Categories
Speech

Habemus Papam! Podcast

An amazing piece of audio history was captured by the Catholic Insider Podcast during the final moments when the most recent pope was announced. Father Roderick Vonhögen takes you into the middle of St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican on the evening of April 19, 2005, amidst the excited crowd, with people from almost every country expectantly waiting to see the white smoke and hear the bells proclaiming the new pope. The audio you hear is very real and it places you right in the midst of the action. Close your eyes as you listen and be taken to this special moment in history. It’s very personal and compelling.

Habemus Papam! – Catholic Insider, April 19, 2005 (54:14, 24.8 MB)

Note that the Catholic Insider site doesn’t provide a link to the show notes for this episode, so I have to link you to the mp3 file directly
(http://www.rorate.com/podcasts/ci20050419b.mp3).

Categories
Linux

Computers compared

On Linux, you can look at the file /proc/cpuinfo to find out information about your computer’s CPU. Here’s the info on my two machines.

“CARL”, my desktop at work:

processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 15
model           : 0
model name      : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 1500MHz
stepping        : 10
cpu MHz         : 1500.395
cache size      : 256 KB
fdiv_bug        : no
hlt_bug         : no
f00f_bug        : no
coma_bug        : no
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 2
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 
     clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm
bogomips        : 2965.50

“BEAKER”, my desktop at home:

processor       : 0
vendor_id       : AuthenticAMD
cpu family      : 6
model           : 6
model name      : AMD Athlon(TM) XP2000+
stepping        : 2
cpu MHz         : 1261.442
cache size      : 256 KB
fdiv_bug        : no
hlt_bug         : no
f00f_bug        : no
coma_bug        : no
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 1
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 
     mmx fxsr sse pni syscall mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow
bogomips        : 2498.56

According to the bogomips value, which is a hand-waving sort of index of cpu speed, my machine at work should be faster. Now CARL has 384 MB of RAM and its video card only 32 MB, but BEAKER has 512 MB of RAM and 64 MB of video RAM, so BEAKER has a much quicker user interface. Note that both of these machines have motherboards and CPUs that are three years old. But they still run great for what I do with them.

What bogomips values do your computers have?

Categories
Philosophy

A year later

I just looked back and re-read the entry on William James that I wrote a year ago. I was prompted to do this by a similar exercise that Mandi went through the other day on her blog. First, I was surprised that I had something interesting to say back then, and that I did so eloquently. I guess lately I’ve held a low view of my own ability to write. Second, and more importantly, I’m able to see how far I’ve come since being so depressed at that time. These days, generally, I feel good and am excited about life. My energy is not always high, but my thinking is pretty clear and I have ambitions again. I mentioned this to Gulistan the other day, how the world is so interesting and there are so many things to explore, but how I can narrow my focus by putting my energy into creating things. I want to create, and that is what will carry me from now on.

Categories
China Tech

Gmail Tip

When logging in to Gmail, if you request the login page by specifying https explicitly in the address bar, as:

https://gmail.google.com/gmail

then your entire Gmail session will be encrypted, not just the password authentication handshake. Cool, eh?

Update: This tip will also help solve any problems with connecting to Gmail from China.

Categories
China

Never Ending Travel

Well, after Shanghai, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Shanghai, I’m finally back home in Beijing. Gulistan’s niece Guliziba arrived at 06h00 on our first morning back to Beijing. We both worked Friday and Saturday, and then the May 1st to 7th holiday started.

So on Saturday, after work, the three of us met and then had a dinner with Gulistan’s classmates from university, a mini-reunion of about 12 people plus friends and spouses. While I was waiting for the two of them at the gate to her university, I sat on the grass and started and nearly finished working on a paper that I had to do. The evening was very beautiful and warm. Very nice. The dinner was great and I met some very good people from all over China. We finished the night by taking Guliziba to Tiananmen Square and Qianmen. The square was closed, but we were able to take photos and walk around the perimeter of the square.

On Sunday, we went to an opening exhibition of the artist Redxing’s 365 show, which featured a series of paintings that she had done one a day for a whole year spanning 2004/2005. Very cool. Then we went to my apartment to hang out and visit some of the parks in my neighbourhood. We ate at the local cheap and favourite restaurant, and then called it a night.

On Monday, we took an overnight trip with some of Gulistan’s friends from the arts and culture community to the countryside near Huairou, to the NE of Beijing. During the dinner, it was hard for me to relax and feel a part of the group because I don’t like to drink very much yet that was the theme of the night. But then I solved a candle problem and instantly relaxed and felt like I belonged. In short, one man brought out some candles and was trying to put them in the mouths of all the empty beer bottles, but the candles were slightly too narrow and would fall into the bottles. So I suggested sticking a toothpick perpendicularly through the base of each candle to stop them from falling inside. Instant success. And soon after, they cleared the floor and put on music for dancing, so I relaxed more and started dancing. I guess I’m a dancer now. I would have never in the past been made comfortable by dancing at a party. It seems I’ve changed, and everyone was impressed with my and Gulistan’s swing dancing, even if it was to the Eagles!

Back in Beijing on Tuesday evening, we spent time at my apartment so I could do laundry, and later we had dinner at Pizza Hut. Mmmm. Pizza.

And that brings us to today, which is Wednesday. My cousin Corinne has been teaching English in Changsha in southern China, and her sister and father have come to visit. The three of them will arrive in Beijing today and spend a few days here with us. We’ll have a Peking Duck dinner tonight and decide what sights to see over the next few days. Phew! After this is all over, I’m going to need a vacation from my many vacations! But I’m glad they are coming.

Pictures of Shanghai and everything else will follow once I get some time to work on them.

Categories
China General

Voicemail

I’ve got voicemail now. Not that I want an answering service or anything. Mobile phone and SMS are just fine for communication within China. (Answering machines and voicemail don’t exist here because mobile phones took off ahead of the laying of land lines.) The voicemail is just a way for my friends and family to communicate with me in a way convenient for them.

So, if you call the number below, you can leave me a 5 minute message. It then gets emailed to me as an audio attachment. Very cool. And free. The number is out of Seattle, so it’ll cost you some change for the long distance charges, but then again, your call will be short. This is a free service from k7.net. Wanna give it a try? You know the drill… Leave me a message at the beep!

  • (206) 888-4743
  • (206) 888-grif
Categories
China Swing

Swing out Shanghai!

[Shanghai Speakeasy Party]

I’ll be in Shanghai from Friday to Friday. I and 12 other friends are taking the overnight train and going to the Shanghai Swings Speakeasy party. We’re all quite excited. We’ve got a boombox planned, and we’re going to take over the sleeper car and dance in the aisle! All night. 🙂

This is my first visit to Shanghai. I hear it’s quite different from Beijing. A different feeling, history, dialect, culture. Everyone will fly home on Sunday evening, except Allena, Gulistan, and I will stick around and tour the city for two days. Then, a boat trip to Suzhou (the Venice of China), and a day and night in Hangzhou (the Silk Capital of China).

Awesome.

Categories
Rant

The power of blogs

Prologue 1: Let me start by encouraging you to consider using Yahoo! Search instead of Google if only for this single feature: Yahoo searches within the domain of the websites in its collection, whereas Google ignores the domain (as far as I can tell), and so Yahoo can deliver more relevant results. What does this mean? The domain is the first part of the web address, such as my www.madphilosopher.ca. So if you search for the phrase “madphilosopher” on both Google and Yahoo!, Google won’t find my site but Yahoo will. In fact, I’m currently the top hit in Yahoo!, even beating out the site www.madphilosopher.com. Maybe this isn’t important to you, but perhaps it will make your web searching more fruitful. Try it here:

Prologue 2: Okay, now that you’ve tried that, you might think I’m a total loser because the opposite of what I said actually occurred. But I swear it didn’t work this way yesterday when I was doing research for this post. That is, with Google, my site didn’t use to appear within the first 10 hits, but with Yahoo! I was number 1. Now the opposite is happening. Murphy’s Law, I guess. But I’m not the only one to have discovered this no-longer-true discovery. James Slusher wrote about this very thing back in February 2005.

All of this is to announce that I’ve switched to using Yahoo! search instead of Google for the majority of my web searches. Why? The primary reason is quite interesting. Basically, I started to read the Yahoo! Search Blog and the Google Blog. And what did I find? I found that the Google blog was surprisingly trivial. Sure, Google occasionally announced new and old features through their blog, but a lot of what they were talking about was fluff and sounded like it was being written by an airhead. Seriously. It still sounds that way to me. But Yahoo’s blog was quite serious in tone, and they wrote about technologies and partnerships that seemed to support the vision and kind of growth that I would like to see in the future Internet. Some examples of engaging content would be the post on the partnership with Wikipedia, on Wikipedia and geography, and on the partnership with the Creative Commons.

The contrast between these two blogs showed me the differences in the hearts and visions of the two search companies. Note that the choice to publish a public blog was a marketing strategy by the two. Via their blogs, Yahoo! and Google choose to communicate directly to the public, and what they talk about and how it gets said are both consciously and subconsciously determined. Yet even if what they present is merely spin, the readers of the blogs react to the content nevertheless. So for me, my reaction was a revocation of my allegiance to Google. Making that choice was a surprising outcome for me, one that I didn’t foresee when I first subscribed to the two blogs. The Cluetrain Manifesto begins by stating that markets are conversations. Certainly. And the conversations of the markets are being furthered through the use of blogs.

I think it’s time for me to go back and reread the Cluetrain Manifesto cause it’s been a few years since I first saw it. If you haven’t already, go read it for yourself. And please leave me a comment below. I’d appreciate your reaction to this weblog entry and what it says about the consequences of blogging (corporate or otherwise). I’d love to hear stories about how you’ve reacted to the blogs you read or have read in the past. Keep the conversation going. And as a teaser, let me say that I’ll have a follow-up to this entry on the power of podcasts, so expect to see that next.

Categories
Astro Audio China General Tech

Cool Websites – Random Links

Here’s a list of some cool websites I’ve come across lately:

  • ctrip. com — A very comprehensive site on booking hotels and tickets for travelling in China. I’m using this for my upcoming Shanghai trip.
  • slooh.com — A subscription-based online telescope. For $50 US a year, you can have unlimited access to their group missions, plus 15 minutes of solo time, where you get to direct the telescope to your object of choice. Cool!
  • Article: How to get the best sound out of your PC — A technical prescription on how to optimize your Windows audio chain. For audio geeks only.
  • madphilosopher del.icio.us bookmarks — An online bookmark storage and sharing service. This link is my account, but you can get one too. The cool thing about shared bookmarks is that you can see how many other people around the world are bookmarking the same sites. And since it’s online, I can access my bookmarks from any machine. Check it out!
Categories
Astro WordPress

Four more days to go

I just read an interesting Wired article about how Blogger has been experiencing tonnes of glitches and outages lately, really diminishing the blogging experience for its users. I just had to smile, knowing that Mercury is just shaking things up for us again. You see, Mercury is retrograde right now, and Mercury is all about communication, thinking, and technology. So when that planet’s motion reverses in the sky, miscommunications happen, and the communication channels that we rely on—especially technological ones—tend to break. This doesn’t happen because Mercury is somehow punishing us, but it is intended to remind us from time to time how reliant we are on our technology. It is good for the soul to be “off the grid” for a while.

I have talked to numerous people in the last few weeks about miscommunications that have happened to them, and I relate them all back to this. I was tipped off to Mercury’s action when my webserver went completely off the wall. This forced me to find a new hosting solution, and alas, to move away from Blogger. As a result, I discovered a new technology called WordPress that I am quite happy with. It’s really a joy to manage and create blog entries under WordPress, and it’s responsive and reliable. Much more so than Blogger.

As for Mercury, we have about four more days to go before the planet goes direct again. Take the time to reflect on the gift of communication, in its many forms from natural speech and body language, to the technologically-enhanced forms we use today. And call your Mother!