The coldest winter I ever spent
Archive for September 2010
I’m in Hong Kong airport after a successful 10 days of picture taking. Malaysia is totally nice; I’ll show you my 50,000 picture scrapbook soon.
I drove every meter of every road in George Town, Cyberjaya, and Melaka. Well, think we missed like 3 blocks total but that was my fault.
Next up: Riyadh from Oct 25-31.
Holy crap. Driving on the wrong side of the road is INCREDIBLY STRESSFUL!
I just went out to dinner. We’ve always been having dinner in our hotel at the Putrajaya Shangri-La. It’s good but we have both been getting bored with the menu. I went out but Brent stayed at the hotel.
In Malaysia, the steering wheel is on the right, the shifter on the left, the blinkers on the right, both side mirrors are convex (i.e. “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear”), the rear mirror is to your left, but the ignition is oddly still on the right.
I drove a total of like 3km to the mall and back and I’m so frazzled. I shouldn’t be. I mean, I’ve been sitting in the back seat as navigator for like 1,o00 kilometers of roads, half city miles. My job has been to make sure we drive EVERY meter of EVERY road in all the cities we drive… Cyberjaya, Malaka, Georgetown, and some other cities coming up. Amazingly, I haven’t gotten car sick from reading in the car even though I’ve been reading maps in a moving car continuously for 3 days straight. It took a while to get used to navigating in this drive-on-the-left country; left turns are easier, reading offramps is backwards etc…
Now it’s time to sleep! (It’s 10pm here, it’s 7am in San Francisco!)
I am sitting in a high backed easy chair with arms that curve up and down sensually. Out the window I can only see the tops of palm trees out to 200 meters and the spire of Taman Putra Perdana. The torrential downpour shrouds the rest of the world in a gray mist. An hour ago I could clearly see the dramatic oversized moire cables of the Seri Wawasan Bridge, and the dramatic onion shaped minarets of both the Putra Mosque and the office of the Prime Minister of Malaysia. Any of those landmarks are good for a story on their own. But right now the rain, lightning, and grand opulent rolling thunder take center stage.
It’s quite a show! Every day by 3pm tall black featureless clouds amble in from the north. You can see them an hour away. Today I could sense them approaching while sitting in this very spot. I couldn’t see them from my seat but I knew they were about to make their appearance. The color of the air changed a little, the wind shifted, the distant drumroll of thunder offered ample announcement.
This has been quite a trip. Yesterday the rain caught us while driving. Due to the sensitive nature of our cameras, we can’t have even 1 drop of rain on any of our 8 lenses. We found ourselves at a highway underpass, along with some motorcylists, hiding from the torrents of rain. But it found a way to get me soaked. The first time a car went by, the splash soaked the backs of my legs while I was slipping the lens covers on the rig. I thought I had the rain beat by hiding behind the car when the next vehicles went by. But the truck sent up a wave that soaked us both even behind the car! Now, ducking my head low behind the car, below the windows as each car past I felt better… until a van got the angles just right and soaked me again! I laughed out loud, totally soaked with the clean warm rainwater.
(this photo taken 5 minutes after the rains let up a bit)
Standing on the balcony of my hotel room in Malaysia on my birthday. In the background is the office of the prime minister of Malaysia! (Derek Zoolander say relax!)
In the continuing effort to fight comment spam, I installed the Bad Behavior plugin on the blog. If this accidentally stops your legitimate comment, please email me at Lee at Lee dat org.
update 4-11-11: I removed Bad Behavior a while back. See the comments
I’m going off on a trip to Malaysia tonight til Oct 1st for work! There will be some time for play. Any suggestions for what to see or do?
Don’t let the kids see! (via Benjamin Carpenter)
(local copy)
I just came across a piece of software called KFC that removes Flash Cookies AKA Local Shared Objects from your computer. These are new to me but a little googling shows a pretty consistent theme, e.g.:
(webdesign10.com)Web sites use them to track you because they know that most people don’t know about them and that they can track you even after you have cleared your privacy settings.
(wikipedia)Several services even use LSOs as surreptitious data storage to reinstate traditional cookies that a user deleted, a policy called “re-spawning”
I’m going to add KFC to my occasional spring-cleaning of cookies and the like. Find KFC here or a local archive of KFC here.
I went to Paris, France on business a couple weeks back. Here are some more notes from the trip. Previously, Previously.
Had a crepe formage 2 blocks from Notre Dame :-)
Right-click and download this giant panorama for best results.
Notre Dame is pretty awesome. The structure totally rivals the Taj Mahal, which I had the pleasure of seeing in February. Personally, I liked Notre Dame better than the Taj Mahal. I took that image to the left. Right-click download it and view it up close. The panorama came out pretty awesome!
Went inside Notre Dame at about 11:30pm following a procession in the doors. The Virgin Mary and son had left at about 10:30 with a grande accompaniment celebrating the Feast of the Assumption. I looked at the holiday’s calendar and darn if I didn’t miss Gregoran chanting at the cathedral by just a few hours! The interior looks like… well… a Catholic Church. The ceiling is pretty nice.
The confessionals in Notre Dame have awesome little Get Smart Cone of Silence things surrounding the traditional wooden cubbies. I hope they work better than the real Get Smart Cones ;-)
Had an “Andouillette AAAAA moutarde de Meaux” for lunch at Dudule just outside Place d’Italie. When I picked it with my patented menu order randomizing system our French host Arnaud cautioned me “be careful with that”. Sounds like a dare, right? What other food based on a dare do you know about? That’s right, Scottish Haggis! The anduillette was umm.. err.. Ok, it was pretty gross but I’m glad I tried it. It’s a sausage made with intestines, not just the casing but the whole thing. When I cut open this unassuming sausage, it looked like it had lots of rolls of.. I don’t know.. Maybe little rolls of soggy paper. Not so bad. But it smelled like… When I held it to my nose, Arnaud immediately said “It tastes better than it smells, like cheese.” he was somewhat correct: as long as I didn’t use my nose, I couldn’t smell the stench of death and entrails bundled on my plate! It smelled awful. It had the texture of soggy rolled up postit notes and had almost no flavor (barring the stench).
I passed through Gare d’Austerlitz station many times on my way to the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, and other spots. Here’s a nice panorama of the place I stitched together:
Saw a guy jump a 5′ tall turnstile on the Metro. It was amazing. The guy was walking and then he was springing 6′ in the air. And there was only like 3′ clearance to the ceiling. I might have told the station attendant who was 5′ away but there’s that language barrier.
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The energy around the eifel tower totally had a Burning Man feel to it! All these people are milling around this grand structure trying to figure out exactly how to extract the vibrant energy of the moment, and even just trying to characterize the energy… is it national pride, or an engineering achievement, or just the pretty lights that makes it so magical?
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At once, blacks seem to be more integrated into French society than in the US and also seem more prone to being an underclass, working worse jobs (like window washers and runway crew at the airport) and having sketchier roles (like the kid at the restaurant who acted grabby and the guy who jumped the turnstile).
The black kid at the restaurant: he was maybe 12 years old, accompanied by a 40ish white woman. The kid did little things that made me feel like he came from poverty. He grabbed at food like it was going to be taken away from him. He called to the dog as if it should serve him. He grabbed at things on the table that he thought his matron was going to grab. He literally was shifty-eyed. It was really strange watching this play out during my dinner.
5:31am the phone rings. My coworkers are downstairs ready to go to the airport. I throw the last items in my bag, a still-wet jacket and my computer, and head downstairs with it rolling behind me. Brent and Arnaud are standing in the sleepy dark lobby. The smell of fresh pastries fills the room. They are ready to go. The concierge brings out a plate of chocolate and plain croissants for me and sets them on the bar. Holding an empty glass in his hand, He asks what I would like to drink, coffee or orange juice. It is wonderful.
Brent and Arnaud look at me. The tension of “time to go” pushes on me. I walk over to the bar, place a hot chocolate croissant in my mouth and hold a plain one in my hand. Oh if I only I could carry more! We walk out into a cool drizzling morning and get into the car.
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Oh yeah, and the real reason I was in Paris… setting up a new camera rig for earthmine.
Infinite Scroll looks like a fun plugin. It almost worked perfectly right out of the box (see my note about WP-FancyZoom). I found it on the Balsaman blog.
Just scroll down to the bottom of the page and the next page should load up automatically. :-)
To make the WP FancyZoom WordPress Plugin work well with Infinite Scroll, I figured out that I have to add the following to the “Javascript to be called” section:
addDOMLoadEvent(setupZoom);
Please tell me what you think of this change!