I can’t help myself.
I like this site. All the ingredients are there; offensive, self-righteous anger, backed up by a scattering of history and facts. A quote from their "F--k the south" rant:
And the next time Florida gets hit by a hurricane you can come crying to us if you want to, but you're the ones who built on a fucking swamp. "Let the Spanish keep it, it’s a shithole," we said, but you had to have your fucking orange juice.
Bad day(s)
I've kind of had an off week. While coming back to China has been great in many ways, there have been a lot of peripheral issues and noise that really beat me down the last few days, some of them the usual minor annoyances, and some of them the more sweeping, unresolvable issues that my mind tends to dwell on when it's been beat down by the minor annoyances to a sort of angsty critical mass.
First: fuck you, Facebook. Seriously. You're kind of a handy way to keep track of some of my friends. I'm in China, which blocks it, but I have fairly decent access to my own server to use as a proxy for access.
So I deal with the slow access, the ads, the suggestions that I "reconnect" with people who only added me to increment their friend count, and the nonstop status updates from those same people.
But when I get a Facebook message from a (real) friend in my Gmail inbox, and instead of being able to reply from there you force me to load your goddamn home page and click through two more screens in order to reply, that's when I get irritated. I understand you're hungry for page views, but making me jump through hoops is not the way to keep me coming back.
So, Han: I liked the USP's style and handling better; the Glocks just looked and felt boxy and kind of… rattly. Hard to describe, just a general impression. I didn't have much time with any of the models, really. And just use Gmail from now on, please.
Second, more and more I just get the feeling that China, as a political entity, just plain doesn't like me.
It's no secret now that I'm thinking about buying a piece of property near Shanghai. I'd be more excited/optimistic about it if they weren't making it so goddamn hard. There are extra restrictions in place for purchasing property if you're a foreigner, new taxes being put in place, and I've been told it absolutely won't help me get better visas down the road.
Apparently the property and sales managers have limited English, and even though I can communicate pretty well in Chinese at this point, I want to be absolutely crystal clear on all fronts if I'm going to be blowing my life savings on a piece of property in a country that doesn't seem to be very fond of me, especially if I may have to rely on the political/legal institutions of that same country for conflict resolution. And this isn't just my personal impression here, I'm getting this all of my Chinese friends here.
Basically the reaction has been along the lines of: "Whew… it was an enormous pain in the ass for ME to buy a house, I'm surprised you have the balls to go through with it."
Third, it is also no secret that work is getting harder to find, and that goes just the same for me. I'm at the point where I'm trawling online classifieds to pick up contacts and contracts, and networking as best I can over here. It's a little encouraging to see that there are contracts floating around out there, but likewise depressing to see that (1) People want much more for much less these days, and (2) even when I'm willing to knuckle down and do the work -- which is any time I feel I could execute the project -- I'm competing with developers and development groups from places like India, who will work for much, much less than I can.
This is fine, and that's their competitive edge. In this environment, and with that kind of competition, I can only really compete on service. This has not, at least for the past week, held much appeal for potential clients when the alternative is outsourcing the job to someone with poor language skills who might get the job done for a tenth of the price.
So we'll see how that goes.
I'm pretty confident I can drum up enough work to keep me going for a little while, but it is growing increasingly clear to me that my market viability is waning pretty quickly. I'm therefore -- as always, and just like everyone else -- looking at my options, while trying to make a real go of this at the same time.
Fourth, don't do "real" business with friends. This was a pretty clear cut rule with me, and it's not like I hadn't heard it before, but I bent/broke it once because I liked the potential project and the partner.
It's coming back to bite me in the ass now, so I've renewed my determination to only trade my labor to friends who want it, like for baked goods and favors. After all, in the shitstorm formerly known as our global economy, returning to a barter economy makes as much sense as anything else.
Fifth, I lost my e-reader. Sniff. I really loved that thing. Now the only thing I can do while on the can is pick locks, which is really more of a visceral activity, and doesn't have any of the intellectual or emotional appeal.
Sixth, my ISP decided to move my site to another server without any notification, so access to my site and email has been crappy for the past couple of days, and my gallery may be broken to the extent I have to just scrap the whole damn thing and start over… won't know until the DNS propagates this way.
So I'm on a train to Shanghai tomorrow, where every cheap hotel room is booked because of the World Expo! At the very least, being on the move may help me get rid of some of this mental baggage.
Picky picky
I know... crappy post. I'm just trying to get back in the swing of things; sorry.
I've recently decided to embark on a new hobby, which involves sticking pointy bits of metal inside locks to make them open without a key. This has tended to evoke a raised-eyebrow sort of reaction from people when I mention it. I suppose it's fairly understandable; lock picking is generally understood to be something of an anti-social activity, associated with things like cat burglars and James Bond.
Being associated with James Bond might seem like a pretty good thing, until you think a bit and realize he's actually kind of a sociopathic dick. I suppose it's not really his fault; I'd have a hard time being civil too, if I knew I could put a pistol round through the tires of every un-muffled Harley I saw, and the worst I'd get would be a stern talking-to from Judy Densch.
In the end, regardless of how long they've known me or how jokingly they mean it, people generally assume I am learning how to pick locks so that I can enter their homes while they're at work and commit deeds of unspeakable evil, like make combination mobiles/lamps from lingerie (brassieredeliers, I would call them), or eat all the cheese.
And I suppose these are valid concerns. I do love me some cheese.
So why lock picking?
Kind of like this.
Primarily, I just think it's kind of cool. It has also given me a new perspective on just how insecure most consumer level locks are. Much like banks or the stock market, they only work when everyone thinks they do. So really, our society is based on the honor system. Even locks, which are supposed to keep out the parts of society who don't follow the system. After a week of practice, it takes me anywhere between one to ten minutes to pick the Master brand padlock I bought -- a fairly beefy version that I wouldn't have thought twice about putting on a shed, or or fence -- and about the same to pick a little luggage lock.
On top of that, picking these locks is kind of the dumb way to do it; "shimming" most padlocks can be done with a pair of shears, an empty soda can, and a couple of minutes.
Anyway, it's been interesting, and it promises to get better. My next step is going to be a Kwikset deadbolt -- the kind that I've seen in use everywhere (like on my parents' place, and most apartments I've lived in).
So… hide your cheese, folks.