In LA

I’ve been hard at work lately on several projects: A website, some film-related I.T. work, and have started preproduction planning on a music video I’ll be directing. As often happens when I’m engaged in other pursuits, musical themes intrude into my head and I have to go buy them and listen repeatedly . This time it’s the nihilist pop of Ladytron, with a track by Martin Gore on heavy rotation as well:

Song	Album	Artist
Evil	Light & Magic	Ladytron
Seventeen	Light & Magic	Ladytron
Destroy Everything You Touch	Witching Hour	Ladytron
Playgirl	Commodore Rock	Ladytron
The Reason Why	Light & Magic	Ladytron
Discotraxx	604	Ladytron
Compulsion	Counterfeit [EP]	Martin Gore

If you think these tracks are easy to find in Beijing, you should by rights be wrong. However, almost as quickly as the songs popped into my head, I ran into people who had all of these albums.

This playlist could be entitled “music for not smiling”. Despite the inhumanly mechanical musical textures, this kind of music often broadcasts more emotional content to me than songs with more inflected and showy vocal and instrumental stylings. These and other musical artists of today should be commended for confusing the historian bots of the future, who will likely one day uncover these albums and have huge debates lasting milliseconds over whether or not the tracks were released before or after all humans died out and were replaced by robots.

If you’re on an airplane that has reached cruising altitude, and you start to recline your seat, and the passenger behind you rapidly knocks on your seat, looks annoyed, and says something while indicating with his hands that you should not lower your seat, has either person committed a violation of airplane etiquette? Does one have to ask before reclining?

I’ve always assumed that the ability to recline your seat is one of the inalienable rights that comes with your plane ticket. When the person sitting in front of me has not yet reclined, leaving me with a few extra inches of space at head-level, I consider that space a gift. If the person behind you has a baby sitting on their table (not likely), it is acceptable for them to politely request that you not recline, for a limited period of time, because it would crush their baby and interrupt its yoga session. Otherwise, I figure you get to recline without asking, but it’s nice to recline gradually so as not to bonk anyone.

It’s a moot point in this case, since I couldn’t figure out what to say to or ask the man seated behind me when he loudly complained as I reclined, and instead I just returned my seat to its forward position. A short while later, the person in front of me reclined directly into the top of my computer. I adjusted my computer, then a minute later they reclined even further. I resorted to closing my table, placing the computer on my lap, and resuming work with the screen half-closed.

Airplane philistines!

PS. This blog is now a year old, home to such consequential airline-related postings as this one, or the Airplane Bathroom Sink Review.

I would love to see this new 4-hour documentary about China made for Granada-KQED-PBS-BBC entitled China From the Inside.

From the article:

The footage is vast. Cameras traveled to Tibet; Xinjiang, home to many Muslims; the Kazakhstan border; the Gobi Desert; and the Yangtze River. There are interviews with women activists trying to instill self-confidence among rural women (to try to help stave off a high suicide rate); a National People’s Congress delegate comparing communism with U.S. democracy; a Catholic priest practicing religion in an atheist country; and residents who’ve been displaced by the gargantuan construction of the Three Gorges Dam. …an environmental activist talks about the polluted Huai River, its cancer-inducing contaminants ravaging the lives of villagers whose photos he displays. In the segment about women, a factory worker in Guangdong Province talking about her day-to-day life: Working the assembly line and prohibited from talking between 6:08 a.m. and 6:08 p.m.

It’s no surprise that the Chinese government was a little concerned about the making of this documentary, but it sounds as though the government minders assigned to this project deserve much respect for making excuses and leaving the set when sensitive topics were being covered. The fact that the documentary’s director had previously made a 4-part documentary entitled “Hell in the Pacific” about the Nanjing massacre by the Japanese probably helped him get reasonably free access to cover sensitive locations, people, and topics.

Thanks to <shamus> for the link.

I’m really a bit saddened about this. The inventor of instant noodles and founder of Nissin co, Momofuku Ando, has died at age 96 not long after finishing off a bowl of Chicken ramen. Chicken ramen was his first product. I used to eat lots of Nissin’s Top Ramen, Oriental Flavor (the only meatless one). Great stuff, especially when combined with some egg and hot chili-sesame oil. Very affordable for students, and a bountiful source of vitamin NaCl.

Mr. Ando’s legacy lives on. He is now slurping peacefully in the afterlife –ok, so maybe I don’t really put much stock in the idea of an afterlife, but it always sounds like it would be a peaceful place to slurp.

Thanks for all the soup, Ando-sama.

…

The things you find by looking at your referrer logs… Here’s the story: My blog received a visit from someone who clicked a link at a blog entitled “Zuky“. Out of curiousity, I went over to that blog to see who had posted a link to my blog, and ended up reading through entries at Zuky. I noticed the photo there of Mr. Ando holding what looks like a colostomy bag full of dried worms (apparently an instant-noodle pack he’d designed for astronauts), clicked the link, and wound up at the USA Today obituary linked above. I’ll link it again here in case you want to check out his photo for yourself or pay your respects to the man who invented the staple food that kept you alive in those lean years by learning a bit more about him.

We’ve all waited and waited like hungry beavers for the iPhone announcement. Now that the exhilarating presentation is over, everything else just feels…anticlimactic. How can one feel excitement at anything for the rest of the day, or the week –by noting how the iPhone differs from perfection, that’s how. If this hasn’t already become a popular pastime, it will soon. And the iPhone, amazing as it looks, and though it might seem insanely great, does have many deficiencies that can be named and counted. Follow along and see how much better you feel with each bullet point, listed in order of importance.

• Lacks 3G - With a screen made for web browsing and boasting great email and web browsing software (Apple touts it as a “Breakthrough Internet Device“), it’s surprising that the iPhone can’t connect to the fastest cellular data networks. As one of my friends puts it, “3G is in all the devices professionals carry now …going to be no defections in the business space”. Hurrah, a real deficiency. There’s something to live for after all!
• No Expansion slot? - Apple doesn’t mention an SD or miniSD slot on the iPhone Tech Specs page. Though the device does include 4 or 8Gb of internal memory, that high-res screen aches to display big video files. It’d be nice to be able to store movies and TV shows on SD cards and just swap them in when on a long plane flight rather than keep the device’s internal memory packed full of both seasons of Get a Life in HD. Yay, another demerit for the iPhone, but I’d feel even better if there wasn’t a suspiciously utilitarian-looking slot on the side of the photo of the iPhone on Apple’s site. Something tells me they might have just forgotten to mention or haven’t yet decided which kind of media the iPhone will accept. The Tech specs do look a little parsimonious.
• Won’t be out until June - Apple says they’ve announced the iPhone now so that their FCC filing doesn’t steal their thunder and announce it for them. All well and good, but one could also say they’ve announced a phone that won’t be around until June and are in the meantime inviting comparisons with phones currently on the market. The iPhone should by rights be compared with other phones that will exist in June. By then it is possible that everyone and their dog will have released phones featuring 48Gb of memory with even wider, cinemascope-ratio screens and built-in slide-rules. Maybe PalmOne will finally release a phone based on their Advanced Linux Platform, so that I can finally check my email using emacs vm-mode while on the bus. Maybe Microsoft will release a phone running a slimmed-down version of Vista (though hopefully less slimmed-down than the desktop version of Vista). All conjecture, but the point is, we just don’t know what else will be on the table in June. There may be more annnouncements in the future from other companies to brighten our days over the next few months. One can hope.
• iPhone’s features are not revolutionary - Many phones on the market can already do email, play music, browse the web, and crash.
• no GPS - A deficiency because it’s important to know, at all times, where the government satellites think you are. Also can be useful for navigation when you throw caution and anonymity to the wind and remove the tinfoil wrapped around your phone antenna. Geotagged moblogging would the teh awesome.
• no video chat - looks like the camera is on the back of the phone, making video chat an unlikely possibility without some crafty use of mirrors or an iPhone-camera-periscope. One can do video chat between Nokia 7390s, why can’t iPhone users do video chat with other iPhone users, or with computer-based iChat users? Maybe the lack of 3G makes this feature less possible.
• no iPod connector - or maybe I just haven’t given the device a close enough look. Can it connect to all them iPod stereos and alarm clocks and whatnot? How bout the iPod+Nike kit or the iPod FM tuner?
• no brown color - I thought the availability of the Zune in brown was one of the best things going for it. No joke. Brown is cool. Mr. Jobs even wore a brown shirt to announce the iPhone, so you know this has to be something Apple plans to introduce in the future. Has to be. Another announcement to live for.
• no fingerprint scanner - Well, it’d be neat and potentially useful. Do I really want to have to divine my friend’s password and poke it on a touchscreen keyboard when instead I can hack off his thumb and press it to the iPhone’s sensor so that I can read his mail and determine when he first turned state’s evidence against me?
• no thermometer - How hot is it in here? I don’t know. My phone won’t tell me!
• no altimeter - How high am I?
• no FM radio tuner! - This was one of the most-noted deficiencies in the early days of the iPod. Apple even eventually made an FM tuner accessory for the iPod nano, which I bought. It works well. But as it turns out, I rarely use the FM radio, and other people bought plenty of iPods even though they lack an FM radio, so maybe the need for an FM tuner was overplayed. Regardless, it is very true that the iPhone, like the iPod before it, lacks an FM tuner. Once a deficiency always a deficiency.
• Works on a PC - If it really runs OS X, people should by rights be forced to buy a Mac in order to use this phone. All the other great smartphone options only support one computing platform (or at least require commercial 3rd-party software to work on other manufacturers’ platforms). Has Apple not heard of this marketing strategy? If the iPhone is made MacOS-only, it could motivate Mac marketshare to shoot as high as 5%!
• No diagonal mode - The iPhone automatically senses orientation and switches the display between Portrait and Landscape modes, but where is “diagonal mode”? What if I can’t make up my mind how to hold the phone? More orientation options are needed, neither the world nor 3D space is so binary. I want 6 axes, 5 dimensions, and a diagonal screen mode.

Uh oh, I just watched the flash animation on Apple’s site of the iPhone’s music interface. Amazing. What a perfect tactile interface, and the use of coverflow is outstanding. And since the iPhone really does run OS X, emacs vm-mode might be a possibility. Unfortunately, despite having worked up a list of the product’s many real and imaginary flaws, I think the iPhone announcement may well kill my enthusiasm for any other not-yet-released-product-announcement this week.

A while back, when rumors of an Apple cell phone began circulating, I only allowed myself low expectations. Given how uninteresting the Motorola Rokr was (100 song limit?!), and how crazy the rumors sounded, I figured this was a reasonable move. There were signs of something good in the offing –Apple’s late-2005 patent filing for a touch-screen interface that displayed a “virtual scroll wheel” was a dead giveaway that this technology would be in future Apple handheld devices, but other details were less easy to guess, and the guesses rampant on the net sounded outlandish. I assumed that other rumors to be just rumors, especially the one which stated that the phone would be a full-on smartphone that runs a version of OS X, or that it would have WiFi networking built in. What pie-in-the-sky thinking. I expected only a fairly simple but nice phone with a touch-screen interface paired with an iPod nano, basically a phone with 8Gb of music on board. Maybe smartphone features would come in a later edition. I didn’t expect WiFi to ever be included.

There were reasons for my skepticism about WiFI. Cell phone companies do not love everything about smartphones, specifically they don’t like smartphones that they can’t control, that might not allow them to take a cut of everything. Rumor has it that the Rokr couldn’t buy songs from iTunes because the carriers wouldn’t allow it unless the price per song was jacked up and they could get a huge cut. It is rumored that similar pressure from carriers is the reason the Palm Treos lack WiFi. Palm actually makes a SD-card WiFi adapter for their PDAs, but for some reason never released a driver to make this device work in their Treo smartphones. The carriers control the cell phone market. As a cell phone manufacturer you’re screwed if Sprint, for example, says they won’t carry your smartphone in their stores if you allow the phone to access WiFi networks, because they worry that consumers will install Skype or other voice-over-IP software (VOIP) and use it over wireless networks rather than paying for minutes. Some Windows Mobile phones work with WiFi, maybe Microsoft had enough clout to push that past the carriers, I’m really not sure how that happened.

In any case, I was wrong to lower my expectations for Apple’s iPhone, because the cell phone Apple has announced sounds terrific. Here’s a rundown of my thoughts on the features of the announced device:

• “Runs OS X” - Obviously a form of OS X slimmed down and optimized for the phone, but judging from descriptions of the presentation it still includes some graphics acceleration. Hopefully it will be possible to develop for the iPhone using Apple’s free developer tools, in which case I’d expect a PalmOS emulator to be ported to the iPhone in short order. This would make thousands of great PDA apps available at once. I am especially hopeful that this happens so that (were I to purchase an iPhone) I could run Plecosoft’s great Chinese dictionary. If it is really running OS X, I look forward to trying Terminal.app on it. I’ve wanted a good cell phone that runs Unix for a long time.
• Includes the Safari web browser, Widgets, iTunes, Email, and a Google Maps application - This all sounds good. Widgets are usually little bits of Javascript and HTML cobbled together to make tiny apps, the fact that support for them is included on the phone makes me optimistic about the future availability of lots of useful user-written applications. Negative commenters on engadget who diss the Google Maps support have obviously never tried to use Google Maps from a smartphone before. The Google Maps website is so Javascript-intensive that it brings all smartphones to their knees.
• Well designed call and voicemail interfaces - It’s difficult to watch Apple’s flash demos of the UI and not get excited. Finally a phone UI that makes it possible to listen to voicemail messages out of order, or properly deal with incoming calls during a conversation. My Treo doesn’t get either of these right.
• 3.5-inch widescreen 480 x 320 display - Sounds gorgeous, and might make this the highest res cell phone in existence, assuming someone doesn’t beat it before the expected release date in June. Resolution isn’t just a matter of flashiness, but it a utilitarian matter if you plan to read much text or browse websites. Every day I thank the cell phone gods for the 320×320 display on the secondhand Treo 650 I bought here in China (very useful with the aforementioned Plecodict dictionary).
• An actual 3.5mm headphone plug - It would be very annoying to have to use an adapter to be able to plug non-cell-phone headphones into this phone. This is a feature that other smartphone manufacturers constantly overlook (I’m pointing at you PalmOne, though I doubt you’re alone in this).
• Bluetooth, WiFi - Bluetooth was expected, but WiFi which “automatically engages when in range” is a great thing. This will be great when Skype is available for the phone, or someone writes a SIP client so that we can all use this phone with our home servers running the Asterix PBX.
• Proximity sensor disables touchscreen and display when device is held to user’s face - Great feature! I wish my Treo was this intelligent, but instead it runs down the battery keeping the display on during calls, and I can accidentally hang up a call by hitting the hang up button with my chin. I tried an extension that blanks the Treo screen during calls, but it’s sometimes useful to pull the phone from your ear and check something on the display.
• Free push email from Yahoo - and likely from everyone else soon after launch I’d guess once people sort out the likely very simple protocol. Nail in the coffin for Blackberry? Well, those Blackberry phones do have other features, but given the availability of Chattermail for Palm, and now push email on the Apple iPhone, Blackberry’s push-email feature no longer sounds like the one feature that makes that particular device essential for every business executive with ADHD.
• Touchscreen keyboard - I’m a little less excited about this. I’ll have to try it in person. I suppose the screen would have been smaller, or the device thicker, had there been a real keyboard included. My past experience with touchscreens has been that it’s difficult to hit keys very precisely without a stylus, and kayboard buttons give useful tactile feedback that will be missing here. I’m not excited, but have learned my lesson about low expectations. Given how well the iPod’s touchpad interfaces work (Apple even managed to cram a tiny piezo speaker in the iPod nano just to make barely perceptible but surprisingly useful feedback noises while you use that device’s interface), I’d expect that if anyone can finally make a usable touchscreen interface it will be Apple.
• $499 on a two-year Cingular contract for 4Gb model - Price sounds high, but smartphones are expensive. The Treo 700p on Sprint was only $100 less, and it only has 128Mb of built-in memory.
• GSM/EDGE - These are the largest and most available voice and data networks right now, worldwide. I’d be surprised if there isn’t also a CDMA/EVDO version of this phone in the near future, everyone always launches with one network and carrier at first due to exclusive deals that last a couple of months. I’m happy Apple first launched with a GSM rather CDMA model, it means the phone will be usable in China and Europe by popping in a local SIM card as soon as people figure out how to undo the carrier lock, which will happen quickly.
• 5 hours talk time - That’s decent battery life, in line with most other phones. It’d be nice to know how many days of standby.
• 4.5 inches by 2.4 inches by 11.6mm - That’s very very tiny and thin. Compare to the thickness of the Motorola Razr V3 at 13.9mm thick and Slvr at 11.5mm. The rounded edges on the iPhone will also likely make it easy to slide into and out of pockets.

I’m impressed. If it’s easy to develop software for this phone, and Chinese language support is forthcoming, and the touchscreen isn’t a pain, and I feel like I can afford one, and my Treo 650 falls down a well, I’ll consider one of these.

There are a lot of expats in Beijing, and sometimes those from the U.S. like to take a break from their breakfast of warm soy milk and fried bread to eat cereal. Expensive cereal. The same stuff they could find back home, but either imported or made in China by U.S. based companies who know they have a captive market.

There are a few stores that have grown up to fill the needs of the expat community, a prime example is the Jenny Lou’s chain. Jenny Lou’s has at least a half-row devoted to breakfast cereal, including sugared cereals, oatmeal, and muesli imported from Europe.

I remember my Mom bought muesli a few times when I was a kid. It was awful stuff, bland tasting, instantly soggy. Pass the honey-nut cheerios, please.

But now that I’ve gotten older, and have moved to Beijing, and am dating someone who likes muesli, I had to give this soggy european export another chance. It turns out that I now like muesli, as long as it has good fruit in it. Lord knows, the texture of muesli alone isn’t much of a draw, but it can be part of a nutritious and low-fat breakfast. Etc.

I recently bought a bag of a muesli imported from Germany, and it had whole raspberries in it. I thought it pretty tasty, and finished it off in a few days, but not before taking a photo of the bag and noting that I should buy more of this Seitenbacher Müsli in the future.

If you are what you eat, I am now healthy, soggy, and fruity.

When serious journalists at the Associated Press push out headlines like Spears falls asleep in Vegas nightclub, I’m not sure there’s any room left for humorists.

By about one o’clock, she was just done, so we took her out,” Spears’ manager, Larry Rudolph, told The Associated Press Monday. “She was not drunk. She was just tired and falling asleep.

I love the hilarious fake newspaper The Onion, but at this point the real press is indulging in such self-parody to give that humor rag a run for its money.