Author: Darren

Categories
China General Music Swing

Party On, and other thoughts

Party On

Well, I’m having too much fun. I’ve been really busy these days. A little bit of work, a bit of play, and a whole hell of a lot of socializing. I was at a birthday party/get-together for my friend Allena last night. There must be live music at The Big Easy (a Cajun-style restaurant/bar in Beijing) every night because there was a live band there last night and we got up and danced Lindy Hop to a few numbers. They were playing blues, of course, but it worked well.

Right before that party, I was hosting two fellow Canadians who had just arrived in Beijing. Last week, at the Annual Canadian Charity Ball, I met and talked with the guest speaker, Canadian Astronaut Bjarni Tryggvason. We talked about the possibilities of space science research collaboration between Canada and China and getting Canadian payloads on Chinese recoverable satellites and manned missions. So he passed my name on to two of his colleagues (the two I met last night, Marcus and Catherine) so that they could hook up with me on their visit to Beijing. So this week, they’re visiting various institutes belonging to the Chinese Academy of Sciences (my employer). We had a great time last night, as they were very excited about being in China and experiencing everything they could in their week-long visit. I took them to a Guizhou-style restaurant, introduced them to whatever I could about the food, the beer, the culture. And I filled them in on things to do, things to avoid, and how to tell the difference between a 1.6 RMB and a 1.2 RMB taxi. Just so you know, the cheaper of the two taxis is smaller, especially the back seat, they don’t always have suspension, and they quite often carry a strong smell of gasoline in the interior. But hey, they’re cheaper, right? You will run the risk of a driver with bad B.O. and completely unbearable halitosis in either type of taxi. Welcome to China.

Why I haven’t written lately

I also have been avoiding computing tasks, including writing this blog. You see, I developed some extreme pain in the joints in my hand recently, and it seems to be related to typing at the computer. It was mostly aggravated by a recent assignment which involved editing on the computer for an entire week. I normally do my editing work on paper with a red and a black pen. That, and the weather changed extremely recently, with lots of low pressure and humidity. So I’ve been trying to rest my hands.

But that’s just a small excuse. I’ve also had lots of ideas of things to write about but I haven’t explored any of them, so none of them fully developed. My friend Jodi, a professional writer, suggested that I write out these ideas anyway so that I don’t lose them. Cause, yeah, she’s right. I’ve already lost them. My nighttime dreams overwhelm my daytime thoughts so much, and that’s another blockage to being able to think (and write) clearly.

SomaFM revisited

SomaFM kicks ass. I’m still listening. You’ll remember that I wrote about SomaFM in a previous entry. I’ve been listening a few times a week (for about an hour at a time) so I decided that I should send them a donation. So last month, I sent them $25 USD via PayPal. I think it’s well worth it. You should too. Or at least start listening first.

I’ve explored some of their other channels only a little bit, but by far I listen to “Boot Liquor” the most. American Roots music, lots of songs about drinking, some really funny shit sometimes, and a few token bluegrass songs. Keeps me happy. When I first started listening, Boot Liquor was offered as a 96-kbit MP3 feed, but now it’s 128-kbit MP3 and that’s pretty much CD quality. Sometimes the feed is choppy, so I switch to the 32-kbit mono feed, and it works well. Plus my sound card came with some DSP software that can enhance the mono to a pseudo-stereo image, and that makes it better.

Categories
Philosophy

William James

I’ve been studying the American philosopher William James (1842-1910) for some time now. I discovered him through the philosophy of Alan Watts (1915-1973), who helped guide the world during the Psychedelic Movement. [Watts decided to publish his cautionary The Joyous Cosmology on his clinical experiments with LSD-25 after Aldous Huxley had “let the cat out of the bag” by publishing his own tales in The Doors of Perception.]

Last month, I read James’ work Varieties of Religious Experience, a practical look at the phenomenon of religious belief and mysticism. It deepened my appreciation for pluralism and it strengthened my role as a religious philosopher. Then last night, I came across this article entitled “The Nitrous Oxide Philosopher” by Dmitri Tymoczko, which gave me some background into James’ life and the origin and evolution of his philosophy. I found some comfort in learning that he too faced a severe depression at the age of 28. The experience contributed to the formation of his philosophy and helped him find a way out of the depression. For James, it was an overwhelming belief in the lack of free will that grew from the determinism of his materialist contemporaries. At a crisis point, he came to see that he could “generate” free will (whether it truly exist or not) by believing he had free will: “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”

In shifting to modern-day research relating to James’ views, the article had this to say:

Some remarkable work by psychologists has recently illuminated James’s position. Lyn Abramson, of the University of Wisconsin, and Lauren Alloy, of Temple University, have uncovered a number of “cognitive illusions” to which normal, healthy people are subject. Emotional health, they suggest, involves mildly overoptimistic presumptions and a corresponding insensitivity to failure, which result in a propensity to make straightforwardly false judgments. Perversely, the clinically depressed are often free of these cognitive illusions–they are, to use the subtitle of one of Abramson and Alloy’s best-known papers, “Sadder But Wiser.” Likewise, Shelley Taylor, a social psychologist, has studied the use of illusions by victims of trauma and illness. She found that like James’s mountaineer, those who are unjustifiably optimistic tend to live better-adjusted and happier lives than people faced with similar situations who are thoroughly realistic about their prospects. [Emphasis mine.]

So in this article about James’ story, I have found some clues that point toward my own healing. I am perpetually the “Sadder But Wiser” soul, the mad philosopher, but this need not be so. I will learn that I can control this by my own thinking.

In fact, this insight reminds me of the chapter in James’ Varieties that appealed to me the most—the chapter on Christian Science mind-cures and the phenomenon of the “once-borns” . These are people that James describes as being in no need of repentance or redemption, for from birth they remain deeply “at peace with God”. This is in contrast to the “twice-borns” who require some experience of conversion to feel this same peace with God. Before reading Varieties, I had no idea that the first kind of person could even exist. I was thus attracted to this revolutionary idea.

For now, at least, I need to contemplate my new-found knowledge, absorb it, learn more, and finally put it to good use. Here goes everything!

Categories
FreeBSD

Dodged a howitzer this time

We were lucky. Very lucky. Saturday morning (for me), I logged into madphilosopher.ca from my home in Beijing. Immediately, my friend Bruce, who was also logged in at the time, sent me a message saying that we had a serious problem: “The heads are banging.” I had to ask him what he meant by heads. I thought that perhaps he meant potheads were attacking the computer. Then without warning me, he rebooted the machine, which had the effect of booting me off. When I logged back in five minutes later, I was able to ask him what the problem was. The hard drive was making noise, a sign that it was about to die. Oh! So that’s what he meant by “the heads were banging.” (A little context goes a long way, in my book.)

The machine, madphilosopher.ca, is an old Pentium 100 running FreeBSD 4-STABLE. It’s been in the service of its current role for about three years now. Bruce added a second hard drive a few months ago to provide space for backup and archiving purposes. So it wasn’t clear in the present emergency whether the new or the old hard drive was about to die. (I suppose if he had a stethoscope handy, he could have determined the source of the noise.) Losing the old hard drive would have resulted in much downtime since it is the system drive. Losing the new drive would have wiped out backups, but the system could have carried on without it.

We make regular, automated backups of the system, but having fresh backups is prefered when you might have to rebuild the system. So Bruce and I spent the next two hours creating backups of various system and user files and transfering them off the machine before its impending doom. The noise kept coming and going, and that kept us even further in suspense.

We were communicating using a chat window running on the machine, but we agreed to meet on Yahoo chat in case the system went down and cut off our line of communication. That never happened. So after the backing up was done, Bruce went to watch the news on TV and I needed to leave the house and get on with my Saturday. I checked in with him much later to see what had happened with the hard drives. He was supposed to power down the machine and pull it apart to find the source of the noise. Well, it turned out not to be the hard drives at all. It was the CPU cooling fan dying a slow death. In an email, he said to me, “That was the closest I’ve come to witnessing a hard drive dying without it actually dying. We dodged a howitzer this time!”

Categories
General

Just waiting to die

Depression Sucks. I know I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again. Depression Sucks. I’ve been wanting to get over these feelings I’ve been having for quite some time now. I’ve upped my dose of Prozac to 40 mg daily from 20 mg daily, but it doesn’t seem to be any better than when I was taking 30 mg. I’ve been really searching for alternatives to taking this medication. I don’t like being on it. I’ve been on it since 2000. That’s four years of not being able to cry.

Of course, the reason I am on it is that the alternative situation is worse: sinking into severe depression. Typically, I just sleep a lot. That’s probably the major symptom for me. And it is related to another symptom: lack of motivation. At my worst, I feel so unmotivated and heavy in my chest that it seems that if I were to stop moving, I’d fall over and just lie on the ground till I expired. Happy thought, no?

But lately, over this last winter, I’ve been noticing other things about my state of mind. And these clue me in to the fact that the medication isn’t really helping, or at least it isn’t bringing me to the level of normal emotional functioning. Currently, I’m suffering from anhedonia—the inability to experience pleasure. Nothing excites me. And nothing looks appealing enough to pursue, either. In fact, I feel like an old person just waiting to die, like I’ve experienced all that life has to offer and that I, at some point, stumbled upon what I was supposed to do in this life, and now there’s nothing left to do or work towards. It’s not that I’ve lost hope. Life does seem like it’s worth living. I’ve just lost vision—there’s nothing to work towards.

It’s this last self-revelation that told me that I might not be normal. It’s hard to know what normal is, even for the healthy, but I can’t imagine that most people are walking around out there just waiting to die. So I must be an anomaly.

Yet, I’m not totally sick. I know this because I can still concentrate enough to read (and apparently write), I get my work done every week (editing research papers), and I manage (most of the time) to drag myself to Swing Dancing three times a week (which is where my friends are). But beyond that, my life is quite empty. I long for some happiness or passion.

Neither my mentor nor my girlfriend understand why I am taking this medication, perhaps because there is no concept of clinical depression in the Chinese mindspace, or perhaps because medicine isn’t something you take forever. I hope that this blog entry will at least help them to see that my depression is real and that (perhaps) the medication is keeping me afloat. I don’t really want to see how far I would sink if I were to stop taking it. But I do long for an alternative. In any case, I need to find something better.

Categories
Audio Swing

Teaching Swing last night

I taught Swing at Zuma last night. Adam had a special event to be at, so he asked me to take the Saturday night party. I was nervous for days leading up to it. I’m a good teacher one-on-one, but I have had trouble in the past whenever I try to teach dance to larger groups of people. I need to figure out how to keep the class focused while still trying to help out those who are struggling.

Well, I didn’t actually get any practice teaching with a large group last night because only one couple showed up. Despite the small numbers, we had fun together, learned lots, and they stayed to 23h30. So that made the night a success. It was their second time to learn Swing, and they were showing much improvement by the end of the night.

I also fixed the problem of the terrible quality we were getting out of the sound system. Following the pattern of the previous setup, Adam would plug his laptop (with all the tunes on it) into the mic input on the mixer/amplifier. So in getting ready for last night, I discovered that this was the case, and with a little searching, I found the amplifier indeed had line inputs. So then, switching to the appropriate pipes sure made a difference. The music wasn’t muddy or overdriven anymore. It just sounded right. Now we’re ready for more people to come and Swing with us. But where are they?

Categories
Music

SomaFM: Like a Koala Bear Crapped a Rainbow in my Brain

This is great! I discovered a new radio station yesterday, and I love it. It’s called SomaFM, and they are internet-only, commercial free, and listener supported. They seem to be playing the same kind of music that I get on CJSR Edmonton, which really pleases me. Their main website says that there are currently 3043 people listening to SomaFM now. That’s cool.

While it’s one “station”, they actually offer 7 different channels of music at various audio quality levels, the best being 128 kbps stereo MP3. This is impressive. The channels are:

  1. Groove Salad
  2. Secret Agent
  3. Drone Zone
  4. indie pop rocks
  5. cliqhop idm
  6. Beat Blender
  7. Boot Liquor

You’ll have to visit the SomaFM website to read the channel descriptions. So far, I’ve been listening mostly to “Boot Liquor”, which is described as American Roots music, looking for (and getting) some bluegrass and Johnny Cash. I’ve also listened to “Groove Salad” for a while. I have yet to check out the other channels, but you can be sure that I will.

This sure makes up for the terrible broadcast radio that’s available here in Beijing. I’ll soon be listening enough to SomaFM that I’ll want to contribute (which is voluntary). It’s a good deal.

By the way, the title for today’s post comes from one of their station IDs, in answer to the question, “What does SomaFM feel like to you?.” Cute. Not exactly the answer I would have come up with, though.

Categories
China

I can see clearly now…

Something must be seriously wrong with the world, or at least with my understanding of the global economics of the eyewear industry. I went and got new lenses for my glasses yesterday, and what I discovered prompted this story. First of all, I wanted to replace my 2.5-year-old lenses since they were very badly scratched. Not from mistreatment, but because the anti-reflective coating went FUBAR, possibly because of the water here in China. This is the second time I’ve had this problem. In 2000, I travelled to the Maldives and Sri Lanka, and the coating on my previous pair of lenses also became a mess of microlines that made it difficult to see. The last two pairs of lenses were purchased at Shopper’s Optical in Edmonton, and maybe that’s the common factor and not the international travel. I don’t really know.

I put off the quest for new lenses because I thought it would be a difficult undertaking for me here in China. I didn’t know the procedure for getting my eyes checked or if the old prescription would be understandable to the technicians here. Plus I wasn’t looking forward to having to choose new frames because of the difficulty of getting used to a new pair of glasses. (Whine, whine, whine….) But, the experience turned out to be quite easy, in fact. My girlfriend took me to a centre which is a collection of many eyeglass wholesalers, and she helped translate for me. Well, the one shop we settled on had a computer which “read” the prescription off of my old lenses. I didn’t know they could do that. It was a Topcon CL-100 Lensmeter, in case you are interested. And then they double checked it with the prescription that I brought with me. Cutting the lens blanks and fitting them into my glasses was the identical procedure that I would find in Canada, but it didn’t take an hour. More like 20 minutes.

Now here’s what surprised me about the whole thing. The new lenses cost me $18 CDN for the pair! That’s less than the cost of a dinner for two at any restaurant in Canada. They were high-index, single-vision lenses, with anti-reflective coating, and they were thinner than the old lenses, which were also high-index. I think I had a choice between lenses that came from Japan and those from Korea, and I probably ended up with the Japan lenses. I’m still incredulous about the low cost. In Canada, at least 2.5 years ago, I would have paid $100-150 CDN for the same lenses. I’m going to guess that the same is true today. Why the difference? Is it the large population here in China? Or the cheapness of the labour at the eyeglass store/lab? I don’t know, but it makes me wonder what people in Canada are paying for when they buy lenses.

Categories
Swing

Flipped Out!

Adam flipped me at Swing class last night. Twice. It was a lot of fun. After the official class was over, Adam started to teach the group some air moves, presumably because someone asked. River gets to be subjected to most of the moves he knows, but sometimes she wants to see what it looks like. So that’s when I volunteered to be flipped. I stood in front of him, bent over, as if I were about to pass a football between my legs to Adam standing behind me. But instead of a football, I passed my two hands. All he did was just pull my hands upward and my body unrolled, my feet left the floor, I flipped over, and my feet hit the floor in front of me. Swoosh.

I think I’ll have to volunteer for more in the future.

Categories
China General

Mmmmmm

Today I discovered I had all the ingredients necessary for a peanut butter and banana sandwhich: crunchy peanut butter, bananas, half-decent bread, and a glass of cold milk. In my (almost) two years of living in Beijing, this has never happened before, mostly because of the lack of real bread in my neighbourhood.

It was tasty. Time to go buy more bananas and peanut butter…….

Categories
China Tech

For want of a good book

I went to the Haidian Book City in Beijing today, looking for books on database theory. I’ve been going crazy all week with ideas inside my head about different databases that I need to create for work, and a few for fun. But I don’t know anything about databases—not their theory, implementation, what software solutions are out there, or even how to create and access a database.

Well, I found two textbooks on databases that I could read. 99% of the books here are in Chinese, but there are a few computer science series that are available in the original English. Fortunately, the topics match my interests quite well: software development, hardware, theoretical computer science, operating systems theory, and network programming.

So I ended up purchasing one database book: Database Principles, Programming, and Performance, 2nd Ed., by Patrick and Elizabeth O’Neil.

On other subjects, I picked up two O’Reilly titles: Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, by Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman, and Mark Stone; and Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies, edited by Andy Oram. The first contains essays on the Open Source movement by the original and the continuing innovators of the movement. The second describes the phenomenon of peer-to-peer networks (file sharing networks like Napster and KaZaa) and specific applications and implementations.

I got one famous book in software development theory and practice: The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, by Frederick P. Brooks Jr. I’ve needed to read this one for a long time, so now was a good time to buy it.

And finally, I bought one Chinese title. Can I read it? Not exactly, but I bought it for the pictures. It’s called Web Color Design, and as you can guess, it has many examples of colour schemes for website design, including colour charts and RGB values of the actual example web pages and photographs. So I can use it to get some ideas for sprucing up this website.

How much did this whole book shopping spree cost me? 156 RMB. That’s $24.88 CDN approximately. Not bad for two O’Reilly books, a text book, and a book that’s entirely done in full-colour glossy pages. I figure there’s got to be some benefit to living in China and suffering from the lack of a good bookstore.

Well, enough typing. Time to curl up by the fire (I wish!) and enjoy a good book. Or five of them!