This talk was fascinating, and made me think (more!) about my job situation and what I want to do with my life. While Iyer promotes going nowhere, this talk (and his other, “Where is home?“) actually made me think more about whether I want to spend more time living in other countries.
Tim shared with me a post from the blog Nao, which comments on the conflict between China’s working class and the state. The post offers English translations of some of Foxconn laborer Xu Lizhi’s poetry and of his obituary in Shenzhen Evening News. That’s right, Xu is dead, having survived 24 years before taking his life. He followed in the steps of many others, and certainly won’t be the last to do so.
Though maybe not hidden to their target audience.
Earlier this year, at the top of Runkeeper’s HTML (actually, after 50 blank lines, for some reason), I found this cute message:
<!doctype html>
<!---
,------. ,--. ,--.,--. ,--.,--. ,--.,------.,------.,------. ,------.,------.
| .--. '| | | || ,'.| || .' /| .---'| .---'| .--. '| .---'| .--. '
| '--'.'| | | || |' ' || . ' | `--, | `--, | '--' || `--, | '--'.'
| |\ \ ' '-' '| | ` || |\ \| `---.| `---.| | --' | `---.| |\ \
`--' '--' `-----' `--' `--'`--' '--'`------'`------'`--' `------'`--' '--'
,--. ,---. ,--. ,--.,--.,------. ,--.,--. ,--. ,----.
| |' .-' | '--' || || .--. '| || ,'.| |' .-./
| |`. `-. | .--. || || '--'.'| || |' ' || | .---.
| |.-' | | | | || || |\ \ | || | ` |' '--' |
`--'`-----' `--' `--'`--'`--' '--'`--'`--' `--' `------'
,---.,---.
,--.,--. ,--. ,-----. ,-----. ,---. ,--------. ,-----. ,--. ,--.| || |
| || ,'.| | | |) /_ ' .-. '' .-''--. .--'' .-. '| ,'.| || .'| .'
| || |' ' | | .-. \| | | |`. `-. | | | | | || |' ' || | | |
| || | ` | | '--' /' '-' '.-' | | | ' '-' '| | ` |`--' `--'
`--'`--' `--' `------' `-----' `-----' `--' `-----' `--' `--'.--. .--.
'--' '--'
It's dangerous to go alone!
Take this!
/jobs.
or email us directly! jobs[at]runkeeper[dot]com
-->
<html xmlns:og="http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/">
The other day I noticed Facebook has a nice little message in the developer console to warn people they might be about to fall victim to a scam.
facebook_console_warning.png
I just read (via Eric) the Salon article “GOP voter ID law gets crushed: Why Judge Richard Posner’s new opinion is so amazing,” which beckoned me to go on and read the dissent in full. I did, and it was indeed entertaining.
I began to study Japanese around 3 p.m. Somehow it is now 3 a.m., and I have barely made any progress on that front. But my mind has been busy nonetheless. The NeoPixels with which I’ve lined my walls along with amazing experimental music (today, newly discovered Ludique) transport my mind and emotions to another world. I highly recommend it.
Five months ago, I started a Japanese vocab and kanji learning program through a website called WaniKani. My brother Tim had been using it for almost a year prior to that, and I wish he had forced me to start using it then. Granted, I didn’t know I was going to Japan quite at that point, but it would be so nice to be nearly done with the program by now!
I received a text via the Google Voice app on my Android phone. It was from my brother Ricky asking for math help. I promptly navigated to http://voice.google.com as usual to load the web interface and respond easier via the computer. Only I was redirected to https://support.google.com/chat/answer/3379791…
18 October 2014 update: This online message thread seems to be exhausted, so I’ll call the Chase Sapphire support line soon and make a meager stab at getting my requests fulfilled, and then I will cancel both cards. I refuse to put up with this BS any longer.
TLDR:
After a long, ridiculous thread, Chase wrote:
Another alternative would be to have the San Francisco Credit Union call our Customer Service number which is listed below. If they can confirm that your checking account ending in
****is open and available for use a request can be submitted to unsuspend your checking account.
Upon having SFFCU do just as requested:
Bobby: Charles, I am on the line with a specialist now and they unfortunately cannot verify any information to me.
Bobby: Is there any way that you an contact them now? they said that a letter would not suffice…, that you the cardholder would need to call. :(
Charles Gorichanaz: I’m not sure why they asked me to have you call them then ! I am about ready to cancel all my accounts with them. I have contacted them six times over this already, and they insist SFFCU needs to contact them.
The temple at Burning Man this year was called the Temple of Grace, and it burned to the ground Sunday night with a spectacular twist. Click the image to view a larger version that’s 1280x720. It’s 5.4MB, so it might take a while to load.
Note: I was bit frustrated when I wrote this; I think of it more warmly now.
When I first woke, naturally, or perhaps due to the thunderstorms, the room quite dark and still I quite tired, I checked the time and hoped it was earlier than it actually was, 5:30 Saturday morning. I rolled around trying to get comfortable while not too much disturbing the blanket and any creatures living in it, one of whom made itself known to me shortly after my entering the room and sitting down on the bed. I don’t think it was a cockroach, and it was too large to be a bed bug. Maybe something like an ear wig. Anyway, I eventually fell back asleep for another 90 minutes.
For a second time I woke, this time to the alarm, and a minute later a woman was at my door telling me to come down for the bus. I should have figured 7:30 actually meant earlier than 7:15, but I erred on the side of more sleep. I’m not sure if it helped.
Sa Pa
After about 10 minutes, I got an e-mail asking me to urgently verify my current location and flight info, which I did, and then replied and kept waiting. Sure enough, shortly thereafter I had my letter. The e-mail said to use it to board the plane, but not to use it at immigration. I was to locate someone who would be holding a sign with my name, and they would assist me further.
One Vietnam Visa
I finally started listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point,” and toward the beginning he talked about the 250 New York phone book names experiment.
I went through the list (Are You a Connector?) of names and found I knew roughly 72 people with the given surnames.
With the …
As part of my daily struggle to get to work, I watched the new TED talk by Simon Anholt, a policy adviser who “helps national, regional and city governments earn better reputations—not by launching advertising or PR campaigns, but by changing the way they behave.” I thought it was a good way of thinking, and so I can better remember, here are some of my notes, but do watch the video!
I’ve lived in three cities with a large homeless population: Madison and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and especially San Francisco. But somehow I’ve never mustered the courage to strike up a conversation with any people living on the streets. Really, I rarely muster the courage to strike up a conversation with anyone on the street at all. I need to defeat my shyness.
This got me researching later about the party scene in Tokyo. I found many forums with accounts of people doing drugs – specifically, ecstasy or (the better) pure MDMA, which is called "Molly" in the states and "Mandy" in the UK. The general situation in Japan seems to be:
* Japan is one of the strictest countries regarding drug laws, and quantity or intent matter not
* Drugs that do exist here are therefore much more expensive than elsewhere (“The street price of a gram of cannabis weed was $58.30 in 2005, over twice as much as in the next most expensive nation, Australia.”)
* People don't talk about drugs even if they do them. Similar to elsewhere, but more severe. Apparently many of the population are extremely sensitive about this, due to what I can only imagine is an ingrained sense that breaking rules is wrong (“unconscionable”) and you cannot question the rule's basis. If you even mention drugs, people will stop talking to you and you'll have no friends.
AgeHa
Tokyo Rainbow Pride
It has been a long road thus far to get decent Internet here in Tokyo. I thought Japan was technologically advanced, but no more.
I spent my first month at a temporary place I found on Airbnb, and prior to booking, I asked the host if he could do a speed measurement on his Internet connection. Instead of doing that, he responded, "The internet connection of here is optical fiber broad band one." Well, it turned out to be fast enough, but not as fast as that "optical fiber" made it sound. My connection there was around 10 megabits down and 2-5 up. Not horrible, for sure. The main problem there is the Internet would cut out periodically, and at least once a day I would have to power down the modem and router to troubleshoot. I really looked forward to getting an actual apartment and my own Internet service!
A plastic cable the Internet installation people used to try to get the fiber optic cable to pull through wherever it comes from
I set up a VPS on Rimuhosting using their default Ubuntu 13.04 image and then attempted to follow the instructions on Alex Cabal's PHP Best Practices for configuring PHP-FPM.
I've been using Basecamp's web based service for a few days now to organize projects for my new position at Six Apart, and it's generally worked well, but there are a bunch of things I find lacking after my experiences with the more robust ActiveCollab.
My Basecamp setup
Anyway, to work around this, you can force the script to read the whole text entered and generate a new drop down by hitting the right arrow to cancel the drop down, and then the down arrow to force the drop down. If you have no tags beginning with "2", you can just hit the down arrow after entering "@" to see the list of private tags.
All private tags show after hitting the right arrow key and then the down arrow key
Twenty one months in San Francisco to the day, and I've decided to move on, for now. I still do not feel like I am really moving away, but the magnitude of this all is finally starting to sink in. I intended to write and reflect earlier, but 20 minutes before my flight boards is better than never.
I loved that most of "Inception" seems plausible due to one new thing taken for granted in the movie itself. In this case, that new thing is the device that links sleepers via some medical tubes such that they can share dreams. This is great because it doesn't strike me as being impossible. Humans do not fully understand how the brain functions in sleep; we don't even know the purpose of dreaming. That makes every crazy thing in "Inception" seem as though it could happen, possibly in the near future. Or maybe it's already happened?
"Inception" provokes many questions about the way our minds work and about what's possible
Overall, I feel left out of the conversation, as Spotify is not very forthcoming about how it uses your connection. The only mention I can find in their help documents is a question "How much disk space and bandwidth does Spotify use?" where it states without answering the question:
To reduce download data, increase the cache size. To reduce upload data, reduce the cache size.
Or, just block Spotify from uploading and leave your cache alone, and Spotify will respond much faster and allow your household to enjoy the Internet again. And Backblaze can resume uploading my data. :-)
I'm running a fresh installation of OSX Mavericks on my MacBook Pro. My mobile phone is an Android, and I listen to music exclusively with Spotify. I therefore believe I have no need for iTunes, and wanted to remove it. OK.
sudo rm -rf /Applications/iTunes.app
Not so simple.
I am me! I’m also a scientist minded software engineer who loves reading, running, listening to music, and recording photos and videos and data of all sorts. After earning a biochemistry degree, I lived in San Francisco and Tokyo, and now I find it difficult to stay put. Read more about me and my online life.
SF: 87% complete; Oakland: 27%
San Francisco Bay Area running progress
Charlie says: “What a wonderful region!”
30 November 2022
In-N-Out Burger (Fast Food Restaurant)
333 Jefferson St , San Francisco , CA
Charlie says: “It was super hot and we got a taste for salty fries, but by the time we walked there it dropped 35° and was cold. Still tasted good!”
28 September 2020 at 20:32
Taqueria Zorro (Mexican Restaurant)
308 Columbus Ave , San Francisco , CA
Charlie says: “Restaurants are hoppin’ around here, feels weird.”
26 September 2020 at 19:42
碼頭老火鍋 (Hotpot Restaurant)
仁愛路四段409-1號 , Da’an District , T’ai-pei Shih
Charlie says: “Delicious spicy hot pot with Harry. I am so full!!”
25 March 2020 at 08:40
桶好呷滷味 (Asian Restaurant)
, Taipei
Charlie says: “We pick a representative set of ingredients and they build out the rest into a braised soup like thing over noodles.”
23 March 2020 at 06:46
Addiction Aquatic Development (上引水產) (Fish Market)
民族東路410巷2弄18號 , Taipei
Charlie says: “Standing sushi bar at a fish market.”
21 March 2020 at 07:03
ACME Breakfast CLUB (Breakfast Spot)
3F., No. 10, Ln. 27, Chengdu Rd., , Taipei
Charlie says: “Brunch w/ Shawn! Was tempted to get the avocado toast kind of as a joke since I never get it in SF, but resisted, sourdough was good. :-)”
20 March 2020 at 22:27
三甲和風創意料理 (Japanese Restaurant)
Charlie says: “Late dinner with Shawn, at a lovely place!”
20 March 2020 at 09:28
中央藝文公園 Central Culture Park (Park)
北平東路與紹興北街口 , Taipei
Charlie says: “Social distance.”
20 March 2020 at 03:42
虎頭山環保公園 (Scenic Lookout)
Charlie says: “Exploring the hillside in Taoyuan City.”
14 March 2020 at 23:49
Abura-Ya (Japanese Restaurant)
362 17th St , Oakland , CA
Charlie says: “Dinner with Beam before Sarah McLachlan!”
24 February 2020 at 18:55
