In LA

Some of my friends now have good net connectivity, but I’m still mostly off the grid. Worse things can happen.

An article in the China Daily News interviewed a bunch of Chinese folk who spend their waking lives chatting on MSN. They are apparently going through annoying-huge-animated-emoticon withdrawal:

“The breakdown of the MSN service since Tuesday has brought a sudden end to my familiar cyber world, making my life dull and boring,” said Liu.

Wow. Happy New Year, everyone.

Could whoever was updating the great firewall of China about 24 hours ago please double-check your work? The entire internet outside of China, or at least the portion of the net that includes all web traffic (port 80), has been completely inaccessible for the past day. Websites originating outside of China take about 10 minutes to load, if at all. I know you need to occasionally update the great firewall in order to better block any websites that contain unhealthy thoughts or statements critical of the Chinese government that might lead to instability, yadda yadda yadda, but when updating the firewall’s rules it’s important to take care that you not block simply everything. Argh.

Update: It would appear that the net in China is down due to an earthquake in Taiwan. I still blame the firewall, partly because it’s annoying and I like to blame it for things, mostly because if it weren’t for this country’s need to filter the net they’d have more than one point of connection to the outside world –we could all get to yahoo.com just as easily through Russia or Japan as Taiwan if such connections existed. In any case, I hope all the people in Taiwan are OK, I’d know more about this quake if I could get to an English language news website.

Last week a huge portion of Seattle was without power due to a big storm. Highest winds on record, most rain on record, etc. Over a million people fell off the electrical grid, at least 7 or so people dead, another 100 admitted to hospitals with carbon monoxide poisoning after they brought barbecues or generators indoors for the heat, and at least one server (this one) without power for several days.

But now at least this server is back online. Yay.

♫ So long and thanks for all the shipping traffic ♬

Lipotes vexilifier is the first species of cetacean – whales, dolphins and porpoises – to disappear from our globe in modern times…the first large mammal to go extinct as a result of man’s destruction of their natural habitat and ressources.

A team of researchers searched a 1000-mile stretch of the Yangtze river hoping to sight a Baiji (white dolphin) and found nothing. They guess that the Baiji is effectively extinct, and blame human activity — fishing and shipping traffic on the river did them in. Because there is so much sediment in the river, the Baiji have evolved to navigate and find food using echolocation (and are nearly blind). The researchers think that the sound of boat engines along the heavily-trafficked river disrupts the dolphin’s sonar so that they can’t find food.

The researches also tried to estimate the size of the dwindling Yangtze finless porpoise population, and only counted 400. They’ll likely be next to go. There’s a photo of that porpoise on cnn’s site, it’s either insanely cute or the winner of the H.R. Giger’s Alien look-alike contest.

Looking on the bright side, the white dolphin was an obvious impediment to China’s booming economy, as once was the city of Beijing’s overly-clean air. Many people were even concerned that the completion of the massive Three Gorges Dam project would result in the extinction of the Baiji. Now that both of these problems have been overcome (and Baiji dealt with ahead of schedule!), the Chinese economy can continue its rapid growth unabated. Investors take note.

Note: If you took these photos please let me know if you’d like a credit, a link, or would like them to be taken down.

This is reportedly a leaked photo of the long-rumored Apple iPhone, corded version. I had placed this image alongside a previous post, but I think the device is important enough to warrant its own entry.

If I am interpreting the image correctly, the phone appears to feature multi-line support and iPod-inspired rotary dialing (yes!). I hope it works with hotel PBX lines without frying its modem.

I am very excited about this. Aren’t you?

This image is likely by far the most accurate leaked photo of the Apple iPhone (at least until Kevin Rose, who often vacations in a cupboard at an Apple hardware testing lab, posts a sketch). However there do appear to be a number of more fanciful fan photos of iPhones on the net. Some of them are nice 3D renderings, and worth a look.

I know that publications like to juice things up in order to add interest to their articles, but I think Red Herring strayed into fantasyland in a recent article about iPhone rumors when they published the following irrelevant information:

Apple’s company orientation for new employees even instructs new hires that they’re working for a “cult.” It also tells employees to not make contact with Steve Jobs when passing in the halls.

When I went through orientation as a new Apple employee, we were told nothing of the kind. Nor were we asked to climb down a rabbit hole or to learn secret handshakes. At orientation we were taught about our benefits, duties, what to do in the case of a medical emergency, and to avoid discussing Apple internal secrets outside campus or even on campus when around fellow Apple employees who weren’t cleared to know about that particular project.

Yes, Apple does take secrecy very seriously, to the point that it can become a subject of humor. When I’d decline to speculate about upcoming apple products or discuss secret projects with which I was involved, friends would tease that I worked for the CIA. But besides the emphasis on secrecy and the intentionally humorous security video we were shown (which featured employees of the security department as actors), there was nothing very funny or odd about orientation that I can recall. I was certainly not told at orientation that Apple was a cult. The security folk did express some surprise at how unusually fervent Apple fans can be and stressed that we should not only consider when discussing secret projects whether we can be overheard by competitors and press but also to watch out for Think Secret types. As for not making contact with Steve Jobs in the halls, I remember no such warning. I know people who have said hello to him the hallways and elevator and have sufferred no ill effects. I never attempted contact because whenever I saw him walk by he was always deep in conversation with Jonathan Ives. I eagerly await future articles from Red Herring about the upcoming Microsoft Zune 2.0 player (this time with an even newer version of DRM that’s incompatible with previous portable Windows Media players including the Zune 1.0) which end with a couple of sentences about how Microsoft new employees are instructed to be sure to drink enough free fruit juice to gain 10 pounds of weight and to never interrupt CEO Steve Balmer when he’s doing his monkey dance on pain of having to work on the regedit.exe team.

Note: This post was written yesterday while I was waiting at the airport for a flight. I was in an irrationally foul mood, though much less foul than it sounds in writing –it’s just fun to grumble. I acknowledge that arriving to the airport early for a flight is immeasurably preferable to arriving at an airport late, that the average sane person would have been content to sit at the airport and attempt to read a Dale Carnegie business book in Chinese, and that my rant is a bit on the silly side. But as someone who is more accustomed to operating on “Jewish time” I was annoyed by the fact that we arrived at the airport far far too early for my tastes. (As an aside, do other cultures jokingly refer to lateness as “Polish time”, “Mexican time”, “Zoroastrian time” etc? Is this a Jew-specific in-joke?). On with the post…

Today, I had to catch a 6:30 PM flight from Lanzhou to Beijing. That sounds simple, doesn’t it? The drive to the Lanzhou airport from the hotel in Liancheng is a little over two hours, the airport is neither big nor busy, and it’s a domestic flight. To arrive 1 hour in advance would leave plenty of time. But did I hear someone say in Chinese that the car would leave at 2 PM? This seemed a little early to me, but maybe I was to share the car with people leaving on a 5 PM flight.

So around 1:05 PM I was out in a nearby village buying a wonderfully ugly duffel bag sporting a “Nike” logo in which to store some of my overflow luggage. My cell phone rang and played the Pac Man theme, which was not a familiar tune to the elderly Chinese gentleman perpetually standing next to me staring while I looked at some fashionable solid-dark-green canvas Converse All-Star style sneakers with the logo of the nearby power plant imprinted on the ankle. It was the Chinese production office on the line, calling to see where I was because the car was waiting for me. Apparently we were supposed to leave at 1PM!

I ran back to the hotel, passing butcher shops, motorcycles with live sheep tied on the back, outhouses, townfolk shoveling huge mounds of coal, crossing the bridge and sluice-gates over the partly-frozen river, and trying not to breathe in the occasional snowflake that might possibly be impregnated with a chemical byproduct of whatever was in the smoke released by the local power plant. This took 20 minutes. I then ran to my room, packed (breaking one zipper on the “Nike” bag), and ran down to the waiting car. We probably left around 1:35 PM.

We raced to the airport in the finest of thin off-white Chinese vans. I sat in the front seat, and took advantage of the fact that it had the only functional seat-belt. While near Liancheng, the driver sped, swerved around vehicles, drove in the left lane, and honked frequently. He honked at schoolchildren on bicycles, old people walking on the side of the road, other cars that didn’t pull onto the shoulder to let him pass, and large trucks. The windshield was so completely covered with dirt that I was impressed he could see enough of the road to navigate. Occasionally he would open his window to spit or toss the remains of a cigarette. I knew this driver. The last time I’d driven with him he’d gone at insane speeds down dark country roads as if he were playing a video game and had a few extra lives saved up. That time I’d asked him to slow down.

Eventually we made it to the toll freeway, which was nice and clear. I finished a bottle of water and placed it in the center console’s cup holder. A few minutes later the driver noticed it, opened his window, and threw the bottle out into the center of the road as we sped along. I didn’t hear it bounce. He threw his bottle a few minutes later. That’d be a $500 fine in the U.S., but since this is the industrial center of China, maybe that bottle is now the least harmful bit of matter in its vicinity. I talked a little with my fellow passengers, all Chinese members of the film crew, and as it turns out we were all on the same 6:30 PM flight to Beijing.

We arrived at the airport at 4:00PM. My co-passengers acted as if we needed to rush, so there was no stopping at the overpriced Lanzhou airport café. We loaded our bags onto carts, hurried into the airport, and by 4:15 we were checked in and at our gate. Since I’d missed breakfast, I bought a bowl of instant noodles. We all sat down in the completely empty section of the airport to wait for almost 2 hours before boarding the plane.

I know it’s good to get to the airport on time for a flight, but this seems insane to me. If I hadn’t been “late”, we’d have all arrived 3 hours before the flight. As it is, my co-passengers sat there futzing with their cell phones, while I typed (this post) on my computer, while we all waited at the gate for two hours. I could have used that time back at the hotel to do work, rest, make finger-paintings –the point is none of us needed to be at the airport that early. We could have worked 80% of a workday and left at 3 PM.

The other passengers tell me that I can share a car with them once we arrive in Beijing since we’re travelling in the same direction. Sounds good. As long as we land in Beijing two-and-a-half hours before the car is supposed to pick us up we should be fine.

As it turns out, we were picked up by a friend of one of the passengers, who gave me a very nice ride home.