To the largish woman in black who made an attempt to force her way onto the subway a couple of days ago:

I feel I should inform you that in general society, letting people get off before you get on is generally preferred. That way, you see, there is more room for the people getting on. I know the image of potentially empty seats, rightfully yours of course, is rather tantalizing, but try to resist the urge for just a little while. The train isn’t going to leave right away, so a few seconds more won’t have a great impact on your busy schedule.

As to your ending up on your prodigious ass, I’m afraid that, despite your protests to the contrary, that brutal bitch we call physics was the main reason for your less-than-graceful downfall. That, and psychology, for when you assume that everyone will immediately get out of your way and allow you to barge onto the train before anyone can get off, you might neglect to consider that someone might not so readily acquiesce to your desires. Particularly if that someone is (a) larger than your not-inconsiderable personage, (b) listening to music on headphones and (c) doesn’t happen to be facing you directly as you approach from the side to avoid that pesky line of people who were so naive as to think they could get on before you (I know: the nerve).

In short, that person in this case happened to be me. I am no stranger to such instances, and while the rather spectacular nature of your rebound did earn a backward glance on my part, I felt the performance just a bit too operatic for my tastes, and not quite worthy of a tasteful clapping as one would find on, say, a golf course after someone quotes Woody Allen.

I have no doubt, however, that others will be on the receiving end of your attempts to board other trains in the future. Perhaps they will be so lacking in mass and structure that you will feel confident in your ability to make them cower in the vastness of your presence, but should you fall victim to the slightest doubt, and happen to recall that ache in your backside from our chance encounter, you might do worse than to reconsider, and gracefully withdraw. No one will think the worse of you if you appear to be joining the common folk in their quaint fashions, no matter how mightily they confuse your no-doubt expansive worldview. I am sure that one glance at the name-brand markings on your various accouterments will assure them of your lofty status.

Prince Roy, Spicy Girl and their friends Kate and Paul came down to Bitan on Saturday, as the latter two had never been down here before. We rented a fish-shaped swanboat and paddled around the lake playing bumper-boats with the tourists and looking at the birds. It was pleasant. Everyone else was making AIT-related conversation and taking pictures of the scenery, while I rocked the boat and took shots of the paddle pedals.

Once ashore again, Daniel showed up with his brand-new, ridiculously large Nokia smartphone. We had a pizza dinner at Rendezvous. I tried SG’s risotto and found it pretty good. I’ll have to have that next time instead of trying to stuff myself with a whole pizza.

I had to leave early, though, to make the Bliss gig. Daniel drove me and my stuff over to the Xinyi Road establishment, where David was getting out of a cab just as I arrived. The bar was empty. David and I moved couches around upstairs to make room for the inevitable dancing. Slim showed up, sans tux this time, and Sandman called to see if his entourage had arrived yet.
We cajoled the owner, Barry, into letting us have free drinks, and I started in with some rye whiskey. People started showing up, and soon the place was packed. Eddie Tsai, who helped us with fight choreography and swordwork, was there, along with a music professor who played bass. There were many other familiar faces, including that of Chris, whose 30th birthday we were marking that night.

We got a bit of a slow start. Viola Lee was too slow, and my attempts to spice it up with trumpet riffs met with mixed results this time around. We’ve done it better, but we were just getting started. As the night progressed, things got hot. Really hot. Streamers fell from the ceiling. Whiskey was passed around. Tempos quickened. Dancing ensued. The crowd smoked. With little regard for any and all mistakes, we charged forward through the night. At one point I found myself completely lost; it took me a couple of measures to realize where the song was and myself relative to it. But it didn’t phase me. Nothing phased any of us. Song followed song, but we kept on. David was a madman, and I played the tub until it split in two.

It was after 1am when we finally stopped. If we’d gone any longer we would have collapsed into a heap of dark chaotic matter. But it didn’t matter. We’d created this great big thing that couldn’t be undone; there were too many witnesses.

Afterwards, the band dissolved out into the crowd, everyone spinning on the vibe we’d been producing all night. For some reason, kissing-related troubles occurred on several fronts. I was sober enough to resist giving in to kissing a certain party, but only just. Instead, we ended up out on the curb, marveling at the show and sizing up cabs with a mind to the capacities of their trunks. Sandman wanted to hold out for a Wish, but we settled for a regular cab home instead.

My apartment is usually nice and quiet. Once or twice the people downstairs cranked up their 60-million-watt Karaoke system, apparently to attract aliens from far-flung planets, but after I had a word with them they stopped.

Recently, however, I’ve been hearing a piano. Playing the same melody over and over again, it sounds nearby. Yet when I went around to all my neighbors, nobody admitted to having a piano. Some people had heard it, but nobody knew who the culprit was. I crept along with my ear to the hallway walls, listening for some clue. Was the building haunted?

On a whim, I went up two floors, but no piano. Then I went down two floors from my place. Ah-ha! It turned out to be the apartment two floors below me, though the people in the apartment below me, the alien-hunters, claimed to have never heard the piano. I can only assume that they’re actually deaf from all of the karaoke…either that or some strange construction fluke transmits sound around some apartments and into others.

It’s a student, I’m guessing. The parent or husband (I’m guessing, as I never actually saw the piano player) said they would stop playing in the mornings and waking me up. The problem is that they play during reasonable hours, when I can’t really raise any objections. But the constant sound of piano practice in my apartment is really, really distracting. I can’t have cover-up music on all the time. The torturing soul plays all weekend, when I’m home trying to edit. The same tune, over and over. The next time someone tries to impress me with their piano-playing skills, I’ll wonder how many of their neighbors went insane so that they could play “Imagine” whilst looking wistful for their friends.

The more time I accumulate navigating the online world, the more I find bits of that mindset popping up in The Real World. I’ll be reading a book and want to find a certain section and automatically think, “I’ll just do a search” before realizing that there is no search. I’ll see an unfamiliar Chinese character on a sign and some part of me will try to mouseover it to see what it means. I’ll be looking at a building or a car and thinking it would look better in a different color or shape and mentally prepare to adjust the hue or morph it. The other day I noticed that one of my favorite posters, Thomas McKnight’s “Riviera Coast” was covered with scratches due to multiple moves over the last few years, and I thought to myself, “No problem, I’ll just use the clone tool and it’ll be as good as new.”

Thankfully this kind of thinking doesn’t extend to wanting to jump off buildings because you can fly in video games or anything like that. It mainly concerns a desire to have the same level of access to information IRL that I do online. You get used to being able to look anything up instantly, having your entire world indexed, searchable and adjustable. Now, 3.5G mobile devices with Wi-fi and GPS are starting to provide more information to us when we’re out and about, but not to the degree we’re used to online, not yet. Virtual environments are still laughably oversimplified and clumsy, but at the rate hardware and software are improving it’s really only a matter of time before they will resemble the actual world that we live in to such a degree that they’ll seem just as vivid.

I don’t believe, however, that such virtual worlds will draw people into them. I think that what people really want is to go the other way, and rather than taking themselves into some virtual word, instead bring all of the benefits of a virtual environment to everyday life via an interface for the world that we already inhabit, a personal browser that gives us accessibility to information about the real world to the degree that we are privy to online. Searchable literature. Objects, even buildings, that can change color. Or perhaps glasses that can scan and search what we see, or even change the world to look differently to each person (they could call the product “Rose”). If Twitter is anything to go by, I can imagine people doing nothing all day but looking out of other people’s eyes. Of course, if everyone does that, there won’t be anyone left actually doing anything for anyone else to watch.

I suppose that the downside to living in a society where we can make everything Just So would be that people might become so unaccustomed to seeing and dealing with things that they didn’t like, that we would lose any shred of adaptability that we have left, leaving us completely vulnerable to the slightest unexpected change in our environment. Some argue that we’ve already reached that point with iPods and the Internet. As we retreat from “traditional reality,” our ability to deal with it will naturally atrophy, but this has been going on since history began; who among us wouldn’t have trouble adapting to life a hundred years ago? In any case, the trend of acquiring greater access to information isn’t going to stop, so we’re going to have to deal with it somehow. And, somehow, I think we will.

And of course, there’s always the brain-plug thingy, just in case.

It’s been a while since our last show, but the Muddy Basin Ramblers will be back on stage at Bliss Saturday night from around 10pm, in celebration not only of St. Patrick’s Day (I assume someone in the band has Irish blood) but primarily to celebrate our friend Chris’ entry into the real adult world, i.e. her 30th birthday. We’ve been concentrating on the album for so long it might be kind of strange to go back to stage stuff, but I’m sure we’ll manage.

I’ve been making some small changes to this page. I added a little bit of code that creates little pop-up versions of the websites links lead to if you mouseover them. I found it when I last visited Tinmanic’s page and liked the idea of more than just plain ALT text, so I included it on this page as well as my links page. If it drives you crazy and just gets in the way of your reading, let me know.

My archives are now available through a pulldown menu on the sidebar rather than taking you to a separate page. I’ve also reconfigured my Flickr page to show a few large photos on the front page rather than a lot of little ones. I think the little pictures don’t show enough detail; the big ones just look better, but I’m biased of course. Zooomr is apparently implementing its next phase, but I’m not sure just yet what that involves. It will be interesting to see if they’ve addressed any of the issues I listed in my last post. As many of those are simply my personal preferences, probably not. But one can hope.

The only other things I want to do with this page are make the graphic at the top link back to the current page without a nasty-looking border and change the color of the comments so that they’re visible on the individual post pages. Oh, and somehow figure out how to make the trackbacks work. If you have any ideas, let me know.

It’s hard to believe that I’ve kept basically the same layout for nearly six years. That’s, like, Lorne Greene’s age in Web years. But it’s held up pretty well so far, and I’ve grown partial to it. I remember one early review complaining about my humongous icons, but they seem just right at today’s resolutions. In any case, I’d like to keep it a while longer.

Mark‘s been raving about Zooomr for a while now, and as the deadline approaches for Flickr users to merge their accounts with Yahoo! accounts, and having been through several instances where Yahoo! decided to randomly change my password without telling me, I thought I’d give Zooomr a try. I put up a few (75) photos and looked around the site for a few weeks. This is what I’ve found:

Zooomr’s strengths seem to lie in a more geographically and socially oriented navigation. When you log in you are presented with your friend’s photos, everyone’s photos and photos taken nearby you. Geotagging a photo is easy and is done within Zooomr, while with Flickr you have to use an outside geotagger like Yuan.CC.maps (which is nearly as easy to use). Photos are also arranged by who’s in them, resulting in a “popular” category in the top menu. If you want to look for photos and don’t have a particular tag in mind, you are given the choice of most-recently uploaded pictures and…well, that’s about it. Oh, you can also see who has uploaded the most photos, but I really don’t see the point in that, or the “famous” category for that matter.

Zooomr also has trackbacks, though there is no list of them on the multiple photo pages. You have to go to each and every photo page to see them, and, at least in my experience, they are mostly spam. Supposedly this is the reason Flickr has been hesitant to implement them, and I can understand why. Mark told me that the trackbacks were implemented when someone suggested them to the guy who runs the show over there. He wrote a few lines of code in a few minutes and viola! -trackbacks. But they don’t seem to work very well. Even when Mark linked to one of my pictures, people were obviously finding the photo through it, yet the trackback itself never showed up.

Zooomr’s photo presentation is busier and (I think) uglier than Flickr’s. While the Flickr design leaves white space around the photo and lets it be the most striking thing on the page, Zooomr crowds things around it and includes the distracting tri-colored banner at the top and grey sidebars.

Mark claims that Flickr adds filtering to photos, but all the examples he has raised involve resizing, which of course will change the parameters of any photo. I’ve looked very closely at photos on my hard drive as compared with original-sized photos on Flickr, and I can’t say that I’ve seen any differences. Nothing noticeable anyway. Doesn’t mean that there aren’t any, but if I can’t tell it’s there, it might as well not be.

Perhaps it is because I am used to navigating the Flickr world, but even after several weeks of using Zooomr, I never really got into it. There aren’t any groups that I can see, something I find it hard to do without for looking at a bunch of photos on one subject. It wasn’t easy to explore Zooomr photos, nothing led me on from photo to photo the way Flickr’s groups and user communities do. I suppose it could be that Zooomr has such a system, but due to the lack of a FAQ or help section I have no way of finding it.

Speaking of exploring, one huge advantage Flickr has over Zooomr (and other sites) is its Explore feature, using its “Interestingness” formula. I have found a great deal of exquisite photography using this feature, pictures and users and sets and groups that I never would have found otherwise (The Flickr blog is also great for this). And I’d like to think others have found my pictures using this feature as well. Searching for photos, you can view the search results ranked by “interestingness,” “most recent” or “most relevant.” With Zooomr, you can search for tags, and that’s it.

Another thing, obviously, is the fact that a whole lot more people are on Flickr than are on Zooomr. On Flickr I get views, comments and favorites on a daily basis, but most people I’ve seen on Zooomr have “oops, this user hasn’t faved any photos yet.” Occasionally I’ll get a couple of views, the odd comment. Yesterday I got linked to by Thomas Hawk, the guy who occasionally gets yelled at by building security guards. Which is something. But on the whole, it seems that the same factors that seem to be holding me back from getting more into the photography of other users on Zooomr are preventing other users from seeing my stuff as well.

All in all, while Zooomr is a valiant effort with interesting functionality, it seems that, while Zooomr puts the emphasis on physical place and who is in the picture, Flickr puts the emphasis on the photography itself, making it easier to go in and find good photos as well as good photographers from all over the world. The superior presentation, the groups, and just the sheer explorability of photography on Flickr win me over.

Let’s just hope that Yahoo! can preserve and nurture Flickr in the future. After seeing the rape and pillaging of Geocities, eGroups and other previously useful services at their bloody little hands, I have my doubts. Thus my interest in other services, as well as the fact that Ernie‘s gone off to “find himself” or something and is no longer at Yahoo! to help me retrieve mysteriously changed passwords. Flickr is far, far better than Yahoo! photos. In fact, there’s no real reason for Yahoo! to keep that part of its service any more. What remains to be seen is how they treat Flickr. A great many people have a huge amount at stake in this question.

While I will keep using Zooomr, I feel that right now, Flickr is still the best online photo service for my needs, and probably worth sticking to for a good while yet.

Haven’t felt like blogging in a while. Felt like crap through the Chinese New Year holiday, a situation not improved by the constant barrage of fireworks out my window. So that period, which I had planned to use to get most of the film editing done, was basically a washout.

Last weekend the Muddy Basin Ramblers got together after a long hiatus down by the riverside for a jam to get back into the swing of things. I, for one, needed it, as I’ve gotten out of practice. The cops would swing by occasionally, and eventually they told us, very politely, to stop playing. The fireworks, of course, went on unabated.

The next night, resigned to sleeplessness, I went down to the riverside to take some pictures, but it started raining, harder and harder until it was a real downpour, effectively silencing the fireworks. Hallelujah! Finally, a decent night’s sleep.

Now, well into the week, the summer-like temperatures have ended, and we’re back to a wintry 11 degrees and the usual greyness.

In other news, Chen Shui-bian seems to have passed the bedroom mirror one too many times and realized that he can now be the kind of president he has always wanted to be, i.e. the kind of president that he and his party spent a great deal of time and effort over the course of many years convincing moderate voters he wouldn’t be so that they would vote for him. Now that he doesn’t need the votes and a bit short in the legacy department at this late date, he’s been keeping busy changing the names of the airport, the post office, stamps, companies that have “China” or “Chinese” in their names, and getting rid of the memory of Chiang Kai-shek, which apparently includes changing the CKS Memorial Hall to the “Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall” (Democracy Memorial? Is Democracy dead? Ah, Democracy, we hardly knew ye.) and tearing down the lovely shady verandas and ornate gates we’ve enjoyed for nearly three decades. Why not just let the missiles do the job for free? Come on, get with the program.

To make sure the US is clear about any obligation it might have felt about to help defend Taiwan in case of a PRC attack, Chen has also thrown his twice-declared “Five Noes” campaign promises/inauguration speeches out the window and is gunning for formal independence with a speech made at a recent pro-independence FAPA meeting, which went so far as to tell the US to shove off and stop interfering with “Taiwan’s internal affairs.”

Ironically, Chen’s unilateral and undemocratic actions of late, all seeming in the name of “Democracy,” seem like they’re softening Taiwan up for rule by the PRC. The party dictates who is publicly admired and who is not? Check. The party dictates the names of organizations and companies? Check. References to political enemies removed from public view? Check (the PRC agrees with the DPP about CKS, so that fits as well). Telling the US to stop meddling in “internal affairs”? Check. Try to move the capital to your political base and to disassociate yourself with your political opposition? Check. Fanning the flames of an old outrage/massacre/incident to whip up a sense of victimization and indignation at your perceived political enemies? Check. Today’s DPP is feeling more and more like the KMT of old, and their tactics seem to have come out of Zhongnanhai itself.

Actually, you’d think that Beijing would want Taiwan to de-sinify itself. No more of that pesky “Free China” or “the other China” business. China would be completely and irrevocably communist and under Beijing’s control. If it weren’t for the threat of other regions wanting to split away as well as the economic ties and strategic considerations and public sentiment…well, ok, I suppose it would be expecting too much for them to take that view. But it does make one think about all of those people who do believe in the idea of “Free China” especially those who fought and sacrificed everything for it, how they must feel to see certain parties belittle their efforts and try to undo everything they ever believed in. Not that they were angels, but to fight a very nasty war against the Japanese and then the Communists, and then give up any hope of ever going home is surely worth something.

Someone on Forumosa mentioned that he feared that if Ma Ying-jeou won the presidency in 2008, it would be Taiwan’s last free election. But I’m thinking at this point that we’ll be lucky to get another free election if the greens win again. Indeed, if Chen doesn’t make his traditional turnaround this time in the face of international opposition to his latest tactics, we’ll be lucky to have even the 2008 election, for, in their strange way, Chen and the DPP are campaigning harder for unification now than the KMT ever did.

It would be hilarious if the possible ramifications of his recklessness weren’t so potentially disastrous. But hey, if we can make Charles Hong of Akron, Ohio happy, who are we to fear any repercussions?

Haven’t felt like blogging in a while. Felt like crap through the Chinese New Year holiday, a situation not improved by the constant barrage of fireworks out my window. So that period, which I had planned to use to get most of the film editing done, was basically a washout.

Last weekend the Muddy Basin Ramblers got together after a long hiatus down by the riverside for a jam to get back into the swing of things. I, for one, needed it, as I’ve gotten out of practice. The cops would swing by occasionally, and eventually they told us, very politely, to stop playing. The fireworks, of course, went on unabated.

The next night, resigned to sleeplessness, I went down to the riverside to take some pictures, but it started raining, harder and harder until it was a real downpour, effectively silencing the fireworks. Hallelujah! Finally, a decent night’s sleep.

Now, well into the week, the summer-like temperatures have ended, and we’re back to a wintry 11 degrees and the usual greyness.

In other news, Chen Shui-bian seems to have passed the bedroom mirror one too many times and realized that he can now be the kind of president he has always wanted to be, i.e. the kind of president that he and his party spent a great deal of time and effort over the course of many years convincing moderate voters he wouldn’t be so that they would vote for him. Now that he doesn’t need the votes and a bit short in the legacy department at this late date, he’s been keeping busy changing the names of the airport, the post office, stamps, companies that have “China” or “Chinese” in their names, and getting rid of the memory of Chiang Kai-shek, which apparently includes changing the CKS Memorial Hall to the “Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall” (Democracy Memorial? Is Democracy dead? Ah, Democracy, we hardly knew ye.) and tearing down the lovely shady verandas and ornate gates we’ve enjoyed for nearly three decades. Why not just let the missiles do the job for free? Come on, get with the program.

To make sure the US is clear about any obligation it might have felt about to help defend Taiwan in case of a PRC attack, Chen has also thrown his twice-declared “Five Noes” campaign promises/inauguration speeches out the window and is gunning for formal independence with a speech made at a recent pro-independence FAPA meeting, which went so far as to tell the US to shove off and stop interfering with “Taiwan’s internal affairs.”

Ironically, Chen’s unilateral and undemocratic actions of late, all seeming in the name of “Democracy,” seem like they’re softening Taiwan up for rule by the PRC. The party dictates who is publicly admired and who is not? Check. The party dictates the names of organizations and companies? Check. References to political enemies removed from public view? Check (the PRC agrees with the DPP about CKS, so that fits as well). Telling the US to stop meddling in “internal affairs”? Check. Try to move the capital to your political base and to disassociate yourself with your political opposition? Check. Fanning the flames of an old outrage/massacre/incident to whip up a sense of victimization and indignation at your perceived political enemies? Check. Today’s DPP is feeling more and more like the KMT of old, and their tactics seem to have come out of Zhongnanhai itself.

Actually, you’d think that Beijing would want Taiwan to de-sinify itself. No more of that pesky “Free China” or “the other China” business. China would be completely and irrevocably communist and under Beijing’s control. If it weren’t for the threat of other regions wanting to split away as well as the economic ties and strategic considerations and public sentiment…well, ok, I suppose it would be expecting too much for them to take that view. But it does make one think about all of those people who do believe in the idea of “Free China” especially those who fought and sacrificed everything for it, how they must feel to see certain parties belittle their efforts and try to undo everything they ever believed in. Not that they were angels, but to fight a very nasty war against the Japanese and then the Communists, and then give up any hope of ever going home is surely worth something.

Someone on Forumosa mentioned that he feared that if Ma Ying-jeou won the presidency in 2008, it would be Taiwan’s last free election. But I’m thinking at this point that we’ll be lucky to get another free election if the greens win again. Indeed, if Chen doesn’t make his traditional turnaround this time in the face of international opposition to his latest tactics, we’ll be lucky to have even the 2008 election, for, in their strange way, Chen and the DPP are campaigning harder for unification now than the KMT ever did.

It would be hilarious if the possible ramifications of his recklessness weren’t so potentially disastrous. But hey, if we can make Charles Hong of Akron, Ohio happy, who are we to fear any repercussions?