Today’s hockey was brutal. I don’t know if I had an especially poor diet the last few days, or if my body just didn’t show up, or if the heat took more of a toll than expected, but I was dead on my feet after the first half hour.
We took some pictures. I have some more, but not a very good system for making them available. Oh well.
For those of you who missed game six of the Calgary vs. Detroit series tonight, you missed what may have been the best 1-0 game that has ever been played, on ice or any other surface.
I’m not a huge Curtis Joseph fan — a man who seemed to remind us regularly that a two-goal lead is never safe — but he was the only Red Wing who brought his A-game. Which is just fine with me, because any day in which Detroit loses is a day in which I’m glad to be alive.
It’s never a challenge to cheer against Detroit, but it was made silky smooth and extra flavourful by the fact that it was done by sixth-seed Calgary, who are a true joy to watch. Except for their power play. Yeesh.
Fortunately for us, this edict is rather loosely enforced. One can only assume that the Somerville city council planned this space for lavish tea parties presided over by Lord Huggington VI and his stuffed colleagues, who gather fortnightly to discuss topical issues of the day. I guess the basketball court was throwing people off, hence the sign.
The hockey was pretty good, and more lively than last weekend, probably because it’s considerably cooler. We also played a shorter set, owing both to our desire to get to the Pru in time to purchase Starcraft of all things, as well as our idiotic collective failure to bring thirst-quenching liquid of any kind.
So, Starcraft. Almost certainly the best game yet to emerge from the Blizzard collective, and it seems unlikely to be topped any time soon, if Warcraft 3 is any indication. Produced in 1998 with 1995’s finest technology, it was a staple of our university-era procrastination regime. We saw it in the 50-cent bin at the game store a few weeks ago, but imagine my surprise when I see that Blizzard released a patch last week. Having thrown down the gauntlet like that, how could we possibly refuse?
As someone who makes software for a living — well, software favours heavily somewhere in the equation — software which uses a network even, you might assume that I know one or perhaps two things about software which uses networking technology.
One thing that I apparently never learn, however, is that all multiplayer games are terrible. To be clear, this has nothing to do with the basic premise of these games, or the subtlety with which their mechanics are finely tuned to produce a lavish bouquet of balanced game experiences. None of that matters because, almost universally, you are unable to play the game.
Tonight we played a four-player, 90-minute game of “try to make Starcraft work,” which bears considerable similarity to a game that shaver and I used to play almost every night called “try to make Rogue Spear stop desynchronizing and crashing.”
Any game in which Joe and Jacob both participated was immediately beset by intolerable delays and dropped players, a situation which was blamed for a long time on the fact that they’re both behind the same NAT. After 30 minutes of hunting for this hardware, and tweaking that setting, and forgetting to change some other setting, Joe claimed to have been using someone else’s network. This didn’t improve matters, so we gave up. Fuck Blizzard, and fuck their Starcraft right to hell.
In my dream I was playing in the Stanley Cup finals in overtime in some futuristic arena. The glass went all the way to the floor, instead of ending halfway in boards.
The panel right behind the goal broke, and the puck went off my skate and into the hole. I guess because it was behind the goal, they sent it upstairs for review, and it was judged to be a goal, so we won.
Isn’t it weird how everything related to food service in an airplane cabin is branded? Every cup, saucer, plate, wine glass, napkin, salt and pepper shaker, sugar packet, fork, spoon, knife, napkin ring, even the little metal tureens from which they ladle the salad dressing. Everything. No wonder they’re hemorrhaging money. You already have my business.
Am I Awake? is an excellent song to put on when you wake up somewhere over Alaska, on your new time zone, and start drinking coffee.
I’m in the home stretch of my Boston / San Francisco / Hong Kong / Guilin itinerary, which, if you were curious, takes about 28 hours. I got a ton of work done, and a lot of sleep, so I think with a good night’s sleep tonight I’ll be on the right time zone without too much trouble.
I have about two hours here in Hong Kong, which was enough to buy my ticket to Guilin, take a shower, and get my email through this somewhat feeble but serviceable wireless link.
The approach into Hong Kong was a bit foggy, but what was visible was very much like a tropical paradise. It’s already dark now, but hopefully it will be clearer when I pass through next weekend.
From Guilin it’s about a 90-minute drive to Yangshuo, where we’re staying. I think we’re visiting just before the rainy season is supposed to begin, although the deluge we received en route might lead one to believe that it’s getting a head start this year.
Like in Hainan, I woke up to a delicious view from my balcony which only begins to communicate to you the natural wonder by which I am surrounded. I would argue — am doing so right now, in fact — that this area competes with any in the world for lush mountain forests and raw natural beauty.
We rented bikes and rode a couple of kilometers up the road. Little rafts of bamboo lashed together are quite common, and we paid one such operator to carry us across the river so that we could climb one of the small, probably perpetually muddy, mountains. We were charged more than two dollars for this service, and were probably fleeced quite badly.
We waited at the bottom for what looked to be a small thunderstorm to pass, and after a few minutes we realized that we were waiting in a graveyard. Round above-ground graves — they almost looked like filled-in wells — were all over the side of the mountain, with small, often worn-down, stone tablets. I do not know what the stone tablets said. I did not have my camera with me, because I did not have a backpack.
Later, we were treated to a typhoon. This before picture might help put that in perspective.
They import huge quantities of Lymon in enormous tanker ships, with which millions of gallons of thirst-quenching Sprite is produced to satisfy the parched thirsts of this delightful country. I purchased some and found it authentic, crisp, and clean. I purchased another, just to be sure.
Those of you who play SimCity are familiar with the sense that the game is not being wholly realistic when it puts six identical buildings all right next to each other. Or even a half dozen identical buildings spread throughout the city. Surely, I thought, city designers demand more variety of their developers than that.
It turns out, having looked down upon Hong Kong and Beijing this weekend, that the SimCity art developers are merely imitating communist China, where it’s apparently totally normal to plop completely identical buildings side by side. I guess there’s some fiscal logic to that, if not aesthetic. Why waste money on more architects?
I looked at some apartments today, but I think these are all but sold out already. If I wanted to buy one, I would have to act faster than I think I’m willing to do. They’re nice, though!
I could probably spend literally half as much a few miles out, but I think I really want to stay in Chaoyang district. It’s a very central business district, our office is there, I know the restaurants. Traffic is brutal in Beijing — perhaps already worse than in Boston — and I would not want to really commute, I don’t think. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll see something really spectacular. Maybe I won’t get one at all.
I was running some errands and stopped in my favourite little CD and DVD store. I was only there for a few minutes when something touched off a fire drill of activity; all of the employees dropped everything they were doing and went into a full panic mode.
It’s not a very big store, but one whole side wall is almost entirely DVDs in boxes, and the whole back wall is almost entirely DVDs in thin plastic wrappers. It was these they went after, dumping all of the plastic-wrapped DVDs into big plastic tubs waiting under the bottom shelves, seemingly for this precise purpose. As each one was filled, someone ran it out the door, I’m not sure where to. Then they grabbed CDs from the CD racks and spread them out along the empty space.
Nobody spoke English, so I just smiled, and every once in a while one of them would smile back knowingly. I didn’t buy anything in the end, and when I walked outside there was a police car about a block away. I’m not sure if that’s what spooked them. I’m also not sure why only the plastic-wrapped DVDs were spirited away. I don’t think the boxed ones are any more legal, although they look more legitimate. I think the CDs are more or less on the up and up now.
I went to pick up my laundry from the cleaners after that, which was a pretty fun experience. Because they lost my clothes. I’m not really surprised, because this is not the kind of system to which we in the West are accustomed. When you drop your clothes off, they do not give you a ticket or a price. They dump your clothes out in a big pile on the table and tell you to come back tomorrow tomorrow, the day after tomorrow.
It worked out in the end. I managed to find the most important half myself after some small effort, and had to work to convince the man that the clothes next to it were not, in fact, mine. A half hour or so later the woman who took my clothes came back to the shop, and she knew where the rest of them were.
Beijing to Hong Kong and Hong Kong to Chicago were relatively uneventful. I slept most of the way. I think I almost didn’t get my upgrade, but I also think they have to basically sell out every single seat for that to happen. Or there has to be some other 1K traveling on a Y-class ticket, in which case I’m screwed and I can park myself in an exit row and whine about it on my internet.
The company that makes my so-called “universal” laptop charger doesn’t make a tip for my new laptop, so I bought a power inverter. Now I get DC from the plane seat, which gets converted to AC by the inverter, into which I plug my regular laptop charger to convert it back to DC. Then I use the heat generated from the entire assembly to boil water to steam, which turns a turbine to generate electricity, which I filter and finally plug into my laptop.
I’ve only been to UIUC once before. It’s a strange place to hold a meeting, because it’s such a pain in the ass to get to — it’s basically only served by American. And this is exactly how it played out last time.
Delays. Well, delays I have come to expect, particularly in Chicago. So first there were a couple of those, as a warmup.
Then we boarded, and I ran into Evan Felix and Robin Goldstone. What a pleasant surprise!
Then, perhaps seconds before the door closed, they cancelled the flight. Rain, or tornados, or plague of locusts, or firey apocalypse, or something, it was unclear.
I got booked on another (delayed) flight, but all of my friends (now including the charming pair of Charles Shereda and Mark Grondona) were on the standby list for the (delayed) flight. There’s no way they were going anywhere on an aircraft today.
American, bless their cold rotting hearts, put us on a “bus” (passenger van) driven by a sweet midwestern man (asshole) with a handful of airport meal vouchers and a Ruth’s Chris gift certificate (no food or drink of any kind). We drove briefly (two and a half hours) during which the driver remained silent (begged endlessly for extra cash, in exchange for dropping us off where we want to go). When we got there, the University folks got the $10 back that American had overpaid for their van fare ($0), and the driver got a large gratuity for his excellent service ($0).
We ate at the finest 24-hour restaurant Urbana had to offer (Perkins). Tabasco makes anything flavourful (it does).
So this Gelato.org crowd is interesting.
I’m here just to talk about Lustre — what else, right? — but there were a lot of other interesting speakers. Robin talked about Thunder (and said very nice things about Lustre, thank you); some OpenIMPACT people from UIUC gave an interesting talk about building an open source compiler that actually optimizes for IA-64; someone from Purdue gave a talk about digital publishing that seemed really out of context… but anyways, through all of this, there were almost zero questions! Only Charles seemed to be paying attention. I have an excuse: I don’t actually own or use these things.
As Robin pointed out, their own member survey showed that they felt their #1 issue at the moment is compilers, and somewhere around #5 came a cluster file system. So relative to that, the lack of engaged enthusiasm was pretty complete.
Because I use AT&T Wireless, my phone only works if I walk a few blocks closer to “downtown”.
04h35 is really the best time to wake up, in my opinion. If you’re an idiot. I was all nice and cozy, back on a reasonable US schedule. Who knows what this will do.
Driving to the airport, one is struck by how much UIUC really, truly is in the middle of nowhere. You don’t have to drive too many blocks before your farm plots outnumber your house plots.
I saw in particular one chunk of generic apartment housing which looked almost exactly like my generic apartment housing in Minneapolis. A dozen or so buildings, 3 or 4 stories high, designed to look like really big houses, each with probably 30 or 40 apartments inside. A little lake next door. Absolutely nothing else nearby.
I find it interesting how often we fly above the clouds, and it looks almost perfectly flat. Unnaturally flat.
I’m glad to be home. I would just as soon have stayed in China, actually, but the promise of another day in Illinois really settled the matter.
I can’t possibly pass on the opportunity to add to the list:
