Author: geoff

What a week

This has been an incredible week. 10 days ago we shipped all of our belongings off to California. Since then:

  • We’ve stayed in four different hotels (one in Seattle, three in California). The California shuffle was because of having to continually adjust our expectations about when our stuff would arrive from Seattle, and because many hotels were sold out because of a sporting event for the older set over at Stanford.
  • We’ve set up local bank accounts, and found to our delight that Bank of America is California is actually wired in to the rest of the network, unlike BofA in Washington State which seems to be a poor stepchild.
  • We’ve bought two cars. Well, actually Kate bought her car; I’ve agreed to a purchase which will be consummated next week.
  • We’re moved in – finally. (Yes, the movers were a day late on an expedited move for which we paid an extra $500. Yes, we’re pissed. Yes, we’ll get over it.) Of course “moved in” is a relative term: we still have around 50 boxes to unpack or commit to the storage area. But the furniture is in place (the movers only broke three pieces), the kitchen is up and running, and we have somewhere to sleep.
  • We have internet connectivity, WiFi, and VOIP phone service. We would have TV as well, except for the creative ingenuity of someone at Comcast. And the (non-Comcast) VOIP setup was tedious, involving 40 minutes on the (cell)phone to tech support (including opening up the WAN side of the VOIP box so the tech could ssh into it), followed by a reconfiguration of the Time Capsule that we use for WiFi. TV should be set up on Monday.
  • We’ve discovered three wonderful Italian restaurants nearby, ranging from the fabulous to the neighborhood (in walking distance) to the delightfully creative. And we realized that this was something we missed in Seattle; while there were tons of good seafood places and eclectic nouveau wine bars, there were relatively few good Italian restaurants. Perhaps we missed them; it’s academic now.
  • I spent a relatively full week at work, including several breakfast meetings. Busy, busy, busy. I’m having fun.
  • And this evening we finally got to see the latest Harry Potter film. It was good. Watching the scene where they magically restored a house which a wizard had trashed, we both (a) thought of Mary Poppins, and (b) wished we could use some of that magic on our unopened boxes. Ah, well.

Tomorrow we’ll tackle the clothing and the rest of the geek infrastructure. (Printing would be good. Music too.) And we’ll do a grocery run, which will involve a tough choice: we have Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s and Safeway within a few blocks….

Why "new atheists" are not about to shut up

It’s because nobody else seems to care about this kind of crap. Why aren’t the Catholic and Episcopal Bishops of the US speaking out against this obscene kind of totalitarian warping of Christianity?


UPDATE: Blast – this video has been taken down by HBO. Never mind; you can check out the material discussed by Bill Maher and his guest, Jeff Sharlet, at Jeff’s website.

All the places I've lived

I’m sitting here at the Red Carpet Club in Seattle Airport, waiting for our flight to San Francisco. Tonight we’ll be in a hotel in Palo Alto, and in a few days the movers will be delivering our stuff. Another move completed.
The last few nights have been characterized by broken sleep: a combination of the jet lag of the return from China and the busy and distracting events of the move. At one point I found myself, half-awake, composing blog entries in my head. One was a challenge to self-declared supporters of Intelligent Design, which I may actually type up some tome; the other was a list of all the places I’ve lived. Since that’s actually relevant to today’s move, I thought I’d see if I could recreate the material that I dreamed. A disclaimer: this is slightly simplified, and there are overlaps during the period between 1968 and 1972 when I was working and attending university.

  • 1950: Chelsea, London, England
  • 1952: Kilburn, London, England
  • 1955: Dollis Hill, London, England
  • 1962: Beaconsfield, Bucks, England
  • 1969: Abingdon, Berks, England (“Barracks” accomodation while working at AERE Harwell.)
  • 1969: Amersham, Bucks, England (My mother moved here, but I hardly ever stayed here.)
  • 1969: Chelmsford, Essex, England (Essex University.)
  • 1972: Hayes, Middx, England (We rented a house from a friend for the year.)
  • 1973: Newcastle-on-Tyne, England (Graduate student housing.)
  • 1976: Chesham, Bucks, England (The first house we bought.)
  • 1981: Foxboro, MA, USA (Rented a house for a year, then bought one.)
  • 1999: Brookline, MA, USA
  • 2006: Seattle, WA, USA
  • 2009: Palo Alto, CA, USA

Heading home

I’ve just finished up my two week visit to Huawei’s HQ in Shenzen with a delightful dinner with my opposite number on the HQ team. (Many thanks!) Tomorrow morning, bright and early (6:15am), I’ll be heading home: a taxi to the Shenzhen Shekou ferry terminal, ferry to Chek Lap Kok, a United 747-400 to SFO, an Alaska Airlines 737 to Seattle, and finally a taxi to Uwajimaya. Speaking of United, it looks as if I mistimed my flight: a piece about United on FlyerTalk included the following:

Beginning August 1, we’ll offer tasty new options on our fresh Choice Menu, all-new items in our popular snack boxes on shorter flights and complimentary alcoholic beverages in economy on Pacific flights.

Why wait? 😉
It’s been a really great visit. From a work perspective, it’s been enormously productive, and I’ve started to build a great web of connections here. Shenzhen is a fascinating city, both downtown and the area around the Huawei campus. The heat and humidity were less of a problem than I expected; I found that the coolest clothing combo was a light shirt worn open over a vented t-shirt. I don’t know if it was kosher, but it felt right. My biggest mistake: not bringing a couple of pairs of lightweight shorts.
And the food… Honestly, I didn’t have a single bad meal. Tonight I tried a couple of new items: fish roe, and frogs. (Lots of small bones in the frogs, but not a problem.) Mmmm.

For my Chinese readers – 对于我的中文读者

I’ve added the Google Translate widget to this blog. If you want to read my writings in Chinese, choose your favourite version from the menu (Simplified or Traditional) and it should load in a few seconds.
我已经添加了谷歌翻译工具这个博客。如果你想阅读我的文章中，选择你最喜爱的版本，从菜单（简体中文或繁体） ，并应负荷在几秒钟。

Oi! Who turned out the lights?!

Coming on Wednesday to this part of the world:

WAITING FOR THE ECLIPSE: On July 22nd, the longest solar eclipse of the 21st century will take place in Asia. […] On Wednesday, the Moon’s shadow will linger over [Shanghai] for nearly six full minutes, giving residents a stunning and lengthy view of the Sun’s ghostly corona. In addition to Shanghai, the path of totality crosses a number of other large cities in India and China–e.g., Surat, Vadodara, Bhopal, Varanasi, Chengdu, Chongqing, Wuhan, Hefei, Hangzhou–each with populations numbering in the millions. This could be the best-observed solar eclipse in human history.

From SpaceWeather, a website with great content but lousy navigation, which has yet to learn the value of permalinks and RSS/ATOM. The area of totality will be well to the north of us, slicing down from Shanghai to Mumbai, but we should get a decent partial eclipse here in Shenzhen.

A thoroughly successful day…

As I was planning for my new job, with its regular travel to China, I realized that I wouldn’t be able to rely upon my AT&T iPhone. Yes, it would be OK (but expensive) for calls to and from the US, but I couldn’t really use it for local calls and text messaging within China, and I certainly couldn’t afford to turn on data roaming. So while I was at SFO awaiting my flight to Hong Kong, I bought myself an unlocked GSM phone, intending to put a pay-as-you-go SIM into it when I reached China.
The phone I bought was a Palm Centro. Cute as a button, nice keyboard, and Palm OS, which is a bit primitive but still oodles better than Windows Mobile. I arrived in Shenzhen, plugged a China Mobile SIM into it, bought a prepaid card from a street vendor, topped up the balance to just over 100 RMB, and I was ready to go. And during the first week, I used it a lot: checking email, text messaging ((Tons of texting – I never really used it back home, but here everyone texts all the time.)) There was just one problem. The phone didn’t handle Chinese characters. Any Chinese character – in email, SMS, SIM management, caller ID, etc. – simply displayed as a “?”.
Now you might think that this wasn’t very important. After all, I don’t speak or read Chinese. But there are lots of cases where the ability to receive (or even send) Chinese email and text messages is really useful. For example: this afternoon, Jim and I were in downtown Shenzhen, shopping for electronics. (More of that anon.) By 6:30, we were wrapping up and thinking about dinner. Jim texted a colleague of his, and asked him to recommend a really good restaurant. Back came the reply, with the restaurant name in Chinese. As we navigated the maze of streets towards the restaurant, Jim was able to get directions by showing the SMS message on his phone to several people who then pointed us in the right direction. We’ve used the same trick with taxi drivers.
All of this explains why we found ourselves shopping this afternoon. Jim was looking for some networking gear, and I was hoping to find a reasonable unlocked phone that “spoke” Chinese. Jim had trodden this path before, and after a wild taxi ride we found ourselves in a street full of vast electronics bazaars: department store sized buildings full of stalls and shops where people were selling everything from resistors and ribbon cables to graphics cards to cellphones to cameras to laptops… and everything in between. It was a geek’s heaven. Jim found what he wanted, and I was browsing and on the point of giving up when I spotted a G1 Android. Was it unlocked? Of course: the stall-holder invited me to remove the SIM from my despised Centro and put it in the G1, whereupon Jim called me and sent me a text message. I went down to the ATM on the ground floor, got some cash, and returned to close the deal.
Flushed with success, Jim and I went out to dinner at a restaurant which is one of the best we’ve ever eaten at; I would give you the name, except that I can’t read their business card! (But it’s a chain, and they have a cool web site, and the phone number of the one we went to is 26492008. Does that help?)
Back at the hotel, I checked out my new toy. There was only one flaw: the charger was actually for a different phone, with the wrong kind of mini-USB connector. ((Why are there so many different types of connector for a “standard” interface like USB???)) Fortunately the regular USB cable was correct, and I found that I could use my iPhone’s charger with the G1. Everything else is just fine, and the Android itself works like a dream. 3G data access is lightning fast, and Google Maps works fine here in Shenzhen.
Who knows? Perhaps I’ll wind up getting a prepaid SIM in the USA, just to show off the new toy. Although from what I hear, none of the carriers offering prepaid service in the USA support decent data plans

A change in the weather

My first week in Shenzhen was accompanied by the expected hot weather: high temperatures around 90-95F, high humidity, heat index around 105F, oppressively sticky at night, occasional afternoon showers. It sounds unpleasant, but it was actually less of an issue than I’d feared.
Yesterday, all that changed. Typhoon Molave arrived. From Window on China:

Molave landed at Nanao town in Shenzhen City of Guangdong at 0:50 a.m. (Beijing Time) Sunday, packing winds up to 145 km per hour in its eye. CMA issued an “orange alert” at 6:00 a.m. on Sunday that the typhoon has weakened to strong tropical storm after landing in Shenzhen. It located at 22.7 degrees north and 113.7 degrees east at 5:00 a.m.

It rained pretty heavily yesterday, so that we postponed our plans to go sightseeing, and by the time I went to bed the wind was howling and the rain was hammering on the windows. During the night I heard a number of loud crashes, and the noise of the storm made it difficult to sleep.
This morning, Jim and I headed out to find some breakfast. The wind had dropped to the point where umbrellas were not at risk, but the signs of the storm were everywhere: palm fronds down, many trees and shrubs uprooted and shattered, minor debris everywhere. South of the Baicow Gardens complex, we saw the remains of a security (?police) booth. Yesterday it had been a handsome aluminium and glass box on a six-foot high substructure. Today it was a mess of twisted aluminium sheeting surrounded by piles of shattered glass. The whole scene was quite reminiscent of Hurricane Gloria, which tore through central New England in 1985.