In LA

An ashtray on the inner door of the minty-fresh new Airbus A330 aircraft that flew me to Tokyo. The happy icon is the ashtray’s way of saying “smoke, ply me with ashes, and I will feel a great sense of purpose”.

One foot and one generation away, a sign on the other half of the door makes it clear that crime does not pay, and that these door-halves have not been talking to each other for some time.

A few notes on yesterday, March 28, 2007, which for me was a 36-hour-long day containing a couple of geeky surprises (marked in bold below).

• Woke up at 5:50 AM to the alarm and message “Wake up!” I’d set as an entry in my Treo’s calendar.
• Sync’ed my iPod nano so that I could listen to the latest Diggnation podcast while on the plane.
• Went to the Beijing airport and caught my Northwest Airlines flight to Tokyo’s Narita airport.
• The plane was an Airbus 330, which meant that it not only had nicely designed bathroom sinks, but also featured an electrical outlet for each seat.
• I plugged in my Mac Book Pro (after removing the battery to reduce the machine’s power consumption to below the 75W provided by the outlet) and watched an episode of Battlestar Galactica season 3.
• Changed my Treo’s locale to Los Angeles, and time zone to Pacific. Its clock set itself to L.A. time.
• Landed, hung out at the Narita airport for an hour and circled the waiting areas near my next flight’s gate.
• Noticed an extremely strong positive correlation in the waiting area between people holding paper bags of McDonald’s take-out food and their weight and nationality (lots of morbidly obese Americans waiting for flights to the midwest guzzling cokes and munching on fries).
• Caught a flight to San Francisco.
• geeky surprise #1: Slept for a couple of hours, and was then woken up by the same “Wake up!” alarm on my Treo when 5:50AM Pacific rolled around. How crazy-cool to be woken up twice on the same day by the same alarm in two different time zones!
• Plugged in the computer (plane was another A330) and watched four more episodes of Battlestar, the best sci-fi TV show ever. Strangely enough, I editorialized about this show a while back in a similar post about the trans-pacific flight from my last U.S. visit. The last episode I watched felt like Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle set in space. Battlestar’s ever-ambitious and capable writers managed to make it all work. I suppose anyone who can ably cover issues such to torture, sexual-abuse, and post-traumatic stress disorder in fracking robots with fracking laser beams can pretty much make any complex story zing along.
• Landed in San Francisco, utilized SF’s awesome public transport system for a quick and no-fuss trip to Cupertino (BART subway from the airport one stop to Millbrae station, CalTrain South to Sunnyvale, number 55 bus to Cupertino).
• Had lunch with my pal Chris at Cafe Macs, said hello to a few other former coworkers of mine back at Apple.
• geeky surprise #2: Checked my email, noticed that internet luminary Odd Todd had posted a comment to my last blog post. A flush of geeky pride was in order –my very own blog had accrued a post from the creator of the great flash animation Laid-Off: A Day in the Life and other notable unemployment-related animated shorts. He also invented the very useful word “mep”. A brush with greatness.
• Hung out with my friends David and Ana. Chatted. Had some decent pizza and salad. Old friends, decent pizza, and quality salad are three things that are hard to come by in Beijing.
• geeky surprise #3: Got on my flight to LA. Walked toward my seat and saw someone who looked familiar. I realized that he was Alex Albrecht of the hilarious tech podcast Diggnation, but I was not absolutely certain and also wasn’t sure if he wanted to interact with a fan at that instant, so I tried to give him an out –instead of loudly calling out his name I subtly looked toward him and said “Diggnation?” (hmm, maybe it wasn’t that subtle, but the intention was sincere). He responded and we ended up chatting for a bit about the show. A few weeks ago I was surprised to listen to an episode and hear him talking about my friend Henri Lubatti, so we talked about Henri for a bit and about the pilot episode of Outsourced (”the worlds first weekly internet sitcom”), which Alex created and Henri starred in.
• I fell asleep almost as soon as I sat down in my seat, and slept for the entire hour-plus flight to LA. Woke up during the landing with that sort of pain in the ears that comes from sleeping through the flight without equalizing ear pressure.
• Henri picked me up at the Airport, I hung out at Chandler’s place for a bit, then went to sleep after a very long day.

Speaking of brushes with geeky greatness, I think the creator of the awesome Chinese language learning tools NewsInChinese and Adsotrans just left a comment on the post in which I decry the evils of streaming media. Cool. I feel a little silly sounding this excited over a few comments, but this blog gathers so few legit comments (20 in total since its genesis in January of 2005, not counting thousands of others advertising online poker or c1alis) that it’s kind of fun when a real post gets through, and it’s especially fun when the post is from someone I’ve never met but whose blog I’ve read or software I’ve used.

I’m a little disappointed with the New Yorker animated cartoons.

It’s a good idea from a business perspective, twitchily animating short print cartoons and then sticking an ad on the end can’t be a terribly expensive process but could bring in decent revenue.

But after watching a couple of cartoons and not laughing or even smiling, I realized that for me, much of the fun of the New Yorker cartoons (and all other one-panel comics) is that I can scan my attention across them in whatever way and at whatever speed I want and the dialogues and images work together in an organic fashion. These animated versions are very directed, the camera pans across and zooms in on important details to bludgeon the viewer with bits of the drawing that only seem funny to me when I read the cartoon at my own speed in a random-access fashion.

You can see one of the New Yorker Animated Cartoons here.

I’m easily annoyed by musical choices, so I also take issue with the annoying “jazzy” upright bass plucking that opens each cartoon. It’s so smooth and “sophisticated” and makes me imagine an old psychoanalyst dude (albedo 0.60) sitting back in a chaise lounge with a meerschaum pipe watching “expletive-free comedy at the improv in front of a bare brick wall” on A&E. It’s not that it says all the wrong things –it’s probably perfect for their intended audience, it just happens to irritate me, and will continue to do so at least until I slip well out of the 18-34 age bracket. Take some risks with the animation and music, people!

They should get Mr. Odd Todd to try his hand at animating a few of these. Actually, they should have a different internet animator score and animate a different New Yorker cartoon each week, that would be interesting. Cutting the opening credits and opening music down to a glitchy single second would also be a worthwhile move. Credits should not be 20% the length of the total animation.

Speaking of The New Yorker. They have a cartoon caption contest that is pretty amusing (and I’ve entered a couple of times). Radosh.net in response created “The New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest“, which asks visitors to come up with the worst possible caption (just not funny, or missing the point) for a given New Yorker cartoon. Pretty brilliant idea. Here’s the winner from the first, Oct 31, 2005 contest:

Kudos to the New Yorker for not crushing the anti-caption contest like a little bug. Looks like there’ve been 91 contests so far without one cease-and-desist letter.

written last week: Because we’re moving to a new apartment this weekend I needed to buy some boxes in which to put all of our things. So I walked over to the nearby post office to buy the largest boxes they sell.

I bought 3 bundles of 5 boxes each, all mint and flattened, and struggled to carry them to the curb outside. The boxes were surprisingly heavy and bulky, impossible to carry for more than a few steps. I stood by the curb intending to hail a taxi, and a man riding by on his primitive bicycle-driven cart spotted me.

He stopped, beckoned me over, and asked where I needed to take my load. I told him (it was approximately 5 blocks away), and he quoted me a price of 50 RMB. Were I to grab a cab, the ride would cost the minimum fare of 10 RMB, but I figured his way would be more interesting than a cab. I bargained down one more step to 20 RMB, which is undoubtedly more than any Chinese person would pay for the journey, but felt silly after noticing that his hole-ridden jacket was barely held together by frayed threads and did not bargain further. I loaded the boxes onto the back of his bike-truck, and he motioned for me to sit on top. I feld a little bit self-conscious about this. I’ve occasionally seen people sitting on top of these carts, but they’re usually very old women from the countryside.

We rode out into traffic, weaved through a crazy intersection, and then went the long way home (so as not to have to carry the bike across the train tracks which are used to carry coal to the local power plant). We passed some of his fellow primitive cart pedalers along the way, and they shouted something to him in heavily accented Chinese that I couldn’t understand. We went through an area of newly demolished old buildings, and a group of about 20 people clustered around a Chinese chess game turned and stared for a long time as we passed.

Eventually we arrived at the destination. I dismounted and gave the pedaler a 20 RMB bill. He balked because the bill had a little tear in it. I guess he wanted a bill that was in better shape than his jacket. I scoured my wallet and found 18 RMB in other bills, and told him that he could either take the 18 or keep the 20, as that was all I had. He pocketed the 20, brightened up, and left after helping me to load the boxes on my head. I carried the boxes the equivalent of a little over a block into my building and brought them home.

Net connections are not good from Beijing. How not good? So not good that whenever I try to watch any streaming media clip, such as anything on youtube, the New York Times, Salon.com’s Video Dog, the embedded video clips on Robert Scoble’s blog, etc; On any of these I can only see a few seconds of video at a time with long stretches of still frames while reading text that says “Buffering 6%”, “Buffering 11%”, “Buffering 14%”, etc.

Salon.com’s flash-based media player is the worst of the lot. With many streaming media players, if I get tired of watching the video in 2 second bursts, I can just walk away and read the latest Harry Potter novel, then return, rewind the clip, and watch the now-fully-buffered clip in its entirety. The player for Salon.com’s video dog, if left alone for a bit, apparently erases its buffer and jumps back to the beginning of the clip. Thus, unless I’m prepared to sit there and monitor the buffering of the clip and hit the rewind and play buttons during the window of opportunity, I do not get to see the clip at all.

Speaking of streaming media, “goodbye and good luck” to Calvert DeForest (AKA Larry “Bud” Melman), we hardly knew ye
The existence of this clip illustrates the value of the common archive that occurs when ordinary people are given the ability to record and preserve media, hooray for VHS.

I believe there are reasons to provide streaming media, which I’ll explain below, but any instance of streaming media on a web page should always be accompanied by a link that users can click to download the video as a file.

I wrote to Salon.com a year ago, asking if they would please make their video files available for download, not just as streams. They responded that this was not possible because the videos contain bits of copyrighted media. This is an unnecessary and particularly gutless bit of rationalization. Salon.com is a publication and can easily justify its redistribution of these excerpts of tv shows as commentary, protected as “fair use” under U.S. copyright law. Their stance is both gutless and bizarre –in what way is providing media on which you do not own the copyright any better when provided as a stream rather than a file? I guess we’ll find out for sure if YouTube tries the “but we only provide streaming media” defense in the billion dollar Viacom vs. YouTube lawsuit.

Ranting aside, I admit there is one very good reason to use streaming media on a site. With a good net conection, playback of streaming media starts instantly and requires no download. Not only does playback of streaming media begin just after the user clicks the media, but the better streaming servers (QuickTime, Windows Media) can adjust the bandwidth of the video to match the user’s net speed. It is of course, also possible for playback of certain kinds of downloaded files to begin immediately (QuickTime files), but not with the same level of bandwidth control.

But another reason to use streaming media is dumb and evil. The logic probably goes something like this

If I, the company hosting the video, provide a file to users as a stream and not as a download, then the user can’t keep the file and do nefarious things with it. Thus I keep the level of control I desperately need over the media and its distribution.

Dumb dumb dumb. This begins with the assumption that people who plan to watch the video you provide have criminal intentions that can be thwarted by not providing them with an actual video file. It’s that kind of lack of trust that leads to unnecessary technological stumbling blocks that just make things more difficult for ordinary non-criminal users. And the stumbling blocks are annoying rather than effective –the desired level of control over a stream is barely possible (for the moment it’s possible to surreptitiously download video files from YouTube and some other streaming flash sites, and I am grateful, because otherwise I would never be able to watch these videos).

So while it’s great that users are putting more and more video online, it is unfortunate that much of this video is available only as streaming media, which us reasonably law abiding users can’t put on an ipod, and can only watch in excruciatingly low quality (due to streaming servers’ bandwidth control features) on sub-amazing net connections if at all.

On the bright side, due to the popularity of the iPod and other mp4 video devices (I’m trying to not be a total Apple partisan here), plus the fact that Apple put podcasting features and a free and easy to use podcast directory into their ubiquitous iTunes software (gotta give ‘em huge props for that), downloadable video files are becoming much more common. I found a video podcast of the aforementioned Scoble show in the iTunes Music Store’s podcast directory. These are downloadable mp4 versions of the same video clips I could not watch as inline streaming flash video on the Scobleizer blog. The New York Times also puts many of its video clips online in a series of video podcasts, though they inexplicably miss the ones I’d actually like to watch, like the video about Chinese adoptee Cece Nealon-Shapiro’s bat mitzvah, which is only available as a stream.

Everything I’ve said above also applies to audio streams. The Recidivism blog republished NPR’s great Fresh Air interview with Sacha Baron Cohen as an mp3 file. Previously it was available only from NPR’s site as a stream and as that blogger says “Streams are completely useless when I’m trying to use my device (acrylic push-button model) in the car”. A comment on that blog post mentions that NPR has taken the audio stream down, so the existence of this user-hosted mp3 file may be the only way to hear the interview. This is a great example of two reasons why such files should be available for download rather than just as streams: users should be able to listen to such audio clips on the device of their choosing, and interesting files can have more staying power if they are not only hosted as streams that might be taken down at any moment. Imagine the photographic evidence of history that would be lost if all daguerrotypes had only been available for viewing in one building, which then burned to the ground.

If you ever find yourself using bittorrent technology to download files, and you run OS X, you would do well to check out the great new bittorrent client Xtorrent. It’s still in beta, it’s commercial, but it’s the best I’ve ever used on any platform.

It allows you to search a set of preset and customizable torrent search sites from a unified search field, and it presents results as both a simple unified list of results with download buttons and also as a series of embedded web pages in tabs. It supports torrentcast subscriptions, allows you to (try to) open partially downloaded files in your choice of application from a contextual menu, bandwidth limits, and remains responsive when downloading multiple torrents. A great UI completes the package.

Definitely worth a look.

I’ve been using the Adso firefox plugin for a while to pop up translations for Chinese characters in web pages. It’s a great tool, brought to you by the same people who make the great language-learning resources NewsinChinese and adsotated Chinese texts, but the plugin can only be used when online because it has to load the translations from a server, and given the slow speed of my net connection it can be less than responsive. I’ve recently found out about a couple of other tools that have similar functionality but use a dictionary stored on the local computer and as such are much faster to use. Here are links to adso and these other pop-up dictionaries:

• Chinesepera-kun: Chinese Popup Dictionary (free, open-source)
• HanziBar (commercial, $10)
• Adso firefox plugin (free)

There’s a summary of these and some other Chinese learning tools here.

Referrer logs are weird. Just for the fun of it, I sometimes look through my site’s referrer logs to see where my visitors are coming from. Today I noticed the following showed up in my site’s referrer log:

Google Search: beijing video cancer gregg

This means two surprising things:

1. someone ran a google search for “beijing video cancer gregg”. I wonder what ever they were hoping to find.
2. a link to my blog showed up in the search results, and the person clicked that link

I ran that search myself, and it would appear that not only is my blog listed in the search results, but it’s the top result for the string “beijing video cancer gregg”. How awesome!

So welcome to the home of beijing video cancer gregg. We have more beijing video cancer gregg here than you can shake a stick at.

I’ve been using Apple’s mail application for a while, and I like it, but it has been getting slower and slower over time. It turns out that the culprit, according to comments on the Hawk Wings blog, is that the “envelope” sqlite database that Mail.app uses can become larger than necessary, full of empty space left behind when objects have been dropped, and a simple command executed in the terminal reorganizes the data structures. The process (which involves the sqlite command “vacuum”) is analogous to defragmenting a disk.

Following the directions on that web site, I quit the Mail application. I then opened Terminal and ran the following optional command so that I could see the size of Mail’s Envelope database before and after the cleanup:

% ls -lah ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index -rw-r–r– 1 zach zach 42M Mar 6 00:55 /Users/zach/Library/Mail/Envelope Index I then ran the actual cleanup command: % sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index vacuum index; That took about a minute. I then again checked the size of the Envelope Index: % ls -lah ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index -rw-r–r– 1 zach zach 25M Mar 6 01:07 /Users/zach/Library/Mail/Envelope Index

Hot damn! The database dropped in size from 42Mb down to 25Mb. I ran Mail, and it popped up near instantaneously. Wouldn’t you know, it is now lightning fast to open folders full of thousands of messages. Before I “vacuumed” the Envelope index, such a folder might have taken upwards of 10 seconds to open.

If you’re running OS X Tiger and have been using Apple’s Mail application, do yourself a favor and try running the commands to “vacuum” Mail’s Envelope Index. If Mail.app has been slow, you may be shocked by the increase in speed. At the very least, you’ll recover a bit of disk space.

Ron Sims makes a video podcast I enjoy entitled Black Man in China about his experiences in Fuzhou. He’s a funny and talented guy — it’s not easy to shoot, edit, and produce a watcheable series about oneself (there are plenty of non-watcheable ones out there), but he makes it work with style and humor. I hope the title of his latest episode “All Things Good” doesn’t mean his adventures in China and his video podcast will ‘Come to an End’.

In a recent entry to his blog, Ron reported that a random drunk British fellow decided to pick a fight with him just after asking him the extremely deep question “What is the purpose of being black in China?” Fortunately no permanent damage was suffered by either party. I was puzzled by the question for a while and thought it nonsensical, but then realized it has an answer: “To avoid sunburn.”

My friend Dave (link to his blog) lives out West in Urumqi. He has also had people come at him swinging. In his case, it is not because he stands out in any way –if he looked like a foreigner people would likely leave him alone; it is because he can pass as a local that drunk Uighur guys occasionally pick fights with him on the street. I don’t know if any of the fights began with a bizarre question with racist overtones –as the champion of many a pub quiz Dave would likely have the correct answer at the ready.

On occasion, I see fights on the streets of Beijing. I’ve seen guys in loose combat fatigues rolling on the ground punching each other, and women in tea shops throwing saucers at their husbands. These fights generally look pretty tame, with lots of posturing and grabbing but little chance of causing lasting damage. They might be considered by participants as a way to pass the time, like playing badminton, drinking baijiu, or KTV.

I wonder how long until someone picks a fight with me in China, and how it will begin. From now on I’m going to have to keep my wits about me when in the vicinity of tea shops, drunken Englishmen, drunken Uighur youths, or bloggers.