Chopstick Lobster

Ok, only a cat(erpillar) bus, sorry to get your hopes up. Not nearly as cool as the Cat Bus, but still pretty cool.

Saw this outside ShiDa last week and thought I’d share.

I just came across what may be the perfect PC (for me–but quite possibly for you too). It’s called the Zonbu, and it’s a tiny, two-pound Linux box that costs $99. What’s the catch, you ask? Well, the machine is normally $250, but to get it at the discount price, you’ll need to sign on for a two year subscription to Amazon.com’s S3 data storage service. At $13/mo, that brings the total to $410 for two years ($370 if you pay upfront), this is not a catch for me, and I’ll explain why.

The Goods
The reason an S3 subscription is required is that the thing ships with no hard drive, only a 4GB compact flash card for storing the operating system and for caching frequently used files. Amazon stores everything in data cloud up in the internets, finally making “The Network is the Computer” a reality. There are several reasons this is a good thing. The first is that all data is automatically backed up and mirrored in some safe server, far from any thieves, typhoons, lightning strikes or HDD failures that may afflict my local machine. I belong to the 99% of the population that don’t make regular, or even half-way frequent backups, so this is cool. And since it’s Amazon and not some small startup named “Zonbu” that’s storing my stuff, I won’t have to worry about losing all my data if they go belly up. Awesomest of all, everything’s online, so if I need access, I have it, from any internet-enabled device, computer or phone.

The second super awesome thing about it is, it’s totally silent. Not just really, really quiet, but dead silent. No hard drive, no fans, no moving parts–quiet. This is a big plus for me because all of my previous machines have been really loud. They’ve whirred and whined, clicked and droned themselves into a bad place in my memory. It makes such a difference in a room to turn off the computer (though I rarely do this). A truly silent PC would let you hear soft dialogue in a movie, lower stress levels, let you hear yourself think. Grand.

The Bad

That said, there are a couple drawbacks. Networked storage means that when browsing or playing big files you’ll encounter a buffer period while it’s being accessed and sent to the cache on the CF card. This shouldn’t affect small files stored locally. If you want more space, you can upgrade the CF card, there are six USB ports for attaching external drives, plus there’s space for a laptop HDD inside if you like.

Next, no optical drive, or room to install one. Not a biggie, but they offer a slim CDRW/DVD USB drive for $50. Very good price and quite a handy thing to have around if you have older computers or ultra-compact laptops.

Also, to make everything so quiet and cheap, it’s a tad underpowered. There’s a 1.2Ghz processor made by VIA, a Taiwanese manufacturer that specializes in low power CPUs, and 512MB of non-expandable memory. The processor speed is higher than my last computer’s 900mhz PIII, and amazing in comparison to my ancient 266mhz Pentium II I ran until early 2006. The non-expandable RAM hurts, but not much, as I’ve never had more. My typical usage pattern consists of Firefox (95% of the time), Azureus (50%), iTunes (30%), Office/Skype/movies and other (10%), so I don’t expect any performance issues.

Finally, there’s no way to install programs not in the Zonbu repositories. Why they would do this I’m not really sure. It makes things über-secure, true, but Zonbu runs Linux, so it was already. The best I can come up with is that they want to provide a limited support ecosystem for the device and not confuse grandparents or little kids who they see as their target market. Zonbu takes care of all backups and software updates automatically, and includes all codecs to play music and video files already, so this idea fits with that.

Anyway, this last restriction is a bit much to accept and very well could be a deal breaker for me…but there is a workaround. By installing the free Community Edition and by applying software updates manually, you get to install what you want.

Regardless of how cool it is, I already have use of a computer in the hostel, so can’t justify getting one myself just yet, but if anything changes, I know what I’ll get.

Peter sheepishly shows his collection of SuperBeetle playing cards for the camera. Before class began, Ray said a bee was in his bookbag, which Peter confirmed. I took the bag outside and gave it a good shake. Out came, not a bee, but a cockroach. When they didn’t know what a cockroach was, Peter got out his book. Unfortunately, all SuperBeetles have massive horns and no cockroaches could be found.

Today, totally inexplicably, Thomas started crying. He’s a new student, only been at my school a month yet. He’d cried before, during his first week, when he had no idea what a “g” sound corresponded to in a spelling test where numbers 4 through 10 were all “g” words. He gave up, moaning dramatically into his test sheet, and cried after getting his score of 15%. His crying today was hard to explain, because on his test he’d gotten a 90, his best score to date.

The previous time, Thomas was the third to cry that day. Ray had launched into tears in that same class after I’d found out he missed his friend, Peter, who was absent. (Earlier, he was uncharacteristically mute, but smiling. He only started crying once I asked if he missed Peter. Go me.)

There was also Ian earlier on. A very young and shy student, he was also the sole representative of seven sign-ups to arrive for a new ESL class. The decision was made to proceed anyway, but as soon as his mother left the room, the tears started rolling and he began trembling. He continued to cry silently for the next hour. I finally got him to open up some, but when he spoke, it was only the barest whisper of a voice. That pretty much described his behavior for the next two weeks, too.

While I didn’t actually do anything to make them cry, it still wasn’t too fun. My attempts to console by saying “沒關係” (”no problem”) were never enough, so a secretary was required to come comfort them.

Sunday was the final day of Wikimania 2007, the convention for all things wiki. I was quite surprised to find out that Taipei happened to be selected as the host city this year. I only managed to attend for the third day, but being only 20 minutes away, there was no way I was going to miss it completely.

I was pretty psyched when it finally came time to go. Got there early, meeting a French-Malian, Renaud Gaudin, on the way. I learned that his airfare was $2,500 USD, but that he’d been awarded a scholarship for being a speaker. I asked about internet rates in Africa and his is a mere 128kb/s ISDN (dial-up x2), $75 a month, and shared among seven people. On the other hand, when in France he has really cheap 20Mb/s access, which isn’t even available in most of the US.

I bagged some swag at the tables, mostly just stickers. Attendees also got lunch and a free Wikimania tote bag, t-shirt and spherical puzzle. Not bad, though they only had XL and XXL sizes left for the tees. Grrr. Why is that always the case?

The conference itself was incredibly geeky, I guess because it attracts the software developer crowd more than casual contributors. A shocking number of attendees were using laptops constantly, even throughout the talks. As for myself, I geeked out taking pictures and getting to know my new digital camera, a Ricoh Caplio R6 which I’d received for my birthday.

In total, about 400-500 people, half foreigners. Lots of volunteers, though those I talked to weren’t contributors to any Wikimedia projects. Didn’t talk to all that many people, as I did a lot of running around looking for photo opportunities and half the people had their heads buried in their laptops. Reminded me of my roommates instant messaging eachother from two steps away, both in the same dorm room. I imagined them all heading to Wikinews to cover their part of the conference and to read up on what was going on everywhere else (two steps away). Go figure.

Last night was my birthday in my birth-timezone. Because I live in the future (by 12 hours), I also had a birthday two days ago, as well as a surprise party sprung on me last weekend.

I’d been pretty busy on Thursday, was up at 7:00, and ended up only heading to bed 24 hours later. The plan was to celebrate Friday night at Wax Club, which is nearby and all-you-can-drink, so sleeping after work wasn’t an option. And Fridays are my ‘early’ days, when I start at 15:00.

I usually have a pretty good internal clock, that gets me up when I need to (but never when I merely want to). As a consequence, I’ve not once been late to work in six months, despite an extremely irregular sleeping schedule.

I set four cellphone alarms and slept across four ottomans in the lounge, rather than in my curtained cubbyhole beneath the stairs. Having the extra light and noise helps me to wake up, and I needed all the help I could get. Additionally, I anticipated some extra help from Andrew, a 5-year-old Singaporean kid staying for a few weeks.

True to my expectations, the next day I slowly woke to Andrew climbing on top of me and talking a lot. When I resisted his attempts to rouse me, he proceeded to jump up and down on my stomach. This was at 9:00. Oops.

Good thing he has a short attention span. In the afternoon he started hitting me with an inflatable toy, and wringing my neck when I proved too stubborn. After wrestling him away, I found it was the perfect time for a shower.

So it’s August 2, 2007. Six months to the day since arriving in Taipei. This blog’s been a long time coming, with many reasons for delay: job-search guilt, no computer, no domain, no digicam, no money for any one, what do I say?, in what way?. OK, computer, but now the internets are really, really distracting. Then procrastinator’s guilt, all-too-powerful frontal lobes, laziness, … it’s too hot….

And now.

What will this be about? Partly some overdue updates on my happenings this past half year (Good news everyone! I’m not dead!). A large dose, to start, on Taiwan and teaching. General diary/journal. Photolog. My thoughts on things. Probably political rants that I’ll try to make as un-rantlike as possible and instead insightful musings that everyone likes to read.

What do you think of when you hear chopsticklobster? For me, it’s a fun, colorful, mishmash of ideas. With ten legs. Sometimes moving backwards, molting and growing, feeling out a way, composing itself of bits and pieces of those before it, drawing out analogies way too long, pinching and poking if you don’t like it. (In truth, it’s just that lobsterswithfrickinlaserbeamsattachedtotheirheads.com was already taken.)