17 hours

Jun 21

Posted by jeff in Everything, Travel | 1 Comment

I watched with a rather perverse fascination as the liquid yellow tentacles felt their way along the aisle towards my feet.

I should probably do something, I thought.

Fortunately, the train leaned over as we started down a sweeping left turn, and the stream of urine abruptly tracked right. It disappeared under a row of seats, promptly reappearing between the feet of the man across the aisle from me. He gazed at it bemusedly for a moment before jumping up with a startled oath and plucking his briefcase off the floor.

The wellspring's mother, meanwhile, bounced her giggling child a few times on her knee to get the last drops onto the floor.

That was hour three of seventeen.

The Shanghai World Expo is in full swing, which makes things like getting to and from Shanghai -- even if you're just passing through -- a little more difficult than normal. Hotels are mostly booked solid, so overnight layovers are tough to arrange. Tickets for planes and trains are unusually expensive, if they can be had at all.

And so it came to be that Jing Jing and I had to buy tickets from Shanghai to Wuhan, normally not too difficult, a few days in advance.

We first tried the normal lower middle class preferred level of train travel, an overnight hard sleeper (ying wo / 硬卧). These are 3-tier bunk beds, essentially a thin futon mattress slapped on top of a sheet metal plank and bolted to the side of a train carriage. Not terribly uncomfortable, and you get to save money on a night's accommodation.

No go. All sold out, even for the goober train that made all 16 stops between the two cities, leaving Shanghai at 1pm and arriving in Wuhan the next day at 5am.

So we looked at the middle class preferred level of travel, a soft sleeper (ruan wo / 软卧). These are rather thicker futon mattresses folded onto sheet metal planks bolted in two tiers to the side of individual compartments, and as a final luxurious touch they usually put a rose in a little plastic vase on the compartment's table. Posh.

But also no go; they were just too pricey. To be fair, they were only 400RMB per bunk, which works out to a little under $60. But seeing as we were both without steady income, it made sense to save money where we can.

So we opted for the only other available option, seventeen hours of hard seat ( ying zuo / 硬座 ) goodness on the goober train.

Hard seats are the working class berths, cloth-covered benches that fill a train car end to end; 3-person and 2-person benches across an aisle, with tiny tables between them. Also common in these cars are "standing tickets" (zhan piao / 站票), which are exactly what they sound like; standing room only. You get to take a break in someone's seat when they get up to go to the bathroom, but otherwise you're pretty much on your own.

These rides are usually hot, sweaty, noisy, and crowded. The babies and toddlers in these cars, unlike those of richer parents on planes or the soft sleeper cars, wear pants with slits cut in them rather than diapers, and they generally just whiz on the floor whenever they feel like it. Shoes with waterproof soles are a good idea, and keep anything you even remotely care about off the floor.

Likewise, many people in this economic bracket tend to be fairly blase about littering and spitting, and you'll get a fairly rich mixture of mucus, chicken bones, ramen wrappers, and other assorted treats under and around the seats, so heading to the bathroom can quickly become a game of "let's not step on the slime."

Once you actually get to the bathroom, that's where you learn to really appreciate the value of the saying "it's about the journey, not the destination." The bathrooms on these rides are notoriously filthy; the cars generally run out of water before the final stop, so you can usually expect a fair amount of piss and shit to welcome you upon your arrival.

After one or two visits to these restrooms, I started the practice of fasting for about eight hours before any long haul train ride.

At any rate, if you're not one of those lucky individuals who can sleep anywhere at any time, you quickly learn to adopt that half-conscious doze which, if not exactly restful, at least fends off possible small talk from your neighbours.

Anyway. No point to this post, I'm just killing a little time while I wait for Portugal to finish sending North Korea home from the world cup.

Awesome speech

Jun 18

Posted by jeff in Everything | 3 Comments

http://tinyurl.com/36q6rpn
A commencement speech given to Stanford School of Medicine's graduating class last week by Atul Gawande. One good bit:

You come into medicine and science at a time of radical transition. You have met the older doctors and scientists who tell the pollsters that they wouldn’t choose their profession if they were given the choice all over again. But you are the generation that was wise enough to ignore them: for what you are hearing is the pain of people experiencing an utter transformation of their world.

Doctors and scientists are now being asked to accept a new understanding of what great medicine requires. It is not just the focus of an individual artisan-specialist, however skilled and caring. And it is not just the discovery of a new drug or operation, however effective it may seem in an isolated trial.

Great medicine requires the innovation of entire packages of care—with medicines and technologies and clinicians designed to fit together seamlessly, monitored carefully, adjusted perpetually, and shown to produce ever better service and results for people at the lowest possible cost for society.

I can’t help myself.

Jun 11

Posted by jeff in Everything | 1 Comment

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)

Jun 8

Posted by jeff in BooBooBeeBoo (Angsty Melodrama), Everything | 7 Comments

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

Jun 5

Posted by jeff in Everything, Geekery | 8 Comments

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?

wow

Kind of like this.

I like little puzzle games, I enjoy challenging my manual dexterity, and I like having practical skills. Lockpicking sort of wraps all these up into one seductively anti-social bundle, with just enough of the taint of unrespectability that makes what is essentially a pointless and cyclical exercise into a thrilling adventure.

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.