) Denmark is symbol-rich in carvings in stone or castings in metal. These are easily accessible decorative engravings and statues. China is also symbol-rich, but most of the symbolism is seen in the form of writing everywhere, mostly in paint rather than more permanent media. The writing can be very artistic, but it is far less accessible, 'accessible' being used to indicate 'easy for foreigners to appreciate'.

Oh, finally, I feel like mentioning something you all know already. I am a big dork. I like having conversations about Nestorianism, Scholar stones, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, or Paha, the helper of Lempo. I think it is interesting to discuss the fact that Lempo, the Finnish pantheon's chief of wickedness, confusion and cruelty, is also the ancient Finnish God of Love.

Strangely enough, there are a lot of people who feel that this fact is not comment worthy. It remains beyond my comprehension that things like batting averages from the 1990s are considered socially acceptable topics, but discussions of social history (e.g. the many cases of primitive gods of love also being gods of hate or mischief and what this information implies about human nature) are somehow considered to be "weird" to discuss. Oh well.

060421 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
This Saturday afternoon (April 22, tomorrow), I leave for a week long business trip to Denmark. I'll get to attend lots of research meetings and meet with coworkers and friends from my other postings. It should be fun. I hope the hotel will have internet access...

Oh, yeah, I was a masochist and ground away at all the little minor conversion details. Every page on this site now meets XHTML 1.0 Strict specifications. Bleah. I really ought to php more of the site so I can make one change instead of needing to make the identical changes to some 45 different documents. Hopefully, everyone can still read everything and I made things better, not worse.

060418 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
Dang. I've been waiting for the implementation of ruby text so I could do proper annotation of non-English words, with pronunciation above and meaning below the word, etc., but now I've noticed that the standards specifications call for ruby text to be an XHTML standard, not an HTML standard. This means that Netscape/Firefox/etc. are standards-correct in failing to handle ruby text in HTML documents. IE's very convenient choice to handle ruby text in HTML documents is actually non-standards compliant. Sigh. Considering the effort I've put into trying to make this site platform-independent (strict adherence to HTML 4.01 and CSS official specifications, Unicode for all special characters, etc.), this means I can't go the easy route of taking advantage of IE's ruby text support. Noooo. I'm going to have to read up on the latest XHTML specifications (1.1) and eventually migrate everything over to XHTML. It shouldn't be that big a deal for me, since I've been careful to stay strictly with HTML 4.01 specifications, but there may be things I don't currently know about. Seems like a lot of effort just to add annotations to the occasional block of text, but I refuse to use hacks. Three reasons: 1) principle 2) the drive to learn something new (how to do it properly) and 3) because hacks eventually go out of support and I'd have to go back and fix the hack anyway, eventually needing to do things in a standards-compliant way anyway.

On a random note, attempting to write while on a bus in Beijing traffic makes even English look like deranged chicken scratchings. To simulate it, get on the amusement park ride "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride" (based on the story from the book "Wind in the Willows") and attempt to write a letter. Come to think of it, Beijing traffic is a lot like "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride", except there are no safe rails taking you from one near miss to the next, the road is full of other "Mr. Toad"s, and you are occasionally going far faster than the ride lets you go. Since there are far fewer accidents than one might expect, it is kinda fun instead of scary.

UPDATE: This page does not validate properly when I try checking it with the XHTML validator and the listed error is nothing I can find. My other pages validate, but this one has a "non-UTF-8 byte on line 402", supposedly, but I can't find the cause of this error and replacing the suspect block of text with a block of text from a page that does validate still gives the "non-UTF-8 byte on line 402" error. Huh. Looks like I'll have to wait to shift over until I have the time to troubleshoot a lot of little fiddly annoyances.

Oh, I finally uploaded the Simatai pictures to my picture gallery. On the way out to Simatai, renting the taxi for all day was 650 yuan (about 82 US dollars). The trip is 2.5 hours each way and the driver covered the highway tolls. The wall and scenery around Simatai is stunning. At a gateway where it was possible to pass from one side of the wall to the other, I was able to hop back and forth between Beijing province and Hebei province... So I did.

Page Last Modified: 2006 06 21, 21:28:56

 

 

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