Weekend in Qingdao

My weekend: 3 hour delay on flight to Qingdao, 20RMB all you can drink beer at rooftop bar at hostel, breakfast (with bbq eggs/omelette/sausages) included, beer museum/factory, no available cabs anywhere, forgot to charge my camera batteries, afternoon drinking at the beer festival, meat on a stick, Dairy Queen, running into the Shanghai rugby team at a German bar, missing the ABs game because it was too late (Australia network screened it an hour late, and cut off the anthems and haka, jerks), more bbq breakfast, pretty awesome old Governor's residence, not being able to find my friends (two cabs required), thunderstorm, 9 hours at airport, 1st class lounge, 5 hour delay, home by 04:30. Some of these things were super fun, some were really not. 

This was going to be a status update (but turns out it's way too long), so sorry for the rushed narrative.

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Finally, vindication!

Anybody who has ever had to live with me or make an appointment with me early in the morning knows that I am not a morning person.  No matter how much it would improve my standard of life, I just can't go to bed early, even if I have to get up a few hours later.  I have real trouble going to sleep before midnight, and even when I have to get up at 8am (or before), I'm usually falling asleep between 1am and 2am.  When left to my own devices, I stay up until the sun rises, and then feel guilty and go to sleep (usually until sometime in the early, or late, afternoon).

I came across a link to a study today that shows that being an early bird is not necessarily better at all.  The study showed that while attention levels were about the same for early birds and night owls 1.5 hours after waking up, night owls performed quite a lot better than their early rising counterparts 10.5 hours after waking.  This only confirms what I suspected, though.  My boss is an early riser, and he's quite often quite useless when it comes to about 5pm.  I'm still wide awake until not long before I go to bed.  (Though it does say that early birds feel more rested more easily, which also correlates with my experience.)

There was no real difference between the early birds and the night owls in their performance on the morning test. But the evening test was a different story: night owls were less sleepy and had faster reaction times than early birds. (Just to emphasize, 'evening' was a relative term: it was a different actual time for each group, but the exact same 10.5-hours-after-waking for both early birds and night owls.) So even though both groups were sleeping and waking according to their preferred schedule, night owls generally outlasted early birds in how long they could stay awake and mentally alert before becoming mentally fatigued. 

So, early birds on high horses, you can climb on down now. 

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Anniversaries of sorts

For whatever reason, I realised that today is the 5th anniversary of one of the incarnations of one of my blogs.  When I started using Blogger, I was working for a hospital back home in Auckland, and there really wasn't a hell of a lot to do (besides start a new blog and sign up for Facebook - hey, that means I've been on Facebook for five years too).  I was also waitressing part time (I actually really enjoyed that job, and the people), and in the middle of the first winter I'd had at home since I left New Zealand in 2000.  Going back even further, I started blogging in July 2002, using Diaryland, a service which I am surprised to find still has my old blog online.  Oddly, when I started that one, I was also doing a full time admin job (in Edinburgh) and working part time hospitality (in a sketchy sketchy nightclub in Leith).  Looking back on the first couple of posts makes me smile because I was only 21 and all excited about life in Scotland (which I continue to be every time I visit).

I'm not quite sure where I'm going with this, except that maybe I'm feeling a little nostalgic these days.  I'm coming up to two years in Shanghai, 10 years on the road (with breaks), my 30th birthday, and some significant upcoming changes in my life, so I guess it's not surprising.  Seems a bit crazy to think that I've been a citizen of the world for so long, but I like to think I've fit a reasonable amount of good times into the last 10 years of my life (even a little bit of stability!).  It's been really nice reflecting on the people and the places I've been around at different stages of my life, and kinda wonderful to realise that a lot of them are still very close friends of mine, even though all of our lives have changed pretty significantly since.

Thanks, friends. I love you!

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Picasa facial recognition is freaking me out

I decided to play around with the 'People' feature on Picasa (Google's photo management software), and it's been eerily accurate (besides a couple of mistaken suggestions where it thought that my (male) friend was me, but since I've tagged him, there have been no further confusions).  All you have to do is name a person once and it will happily go through and find a major proportion of the pictures they are in.  The more often you confirm something the program is unsure about, the more accurate it gets.  I even tried tagging a picture of a friend where she is making this crazy expression, and just based on that the program has pulled out over 50 pictures of her, in all sorts of poses, good and bad lighting, weird expressions or not.  The only one it got wrong was actually her sister.

I'm both impressed and a little scared by the technology.  Not that I have a problem with it going through and finding all my friends, but I'd prefer to keep it local (that is, on my computer).  The default setting for the People feature is to synch with your address book, adding email addresses etc.  And you can't even delete an email address once it has been added (I chose to just change them to fake ones after I discovered this).  I love Google, but I don't want to give them detailed information about what all my friends look like.  Scary thing is, there's no way to prevent anyone else from doing this.  I can just imagine that sometime in the future (or even now) they'll be able to scan security footage or Google Earth images and be like 'Yes, we're 99.99998% sure that that's joeblogs@gmail.com. We know exactly how many times a week he goes to the supermarket/hairdresser/bookie/adult shop.'  

Note: I am taking some inspiration from the National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo - and I hope never ever to say that out loud) people who are posting one post a day for a month, except that I now have four blogs, so will try to post one post a day over those four.  This one is gonna end up being the one with the random leftover stuff (not about life in China or about language), so apologies in advance.

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New year short shorts

I had a great trip to Hong Kong, despite the unseasonal cold and rain down there.  I wanted to upload some pictures and videos and whatnot, but the internet situation continues to put those things in the 'too difficult' pile.

Luckily, Jessica has posted some.  Enjoy some footage of the special gymnastics team of the Paris fire brigade.  They must have been cold and wondering why they were performing for a handful of random Chinese people in the deep dark New Territories.

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Credit, I guess

I was at the airport on the way back from Hong Kong the other day when I stumbled across this book, which has one of my pictures on the cover.  I flicked through to see if any of my other pictures had been used, and another one of them had.  I guess I'm a published photographer now. 

I've got a bit of an issue with this book, though.  Even though I got a credit at the end of the book, and I knew that it was just going to be a submission to a Facebook group book that I would never see any royalties from, I never actually got any kind of notification or thanks from the author for it.  I wrote her a kind of passive-aggressive email about it when I saw my picture on the cover of the pre-release, and she wrote back to say that the cover wasn't finalised (the print version is the same as the pre-release image), and that everyone would get an email after everything was confirmed.  No such email.  Guess it just fell by the wayside.

I think the FB friend request from her may have been a mistake, like one of those scan your email account for familiar addresses and add them kind of thing, but maybe ignoring it was the wrong thing to do.

Oh well.  It's still sort of cool, I suppose.

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W(eather)TF.

OK, so I haven't posted since I got back from my holiday last year.  It's been cold and busy in Shanghai, and lots of exciting/crazy/delicious things have happened in the last few months.  I have been having a bumper blogging day today (although this is the only personal thing I've posted), but this will be short.  I'm due in a meeting right now.

I just wanted to say, what the hell, Google Weather?  I don't even know what this icon means!  It's a whole new different kind of yucky weather.  Also, I'm going to Hong Kong for Chinese New Year tomorrow, and while it's a balmy, sunny 26 degrees today, tomorrow will plummet down to 12.  Joy.  Oh well, at least it will be warmer than here.

恭喜发财!  新年快乐!  Happy year of the tiger.  Whee.

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Some numbers...

So I'm back in the office in Shanghai, and the sun is shining in a blue sky, which is a pretty rare event.  I'd love to be outside since it's a reasonable temperature these days, but here I am getting settled back into the job, with a new boss and a new direction.  I'm actually hopeful, though, which is great.  I'm about to move into an actual office (no more open plan working for me!) and apparently the new boss can get me a deal on a goosedown underlay for the winter.  It'll be like sleeping in a cloud.

I had a wonderful holiday back in the southern hemisphere, and caught up with a lot of people, all of whom it was fantastic to see.  Of course I wish I'd had more time, but hey.  Once you see how many people I had to see, you'll see why the schedule was so tight.  I promise more catch ups when I retire.

So, here is a summary of my holiday in numbers:

• 20 days
• 10 flights (1 cancelled)
• 3 countries
• 6 towns/cities (1 was just a layover)
• 4 journeys to Hong Kong International Airport; 3 to Melbourne; 3 to Sydney
• 6 time zones (if you include changing times for daylight savings twice)
• 11 - 30 degrees Celsius (approx)
  
• 19 family members
• 69 friends and friends-of-friends (and the new people were all lovely!)
• 2 runnings into on the street
  
• 20.2kg in my backpack on the way home (including 2L of 42 Below)
• 12.5kg of extra belongings in a box put in the post
• 1 upgrade to business class (first time in nearly 9 years of travelling!), but only for 2 hours
  
• Countless hugs and kisses, and not enough time, or flat whites.

Thanks to everyone who made the effort to see me (including the ones who wanted to, but couldn't), especially those who let me stay at their places, helped me organise things, and gave me directions.  Miss you all already.

[Image: Blue sky over Bondi, Bondi Beach, Sydney]

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The truth about spam: "Fw: FUNNY" is not as funny as you think

Getting nonsensical, unentertaining, "inspirational" or otherwise worthless emails forwarded to me, often by virtual (ha) strangers or long-ago workmates, is one of my pet peeves.  The obvious reason is that I don't find them interesting or worthwhile, I have better ways to use my time, and I don't care.  The less obvious reason is that I am fairly protective of my own privacy, and I don't want my email address handed over to complete strangers, especially the kind of strangers who will further propagate the sort of emails that I hate, or worse, not be actual people.  Why don't you just give them my phone number, address, and bank account details while you're at it?  Come to think of it, I received a 'warning' email today which included, not just a whole mess of email addresses, but all sorts of personal contact information contained in footers.  Be careful, people!

Before I launch into full rant mode, I'd like to pass the mic over to my completely wonderful, yet easy irritated, friend Dave, who wrote what he intended to be a passive-aggressive response to receiving an illogical but apparently compulsive forwarded email, and actually produced a well-written, educational missive about one of the dangers of the internet.  Like I said to him, if it were more succinct, I might be tempted to put it on a t-shirt. 

I have removed the names and email addresses, because I am a considerate person.  If people really feel the need, the absolute, unavoidable compulsion to send me random crap (and I'm not talking about things you know I'll actually appreciate), for the love of God, learn how to use the bcc: option.  Please. 

Anyway, please read the following message, and feel free to pass it on to your favourite quasi-spammers.  Perhaps encourage them to read the whole thing by saying that something hilarious will happen when they scroll right to the end.

Hi there [name removed to protect baby seals] et al.,

Just so you're aware, it's physically impossible for anything 'funny' to happen if you forward a message to a certain number of people. All that will happen is that people will forward it hoping that something will happen. Which, as I'm sure you now know from forwarding this message, it never will. It just results in a whole bunch of spam being thrown around the internet.

But what's more, all the email addresses that people are forwarding to will be harvested by spam bots, giving spammers a whole bunch more addresses to send their "make your penis bigger!", "FREE viagra!" and "find hot prostitutes near you" emails. Thus these will start flooding your inbox, along with the emails with malware and worm attachments that can really fuck your stuff up.

It's actually quite a clever spam technique - promising the uninitiated users that something 'hilarious' will happen if they forward it to enough people. If you look below at the forwarded message, you'll see all those blue underlined links, all those email addresses to whom "[name removed even though he was one of the forwarders at fault]" sent it out to... well, as soon as this email is returned to a spammer, they can just copy all those addresses onto their database and know that these addresses have real people on the end of them, and so add them to their list of people to send out all their spam. They can also sell the list of email addresses to other spammers. This is actually how most spam email actually gets their millions of target users.

Emails are just strings of letters and numbers being sent through electronic communication channels... there's no physical way that forwarding, replying, or doing anything to the messages will result in any 'cool' thing happening.

So, as a general rule of thumb - only ever forward emails if you actually want or need to forward them. For example, if it's information that you want somebody else to see - that is to say, the intended use of the forwarding feature.

I am sorry if this sounds passive aggressive or preachy, but... well... it's a bit annoying, see. Because now if any of the other 6 people to whom you also forwarded this message (that is, [names removed because it wasn't their fault]) then forward it on to a bunch of other people, it'll be my email address added to the spam list. And then, if any of those people then forward it on to another bunch of people, my address will be propagated again and again and again, etc., etc., ad nauseam. In effect, by forwarding these kinds of emails to your friends, you are actively increasing the amount of spam they get.

So. If you ever get an email and are encouraged to forward it to a certain amount of people - whether it promises something cool, or promises that it will save the life of an African child with every person you forward it to, or promises that it will increase the chance of finding your one true love... the best thing to do is delete it, or just move it to your spam folder. Because that's what it is. Spam. Nothing else. You could always forward it to a bunch of people who you don't really like, and laugh at the fact that they're going to get a lot more spam, but again, your email address is still going to be propagated on that list just by engaging in any kind of forwarding activity.

Sadly, because the vast majority of people are completely unaware of the underhand tactics that spammers use to build up these lists of verified, active email addresses, spam now accounts for over 90% of all email traffic online. Check out this section of the Wikipedia article on spam, if you like (with cited sources): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spam#As_a_percentage_of_the_total_volume_of_e-mail

All the best, and hope you're well.

Dave [name retained to acknowledge the awesome]

2009/9/7 [name removed to reduce global warming]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: [name removed to save the whales]
Date: Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 4:49 PM
Subject: Fw: FUNNY
To: [names removed for the sake of my conscience]

 

----- Original Message -----

From: [name removed to protect the innocent]

To: [name removed for an ideal future]

Sent: Monday, September 07, 2009 10:04 AM

Subject: Fw: FUNNY

 

----- Original Message -----

From: [name removed for the sake of the children]

To: [names removed for world peace]

Sent: Sunday, September 06, 2009 10:55 AM

Subject: FW: FUNNY

 

---

I don’t normally forward these but will give this a try.

---

 

---

Forward this to at least 7 people and see what happens on your screen . you will laugh your head off!!!!!!!!!!! This is the coolest thing I have ever received. All you have to do is send it to 7 people and watch your screen, it is the funniest clip. I can't tell you what it is but I was laughing so hard I almost fell off my chair!!! So, send it to those 7 people and watch. If you forward it to 7 people a video comes on your screen.. This works. I don't know how...but it works.

[It does not work.  No matter how much you want something hilarious to happen to these bouncing bikini-ed beach bunnies.]

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Get your wallet out - it's for a good cause

So, I take a while to clean out my inbox sometimes.  If I don't act on something straight away, it tends to get buried until I manage to shuffle through everything in sporadic bursts of what seems like productivity.

I received an email a while ago from my friend Bjorn asking for sponsorship for a 2.8km cross-harbour swim, in support of Surf Lifesaving NZ.  It's for a great cause, especially in a place like NZ (and, similarly, Australia), where the beaches are unpopulated, beautiful, and sometimes dangerous. 

From his sponsorship page:

Ive signed up as a charity swimmer to raise money to support Surf Life Saving New Zealand. By donating through my web page you are helping to save lives with Surf Life Saving. THE EVENT IS ON THE 21st NOVEMBER 2009

I'll do all the hard work (train for and complete the 2.8km Auckland Harbour Swim as part of the Sovereign New Zealand Ocean Swim Series) but I really need your help to make a difference so that everyone can enjoy New Zealands favorite playground safely.

So, please sponsor me?

Select the "Make a donation" button below. It's simple, fast and totally secure and the money goes directly to Surf Life Saving New Zealands bank account.

If you live in New Zealand your donation is tax deductible and a receipt will be issued.

So please help me today! And pass it on to everyone you know!

I spent a few years in my youth patrolling the beach, but my experience being stuck in the bush fires in Melbourne reminded me what a fantastic job all the volunteers in SLS do.

Good luck with the training, Bjorn!  Click here to donate, especially if you were in the bush fires or have ever needed help on the beach.  Do it.

Also, I posted this on my Facebook page the other day, but you still have one more day to donate to Becks's head getting shaved in support of the Leukaemia & Blood Foundation.  She has to deal with the discomfort of a cold, bald, head, so donating is the least you can do. :)

This isn't intended to be a guilt trip or blatant advertising.  If I can encourage one person to donate something to any good cause, then it's worth the few minutes I took to do this.  If you have no ties to these organisations, there are countless others out there.  Donate some money, time, clothing, expertise, or blood to an (appropriate) aid, research, or charity organisation soon.  You won't regret it. 

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