Which means I’m home alone.

It’s been awhile since I’ve been home alone. So, since I don’t have anything better to do, I thought I’d share why I couldn’t stand the sci-fi movie Battle LA.

See, Battle LA isn’t a good movie.

Aaron Eckhart is a good actor, but the movie is bad.

Disappointedly bad.

There’s all sorts of reasons why it sucks.

It has a 35% on Rotten Tomatoes, and honestly, that’s generous.

So while there’s all sorts of legitimate reasons to think it sucks, my reason, admittedly, is somewhat ridiculous: My reason is geography. Battle LA is really, really bad at geography.

Not just a little; not just a few gaffes here & there, but a lot.

Like you-had-to-try-to-make-it-this-bad bad.

Let’s start with the beginning. There is where the attack of Battle LA begins.

Only, see that pier? That’s Santa Monica Pier.

Santa Monica Pier is in, you guessed it, Santa Monica. Not Los Angeles.

So really, it should be Battle Santa Monica.

But okay, that’s a nit-pick.

A lot of people outside Southern California would think of Santa Monica as at least part of the Los Angeles area.

And, as seen here, they once they arrive at their destination, Santa Monica aiport, they acknowledge they’re in Santa Monica.

Let’s move forward to the briefing. Santa Monica has been evacuated. (Good to know I would have made it out safe.) The military has established a perimeter at Lincoln Blvd & everything west of it will be bombed. This is an important point. A point that will drive a lot of plot, so let’s highlight where that area is.

As the briefing continues, they say there’s civilians who need to be rescued at the police station at Venice & Amarosa.

Okay, so there’s no police station there, but movies often make up specific buildings. We’ll give them this one as well.

But I’ve never heard of Amarosa. But I know Venice Blvd.

Venice Blvd, believe it or not, is in Venice.

Not Santa Monica.

But let’s see the map he pulls out to navigate:

A map of Culver City.

Okay, so here’s going to travel to Santa Monica to find a street that’s actually in Venice… using a map of Culver City.

Right.

Nevertheless, they find it. Considering their methods, fairly impressive.

So after the rally point, they need to head to the police station.

Only…wait, that’s West Los Angeles police station. How the heck did they teleport to the West LA Police Station, some 3 miles east of them?!

Okay, but now look again!

See the palm trees? The ocean? You can’t see that in West LA. They’re back in Santa Monica. In fact, I think I know what building they’re looking at & it almost looks like they’re standing atop my apartment building.

Pretty impressive the military can teleport like that.

Moving on they find a bus. Only one problem: It’s orange.

Santa Monica buses aren’t orange. They’re blue.

They’re blue all over the city.

And the damn bus system is called the Big Blue Bus.

Kinda hard to get that one wrong.

Okay, but hey, look! They at least got the map right now! It’s a Santa Monica map.

But they have a new problem: bombing is 40 minutes away. Much concern. Being in the bombing zone, they’ll all be killed.

But wait. They’re not in the bomb zone. The movie went out their way to give very specific (albiet contradicting) locations.

Either they’re in West Los Angeles, or they’re at the location on 10th street. Both are east of Lincoln & out of the bombing zone.

So what’s the problem?

Anyway, they decide to drive the bus to the airport.

But it’s “25-35 minutes” to the airport. Jokes about LA traffic aside, even with traffic that’s a 10-15 minute drive.

And remember, Santa Monica’s been evacuated except for 5 civilians hiding in a non-existant police station. So there’s shouldn’t be any traffic.

Nevertheless, they get on the I-10 freeway.

Right.

Because if aliens attacked you’d want to be on elevated freeway, one that is mostly like clogged, the one that is the most likely to be damaged, the one that could collapse & the one the leaves you the most exposed to attack.

But let’s proceed.

Kindly, the movie tells us where they’re headed.

Wait, they’re going west? They only thing west is the ocean!

And the airport is to the east!

And how are there building off in the distance if they’re headed west?

Did someone build them in the middle of the ocean?

Does the 10 now drive off mysteriously in the middle of the ocean?

Okay, but let’s say they’re heading west. They get to their exit & discover it destroyed.

Hey, that’s Overland!

That’s a good several miles east of the airport!

It’s all the way on the other side of the 405. How the hell did they get there?

Okay, so exit destroyed, they say they’ll go to the next one: Roberston.

What?! That means they’re heading east!

If they were at Overland, they were east of their location & needed to be heading west. What the hell is going on?

Anyway, they get back to Santa Monica airport & once again, they’re worried about getting bomb.

But Santa Monica airport is waaaaayyyyyy east of Lincoln. So what the heck?

At this point, I gave up.

Think a few intersections near you. Easy, right? Now think of a few intersections that wouldn’t make sense. You had to think for a moment, right? So why would they go out of their way to screw all of this up?

When I first saw the Matrix, I still lived in Chicago got a kick out of the intersections used. Wells & Lake, Balbo, Wabash. The Wachowski brothers being from Chicago had used real Chicago intersections. Not a big deal. But they got it right.

Hollywood lives in Los Angeles. Heck, a lot of Hollywood lives in Santa Monica. They *know* these roads. These are the roads they take to get home every day to work, to the store, to go out to eat. So why would Hollywood go through the extra effort to give locations that don’t make any sense? And if they’re wrong, why go jump through hoops to show maps & exact locations on-screen?

One last thing.

The reason the scientist gives for the attack is “they want our water. No where else in the universe is water in liquid form.”

Hang on a minute.

Ice is all over the universe. Europa is covered in it. Comets typically contain water.

But the problem the aliens have — aliens who have spaceships, lasers & can travel across vast spaces in the universe — is they can’t melt the ice?

They have rockets, but they can’t figure out how to apply heat & turn ice into liquid water?

That’s the reason?

*sigh*

I hope Christy comes home soon.

A lot of my work these days is done in “the cloud.” I use it extensively at work & home. Gmail was good enough to get me to switch away from Thunderbird, and I’m sold on how Google Docs makes it possible to access my docs anywhere, not to mention to making it easy to collaborate. (ProTip: If you’re getting married, Google Docs is a huge time saver.)

With that, I was surprised to find it still took a bit of time to setup my new machine. It seems I still rely a fair bit on local application & resources.

To make my life easier in the future, here’s the steps I need to go through.

On the new machine:

Install:

• Omnifocus
• Chrome
• Adium
• Emacs
• Dropbox
• SlimBatteryMonitor
• Quicksilver
• SynergyKM

Setup:

• Copy my Documents folder. Interestingly, most of the files hadn’t been modified since 2010 or so. I’ve started even keeping personal notes in Google Docs.




• Copy my resource files: .emacs, .bashrc, .bash_profile, & .bash/. I split out a lot of files in .bash & dynamically load certain things based upon the environment (e.g., home vs work).




• Setup iTunes
• Login/authorize.


• Copy music. Apple’s “Home Sharing” made it really easy. I sorted by my ratings & imported anything with 3 stars or above.
• Subscribe to: The Adam Carolla Show, NBC’s Meet the Press, Car Talk, Planet Money, Savage Love, Stack Exchange, This American Life, TwiT, TWiG, and the 2+2 Pokercast.



• Change the Finder preferences to display my hard drive & change the icon to Strongbad.


• Move the dock to the right. Set it to auto-hide & smallest size, with magnification enable & maximized.


• Enable remote login (for ssh) and screen sharing (for vnc).


• Copy over my TextMate Macros. I have a few simple macros to create a few standard meeting templates with a timestamp and folding patterns to allow me to collapse notes from a particular meeting.


• Disable & hide bluetooth.


• Run Keychain & have it display an icon in the menubar. This allows easy screen-locking, but I have no idea why this is where the preference is located.

On the old machine:

• De-authorize iTunes & Audible.

Other notes:

• I’ve ditched Growl. It’s now $2, which isn’t much, but I strongly dislike how they went about it. Surprising your community & taking advantage of them is never a good thing.


• Due to issues w/ Emacs & color-theme.el showing funky, I’m going to forge iTerm for a bit & give Terminal another shot.

Anyway, that’s the impression that it left with me at least. Heck, I knew I frustrated the UX designer I worked with, with my waving of the “Data! Data! Data!” flag, so I could see another designer being frustrated. Might he be right? I personally suck at design, after all.

Which is why so surprised when I tried to actually use Twitter’s new feature, lists.

It’s not that it’s bad. It’s terrible.

Like awful awful. Seriously terrible.

Seriously, it’s one of the most dysfunctional things on the web since Scribd launched. It’s like one guy had been cranking out all those shitty Geocities pages, and when it shutdown, he decided his next project would be Twitter lists.

It was one of the occasions, where you wonder if anyone actually used it before it launched?

It’s that bad.

Now, the idea is sound. A really good one, even. In fact, that’s what lead me to discover how terrible the UX is. I wanted to use it.

Some geeks & I are on a mailing list. Someone started a thread about Twitter, handles started to be shared, and soon a list created. A list list, not a twitter list. Well, not yet anyway.

But that’s what occurred to me. I should just create a twitter list of these guys & then everyone can just follow that. Easier for everyone!

So I head over to Twitter, create my list, copy/paste my list of Twitter homies and *boom* problem solved. Yay, Twitter!

Only, you can’t do that. Oh, you can create the list. But adding more than one at a time? Sorry, Charlie. After all, why would you want multiple people on a list? Apparently Twitter things we’re creating lists of one.

I’m half-OCD with lists, but even with me, lists of one is pretty strong. A “mom” list. A “dad” list. And so on. Luckily, I’m not the girl from Mama Mia.

So you have to search for each one. One-by-one. Each one. Even if you already know the handle!

To boot, you can’t just search by handle only. It searches everything. One of your entries have a handle that’s some generic, say “bill.” Well, lucky you, you get to dig through @BillCosby, @renewabill, “Bill Smith”, and so on until you find your entry.

Okay, so you do that. Now you want to add yourself. So you search for your handle. After all, lucky you, your handle is pretty unique (and awesome), so only one result should match.

Only you get none.

Apparently, you can’t search for yourself. So can’t add yourself.

So how the @#&$ do you add yourself to a list?? I really can’t add myself?

At this point I’m starting to suspect retarded web monkeys are out to get me again.

Whatever. My list is done. I send it out.

A short bit later, a few more people respond. More handles to add to the list. Okay, no problem.

I click the list. I look for the add button. Not there.

I click the edit button. Not there.

I click an empty list I created and the add-people thingie is at the bottom. Ah, I have to page down to the bottom. Fair enough.

I page down. Not there.

WTF!? Am I not logged in? I am. Was I logged in before? No, it let me edit the damn list. I had to have been.

I try again anyway. Not there.

This HAS to be possible! For crying out loud, I’m a 36 year old man. I’m an engineer. I’ve worked at Yahoo & Google. I’ve been online for 19 years. I love puzzles, even! I even know how to set the clock on a VCR! Yet I can’t figure this out.

I feel utterly defeated.

I give up & google it. I discover you have to click over to “Find People”, find them again, then click the middle icon, then select the list. Right. Totally obvious.

It turns out you can add yourself too. Click your lists of tweets & then you’ll get the little icon. Because the way you add yourself should be totally different from how you add everyone else, right?

I’m not sure what they were supposed to be do once they were there, but being a fresh grad who didn’t know anything about business & housewares, my ignorance was neither surprising nor a red flag.

Still, I couldn’t help but wonder. I knew a bit about BBSes, my brothers having run a fairly large one in my hometown.

But the main reason for a BBS’s popularity was warez. Sure some users liked to message other members & post to the forums, but only a few & for those things there was a better way now. I was familiar with the Internet from college. Wasn’t it obviously better for communication?

After all, one of my early projects was to shutdown our proprietary, internal-only email-esque system and switch us over to sendmail — to the email that everyone uses today. I hadn’t heard of Metcalfe’s Law, but obviously being able to email anyone was better than being able to email just people in our 30 person office.

You can guess were this is going: Despite ordering tons of schwag for the service, tons of coffee mugs, tons of t-shirts and so on, the service bombed. I don’t remember how many people signed up, but we had 100s of coffee mugs for a user base in the low 10s.

Now flash-forward. It’s 2009. It’s Sunday. A stranger in a strange land, I’m a Chicagoan in Los Angeles. It being football season, what do I want to do on a Sunday morning? You guessed it, watch da Bears.

Only I can’t. At least not on TV. Not with my cable package.

So what do I do? I find it online. (Thanks Moe!)

But it’s a pain to find. The quality isn’t that great. The streaming can be jerky.

And like digital music, I’m perfectly willing to pay a reasonable price.

So why doesn’t the NFL offer online streaming?

Instead, they’re focusing on pushing their NFL package on cable. But cable today is like the BBS was in the early/mid-90s. Sure, there’s lot of action there today, but it’s clear the writing is on the wall. Video is going online.

If I get the expensive cable package, my options on watching are fairly limited. I have to be at home, the package options are limited to what cable providers are willing to carry & so on.

None of that applies online. I’m traveling to Mexico in a few weeks. With an online package, I could get a season subscription to the Bears and still watch it there. They could even offer Tivo like functionality built in, so if I’m late getting home, I can still watch the game from the beginning and catch up. Or the next day.

I could choose to stream the game to my big screen TV, or put it on a second monitor while I work (like I sometimes do with Hulu).

So why would I ever want it on cable as opposed to online?

On the other hand, I guess I should be glad they didn’t setup a NFL BBS.

Tuesday was the LA leg of the Green Day tour. It was also the last leg of the US tour, which is funny as it means I caught the last US show, while my brother, Jimmy in Seattle, caught the first.

Not much to say other than it was a great show. Expectations were set high from Bullet in a Bible and they delivered. Probably my favorite moment was the music for “Longview” started. Billie Joe ask the audience who knows the words & wants to come up on stage & sing it. A lot did, but he decided to pull up a 12 year old kid to sing it, word-for-word. Credit where credit is due, that’s a moment the kid will never forget & he rocked out on stage like he knew it.

I captured a few videos, as did others In fact, looking out over the audience, there were tons of little points of blue light interspersed through crowd, as people held up their cameras to get a shot or record their favorite song. I counted just under 50 before giving up & that’s with only a partial view of the audience.

I look forward to the day when artists embrace the fan content being generated. Imagine a mash-up of the video from the hundreds of cameras, cutting in from the fan watching the whole stage to the fan upfront who’s best friend Billie Joe is pulling up onto the stage. The collection of related videos is easily solved through tagging. The audio gives a means for syncing all the footage starting & stopping at different points (although handling the distortion + other noise (nearby fans shouting) would be hard.

Still, it’d be cool to see.

Anyway, speaking of distortion, here’s the rest of my videos.

• http://me.yahoo.com/wdr1
  
• http://yahoo.com/

The following is an invalid OpenID:

• http://yahoo.com/wdr1

When you get your OpenID from Yahoo, it tells you the ‘http://me.yahoo.com/wdr1′ bit is created.

A bit later, when you access your first OpenID site, and click “Yahoo”, it typically defaults to ‘http://yahoo.com/’.

Remembering the creation process, you add ‘wdr1′ to the end, only to get an error.

Is this something common to OpenID providers or unique to Yahoo’s implementation?

Comparing birthdays, someone asked me mine, “October 15th”, I replied.

“You know what’s funny, is two guys here actually had the same birthday.”

“What date?”

“I don’t know, but one of them was Rob. Oh, here he comes. Rob, when’s your birthday?”

“October 15th.”

25,000,000,0000 divided by 130,728,360 is 191.23.

So what Detroit is asking is that every American taypayer, rich or poor, be forced to give them $191.23 so they can continue to make shitty cars.

And now Nancy Pelosi is saying it’s going to happen. To quote: “I think it’s pretty clear bankruptcy is not an option.”

Can someone please explain why?

Chapter 7 is when you liquidate a company. So far, nobody is talking about that.

Chapter 11 is for reorganization of a company. It’s been in place for ages. Instead of talking down to the public, perhaps Ms. Pelosi could explain why it’s so obvious it’s not an option?

Obviously in the last few weeks I’ve been spending time thinking about my career. One factor I’ve learned that greatly influences happiness at work is the boss. And one factor that made it hard to walk away from TM was I had a pretty good one. Which lead me to recall one one at the other end of the spectrum.

At one of my first jobs, whenever I had something I thought we should do, my boss would ask me to write up a proposal. Not a big deal, but as I was fresh from academia, I would put a lot of effort in making sure it was correct. All of it — the write-up, the spelling, the details, big & small.

This wasn’t for a grade after all, this was The Real World. Things Mattered Now.

But even though grades weren’t issued, I still thought of things that way. So if my boss changed 10% of it, I saw myself as getting a 90%, a “B.”

(Side rant: those of you would consider 90% an “A” are WEAK and were coddled as children. As is grading on a curve. An “A” is 93%-100%, end of story.)

Anyway, each time he’d change it, I’d head back to my desk & attempt to figure out why. He was the boss after all. And the only way you get to be the boss, is you know better, right? In a lot of cases I was confused by the changes, as they looked really wrong, but again, he was boss. My professors knew better, so too must the boss.

Right?

At that point I didn’t really stop to consider his background, or that he wasn’t really technical. He was a nice guy, and liked geek chatter, but his background was HR & finance. I reported to him because it was a small organization, and there really wasn’t a better option.

So this goes on for about six months. Not only does he continue to changes things (which was driving me nuts), but with time, the changes he made proved to bad. Every time.

And finally, I’m starting to catch on. It dawns on me. His background, the geek chatter that often didn’t really make sense, the constant changes regardless of my effort, and so on… he didn’t change things to correct them… he changed things so he’d feel involved!

If you know me well, you’ll know how much the thought of that annoys me. But now knowing the reason, at least I could figure out a way to control it.

I’d complete my proposal to what I thought was perfect. Then I’d find a few small details I didn’t really care about & change them to something completely retarded. I’d take that version to my boss, call his attention to the retarded areas, and ask what he thought. As I left I’d throw out a few ideas, always being sure to close with the ones I’d thought was right.

Invariably, he’d give me back the proposal as expected: the retarded areas changed to what I more or less had in the original & the the rest of the proposal unmolested. The first time it worked I was elated! He was happy, I was happy.

That was my first experience in managing upwards, and for the rest of my tenure we had an excellent working relationship.

One day I noticed that never happened with my mac. I wondered why, grabbed the cable for my headset, and yanked. The volume indicator dropped to zero. I plugged them back in & the volume jumped back. I unplugged again, set the volume to low, plugged in, watched it restore, yanked, and the volume dropped back to low.

So somebody at Apple realized the volume you want with headphones isn’t necessarily the same thing you’d want without headphones. So it detects if headphones are plugged in, and sets the volume to the respective level. It’s a small thing, but it just works. In a lot of ways, that represents what I love about Apple.

(Rumor has it a horrible surprise will await that day. I am roughly aware of the plan & the parties involved. To those foolish enough to contemplate such an endeavor, I only remind you of 1) my history with pranks is longer than all of yours combined, and 2) my willingness to always go one step further than the other guy. You have been warned.)

It was a tough decision to leave the ticket mines, but I was approached with an opportunity that was just too tempting to pass up. I’m actually really excited about it, but I’ll save that for another juncture. The hardest thing in the type of situation is saying goodbye with the people you’ve been working with day-in & day-out for the past few years. A hardship/challenge can split a group apart or pull it tightly together. I’m really proud of how the team — both mine & Ticketmaster as a whole — rallied together to overcome anything put in out way, even in some pretty difficult spots. Bitch all you want about Ticketmaster service fees, but you won’t be able to find anything bad to say about its people.

One thing that does make it easier to move on is knowing everything will be in good hands. It’s hard to not get emotionally invested in things over the course of two years, and handing things to over to competent caretakers certainly helps physiologically.

There is one other thing that helps too: Any transition brings some pain & turmoil and most of mine will be cast upon one Khayman Walker. Yes, it will be the delight I can take in his suffering. His pain is my joy. I like to think of being a Kahn to his Kirk. (Only in a parallel universe where Khan wins, of course.)

Unfortunately, Khayman is sorta smart, so he has some idea of what he’s in for, but I still like to think that several months from now, he’ll be sitting at his desk, all of it fully setting in. He will lean back and scream “Bill! BIIIIIIIILLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!” Man, I’m getting all tingly just thinking about it.

They are driving customers like me away. Straight into the waiting arms of Southwest.

I just booked my Thanksgiving flight through Southwest.

In this case, I don’t even know if they were the cheapest. Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t. I didn’t even check the other airlines.

Why? Well, I’ll be starting a new job, so I’m only about 80% sure of travel dates. I might have to move things a day or so, but I wanted to buy my ticket before Thanksgiving gets any closer, and prices go up even more.

If I do that on Southwest, they’ll let me change my flight as many times as I want. If the new flight costs more, they’ll only charge me the difference. No additional fees. In fact, if the new flight is cheaper, Southwest will even give me a credit.

More or less, over the last 10 years, they’ve built a lot of trust with me. Trust they’ll be reasonable & do the right thing. Yes, they are a corporation & they exist to make a profit. But they realize a key element is to build a loyal customer base, make it clear what you’ll offer, and stick to the expectations you set.

On any other airline, a change in flight would be the difference in fare, plus an additional $50-$100 for the flight change, potentially for each leg.

Now imagine this person is somewhat notable, and a major media outlet comes along to write a story about his political involvement. He’s presented at someone not really involved in politics, but somehow draw to the McCain campaign. In fact, he’s really not even a Republican. He’s a moderate. There’s just some things that McCain gets right that he likes. And Barak… well, he looks off as he attempts to gather his thoughts, just… doesn’t.

Immediately you’re thinking it’s bullshit. It clearly a republican shill, coupled with the deception of Fox News and so on.

Only it’s not.

It’s not Fox News.

And it’s not even a Republican.

It’s the Washington Post & Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.

In a technology article, Kim Hart writes:

Newmark, the founder of craigslist, isn’t even a Democrat. He describes himself as a “Libertarian moderate.”

Which is fairly ridiculous. According to public data, Craig has made $5,250 in political donations to the Democrats. Donations to Barak Obama, John Kerry, Howard Dean, Al Franken, Dick Durbin, and Barbara Boxer.

And not a single penny elsewhere. Not a single penny to a single libertarian candidate. Not a nickel to Ron Paul. Nor a dime to Bob Barr.

Not a single donation to anyone but Democrats.

But he’s not a democrat. No, he’s moderate. You know, middle of the road. Just a middle of the road, undecided kinda guy, who just thought this Democratic nominee was unique. So special, that though he has “nothing to gain”, it was worth his open minded support.

Would you believe this for a second from someone who said they weren’t a Republican? Someone who said they weren’t a Republican, but had contribute over $5,000 to Republicans? To John McCain, George W. Bush, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Bill Frist, and Pat Buchanan?

I don’t mind someone being a Democrats or a Republicans. I don’t mind people supporting either party or even choosing to donate if they have the means & the desire. Heck, that’s all part of the process.

But what I find deceptive is to the present yourself as something else. If you donate exclusively and in large amounts to the Democrats, just say “Yes, I’ve been a Democrat since XXXX. I’m really excited about Obama and here’s why…” If you donate exclusively and in large amounts to Republicans, jusy say “Yes, I’ve been a Republican since XXXX. I’m really excited about McCain and here’s why…”

There’s no need to lie, mislead & distort. I think we can all agree there’s enough of that in politics and it’s disappointing to see it come from Craig Newmark.

If you’ve never heard of Gogol, think “Gypsy Punk” and whatever image comes to your head is pretty much on the money. They are nuts. But nuts often makes for a great live show. And a great show it was.

I snagged a snippet of “Start Wearing Purple.”

(You see a slightly more coherent version here.)

Rick, being the man, was able to snag us backstage passes to boot.

That’s the lead singer in the middle, Eugene Hütz. To the far left is Yuri Lemeshev, the accordion player and a hardcore World of Warcraft player. So in a nutshell, a touring rockstar and a nerd.

I haven’t played WoW in a bit, but I asked him the standard questions about level/race/class and so on. He had a level 70 human warrior and mainly solos. They have WiFi on the tour bus, so he can play & party at the same time. Right now his main focus is grinding to get enough gold for an epic mount.

I think my ears were ringing for the next two days (perhaps proof I’m getting old?), but it was worth it.

Tip to Alcaraz, at least give a little effort to your slop. (Hint: it’s called Wikipedia.)

Walk through pretty much any market & you’ll find loads of knockoffs. Knockoff watches, knockoff video games, and knockoff everything. Passing a stand with a bunch of phones, I was particularly surprised to find a knockoff iPhone! While obviously fake, I was sorta curious how well it worked.

Playing naive, I walked over and asked if that was the iphone. The scent of blood in water exited the salesman, exclaiming “yes!” and, as expected, pulling it out for me to see.

Me: “Oh, it’s in Chinese. I thought the real iPhone was in English?”

Him: “Sir! This is real iPhone! I change language for you.”

A few taps and it’s in English. Poking around, I confirmed what the bottom-right icon suggested. It was a fake written in Java, though not a bad one.

Me: “So this is a real iPhone?”

Him (annoyed): “Sir! I tell you already! This is very real iPhone.”

Me: “It is? But it doesn’t have an Apple logo back on the back”, I say as I turn it over.

Him (more annoyed): “Sir! Real iPhone not have Apple logo on the back!”

Me: “I thought they did?”

Him (annoyed/exasperated): “Sir! Ones with logos are fake! This one is real iPhone!”

Me: “Really?”, I ask, pulling my own iPhone out of my other pocket, “Because mine has the logo.”

Him (eyes wide, excited, and without losing a beat): “I pay YOU six hundred American!”

At this point 3G phones were $300 in the states, so I was stumped as to why anyone would pay me double that for the older phone. It turns out, those were easier to unlock, and, as our coworker-guide explained, they’d be able to turn around and sell it for at least $900, easy.

I couldn’t believe it, but later I saw this sign.

(For reference, one US dollar equals about 7.7 hong kong dollars, so about US$1,182 for the 16gig 3G.)

After careful consideration and analysis of both the marketplace and customer feedback, Adobe plans to discontinue new feature development for FlashPaper. The demand has continually declined to where it is no longer economically viable for Adobe to continue development support for FlashPaper.

Techcrunch: Document startups in chaos as Adobe’s Flashpaper discontinues

Previously. Previously.

Bill: 1, Internet: 0.

Flying into Hong Kong International, I was surprised how easy it was to get to Macau. Just like a stop-over on an international flight, you can transfer to your ferry without going through Hong Kong customs or security. You just hand over your baggage claim tickets from your airline & they even pick them up for you. Pretty sweet.

Macau was a confusing series of streets that twist & turn. Luckily casino’s are all over the place, and as I map showing each casino’s location, they ended up being really good landmarks. The other problem was realizing how small Macau really is. I’d walk for a bit, looking for a street. Unable to find it, I’d get to an intersection & try to find that on that map. I couldn’t find it until I realized I’d crossed half map & walked right off the page I was looking at. Macau is small.

I visited a few of the sites, including Largo do Senado, the Ruins of St. Paul’s and Fortaleza do Monte.

Like in Beijing, the Friendlies where everywhere. You couldn’t throw a rock without hitting one in the head. Although if you do do that Panda here is gonna bust a cap in yo’ ass.

Of course, like Las Vegas, the city completely changes at night & come alive with neon. I gambled a bit while I was there, come out roughly even. Right now, it’s a bit early for Macau to become a travel destination by itself. Give it about 10 years though, and I expect it will truly be the Las Vegas of the East.

Next stop, Hong Kong.

The crazy thing was people were still streaming in from all directions. By the time tickets actually went onsale, it was estimated some 50,000 people had lined up.

It was a crazy 36 hours or so. We were busy through the night and somewhere around 2am we noticed the security forces that had assembled to protect our box office.

One part of the process involved counting batches of 250+ tickets. Around four in the morning, I realized people count sheep to fall asleep. Here I was trying to stay awake, having to count tickets!

With such high demand, things sold at a fairly brisk pace. So when things calmed down, Hui & I decided to head to the Olympic Green, and check out a few of the venues. Unfortunately, the entire area was blocked off by security fences, so we could only take pics from afar.

The last thing I’ll mention involves the elevator of our hotel. In the West, it’s not uncommon to skip the 13th floor. But I still can’t figure out why this particular hotel skipped not just 13, but 2 & 14 as well. I hope it wasn’t a cheap knock off of an elevantor — sorta how a “Rolex” in China might be missing a 5 or 9.

UPDATE: By coincidence, youtube just featured this AFP video about the final onsale.

It was quite an experience. I had to wake up early to travel from Shenzhen to Beijing on the 24th. I was to land at noon, plenty of time to get to the office before things started rolling at 6, but checking my blackberry the morning of the flight, I found out at plans shifted to start at 2. I still made it there okay, getting to the office at 1:30.

What followed was madness from there. At the office, we started receiving reports of line lengths at the various venues. The onsale didn’t start until 9am the next morning, and here at 2pm some were estimated to be around 1,000.

Around 7pm, the Bird’s Nest box office request we come over to help if possible.

I don’t how to explain what it was like encountering The Line. The cab passed by & it was immediately obvious there were hundreds, with a constant stream of people flowing in from every direction. I later found what I had seen as a tiny bit, the line wrapping around the corner. Once I rounded that corner, I was shocked. There was easy a 1,000 people.

I tried following the line to find the box office, only to find I was, again, near a small (comparatively) piece of the line, watching it double-back on itself again & again. Only to discover after everything that was in front me, in continued into a giant parking lot. I’ve never seen anything like it.

At that point it was estimated 10,000 people were in line, growing to 50,000 when I left at 5am the next morning. Each box office seemed to have 1,000 people in line, and several now with 10,000. What used to be extremely large had now become the low-end of things.

Security was tight, but well managed. Around 2am I looked up and noticed a wall of police & military were standing shoulder-to-shoulder out front, covering a 200′ length, to block off our box office. The surrounding roads long having but cut off, police cars & military vehicles filled the scene, their the strobing light filling the otherwise dark sky.

There were a few incidents — with crowds of that size it would hard to imagine otherwise, but all in all, it went really smooth. Reports of stampedes in the media were a bit overblow.

All in all, it was success.

Things with the great firewall have changed a bit. Youtube & the english version of Wikipedia are unblocked, but pages such as Tibet & the like are still blocked. It looks like the filter is based on the URL as I could access Chicago, but not Chicago?q=Tibet.

A day after things had calmed down, a coworker arranged for us to visit a tea ceremony and see a bit of a Chinese variety act — magic, singing, kung fu, opera, all in one night. For the magic act, I was called on stage. Another coworker, JD, wrote about it on his blog.

I’ll post some pics of my trip when I can. (I.e., when I can find a micro-usb cable.)

In all likelihood this is my last trip to China for a long while. It’s been interesting. The overwhelming majority of time was work related, but we did squeeze in some fun here & there. I’ll post a follow-up of Beijing must-do’s in a later post.

I followed my footsteps back from the night before, and seeing a flight board, walked over to find my gate. Hmmmm… No Asiana 6118. Hmmm… and no 8:30 flight to Beijing at 8:30. WTF?

It’s then that I realize I’m in arrivals. Shit. Okay, how do I get to departures? I journey farther in, find the escalators, and head up to departures. Time check: 6:45am. Okay, not too bad. Good thing I skipped the breakfast, but damn, I’m starving. Maybe I’ll be able to get something in the lounge.

I ascend to about 8 different banks of check-in columns. Which one is Asiana? Ah, luck is with me, just one to my right. I walk over, find my checkin line, and look at the flight board. Wait. No flight 6118? No 8:30am departure? WTF.

I pull my flight info out my bag. Damnit, I flew LA to Hong Kong on Asiana, but my trip to Beijing is on Cathay Pacific.

I see a nearby airport information desk and ask them where Cathay Pacific is. Just two to my right. I head over, but again no flight 6118. Now this is starting to get annoying. I just double-checked my printout and headed to the CP customer service desk. Ah, code-share. They send me to Dragon Air… the first bank on my left. *sigh*

I check the time as I wait for the 2 people in front of me. Just after 7. Not too bad, but it is an international flight. And the airport is pretty big. Hopefully enough time.

“Welcome to Dragon Air, sir. Your passport, please.”

The frown on her face doesn’t bode well.

“What flight were you on, sir?”

“I’m not sure, but it was Cathay Pacific 6118.”

Type, type, type, type. “Ah, sir, that is a code-share flight. That flight is operated by Air China.”

And where is Air China? The last terminal on the right.

Air China ended up being the correct one, but my lucked continued when I asked if gate 64 was far. “Yes, a bit, sir.” And the lounge? The other direction in gate 16. No soup for me.

I ended up making it, but finding out I had to take a train for gates 33-80 and then the shift change at immigration right after the person in front me didn’t do much to calm my nerves and sorta re-inforced my half-suspicion that Beijing is out to get me.

Hopefully all my bad luck is out of my system. Tomorrow morning will be one of your last chances to buy tickets for the 2008 Olympics. One of my co-workers emailed me to say people are already lining up. Here’s to a smooth onsale.

• Watched 21
  
• Ate dinner
  
• Read a chapter on Cocoa Programming
  
• Took a nap
  
• Caught up on email
  
• Read a few chapters of Dune
  
• Watched the last 6 hours of Shogun
  
• Beat Zuma, start to finish, again
  
• Played first 19 levels of Enigmo
  
• Watched first third of Fool’s Gold
  
• Took another nap
  
• Ate breakfast
  
• Played blackjack on my iPhone
  

Things I learned from Shogun:

• Don’t enter a basement full of Ninja
  
• The battle of Ninja versus Samurai is not a clear as you might think
  
• Editing for length was not popular in the 80s
  

I’m in Hong Kong now (free airport wifi!), headed to Shenzhen shortly. I’ll be there for a few days, then headed up to Beijing, and then, finally, back to Hong Kong for a few days of personal travel.

Sadly, my genuine fake Rolex has fallen apart.

On the flight back from Chicago, a screw suddenly popped out, landing my folex on the floor with a thud. The screw had loosened previously, giving a warning so that I could tighten it. This time it just went in one go, and while everyone was deplaning so I dismissed any hopes of finding the screw and fixing it myself.

I am, however, still debating if I should try to take it to a real Rolex store. The entertainment of that visit alone would be worth the $10 I paid for it. “Look at what Rolex sold me! You call this quality?! Fake? What, do you mean fake!? I paid ten grand for this!”

The lady at the Silk Market swore it was top quality too.

I think I may have been lied too.