Wired Conspiracy Theory Generator
This Wired article called “6 Elements Every Conspiracy Theory Needs,” has hilarity potential thanks to its included “Conspiracy Generator.” You can enter data into six fields and generate your own conspiracy theory! For example (not my own work):
Are you kidding me? The past was a total sham! Think about it! Everyone knows that you can’t prove the past. And have you noticed that history books has started to act very strangely? They obviously don’t want this story getting out. I mean, what would happen if people began asking why do history books keep being changed? Well, they may be able to fool the sheeple, but the members of Carpe Diemists aren’t swallowing their story. Look, don’t take it from me; my neighbor with amnesia is convinced as well. But we have to act fast, because who knows when the present could become the past. I just wanted you to be aware of this, in case I disappear.
First Post on WordPress at my own URL!
Hello World all over again.
I finally moved from Blogger over to my own domain, where I have WordPress installed. I want to do more with my blog, and I’ve gotten some practice with WordPress thanks to my work on BrainCanvas (now much more readable!) I also could not keep up with posting as much as I should since Blogger is blocked behind China’s Great Firewall.
No more posts to come from my Nomadlife blog; fitting since Google is ending support for Blogger FTP publishing in a couple of months. I tried to post one last time on the old blog but Blogger wouldn’t publish, neither when I tried to insert a redirect into the old blog’s header. I suppose that is a result of having to temporarily change my old blog to publishing to a Blogspot.com address in order for the WordPress import to work. I set it to publish to Nomadlife just for the one last post, but no dice.
Here’s to a successfully maintained, appropriately developed online personal brand.
Them Bandwidth Blues
The photos from the trip to Qufu, Confucius’ home city, finished uploading to Flickr hours before I left for my Indochina vacation so I didn’t have a chance to write anything about them. It was a nice time generally, worth visiting if you have a free weekend in China. The nicest thing by far was the Kong Family Cemetery, which we didn’t have nearly enough time to wander around in. Photos from that trip can be found here.
Once the photos from Bangkok, Laos, and Cambodia are loaded onto Flickr (all 1 GB of them) I will write about that wonderful trip with my girlfriend, the first time I got to see her in six months.
It takes a terribly long time to load anything to Flickr from within China, VPN or no, so my solution for getting these photos loaded is to send them to Kelsey where she can then download them and upload them to my Flickr account much faster and more reliably than if they were just uploaded by me. My webspace FTP is just as slow and unreliable from here as Flickr is and YouSendIt requires you to break the files into 100MB chunks, which would be too cumbersome in terms of each unreliable upload to send 10 different zip files. Ever to the rescue, Ubuntu offers a cloud storage service called Ubuntu One with up to 2 GB free storage. I was able to upload all the files to a shared folder in the space of a few hours, which can now be easily downloaded on the other side of the globe.
I have been watching Caprica as it comes out on the Internet. It’s a painful process however, as Hulu knows I am connecting through a VPN and therefore won’t let me watch it there. Thus it is up to very cheap and very slow substitutes like Megavideo to pick up the slack. Megavideo takes about five times as long to load as the length of the video itself. The pilot was good, then there were some less-than-stellar episodes but the most recent one, “There Is Another Sky,” was on par with the intrigue and quality of the parent show, Battlestar Galactica. I am looking forward to the development of Tamara Adama especially, as she brings an unforeseen wildcard into the plotline.
Finally: Tomorrow, March 1, marks one year since Kelsey and I began our relationship. For that, I blow a party noisemaker, alone in my room.
Re-Up
In about 18 hours I fly out for Bangkok, Thailand, where Kelsey and I will begin our two-week vacation in Laos and Cambodia.
We will spend the first couple of days in Bangkok, then head for Luang Prabang, Lao People’s Democratic Republic. Fun times in the jungle highlands abound. We will also spend about three days in Siem Reap digging the wat temples, and a day or so in Phnom Penh. I’ll return to six more months of Beijing on Feb 22.
Damnably excited. Especially after the stress-fest which has been dealing with getting the new website up at work. In the meantime, look out for a new BrainCanvas post come Monday.
My New Productivity Email and Task Set-Up
I decided a couple of months back that I should take time to look into productivity for tasks and email management. On account of I have much more free time now than I did when I was a student, I look into such matters at my whim. Anything manageable would be better than my old system, which may have ruined a good bit of my GPA: keeping it all in my head and avoiding using any piece of paper whenever possible. I probably went crazy from trying to shove tasks along with study into my head and not letting it out on paper or into my email.
This is not comprehensive but for my purposes it has already improved my productivity and my sanity ten-fold. Many thanks to the amazing Web site Lifehacker, the task management tool Remember the Milk, and the die-hard fans of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” philosophy. I have not read the book (and I am pretty sure I won’t jump on that bandwagon anytime soon), but the idea behind it is largely expressed through this setup.
What I do now with emails and tasks:
- Organized Gmail with a series of tags called the “Trusted Trio,” key among which are “FOLLOWUP” and “HOLD”
- Got a free account with Remember the Milk to handle task management from everything between simple to-do and project management at work
- Read email as it comes into my inbox. If it takes less than two minutes to reply to or follow up on a task contained therein, I do that immediately then tag the email with whatever accessory tags I choose (AIESEC, BrainCanvas, Travel, etc.) and then click “Archive” to move it out of my inbox.
- If the email takes more than two minutes to follow-up with, I move it to the “FOLLOWUP” folder (along with tagging it with any other pertinent tags) and out of my inbox. I keep it marked unread so I can see how many emails I need to follow-up on; I also add a RTM task to deal with it.
- If I expect a response to the email, or if it contains information that I will need to revisit soon like directions to a restaurant on Friday night or a plane ticket to Bangkok, I move it to the “HOLD” folder and out of my inbox.
- Regarding tasks, I have set up Remember the Milk according to this blog post. This takes the most practice and patience to deal with, but it’s powerful and enables me to accomplish a lot more than I used to. When I make a task (call my mother on her birthday this Tuesday), I type it out as specifically as possible and add as many pertinent tags and info as I can. This way, all the thinking about the task has been put into the to-do immediately and all I have to do to complete the task when the time comes is just do it, since all the info is right there for me to follow. It has also enabled me to do some great organization for multi-step work tasks. I even use it for “someday” wish lists, like “wardrobe overhaul” with the help of the tailors of Beijing.
- The thing to tie it all together: do a weekly review in which I check up on all outstanding tasks and emails. So far I’ve been bad at this, but it’s not a problem since I am not awash in tasks right now.
There was one much larger component of implementing this. After doing the general setup, I realized that I had not used Gmail to its full extent because I had wholly ignored labels, I used my gatech.edu email as my default email inbox until I came to China, and I had neglected the “Archive” button. My gatech.edu email was set up to copy all incoming email to my Gmail as well since January of 2008, but since I did not use Gmail as my mail client, every bit of email I’ve received since then, deleted or not in my gatech.edu inbox, was present in Gmail. One of the key sanity-saving features of this email setup is in keeping your inbox empty, so I had a task ahead of me. After deleting all of the auto-update emails from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, I had about 16,000 email threads stretching from December 2009 to January 2008. I resolved to tackle one month at a time, starting at the present and moving backwards, labeling, archiving and deleting one month of email per day. It was extremely interesting when I came to 2008: reading the history in emails of the July 4 letter’s origins and aftermath, and the democratic renewal of AIESEC US, in reverse. I read each and every email related to the subject and was surprised to see some of the places where I made the right decision, the mistakes I made, and how I reacted to certain situations knowing what I know now. A lot to be learned from that time, now well-organized for future review. It was about two weeks ago that I finally reached the fabled “inbox zero.” I keep it that way with rapid follow-ups and moving email to its right place – out of my inbox.
I have now joined the sycophantic ranks of bloggers about productivity, a set I generally distrust. However, I liked this setup enough that I felt it worthy of publishing here. If I had known about this when I started my LCP term, this setup would have become an integral part of task management for my EB team – and we’d have accomplished a lot more.
My Kind of Politics
US President Obama talked to House Republicans on Friday, at their invitation, during a retreat they were holding in Baltimore. Plenty has been said of it elsewhere, but I particularly liked watching the videos of the actual exchange when he answered questions for over an hour. During that session, he was like the lone player on the dodgeball team catching everything they lobbed at him and then, one by one, tagging out each policy point and clearly putting the Republicans in the harsh spotlight of rhetoric exposure.
Hardball with Chris Matthews with choice excerpts from the session:
Full Q&A, courtesy of MSNBC:
I liked it not only because his intelligence took center stage (for once in the last twelve months), but also because it could be a very positive development if this kind of exchange occurs regularly. There are many advantages to such public meetings, not in the least due to the transparency of testing policy points against different branches of government in the public view. The process won’t be perfect, but I expect that weaker policy points would get dropped, ones that didn’t get dropped would be refined through the questioning process, and the strong ones would gain more supporters.
Some people may say that a regular (monthly?) meeting of the President with different factions in the legislature would be against the spirit of the separation of powers. I do not think so. The separation of powers lies in each branch’s ability to formulate and execute its Constitutionally-derived powers, and whether or not the President has a British-style “Question Time” with the legislature would neither change his ability to use his veto nor reduce the ability of Congress to draft legislation. I think of the intelligence agency situation prior to the September 11th attacks. Due to their compartmentalization, separation, and even bitter rivalry (even though they serve the same god!) was a significant obstacle to preventing those attacks from happening. There are reasons why different functional areas should be separated in different agencies, but a healthy network and knowledge exchange among those different agencies could only produce a more capable intelligence community, in which everyone knows their role at the same time as knowing more pertinent information about their areas of focus and to whom information should be delivered in a time of crisis.
The same ought to be true of the government itself, for so long as we have to have one. Building those rich inter-branch connections and regularly putting policy through the gauntlet can only mean a legislative branch and executive branch which can (more readily) agree that they are on the same team.
If this kind of exchange does occur more regularly, it would turn my interest somewhat more towards getting involved in the political process. I cannot stand the inane “that’s just the way it is” attitude and reality of the institution, but with more opportunities like what went down on Friday, I would find participation to be much more valuable.
Jian Bing Outsourced Entrepreneurship
When I worked out west in the CuiWei area of Beijing just north of the Wanshoulu subway stop, there was usually a food vendor cart just outside the Prime office in a little alleyway. The cart’s husband-and-wife duo made jian bing and sold them for three kuai (about $0.44).
That is what most jian bing I have seen around look like: an eggy mass that tastes like breakfast and is delicious in its own right. However, that is not the kind of jian bing that was made outside of the old Prime office.
This is more like the style of jian bing I used to have for breakfast every morning. The cart was very similar to this, with the key point being that the round stone on which the crepe-like batter-egg mixture was cooked could be spun by the old man, which made the batter mix spread out over the large stone and made it thin and crispy when it was cooked by the hot coals underneath. He would crack an egg over the spread batter and use his big shovel-brush to spread the egg evenly over the spinning crepe. The egg would mix and cook right into the crepe, instead of being a noticeably separate mixture like with other jian bing. For an extra kuai he would gladly add another egg, subtly thickening the giant pancake.
Other jian bing usually have a haphazard mixture of spring onions and some bean sauces thrown in along with a large crisp of thin fried bread for substance and crunch. The result, after being rudely folded over, is an eggy “bag of food.” My favorite jian bing, however, was much more user-friendly. After the pancake was finished cooking, the old man would use a spatula to slowly dig into the edge of the spinning crepe, separating it from the stone underneath. After the edges hardened for a few seconds, he would slow the spin as he dug his spatula more towards the center, carefully scraping off the pancake from the stone without letting it split or crack like a laowai‘s lips in a Beijing winter.
His wife then took over. She would fold the crepe into a sort of long burrito-esque shape, then take a brush to each sauce and evenly layer the sauces onto the surface of the crepe. This was so crucial to the flavor distribution difference between this type of jian bing and the “bag of food” variety. There was the bean paste and then a thin spread of a spicy sauce. On top of the slathered crepe she layed the requisite fried bread crisp, and then covered that with severeal leaves of cold lettuce. A final sprinkling of spring onions on top left only one step: the fold. She took the two ends of the crepe that were not covered by the fried bread crisp in the middle and folded them over the crisp and the lettuce, forming a light but sizeable burrito-wrap formation. She would usually slice this in half and there was my jian bing. It was light and refreshing to eat, yet substantial enough that it did the trick for breakfast until my work’s late lunches which were lucky to begin by 1:30.
Ever since coming to the new office, I have missed the old jian bing style. The only food stall options around our shiny tower are all greasy and have meat in them, too heavy and messy for what I want for breakfast. Thankfully there is a Jenny Lou’s foreign grocery in the Jianwai SOHO office park where I work, and I get a box of Nature Valley nut bars there every week to eat for breakfast.
I have been mildly fantasizing recently about an alternative, which would allow me to have my work in the GuoMao area as it is now and yet eat my jian bing too.
What if I could find some pair of Chinese people who could use a job outside my office, finance a cart setup just like the one the couple had over in Cuiwei, and pay the old man to train these upstarts in his school of jian bing creation?
The only truly major expense would be the cart setup, I think. I would want to pay the old man for training the new folks, and I’d be willing to pay a bit of a premium, but I don’t expect having to pay over 200 RMB for such training – and that as a combination of a reward, a thank you, and taking up his time from otherwise selling jian bing. After this, I would have a reliably delicious and cheap breakfast waiting for me outside the office every morning – AND I would have created two jobs.
When I set about writing this post this was meant to be a musing of fantasy. Now that I look it over, I see that if the costs aren’t prohibitive and I could find two jobless Chinese who would be up for this, this is a very feasible idea.
Village Vacation
Immediately following New Decade celebrations, I got two hours of sleep and went to the airport for a short vacation away from the bustle of Beijing.
The trip was one that Arnab put together to check out some small villages outside of Nanchang, in the southern Jiangxi province of the People’s Republic. They are Luotiancun, Shuinan and Jingtai.
The vacationers included myself, Arnab, and his two Indian friends Swathish and Abhay. Our flight from Beijing to Nanchang was uneventful. I slept roughly the whole two-hour ride. Upon landing, we got a taxi to take us 30 km into Nanchang, and the ride was wild. There is no semblance of driving rules away from the major cities. Passing vehicles by driving into oncoming traffic is the norm down there, and no one goes faster because of it; gridlock is common on the smaller roads.
Arriving at the bus station at 11:30, we got a bus ticket for 14:00 to Anyi, the hub city from which we could reach the villages. In the meantime we ate a tasty and affordable lunch at a nearby restaurant, only about 23 kuai per person. As the only waiguoren (foreigners) in sight, we were stared at by everyone in the restaurant for a good ten minutes. On the way up the stairs, a girl who was coming the other way was heard to say “oh my God” in Mandarin when setting eyes upon our foreign visages.
We piled into the bus after waiting for about twenty minutes and a false start of getting onto the 13:50 bus. On the two-hour ride to Anyi I read a fair amount of The Razor’s Edge, an intriguing book Kelsey sent me.
At Anyi we got a taxi to take us to Luotiancun’s entrance. At the entrance there is a ticket office to get piao (tickets) for the stuff inside, but no one was on duty, so we were able to get in for free. The taxi driver was seemingly loathe to drive into the village because he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to turn around. He also talked to an old man on the road in the local dialect, which neither Swathish or Abhay (who understand Mandarin) could decipher.
We stepped out and started snapping pictures, as the light would only last another hour or so.
We walked up the main street in the village to see what we could. On the way we met a group of three students from Nanchang who were also staying the night in the village. My mates were taken with them, but we saw little of them for the rest of the trip.
The older village resident they were with directed us to a shop where we purchased a local batch of their honey liquor for the weekend’s enjoyment. It tasted pleasant, like a mix between port wine and brandy. The Chinese name for it escapes me, unfortunately.
We secured a room at the largest boarding house in the town, on the main square opposite the large pool. They served us dinner, which was tasty but overpriced due to a chicken costing 70 kuai. Nonsense! They were walking around the whole village like they owned the place. Surely a chicken could be had for 35 kuai or less. Oh well – you have to get ripped off somehow.
We spent the evening playing cards and drinking the honey wine and some beer. Nothing goes on in the village at night. Also, southern China has a tradition of no indoor heating and leaving the windows open even in the cold. Add in the higher humidity and a minor vacation from the stabbing dry frigidity of Beijing becomes only marginally more tolerable wet cold. We shut our windows and after thirty minutes or so our four bodies warmed the room up a bit. We went to bed at about ten o’clock, knowing that we would be waking up with the village between five and six. The blankets they gave us did wonders for me; after about five minutes I could feel my body heat radiating back towards me and I slept soundly. The others tossed and turned all night with the cold.
At six the next morning we were out wandering the village and taking pictures. Villagers were lively at this hour. We took our time enjoying what charm was left in Luotiancun, obviously both a benefactor and victim of foreign tourism and the investment of the government. The old rough-hewn stones which made up some of the footpaths were being replaced by gray bricks, and poured concrete shared space with pre-Communist houses. But Luotiancun’s layout and lifestyle were a welcome vacation from Beijing. Abhay and I went together while Swathish and Arnab paired up at a different pace.
The tree and the old mansion were my favorite parts. High on the list was the two kuai noodle breakfast when I shared a table with two women who were at least eighty years old, and the children who screamed and fled whenever I pointed the camera at them.
Between Luotiancun and the next village, Shuinan, there is a nice 500 meter long pathway that is a part of the old trade road in the area. A few people were working in the tiny farm plots, and at the end we saw a buffalo.
In Shuinan, Abhay and I caught a short but interesting episode: the duck parade.
The old man who was herding these hundreds of ducks got irate at us for standing in the way of his charge and snapping photos. It was a phenomenon we could not miss though; just thirty seconds after the sound of many webbed feet padding against the pavement began, the last delicious-looking bird waddled out of sight.
The rest of the village trip, all thirty minutes of it, was unremarkable. The old charm of Shuinan and especially of Jingtai, the last village, had been rudely uprooted and replaced by filthy, sad poured concrete and dirt runoff. Luotiancun alone retained enough of its old style to be worth the trip.
We got a taxi back to Nanchang, which was much faster and more direct than the bus would have been. We made it into the city in time for lunch, and we spent the rest of the afternoon on a short trip into the Buddhist temple and in a museum dedicated to the Nanchang Revolt. There was plenty of propaganda to go around there.
The evening consisted of a subpar dinner and playing more cards and drinking more honey wine; there wasn’t much desire to head out and party because our flight was to take off at 08:30 the next morning.
However, when we got in the taxi at 06:00 it was so foggy that a three meter visibility plagued us the whole 30 km to the airport, and the main road was shut down so the driver had to use a poorly maintained local road to get there. Our flight was of course delayed, not only because of the pervasive fog in Nanchang but because Beijing was experiencing its worst blizzard in 50 years. We whiled away the time slowly drinking overpriced coffee and beer and playing more cards. I noticed a foreign girl sitting lonely by herself in the airport and invited her to play with us. She was a Polish girl named Tosha who teaches blind and deaf children in Rome, and she was headed to Beijing as well to visit a friend. The plane boarded us at noon, but it was only to serve us lunch; we weren’t able to get out of Nanchang until 17:00 that day. After touching down in Beijing (whew!), the flight board showed that about nine out of ten flights to and from the capital were cancelled. Lucky us.
At the gate to the airport express train, the way had been shut by the police due to too many people trying to get through. After a while ten officers marched up and prepared to open the gate just enough to let a slow stream of people through, but in true Chinese fashion the crowd pressed their way hard and consequently forced the gates open wider and wider. Even with heavy police effort to shut the gate more, the opening would slide open on one side while it slid shut on the other. One man almost got into a fight with a police officer. It was kind of exciting.
The trip was worth it overall even though it wasn’t terribly packed with village exploits. Even what small time was had was a respite to the soul. Now I have mine and Kelsey’s trip to Laos and Cambodia in February to look forward to. There the weather will be truly warm!
My Year-End Self-Analysis
Per the advice of LifeHacker.
Done while listening to Neil Young’s “Harvest” Album
Accomplishments
- Started a relationship with a wonderful woman
- Graduated Georgia Tech with a BS in Electrical Engineering, a Spanish Minor, an International Plan and Co-op Certificate, and a 3.06 average
- Took my sister on a cool trip to Spain
- Had a fantastic cross-country roadtrip
- Summited Half Dome
- Drew up plans with Kelsey for Entropy
- Got a fine job in Beijing
- Started the AIESEC Beijing Trainee Committee
- Started BrainCanvas with King
- Learned a good bit about my ancestry and shared it with the family
- Had a wonderful Blue Plate Special shift on WREK
Failures
- Didn’t get distinction for graduating
- Lost out on my bid for the MindValley traineeship
- Didn’t make it into the NOI BootCamp in DC in July
- Didn’t get the Eben Tisdale Fellowship
- Didn’t make it past the first round in the Unreasonable Institute selection
- Got no job offers from the career fair
- Fell off of good updating for BrainCanvas
- Haven’t started learning Chinese
- Started, then stopped working out again
- Poorly handled turning down the AIESEC Official Expansion Mongolia invitation
Five Pictures to Sum Up 2009
Looking Forward to NYE 2011
- Making Waves in Washington, DC
- Working Out my Body, Mind, and Soul
- Learned Conversational Chinese
- My Writing is Referenced in Influential Publications
- Making Music Regularly
