Author: geoff

Electronics for the trip

I’m heading to China for 19 days, and so the big activity this weekend is packing. I found myself enumerating all of the electronics gear that I’ll be taking:

  1. Apple MacBook Air – my personal laptop
  2. Dell E6400 – my work laptop
  3. Power brick for the MacBook Air
  4. Power brick for the Dell
  5. Mouse – my Microsoft wireless mouse will have to do for both; I’m not bringing my new Apple Mouse
  6. Moshi combined SD card reader and USB hub
  7. Apple iPhone
  8. iPhone USB cable and transformer (the original one, which accepts Apple international plugs, not the cheesy little adaptor which they introduced with the iPhone 3)
  9. Android G1 – my international phone (which I hope to replace with an unlocked T-Mobile Pulse from Huawei)
  10. China Mobile SIM card
  11. G1 USB cable (incompatible with iPhone USB)
  12. Amazon Kindle 2 e-book reader
  13. Kindle USB cable (incompatible with iPhone and G1 – standards are wonderful)
  14. Sennheiser earbud headphones
  15. Panasonic DMC-TZ4 camera
  16. Battery charger and spare battery for DMC-TZ4
  17. Apple Airport Express (so I can create a WiFi access point if the hotel only has wired Internet)

There are definitely too many cables.

That b100dy HP laptop

I just posted this one-star review to Amazon.com:

I bought my DV4-2045DX at Best Buy, on a whim. Soon after I got it, I headed to England for a family visit, and I decided to take this laptop along instead of my usual MacBook Air. Bad idea. Soon after we arrived, the machine began to malfunction. The symptoms were fairly consistent: I would close the lid (configured to “sleep”), and soon afterwards the logo would light up and the fan would come on. If the machine was unplugged, this would drain the battery in a few hours. Opening the lid did not wake the machine: the screen was blank, the keyboard unresponsive. More seriously, the power button wouldn’t work: holding it down for 5 or 10 seconds wouldn’t cause the machine to power down. The only way to stop it was to unplug it and remove the battery. After this, restarting was hit or miss. Usually, the machine would blink the CapsLock and NumLock lights in a pattern indicating “CPU failure”.
I struggled through the trip, and when I got home I called HP. They sent me a prepaid FedEx box to return the machine for service. I did so, and monitored the status of the service order on their website. For a couple of weeks it indicated that they were waiting for a part to repair it. Finally it was returned, two days ago. The service slip indicated that the problem had been reproduced during tests, and the CPU had been replaced.
I booted it up, loaded some software, and closed the lid. The problem returned in a few minutes: fan on, catatonic, wouldn’t power down, “CPU failure” after pulling the battery. I called HP, and they gave me a new service number. I’m still waiting for the next step.
Perhaps this is just a lemon, but the “waiting for a part” is suspicious. It suggests that this may be a common problem Hopefully HP will replace it this time. (I wouldn’t mind a refund, but that may be too much to hope for.)

Off I go again

Another month, another business trip. On Monday I’ll be heading back to China for nearly three weeks. First I’m going to Xi’an, flying United to Beijing and Hainan to Xi’an. A week later, I’ll fly down to Shenzhen, before flying home from Hong Kong. It’ll be my first visit to Xi’an, and fortunately I’ll have at least one day to play tourist.
The only annoying thing about preparing for this trip has been my China visa. Last year, I had a twelve month, multiple entry visa, and I got good use out of it. I just ordered the replacement, and what came back was a six month, two entry visa. This is frustrating; it means I’ll need to get another visa as soon as I finish my next trip. (Even sooner, if I need to visit Hong Kong during this trip.) Time to switch visa agents, I guess.

A collection of thought-provoking posts related to cloud computing

From the last few days….

Post-theist, post-atheist (and post-polytheist too)

Colin McGinn has written a marvelous essay on “Why I am an Atheist”. He begins by pointing out that the atheist cannot rationally limit his stance to a simple assertion of non-belief: he…

… doesn’t just find himself with a belief that there is no God; he comes to that belief by what he takes to be rational means—that is, he takes his belief to be justified. He may not regard his atheistic belief as certain, but he certainly takes it to be reasonable—as reasonable as any belief he holds. Just by holding the belief he regards himself as rationally entitled to it (or else he wouldn’t, as a responsible believer, believe it—that being the nature of belief). Also, given the nature of belief, he takes himself to know that there is no God: for to believe that p is to take oneself to know that p. The atheist, like any believer in a proposition, regards his belief as an instance of knowledge (of course, it may not be, but he necessarily takes it to be so). So an atheist is someone who thinks he knows there is no God. Thus he is prepared responsibly to assert that there is no God. The atheist regards himself as knowing there is no God in just the sense that he regards himself as knowing, say, that the earth is round. He claims to know the objective truth about the universe in respect of a divinity—that the universe contains no such entity.

Many theists (and agnostics) protest loudly that such a position is unwarranted, arrogant, and epistemically unreasonable: a an example of the fundamentalism which many atheists criticize in theists. But McGinn will have none of this: theists have exactly the same confident disbelief in many things – other gods, for example – that atheists do. They have no basis for insisting that the atheist should adopt a selective agnosticism:

My state of belief mirrors theirs, except that I affirm zero gods instead of one. (In fact, the idea of many gods has its advantages over the one-god theory: it comports with the complexity of the world and it promotes tolerance.) Yahweh, Baal, Hadad, and Yam: which of these ancient gods do you believe in and which do you think fictitious? I believe in none of them, nor in any others that might be mentioned; if you believe in one of them and disbelieve in the others, then you are just like me with respect to those others. Atheism is not confined to atheists, and the epistemology is the same no matter which gods you disbelieve in.

Having made his case, McGinn confesses that he finds the label of atheist a rather misleading one:

So my state of belief is not that of one continuously denying the existence of God, with an active belief that there is no such entity (though it is true that I am more often in this state than I would be the issue were not constantly debated around me). I am, dispositionally at any rate, in a state of implicit disbelief with respect to God—as I am in a state of implicit disbelief about ghosts, goblins and Santa. I simply take it for granted that there is no God, instead of constantly asserting it to myself. The state of mind I am in while composing this essay is not then my habitual state of mind, and even to be explicitly denying the existence of God strikes me as taking the issue a little too seriously—as it would be to write an essay making explicit my negative implicit beliefs about Santa Claus. So I am really as much post-atheist as post-theist, when it comes to my natural state of mind—just as I suppose most people are post-a-polytheist as well as post-polytheist. Polytheism, for most people, is simply a dead issue, not a subject of active concern. Theism for me is a dead issue, which is why it is misleading to call me an atheist–though it is of course strictly true that I am. It is misleading in just the way it is misleading to speak of a traditional Christian as an a-polytheist or a normal adult as an a-Santa-ist, since it suggests are far more active engagement with the issue than is the case. Many other difficult issues engage my mind and remain unresolved or at least open to serious question, but not my disbelief in God.

He closes with some thoughts about what it might mean for God-talk to remain with us in a purely fictional mode. I’m not holding my breath. All the same, it’s a wonderful essay. (Of course I would say that, wouldn’t I?) If you want to know what I believe, you could do worse than read it.

James Fallows on the core problem of the USA: its sclerotic government

James Fallows has written a fascinating piece on How America Can Rise Again which turns conventional wisdom on its head. Most people seem to worry about economic competitiveness, global conflict, and social degeneration, and all cling to the unifying principles of the US Constitution (albeit with differing emphases).
Fallows argues that this is a-historical and unnecessarily pessimistic: Americans have always worried about falling short, and have always muddled through. The biggest threat is not that the American people will fail to adapt and innovate, but that the increasingly inflexible and undemocratic nature of their political institutions will make it more difficult to implement the necessary changes:

The Senate’s then-famous “Gang of Six,” which controlled crucial aspects of last year’s proposed health-care legislation, came from states that together held about 3 percent of the total U.S. population; 97 percent of the public lives in states not included in that group. Just to round this out, more than half of all Americans live in the 10 most populous states—which together account for 20 of the Senate’s 100 votes. “The Senate is full of ‘rotten boroughs,’” said James Galbraith, of the University of Texas, referring to the underpopulated constituencies in Parliament before the British reforms of 1832. “We’d be better off with a House of Lords.”

My iPhone apps of 2009

Following Adrian’s example, here are the iPhone apps that I use most often. I’ll skip the basics, like Mail, Calendar, iTunes, and so forth.

  • Travel: Currency, iBART, KTdict-CE (Chinese dictionary), Mandarin Chinese Pro, My Caltrain, TripIt Travel Organizer
  • Games: Bejeweled 2, Dragon Portals, Gem Spinner, Moxie, Rogue Touch, Scrabble
  • Information: Formula 1 2009, NPR News, NY Times, Wikipanion
  • Communications: Facebook, MobileRSS for Google, Skype, Twittelator
  • Other: Amazon Mobile, AppBox Pro, iHandy Level Free, Instant Queue Add for Netflix, Kindle for iPhone, WordPress 2

And the biggest disappointments among my iPhone apps:

  • FAIL: Civilization Revolution, Harbor Master, TweetDeck for iPhone

Aidan on the Noughties

My cousin Aidan (see right) just posted a nice summary of the last decade. I particularly liked his verdict on Tony Blair:

Tony Blair – The pearly-toothed messiah who swept to power on such a wave of promise in 1997 revealed himself as a serial liar and unrepentant war-monger. The supposed socialist became the fawning lapdog of the most right-wing president in US history. The man who promised the resurrection of Labour became instead its executioner.

I have to confess that 12 years ago I was caught up in the collective infatuation over Blair. My brother Stephen despised Blair as an unprincipled liar from day one, but he tends to be a contrarian, so I assumed he was just being a curmudgeon. Mea culpa.

via AidanSemmens: Noughty – but how nice were they?.

Well, that was unexpected

Unexpected aspects of 2009:

  • I didn’t expect that I would leave Amazon, nor that I would join Huawei.
  • I didn’t expect that I would move from Seattle to Palo Alto. (In fact I never expected to live in California.)
  • I didn’t expect that I would spend seven weeks of the year in China (as well as two weeks in England). And there’s going to be a lot more travel to come in 2010.
  • I didn’t expect that I would become a car-owner again.

Overall, unexpected is good… it keeps you on your toes.It can be tiring, of course: it’s hard to relax into a routine. It’s been a year of learning, in all sorts of ways. I wonder what the corresponding list for 2010 will look like.

More details about TSA security theatre

Gizmodo has the text of the new TSA regulations. Note that the order expires on December 30, which suggests that this was simply rushed out to persuade people that Someone Is Doing Something About It, and that we can expect revised (and hopefully more sensible) regulations to follow. Don’t hold your breath, though.