Immigration
So it’s been over two months since I last posted. Lots of changes going on, as usual. Landed a new job based in the US (instead of China) however my family is still in China! They should be coming over any… month… now. It’s excruciating having to wait for them. Going through the immigration process is a complete nightmare, even though we are married. It takes so long and there are so many requirements. Whenever the consulate needs some new document from you it takes them 3 months to get back to you after you send it! I’m literally missing my son grow up because of this hellish visa process. All the while I’m surrounded by illegal immigrants (since I live in LA and take public transportation). Too bad China doesn’t share a border with the US.
Reading List
So here is a list of books I recently bought:
The book I’m currently reading in this list is Faust. I’ve heard of it before and most recently read references to it in the book on Archetypes. The translation by David Luke is really fun to read and the story itself is brilliant. There are many pearls of wisdom to be had in this epic fairytale along with much wit to make it go down smoothly. I’m not normally one to see plays but Faust is actually one play I would like to experience a performance of.
For those who don’t know, Faust is an old German legend and Goethe is a German author who wrote his take on the fairytale piecemeal throughout his life (from the late 18th century into the 19th). Goethe is considered to be one of the fathers of German Literature.
Before reading Faust I was reading both the book on Archetypes and on Synchronicity by Carl Jung. I’ve read Jung in the past but I believe at that time I was really too young to understand it. Since that time I’ve experienced a lot of what Jung calls “synchronicity”, however unlike Jung I don’t find myself able to make sweeping generalizations about the fundamental aspects of creation by accounting for it in my world view. In fact, I’m still of the position that I can’t account for it! If your familiar with the concept yourself you’ll know that it is basically a physical paradox and has profound metaphysical implications. And since we know the first rule about metaphysics is not to talk about metaphysics, I’ll just leave it at that.
The book on Archetypes is a must-read I think for anyone interested in human behavior and how the mind works. While I don’t completely subscribe to all of what Jung says, I agree with most of it. Archetypal figures do pre-exist in the human psyche and are expressed through human myths, art and religion. If you truly want to find God this is where God would be, in the collective psyche. Just as Faust has made me interested in seeing plays when I normally don’t, Jung’s idea of archetypes and how they are expressed through mankind’s myths also makes me interested in mythology and religion (not as a practitioner of it however!) as I normally wouldn’t be. It also makes me wonder whether we can ever engineer machines with convincingly human behavior without accounting for the archetypes. I’m sure when that time comes we’ll understand a lot more about our collective psyche and hopefully discover some empirical facts about it (Jung calls the archetypes empirical however I don’t think this agrees with our modern sense of the word).
EVE
Yes, I’ve succumb to the siren call of space travel, immortality, and Crystal Delta Cybernetic Sub-processor implants! I know it’s probably going to be all over when my wife and son do come back, but hey, it gives me something to do to kill the time waiting for them to arrive! I just joined my first non-NPC corporation yesterday, EVE University. Hopefully I’ll now be able to get some support and do higher-level missions. My ultimate goal is to train Science skills heavily and eventually become an Archeologist, Hacker, or both! I’m also looking forward to the day I can participate in PvP. Right now I would get blasted out of space!
Today I was playing around with GIMP and came up with this image of Deven. Pretty fun stuff! It’s also pretty easy. The most difficult part was cutting out Deven from another image. I would probably have done a lot better if I had one of those pen-mouse devices.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Dub Step and Dark Step lately and most of that is produced in the UK, which gave me inspiration for the UK theme in the picture. The hat he’s “wearing” is called a Trilby. The background images are of course of London. Just 3 random images I found online and mashed together. Each image in the picture was “Desaturated” (made black & white) and then I applied a simple hue to each image of Deven.
I just finished watching the first episode of the new animated comedy, The Goode Family. I have very mixed feelings about it, half the of the time I found it funny, the other half I was asking myself what’s so funny. The main idea behind The Goode Family is to poke fun at the yuppy segment of the America’s left wing. Most jokes revolve around the Goode family’s over-sensitivity to issues of race, personal development, healthy living trends, the environment, etc. Herein lies my problem with The Goode Family though. It is the lumping in of issues like being environmentally concious into a list of jokes that do include more funny, non-consequential matters like their indecisiveness on which politically correct noun should be used to refer to a black person. This, along with some of the other jokes, gives me the impression that this comedy really is geared towards a right-wing crowd laughing at the left. Of course that is all fine and good as we do have plenty of features to poke fun of however The Goode Family seems indescriminate in its criticism.
I’ve been go so long I feel like a foreigner here! Of course I’ve been back and forth before but this time I’ve actually gotten used to living outside the country so it will take some getting used to living inside again. Here are some things I missed about the US:
1. Air quality! Even though I’m in LA, a city notorious for its bad air, it’s still magnitudes better than the air quality in any large Chinese city. Finally I can walk down the street or even ride around in a taxi without an overwhelming desire to don a gas mask. Also, no smoking on company premises, in restaurants, or on public transportation unlike in China where people are constantly smoking everywhere all the time.
2. Fast, uncensored Internet access! Since I spend a majority of my time online this almost ties with #1. Finally I don’t have to ssh tunnel around the Great Firewall to watch YouTube videos. I can download things much faster and I don’t need to worry about Chinese Internet minders logging my chat transcripts.
3. I’m glad I can finally enjoy a wider variety of food! In China you have lots of great Chinese food of course, however if you want non-Chinese food you usually (but not always) have to settle for a poor imitation if you can even find it at all. In the US of course since we have multitudes of people from all over the world we get the added benefit of enjoying their tasty delicacies.
4. Sane drivers! You may think drivers here in the US are bad but you haven’t seen bad driving until you’ve come to China. Chinese drivers cut across multiple lanes to turn, routinely run red lights, drive down the wrong side of the road, drive on the sidewalk, and all the while constantly have their palm on the horn. Madness.
Now that I’m back, here are some things I miss about China:
1. My wife and son! They are still in China so I’m going to miss them until I either go back or they come here. It is really hard for me being away from them but it shouldn’t be for longer than 3 months.
2. The people! I enjoy having lots of Chinese neighbors. When I finally settle my family over here I’ll try to find a neighborhood with lots of Chinese people in it.
3. The bargains! Holy lord stuff is expensive in the US. In some cases, like when taking a taxi, it’s about as expensive as the exchange rate (so taking a taxi is about 7 times more expensive then in China). Also, one thing I’ll miss about China is the lack of tipping! Everyone wants a tip for just about everything in the US. Not so in China. Getting a haircut, served food in a restaurant, getting food delivered, taking a taxi, all of this adds a huge amount to the already exorbitant cost of living in the US. In fact I purposely order my food for pick-up so I can avoid dropping a tip. Yeah I know, stingy, but seriously now it’s gone overboard with the tipping thing.
4. Speaking mandarin with strangers! It seems to be a lot more difficult in the states but not impossible. When I’m in the states I worry that my mandarin speaking ability will decrease so I tend to study more actively. I also miss trying to read all the Chinese characters around me. I guess I should hit some Chinese forums now to practice my reading.
5. Cell phone service. In China the vast majority of people use prepaid service and it’s a lot cheaper than the US. On top of that the service is much better too! I’ve rarely had trouble getting a signal anywhere I went. Now I’m in LA and I have absolutely terrible service (provided by AT&T) that is magnitudes more expensive than in China.
So in conclusion, I prefer to live in the US as long as I have enough cash to pay for the high cost of living and still have enough left over to save for the future (house, son’s college tuition, etc.).
Recently introduced to the world of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and I must say it is fairly awesome. It’s interesting how Amazon has gone from selling books, to selling everything, to becoming a computational resource utility company. Currently getting a grip on the following technologies:
There’s a lot to digest in the AWS world but it’s really exciting stuff. Does anyone out there have their own AWS or Cloud Computer story? I’de like to hear about it. Anyone transfer an existing distributing computing system to EC2?
Not that anyone reads this thing anyway! But I hate seeing blogs without recent updates, including my own.
Last night I stayed up late watching a couple movies. One was What Just Happened (2008). It was a really well acted, at times funny, but overall mediocre film about a week in a Hollywood movie producer’s life.
The other was 1984 (1984), of course based on the famous novel by George Orwell. As we all know, the story is that of a future (at the time it was written) ultra-totalitarian government where even thought itself can be a crime. While watching the movie this time I couldn’t help but think of religion instead of government as the totalitarian regime that dominates people’s minds to such an extent that thought really is a kind of ‘crime’ against God.
The most striking phrase from the movie (or book) was:
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
Religion, by its very nature, denies you this freedom.
“No one patches an old garment with a piece of unshrunk cloth, because the patch pulls away from the garment, and a worse tear results. Nor do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst, the wine will spill out, and the skins will be ruined. Instead, they pour new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved.”
-Matthew 9:16-17
And the same goes for pouring old wine into new wineskins. Trying to turn people to Christianity in this age is like trying to pour old wine into new wineskins.
“‘Red sky in the morning, cloudy and storming.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, yet you can’t interpret the signs of the times?”
-Matthew 16:3
This is the age of reason, and what people need is science and humanitarianism which can transcend religous boundaries and pave the way to a sustainable future for the human race.
I figured I would register his domain name right away and put a stub page up for now.
Update: I’ve since added a feature to Deven’s web page that displays the elapsed time since his birth. You can reuse this code if you like.
Wow, I really didn’t expect it to happen but I was able to convince IT to replace the abomination that is the Lenovo “Thinkpad” SL500 with a real Thinkad, the T500. Here are some notes on what I had to do to get everything working under Linux (Ubuntu 8.10):
First off you won’t even be able to do a graphical install (or use X) unless you make some changes to the BIOS. These changes are outlines here:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Install_Ubuntu_8.10_(Intrepid_Ibex)_on_a_Thinkpad_T500
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=969504
X fails to load because it is confused by the switchable graphics capability in the T500. You can switch between using the integrated Intel graphics chip (in order to extend battery life) or the more powerful ATI card. A nice feature that to my knowledge is not yet supported by Linux.
Speaking of graphics, this laptop has an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650 as oppose to the NVidia (not sure the model) of the SL500. I’m was actually disappointed by this because NVidia’s Linux support is much better. While there are binary drivers that support full accelleration and 3D from ATI, Nvidia goes further with its “TwinView” (dual-monitor support) and a real slick tool to configure it easily. You can get dual-monitor support with ATI using Xinerama, however I much prefer TwinView over Xinerama.
Disk Partitioning
I decided to keep the existing Vista Business installation “just in case”, however upon rebooting to the Vista partition Windows freeked out and I think it tried to screw around with the partition table. In any case the result was that I could no longer boot Windows. I really did want a Vista partition installed in case I had trouble with any of the hardware however I couldn’t even boot to the recovery partition! Oh well, at least my laptop is now “pure” Linux.
I also had trouble booting Ubuntu as I got dropped to the initramfs shell. Apparently Grub couldn’t find the disk with that particular UUID, however after running the blkid command and checking /etc/fstab I couldn’t find any mismatch. After installing Ubuntu again, this time allowing it to consume the entire disk, the problem was still there but then seemed to magically disappear after a few reboots.
So much for disk partitioning…
External Microphone
This still doesn’t work! The same behavior as the SL500. I’m really disappointed by this. When plugging in the external microphone and running the Sound Recorder application bundled with Ubuntu you can see the sound level move when you speak but just barely. Playing back the recorded sound I couldn’t hear anything at all. The internal microphone works fine except it picks up more background noise of course than a pluggable mic.
PCMCIA / Express Card
This laptop has one PCMCIA and one Express Card. This is good for me since I do have a Bluetooth PCMCIA card that I was unable to use with the SL500. I’ve read somewhere that some T500′s have Bluetooth already however it I can’t seem to find it on mine. In any case, my Bluetooth PCMCIA card works fine.
Thinkpad Buttons
The volume controls work, as well as the brightness control, Thinklight, and some of the other special function keys. Remember the SL500, due to its Ideapad firmware, didn’t support the volume controls and the brightness controls were all screwy.
I have not tested the HDMI Out, 1394 (Firewire), or the memory card reader.
So the final result is, the T500 is certainly better than the SL500 but not perfect. At least the T500 bus and memory speed is much faster than the SL500. Once I get some money saved up (like 5 years from now, lol) I’ll buy my own laptop and probably make it a Mac.
Here’s a better look at Deven.
