Chopstick Lobster

My ideal pedometer doesn’t exist yet. They’re featherweight shoe inserts with piezoelectric battery rechargers, GPS, and Bluetooth for displaying data automatically on your phone or computer.

In the meantime, I looked at what was available and came up with the Omron HJ-720ITC. While the gold standard in accuracy belongs to the Yamax Digi-Walker SW-200, the Omron is good enough at +/-5%. It’s a flattened oval shape, size of a large egg. Bigger than I’d like, especially with the belt clip almost doubling its thickness, but not too clunky. It’s light and easy to forget that it’s there.

The belt clip comes loose several times a day, but the smaller safety clip is ingeniously small and secure, preventing you from dropping or losing it whenever that happens. If only the main clip was so well designed.

Beyond mere steps, the HJ also has a clock, calculates your miles walked, aerobic steps (after 10 min at 60 steps/min), plus Calories and grams of fat burned. Each day resets to zero at midnight and a 7-day history is viewable by cycling through the Memo button.

The real standout feature for me was the included software. With a Windows PC and the included miniUSB cable, you can very easily download your walking data and see graphs and averages based on it. There’s 42 days of the non-viewable memory, so you can download it every month with plenty of grace period. Not only is the memory longer, but it’s accurate down to the hour, giving you a very detailed picture of what activities contribute to your step count.

You can also set daily goals for yourself based on steps or any of the values measured. This is nice, but I’d like to have 3-day or weekly goals instead, and the ability to graph a rolling average of those. Things come up and on some days of the week I’m busier or tethered to the hostel for most of the day, so having a wider lens would help in smoothing out day-to-day variations and making sense of the data. I’d also like to be able to change the daily reset time. It would be more accurate to have it change in your sleep at a time you’re never up later than and never up before.

Luckily, it lets you export a PDF with the basic stats, or a CSV file containing all the data for compiling any way you want. I’ve done just that and shared the result on Google Docs. If you know how to make any cool graphs or analysis of the data, please tell me how–I’d like that a lot. For instance, I’d like to see what my data trends are for each day of the week to compare workdays versus weekdays, see how much I sleep and integrate the weather data to see the effects of rain and temperature. Crazy geeky, I know, but still really cool.

Now been six months since I opened this blog, and another six months before that since I came to Taiwan. And a whole lot more has happened than I’ve taken the time to write about. Shame really, with all the thinking I put into composing (unwritten) posts in my head (77 xkcd). But then again, I did that as soon as I even considered starting one. Curses!

Just to tell you, no apologies (besides this one). Ultimately I do want to remember a lot of this stuff, and I’m astoundingly bad at doing that on my own. I also want to work on my writing, give people a clue what I’m doing and create an outlet for myself.

So I give you the Six Month Scuttle. Lobsters are particularly good at going in reverse, so posts herein are old news. They’ll sit up front for a while as new posts, then get scuttled to their appropriate date.

Bottoms up!

No plans going into New Year’s. Had work, hungry, then got a call from Heather asking where I’d been, they’d all gone to Taipei 101 for the fireworks. From talking to my students earlier, it seemed that’s what they were all planning too. And as I soon found out, it was true.

Ran down to Guting Station at 10:50 and was surprised to confront a queue. The station was almost empty, so it must have been crowd control measures to prevent paralysis at Taipei Main Station. There are few weaknesses in Taipei’s excellent metro system, but the complete dependence on Main Station to handle all transfers between the two huge lines is one of them.

Ten minutes in line, few more to Main Station, then a sea of people filling the station, it was clear I wouldn’t make it to 101 in the next 30 minutes by waiting. I turned around and freed myself from the crowd that had rapidly closed in behind me, then searched for a station map to puzzle out the right exit to take. Main has a particularly convoluted design, as it serves as transportation hub for the city, accommodating the MRT junction, Railway Station, High Speed Rail Station, Intra- and Intercity Buses, and two connected underground malls. Must be convenient if you know your way around though.

After reorienting myself after a spiraling staircase, I set off at a run for Shandao Temple Station. Having bypassed the bottleneck, I entered without any wait and successfully squeezed into an overloaded car headed for 101…and right past it. Crowd control measures were in effect for Taipei City Hall Station too, so I was dumped at the next station, two precious minutes later and with only several minutes left. Scaled the escalators and ran in the direction of the crowds’ walking. Not long before I spotted 101, but the world’s tallest building has the habit of appearing deceptively close. Nevertheless, at ten of twelve I was there.

Sending a text message proved impossible, so I plopped down in the street for the show. I wasn’t sure what to expect. The only things I saw were huge crowds, some sporadic, low fireworks and a big balloon advertising funp.com, my friend’s digg clone. Then the lights of 101 dramatically shut off.

And at the stroke of midnight, an explosion of light as the building erupted from all sides with fireworks. Before the first round could fade, another and another wave of fire washed out from the tower, making it look like the building was exploding again and again. From my vantage, I could look straight up and see the sparks shooting overhead. The lights were accompanied by satisfying booms, matched by clapping and the oohs and wahs of those all around me.

It was really impressive, but also short. After 188 seconds and a number of rounds that seemed impossible dense, it was over. Overall really cool. Glad I wasn’t this guy. Stuck around to see the concert, but the program didn’t get me quite as excited as the teenyboppers beside me.Still unable to contact anyone, and seeing the throngs of people lined up for the MRT (specially open all night), I started running back. Weaving through the people wandering away over streets littered with newspaper seats and other trash, it resembled the refugee scene from some post-apocalyptic catastrophe.By chance I ran into a group of Thai students staying at the hostel, who, by chance, had lost their map. They slowed me down, but we managed to get back in two and a half hours in which I got to know them a lot better. At 4:00 we switched on the TV and saw live coverage of people still queued up , waiting to catch a subway train. Success!

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.

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.