Queens For A Day, Part 2

Before my memory goes bad, here is the second set of photos from my recent visit to northern Queens that I decided to share with the blogosphere.



Oh, Scylla!
Back when I lived in LIC, I did not have the ambitious plan of visiting as many different playgrounds as I could. I probably took my niece and nephew to Dutch Kills Playground every time. I did not know about this Charybdis Playground, in the northern part of Astoria Park. Astoria being a mostly Greek town, it is no surprise that a playground is named after a whirlpool in Greek mythology. If you think the heading Oh, Scylla! makes me a Prince fan (Oh Sheila), you are wrong. I just couldn't resist the pun. Instead, I can easily associate Charybdis with the Police song Wrapped Around Your Finger, as in You consider me the young apprentice/Caught between the Scylla and Charybdis

Capture Your Citadel
Putting new words to use is the best way to remember them. My son was reading Knight's Kingdom: The Grand Tournament, a Scholastic Reader Level 4 book, and mispronounced citadel as ker-dat-tle. He unconsciously switched the d and the t and made an incorrect stab at the pronunciation. I corrected him then to reinforce the new knowledge showed him the music video Change Myself by Todd Rundgren. Not only a rock musician, Rundgren was also a pioneer in computer 3D animation, in particular LightWave 3D, which at the time available only for the Amiga computer. In one scene of the music video, as a chess rook falls down Rundgren crooned capture your citadel. Son remembered the new word when we visited Charybdis Playground and announced that he captured the citadel as he got to the top of the slide. That's my boy!

World War 1 Memorial
Just south of the Charybdis Playground is a memorial for those from the area who served the country in World War I. Having never served any countries in the armed forces during wartime, I have high regards for those who did.

Triboro Bridge
One summer while living in Brooklyn, I worked as an intern for Con Edison, out of their Indian Point nuclear power plant in Upstate New York. On the way back, I was supposed to enter the FDR Drive from the Harlem River Driver. I was new at driving and stayed on the right lane even though the right lane was exit only for getting on the Triboro Bridge from the Harlem River Drive. It was probably my first visit to the Astoria before I moved to the area. I think I just went along 31st Street, with the N train's elevated track above it, like in the Rite Aid photo, all the way to the Queensborough Bridge to re-enter Manhattan. That was not as bad as the time I went onto the Washington Bridge from the Major Deegan Expressway, into New Jersey. Again, all because I was afraid to make lane changes and stayed in the right lane too long. I never like driving, to me it's just a necessary evil. All the rude New York drivers don't help the feeling either.

Queens For A Day, Part 1

In an ideal world, I would re-visit my old neighborhood in Woodhaven, Queens, where I moved to after a few years living in the cramped apartment in Elmhurst. It was our first time living in a family house, I liked it so much I went to some local T-shirt store and bought a shirt that read "I Love Woodhaven". Well, the world is not perfect and I instead found myself re-visiting Long Island City, Queens and its neighbor Astoria. After Woodhaven, we spent a year in crime-ridden Bushwick, Brooklyn, then stayed in L.I.C. for about ten years. Here are some photos from my excursion to the northern part of Queens this past Sunday. I used BannerZest to create the slideshow, using the Water Apparition Narrow theme. While it looks kinda cool, it allows no text to accompany the photos, so notes are right below the slideshow.



Long Island City Home
The house with the green awning is where we lived for almost ten years. By then it was just my parents, my older brother, and me. Wow, for a second there, I couldn't remember where my brother's room was. It was in this house that I got laid off from my first job out of college. Life was simpler then, I just took it easy and did nothing for half a year. Got up most morning at 9 and jogged to Astoria Park to run 6 miles around the track. It was supposed to be my training for the NYC Marathon. Of course it was far below the recommended amount. In 1997 I got married and moved out, then in 1999 my parents and brother moved in with me in Brooklyn, when Wife and I bought our house. I had to throw out lots of stuff for the final move and still regret that I included a box of Oriental Heroes (龍虎門) graphic novel.

Almost Bought
At one time we tried to buy a house in the area. It has an odd shape, very short but wide. The house looked pretty much the same as I remember it almost fifteen years ago. After we went to the bank to try borrow money, we were not that sure we wanted to buy it. Luckily the bank turned us down. Where were those subprime loans when you needed one, eh?

Genovese Supported ARROW
Now a Rite Aid, this store near the junction of Broadway and 31st Street used to be a Genovese Drug Store. It was while living in LIC that I got involved with the recycling group called ARROW. Back then the City did not have curbside recycling. ARROW setup a collection site on the sidewalk right outside Genovese for people to drop off metal cans, plastic bottles, may be even newspapers. Someone thought of flattening the metal cans for better storage and welded a square metal plate to an iron pipe. The device was effective at flattening the cans, but the people wielding it would just smash the thing into a pile of cans. Luckily no one was hurt by the cans as that inevitably flew out of the pile. I came up with the idea having some people line up the cans for me to smash. Assembly line, that's all. It was a lot safer that way. Genovese was supportive of the operation and allowed us to store our tools and such in their store.

Dutch Kills Playground
At one time, a cousin lived a few blocks away from us. She had a son and a daughter, little kids, 8 or 9 years old. Back then my job was not so hectic, I had time to take the kids to the park and Hall of Science. No, it was not only during the time that I was unemployed that I hang out with my niece and nephew. I was a good uncle before I became the good father.

Work-From-Home Tech Tips

The thing with magazines for the general public is that they can sometimes miss the boat altogether. This afternoon I read the PC Magazine article The Telecommuter's Tech Toolbox and found myself constantly shaking my head thinking, "Where are these corporations they are talking about?" Definitely not where I work. The software list the article refers to are all so not allowed in my company. Google Docs? Twitter? Meebo? Sure sounds like the article was written for tiny companies that rely on the public Internet. Where I work, "fun" stuff like Twitter and Meebo are all blocked. You can only use whatever the corporate filter allows. No sending sensitive info to Internet addresses, including oneself.

I love tech tips and was obviously disappointed by the PC Mag article. Here's some real world tech tips I use every week, in a corporate environment:

• DSL is not so great for certain disk-intensive tasks. I try to use MS Terminal Services (mstsc) or even Citrix whenever possible. Re-permissioning a folder with many files, loading a list of all objects in an ActiveDirectory, pulling info for a long list of usernames, all ideal candidates for putting the servers within the corporate network to work. I will get FIOS but even then will still rely on the muscles of the servers inside the network.
  
• If I have a file that I edit frequently, then it stays on my C: drive to save the unnecessary trips writing to that far, far away server. If it needs to be elsewhere too then I would setup a schedule to copy it there every so often.
  
• DOS is not dead and there are many DOS commands/utilities that can make your telecommute better.
  
  • map a drive with NET USE
    
  • list the folder's content with DIR
  • RMTSHARE tells you lots about a share, something most people rely on Hyena or DameWare for
    
  • FileACL gives you inside info about a folder/file's permission, no need to visit item and select File/Properties
  • to see a text file's content, use TYPE filename | MORE
    
• Jump on instant messaging as soon as you can. I hate phone calls and love I.M.
• Find out how to check your voicemail while outside the office. It should be a toll-free number or at most a local call. It is part of being reachable while working in your PJ.
• Try not to write down phone messages but instead keep in the computer, perhaps as an entry in your calendar. If you write it down on a piece of paper at work then work at home the next day, how will you read that piece of paper.
  
• Phone-forwarding is great. Where I am now the building is sorta old so phone forwarding is done over the phone, you just have to press the right sequence of buttons. Before, in a different building, we had IP phones and forwarding the phone was done in a browser window. I used to set the forwarding period so that after a certain hour no one would "accidentally" find me.
• Unless you have a really very generous cell phone plan, don't forward your desk phone to your cell phone. Don't use your cell phone to attend conference calls just because it has a headset, something perhaps your home phone doesn't have. The minutes add up fast and you may end up with a big bill. The company may not reimburse you or have some convoluted reimbursement process.
• With long-distance calls, ask the people in the office to call you if possible.
• With the One PC Per Grunt policy, I can no longer control another machine from a machine at home, but if you can, make use of it. Only the screens are sent back and forth, so you can save a lot of time by making use of some machine already inside the network. Same idea like MS Terminal Services and Citrix.
  

I must give credits to the article for mentioning that it's good to go outside for a walk once or twice. Some days I got so into the tasks at hand and ended up spending the whole day inside... and was rewarded with a nasty headache for the evening. Now I try to go to the library, to the bank, pick up my son from school, or even to get coffee.

Happy Teleworking!

Plugging Plurk

Thanks to my ex-colleague TT, I've discovered Plurk, an alternative to Twitter. It is not as well-known as the big Twit but that's fine. Microblogging tools like Plurk is useful for writing something when you don't want to write a lot. You may have noticed the Plurk gadget I added to the blog's sidebar. It was not as easy to setup as Twitter's, but a visit to the Share Your Plurk Page field of one's Plurk home page to get the UID should take care of things.

One fun thing with Plurk is the Karma Points. It's just a way to track how much time and effort you put into using it. Load a picture for your profile page, rant and rave about whatever in your mind, make friends, etc. and your Karma Points go up. Stay away from Plurk and it will go down. Interesting. I cannot help thinking about someone's Karma running over my Dogma...

I look forward to Plurk having its own app for Facebook and the iPhone/iTouch. There's some hack to get Plurk working with Facebook and on September 9 developer Ryan Lim just submitted a Plurk app to the Apple App Store. Ta-ta, Twitter!

Smilebox

Thanks to Google AdSense's intelligence, I got to re-discover Smilebox, a fun way to share photos and videos on the web. I downloaded the Mac software and tried to register but it turned out I already did. Good thing I used a familiar password. I probably opened the account but back then, whenever that was, there was no Mac version of the software. The Mac version just came out this past June.

The free version insert ads into the final creation, but the ads are not intrusive or annoying so I can live with it. I only tried the so-called Blogger embedded mode. While it does not play directly within the blog page, it is not so bad.

Make a Smilebox slideshow

Flashbang

One interesting thing I learned on vacation was the effect camera flash has on shooting arcade. By shooting arcade I mean those amusement park attractions where you shoot at targets to make things move. Piano player hits a few notes, skulls snap backward, bottles do somersault, and so on. I had my share of losing a dollar or so and could not make anything move. Later on, my big group descended upon the shooting gallery so I thought I should take a few pictures of the group members with their rifles. As the flash briefly brightened the gallery, many of the nearby objects went nut! I never knew what normally makes the objects move as there was no actual bullets flying out of the rifle muzzle, but a simple digital camera flash sure did the job.

It was closing time and there was no amusement park attendants nearby to tell me to quit it so I flashed the scene a few more times, much to the amusement of the group. Too bad there was no prize involved otherwise I could have won one of those large stuffed animals.

Vacation Vexation

I am back from a short getaway in Lancaster, PA. It was almost perfect as I managed to avoid being caught in the midst of a shopping spree, three times! How ironic, being in the land of the Amish, who shun technologies and live simple farming lives, and what do most people in my party of twelve did? Of course, they have to shop, shop, and shop some more. Just because some items were on sale at $5 apiece they have to be bought even if the buyers already have x number of such items at home. Sure, just throw something away later to make room for this new batch.

My son did have a good time swimming in the small hotel pool, playing on many rides at Dutch Wonderland, and riding on a real steam engine at Strasburg Railroad. We ate at the famous Miller's Smorgasbord one evening and I had some computer time thanks to the lodge's free Wi-Fi, so everything so far were pluses.

We planned to stop by Weaver's Orchard on the way down but my brother-in-law, who I shall refer to as BIL, in the lead of the two-car caravan, missed the exit because he took a call just then and there. On the last day of the short trip, I avoided the third shopping excursion by going to Strasburg Railroad with my family and a nephew. We were supposed to meet at the orchard and I even beat the other car getting there, relying solely on my sense of direction and a local map, no GPS. Too bad the orchard was closed for the holiday. They sure live a slow life at that orchard, as they even close on Sundays, which should be a day the city slickers would visit to do the fun picking. Heading back to the PA Turnpike, I realized I had to wrestle with the steering wheel to make the car turn. Pulled over and popped the hood, to my auto-mechanic-challenged eyes nothing seemed to be wrong. To BIL's trained eyes, the belt was off its track, some A/C unit was loose thus giving slack for the belt to slip off. Something similar happened before when I was in the city and I was able to strenuously drive the car back to my local service shop, which was probably OK because it was just a few miles. Supposedly with no belt the fan does not turn and the car can become overheated and the engine may die and needs to be replaced. Definitely not what I want to do as I already own this car almost ten years.

We managed to get my bucket of rust to a local repair shop. I drove BIL's car pushing my own, steered by BIL. We happened to be on a hill top so there were just a few rises here and there but mostly it was a downhill roll. I had never done this business of pushing and was scared stiff. What if I push the car into a ditch or worse into oncoming traffic? My junk car does not worth much but there is a human life at stake here. Unlike in the movie, it was all eerily quiet except for the hum of the engine and ambient sounds off Route 10 South. If anything happened it would happened quietly except for the crash sounds, no dramatic music to be expected. I was going so slow BIL had to tell me to go faster, even up to speed limit. I also had to avoid bumping or risk his airbag popping out. Thank goodness for patient PA residents as a few cars at times were behind me but nobody honked or gave me the finger.

After what seemed like an eternity, we actually made it to the Exxon repair shop. As expected, the one person manning the shop and gas station could not do the repair. It was Labor Day Monday after all. I considered myself lucky to have a place to drop off the car. The lone shop attendant took my contact info and got it parked, awaiting the mechanic the next day. The twelve of us squeezed into BIL's minivan, some unneeded stuff left in my Voyager, and back to NYC we went. Per earlier arrangement, we met a nephew's minivan later on on the NJ Turnpike and the rest of the trip was less cramped.

That's it for this old Plymouth Voyager of mine. I will get it fixed just enough to make the 3-hour trip back and no more long distance trip for it. I'll seriously look for another used car, ideally one that is very gas efficient. I have no garage so my car is always parked on the street, exposed to all kinds of threats, including idiotic kids, sometimes adults, who play football on the street. No need to get a new thing just to get it made old in no time. Such is life in the big city.

Zest We Can!

As I walked down the memory lane while writing about my first two homes in the U.S., I needed a way to show photos in a slide show. I actually first thought of Google Gadgets, but searching with keywords like slideshow and Picasa actually did not provide anything that satisfy my need. Luckily, a new feature in Picasa is the ability to embed a slide show into a blog, which is exactly what I did with the blog entry about my second home. Still, I wanted something a little fancier, and re-visited BannerZest.

You may recall I once gave Flash the full version a try and found it too hard to learn. BannerZest allows me to create Flash slide shows, albeit limited by whatever the developer thinks useful, but it is still very good. The only problem is that since I first used BannerZest there was an upgrade of Flash Player, which naturally BannerZest relies on. Even after I updated Flash Player, I still got an error message saying my version 8.x of Flash Player is too old. The BannerZest help page suggested looking up the Flash Player version in Safari, under Help / Installed Plug-Ins, then move the old version of the plug-in into a Disabled folder. Did that, but still got the error. Just by chance, I re-visited the Installed Plug-Ins page again and noticed that I had two entries for Shockwave / Flash Player, with different file names. I then moved the name corresponding to the 8.x version and sure enough BannerZest no longer whines about older Flash version. Look for some cool slide show coming up in the next few days as we wax nostalgia some more.

Second Home USA

Enjoy the following slideshow of photos from my second home in the U.S. Click the speech balloon gadget in the lower left to show or hide the text. Walk through the slideshow manually is recommended as I find the speed is too fast to read the text.

First Home in the U.S.

Not content to just put up a bunch of photos of my old home in the Bronx that I scanned in with the relatively new Fujitsu ScanSnap S300M, I've mapped them out below.

http://picasaweb.google.com/qaptainqwerty/BronxHome/photo#map

I suggest zooming in all the way to see the photos at their most approximate locations. To avoid covering the street names, I sometimes put the photos a bit off their exact spots.

Each photo has a nugget of recollection of my early life in the U.S., but you will need to see the photos in their full size to be able to read the text. Enjoy!

V.S. 0, Consumerism 2

I once heard someone said "If you cannot do, teach." Not that I agree wholeheartedly with the saying, but that is one reason I wrote about Lone Gunman's road to Voluntary Simplicity. I am not a crazy shopper rushing to every sale advertised on the TV, I am just not as far along the path to V.S. as LG. I recently gave the Yahoo! Freecycle group another try but all three of my offers did not yield positive results. One guy asked for LPs so I offered him a bunch that I picked up two blocks from my house sometimes ago. I never own a record player but thought someone someday would want them, and that actually happened. Only thing was the guy said he already had those same LPs I mentioned. In two other cases, some women asked for baby stuff - room monitors and in-door fence. I had used both and wrote to them, but no answer!

Well, not only I did not manage to give away anything, I recently acquired two more pieces of computer peripherals. One is the Time Capsule from Apple. It is really just a network hard drive. At 1 terabyte (TB), it makes an excellent reservoir for backing up data. A recent horror story convinced me to plunk down some hard-earned OT money to get the backup device. A colleague of my wife's had a baby a few years ago and of course took tons of photos, digital photos. Who nowadays take 35mm photos? Of course she puts them in the computer and perhaps sent them around via email or even post them on some web sites. Unfortunately they were never backed up onto discs and one day the hard drive died. Supposedly she took the drive to some local computer guy and the guy made it worse by deleting some of whatever that could be seen. I do not know the details, but by the time she wanted me to try, there was a burn mark on the hard drive case and the thing could not be recognized by my computer. She mentioned something about having to open up the case and replace the circuit board with another board. Whoa, that's way over what I am capable of, as my computer hardware "expertise" only involves unscrewing things and screwing them back. Me don't do no welding, ma'am.

When coupled with Time Machine backup software, the Time Capsule is supposed to make backing up as painless as it can be. Alas, Time Machine only runs on Leopard, which my laptop is not, so for now, painless backup can only be done on my Wife's MacBook, which I don't use that much. Doesn't the Tenth Commandment say something like "Thou shall not covet thy Wife's MacBook?" Or is it "thy neighbor's wife"? My plan is to some day setup some rsync script to periodically copy stuff from my PowerBook to Wife's MacBook. I work a lot with Robocopy at work so it should not be hard to translate the knowledge to rsync.

The other recent acquisition is the Fujitsu ScanSnap S300M. I've been using a Umax Astra 1220U flatbed scanner, bought for $40 at some show at the Jacob Javits Center years ago. The lid's hinges were broken then Crazy Glued back on, the scanner is slow and occasionally is not detected by the Mac, and I have to use some open source software to make it work with OS X. Scanning involves placing photos onto the bed, close the cover, run Photoshop Element, preview, scan, adjust the selection, then crop some parts off, give it a name, etc. It is a lengthy process and does not help with my dream of converting all my photo positives into digital format. Of course, the scanner is also bulky and does not travel well. Enters the ScanSnap S300M, portable, fast, can take stacks of photos through its feeder tray, and works natively with OS X via the supplied ScanSnap Manager software. It takes up two USB ports, one for power and another for data transfer, but that's the price of portability. It would be nice if Bluetooth speed is on par with USB so that portability can be had with just one USB port occupied. As the picture below shows, with two cables the scanner does appear messy.

I already scanned in a bunch of photos from my days with the Vietnamese American Youth Organization, some others of my first home in the U.S., and so far just one of many photos related to the Astoria Residents Reclaiming Our World. While I am looking for old photos to scan, I plan to also transfer them from individual "temporary" albums into real larger albums to better organize them. Therefore, while it is not good for the Earth to have one more gadget produced, the portable ScanSnap will help me organize my worldly possession better. Chances are as I organize I will throw out, give away, or recycle some stuff, so this is not all that bad.

Survival of the Fittest?

So I am addicted to Wordscraper Blitz. It is the perfect answer to the problem of not having an opponent. Any time of the day, there's always someone playing. So far I have limited my activities in the Restobar room, just because its name does not sound as intimidating as Blitz Masters or Bingo Boomers. I am not that good at it, even though in a group of 20 or more, I am usually in the top ten or even top five. Three times I even won the coveted #1 spot. But enough with Wordscraper Blitz. I've promised myself that if I behave and keep up with my blog, do my ATPM review, vacuum the second floor, eat my veggies, etc. then I can have a few rounds of Blitz. So here goes what's happening with the Lone Gunman and his quest for V.S., which is no B.S. ...

So far this year, LG has given away:

• 9-foot solid wood antique "barn door" table to Humane Society
• 2 office chairs
• flat-screen monitor
• big wood-framed Ralph Lauren Esq mirror

He is also down to

• 4 business shirts
• 3 pair of pants
• 3 jeans
• 4 T-shirts
• 4 pairs of socks
• 4 boxers
• some winter clothes

LG is also very much into the idea of Peak Oil. The theory goes: there is only so much oil in the earth, eventually there won't be any left, at which point society will break down and we all go back to some farm life. Entirely plausible. To that end, LG sold whatever vehicles he got and now drives a Honda Fit. I am never much into cars and did not know what a Fit looks like. One day I finally Googled it and the next day I saw one in my neighborhood, at the park where I make my almost daily 3K morning jog. It is a small car for LG's family, but he is making do with it. More power to you, Lone Gunman!

Fabulous Scrabulous

It turned out this business with chronicling the Lone Gunman's Voluntary Simplicity is not as easy as it sounds. I started by going into the SameTime log on the company machine to find mentions of things LG got rid of. Much as I like SameTime, the task was still done on a company machine, on a Windows machine, too. It sounds too much like work, not something I want to do in my free time. Thus, I've been having a sort of Blogger Clogger, I know what to write but something was clogging the path from brain to blog. But here's something I have no trouble ranting and raving about... Scrabulous!

As mentioned some time ago, I was not that crazy about Scrabbles. There are only so many useful words you get out of it. Those that are good in the game, i.e. gain you high points, are of little outside it, in real life. Still, I gave Scrabulous in Facebook a try and got hooked on it. It was a total rip-off of the Hasbro game but who cares. It had good features like chatting, word look-up, notes-keeping, and more. Noted that I used past tense in referring to Scrabulous. Apparently Hasbro cared enough about the copyright infringement and had successfully gotten the app to shut down, at least in the U.S. and Canada, where Hasbro owns the license. The first few days Scrabulous went down, I was so desperate I challenged a Scrab friend to a chess game. She said she was good at it and I needed to play something. Some people tweaked their web browsers' proxy setting, or some other setting, so that they could play Scrabulous from servers in other countries. I didn't want to go that far, having read that the practice was not always successful. At about the same time, Hasbro came out with their own official version on Facebook. I thought that would be the fix but it turned out to be awful. Slow, no playing with strangers and potentially making new friends, no keyboard support, and did I mention slow? Luckily, the Agarwalla Brothers came up with Wordscraper. With the introduction of 4W and 5L (quadrupled word and 5-timed letter) tiles and random board layout, technically Wordscraper is not an exact copy of Scrabble. However, you can build your own board that, uh, can happen to be exactly like the real thing. Would Hasbro also sue to block Wordscraper? I hope not, as I've been enjoy it a lot. I even gave Wordscraper Blitz a try last night. It's just Wordscraper except that you play in a group. Everyone has their own but identically laid out board, and competes to get the highest point in 4 minutes. You won't get to make use of fancy, useful words as there is too little time for that. It is really intense and sometimes I found myself with a dumb mode, not able to come up with any words. I wasted only an hour or so and will try to stay away from it to spend more time on the blog.

Keep re-visiting, readers, Qaptain Qwerty is still around.

Lone Gunman

Before I start chronicling Lone Gunman's road to a simpler life, a belated introduction and explanation is in order.

LG and I used to work in the same department in different cities. He was the sole representative of my extended group in the city of Dallas. A history buff, I easily associated his being the lone rep with the theory of a Lone Gunman doing all the work of killing President Kennedy. No mafia, no CIA, no Cuba, no Marilyn Monroe, just some crazy ex-Marine who decided to put his marksman skill to test. As Jonathan Coulton put it, just a magic bullet did the job. LG didn't mind the moniker and started to use it whenever he commented on this blog. It may have helped that I was always helpful with the various projects he was working on. Got fifty users to update their home paths? No problem, here's a KiX script. Need to set permission for a hundred users' home folders? This other KiX script will take care of it. The scripts are single-purpose and DOS-based, no fancy GUI, but they do the job, and always get produced on the fly, as needed, within hours. He appreciates my scripts and I appreciate his comment on the blog, his readership, and the beliefs he has.

LG is interested in Peak Oil, parenting, the environment (he's mostly a non-meat person), and of course voluntary simplicity. In the next few entries, perhaps months or years, we'll find out how successful he is with reaching for the simpler life.

Keep It Simple

It is time I give voluntary simplicity (VS) some serious air time, so to speak. Lest you think I put down the movement by writing the little limerick about my friend Lone Gunman in Tampa giving away all his worldly possession except the clothes on his back. As a self-proclaimed environmentalist, the idea behind VS jives perfectly with my view. Want less and possess less then you place less of a strain on the environment.

I encouraged Lone Gunman to take before and after photos of his possession before getting rid of them but he hasn't done so. I also asked him to chronicle the process through a blog but he is too busy for it. So, being the wordier of the two of us, I'll be doing the writing for him. Perhaps every week I will list the stuff that disappeared from Lone Gunman's life.

In the mean time, for a good reading on VS from the mainstream press, check out the articles from New York Times and Time below.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/17/us/17texas.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1812048,00.html

Independence Day 2008

I was away on an Independence Day weekend camping trip. In the United States, July 4th is Independence Day, the day when our forefathers so many years ago decided they had enough with British rule and created a new nation. Just some background in case any of my blog fans don't know American history.

Anyway, there I was not quite far from civilization and one of the first thing I did was to check for WiFi hotspots with my iPod touch. Naturally, none was to be found. A guy in my camping group commented that he wished he could check his email. Someone else, said that providing 'Net access for campers is perhaps an untapped market.

It was not my first camping trip, but there was still much that I learned. Last year, my camping trip was just one night in a big city park, with Park Rangers providing the food and service, including night hike and a failed stargazing exercise thanks to an uncooperative telescope. This year, the group consisted of some in-laws and ex-colleagues and their friends and the stay cover two nights and three days.

"Đi một ngày đàng, học một sàng khôn" is the Vietnamese proverb, roughly meaning "Make a day trip and you learn some tips". In this case, seeing platforms for the tents is a first for me. Up until last year, camping in my mind involves driving long wooden sticks into the ground for use as columns or the frame of the tent, then driving more, shorter stakes into the group and attach ropes to hold up whatever draped onto the frame. Nowadays, it seems tents come pre-built and are really easy to setup. Flexible and semi-detachable rods, for lack of better terms (or for being too lazy to research in Wiki), makes up the frame of the tent. Drive the rods through the "slots" in the tent roof and secure them with the "keys" at the four corners and you pretty much have the tent propped into shape. But that was no news to me this year. Besides the tedious work of setting up tent, my other wrong idea about camping in 2008 is that you sleep on the ground. Maybe on a carpet of grass, but still you must be on the ground, or at least having nothing but just the floor of the tent between you and the ground. Not so at Beaver Point Camp. There we had platforms raised on the sides of the hills, as shown in the photo. Upon seeing such platform, I instantly thought of Vietnamese aborigines (đồng bào Thượng) with their raised homes to keep them safe from wild animals. I suppose one advantage of raised platform for tents is that one can make use of hill sides as campground. More real estate if you will. Another would be to keep the tent drier in case of downpour. As a matter of fact, one tent in our group was on the ground and was indeed soaked the first night when it rained heavily. Another tent was also on the ground but it was dry, perhaps because it was on the top of the hill, whereas the drenched one was at the foot of the hill.

It was a great outdoor trip overall.

Subway Riders - The Bad and the Ugly

Unruly and potentially criminal youths in wolf packs are not the only subway riders who get on my nerves. There are other riders and I even have nicknames for them...

The Living Room Guy
Most likely someone tall enough to play for the NBA, the Living Room Guy likes to stretch his legs out halfway across the width of the subway car. The uglier type would even put his size-14 sneakers onto the pole in front of him. Pity some poor child having to grab that pole later.

The Sentinels
Two people on two sides of the doors and there is only a little room left for people to squeeze through to get in and out. The uglier ones are those that stop dead in their track as soon as they enter the subway car. You have just a nanosecond or two to quickly squeeze through them before the car doors close.

The Castle Stormers
As soon as the subway doors open the Castle Stormers charge into the car to grab whatever seats are available. As a Chinese person, I find it even more embarrassing when they talk loudly in Chinese in trying to offer the loot to their colleagues.

The Gabbers
Much as I like to have cell phone service in the subway, it is nice to not have it. As it is sometimes there are too many people who love to do nothing other than... talk. That's when it's handy to have an iPod to tune them out. At least without cell service, I just have to put up with these gabbers when the subway is above ground.

The Pole Hogger
Some people love to own the poles in the subway car. All to themselves, the Hogger would lean onto the pole while reading some newspaper or book. Anyone wanting to have a hold on the pole would have to be tall enough to grab the top part or risk touching the Hogger's behind. Hm, maybe some pickpocket expert can teach the Hogger a lesson someday.

Kristen Shirts

Apology goes to Kristen Shirts, who I erroneously referred to as Tristan Shea in the previous entry. It took a few Google searches to find the info about her. There are some real Tristan Shea's out there but they don't do the ukulele and they did not appear to be connected to the JoCo in any way. Read about Kristen Shirts at

• http://www.jonathancoulton.com/wiki/index.php/Kristen_Shirts
• http://kristenandpatrick.net/

The show itself can be found here

http://www.jonathancoulton.com/wiki/index.php/New_York%2C_NY:_2008-06-21

Shoot, I missed the second encore, but that's alright as it was way too late for me. Next time, I'll drive so I can stay all the way to the real end.

Go JoCo Go!

Months after first hearing about Jonathan Coulton on TWIT podcast, I ended up at a live show by JoCo himself. The wonder of the Internet. Through his web site, I registered with Eventful to be kept informed of when the JoCo would perform in the New York metro area. He is famous now and is demanded all over the U.S. and in London too. Never mind the fact he and I both live in Brooklyn. The notice came, I almost instantly bought 3 tickets for my family, although I am sure Wife would only come along to keep company. My Son has a few JoCo favorites of his own, even if he doesn't get all the jokes.

The show overall was great. The Highline Ballroom is easily accessible by subway. There is even a subway entrance on 16th street so you just need to walk west a few avenues. The line to get into the place is in two pieces, one in front of the Ballroom and another past its neighbor Western Beef. I suppose Western Beef doesn't want Ballroom's customers blocking their entrance. At first I thought that the Ballroom took Beef's place but they just didn't have time to replace the signage.

Paul & Storm were the opening acts for JoCo, but really did more than that. They actually performed half of the show, from the beginning to intermission. They came back to add more flavor to JoCo's performance, too, with singing, tambourine, etc. A gal named Tristan Shea took part in the show with her ukulele off and on. Sorry, Tristan, I'll have to do some research to get your name right, but I can't do that lest I derail my train of thought. There was also a whole army of ukulele players at times, supposedly JoCo fans who were given the honor to participate. Very interesting!

Given the fact that JoCo is pretty cool about fans making things out of his music, I thought it would do no harm to also share part of the performance. Photos probably won't come out right as the lighting is set just to ruin any photos taken. Video recording looked promising and I managed to record a few songs. While recording Still Alive, some security guard told me to stop and I complied. I wonder if it's no video recording at all at Ballroom or just that song. JoCo wrote the song for the game Portal, whose copyright is held by Valve Software. My Son kept asking when JoCo would sing Re: Your Brains and the man finally sang it near the very end. I don't know if he had a second encore, but after JoCo, Paul & Storm, Tristan and her ukulele players came out to bow, we rushed out the door. It was already 10:30ish.

The subway ride home was scary. At one stop a bunch of teenagers hopped on and started to horseplay. They didn't actually physically touched anyone but they turned the subway car into their own playground. The group, consisting of boys and girls, was hooting loudly and cavorting about as their hormones raged unchecked. At the next stop, we went to the next car along with many other passengers. The next stop, those same "kids" followed their scared victims. Again they didn't physically harm anyone although some would remark about the passengers' clothes and appearances. One of them came up close to two Chinese women and made faces at them. All the while I couldn't help thinking about Bernhard Goetz. There will be no peace in this world with these unruly "kids" roaming freely. They are so unaware that their actions are not seen as representative of them, but of their whole race. It does not take much effort from threatening people to actually robbing them, especially when they travel in packs.

The Simple Life

My friend the Lone Gunman told me about some Simple Life movement. I have the link on my work Windoze machine, but I don't have the time to boot it up, or do a quick Google, so suffice to say that we as a consumer society is too busy gathering possessions which in turn possesses us. Let us step back and live a simpler life, excellent idea. Make do with what you have, give away what you don't need. Shoot, I suppose that 3G iPhone will never find its way into Lone Gunman's paws...

One of the fun stuff I did in Facebook was joining the many groups it offers. One such group is some limerick groups. Limericks are poems that consist of a total of five lines, with rhyming happens on the first, second, and fifth lines, also third and fourth. Another pattern involving the two set of lines is that the first, second, and fifth lines have three metrical feet; the third and fourth lines have only two. Whatever metrical feet are you will have to read about in the link of the blog entry. I think a metrical feet is a set of unaccented and accented syllables. Whatever...

Here's a limerick for the Lone Gunman and his Simple Life:

There is a man in Tampa
Possession drives him banana
Give away he must
Simplify or bust
Now he has just his pajama!