Last night, I rode my bike in the snow for the very first time. It wasn’t a heavy snow or anything, and certainly not enough to make the ground icy, but it was a first. Then this morning, I rode my bike in the coldest temperature yet, 18 degrees. These next three months in Indiana are going to be rough.
I discovered the International Children’s Library on-line today. It’s a repository of about 200 titles at the moment, and browsable through a Java application, making it accessible to all platforms. It’s got a pretty neat way of displaying an overview of the books on the “shelf” and zooming in for a more detailed look. Beware, though; you’ll want a broadband connection to access it, for it would be far too slow over a modem. (Even better would probably be to have them on CD-ROM or DVD-ROM.)
Just when you thought holiday decorations couldn’t get any tackier: Wal-Mart now sells gigantic 8-foot inflatable snowmen. According to the tagline, it’s great for the yard, office or anywhere the spirit moves you
. Hmmm, I wonder if I could stick this in my cubicle at the office…or, let’s see, perhaps the spirit
is moving me to inflate this inside some poor sap’s car after he leaves the window open just a crack. The mind wanders…
As of today, you can pre-order a Segway Human Transporter on Amazon.com. It would be really neat to play with one of these things, but I echo Mark’s sentiments, I can’t see what advantage it would have over my bike. The only obvious answer, of course, is that I wouldn’t have to exercise, but that’s one of my motivating factors to ride in the first place. Nevertheless, I’m really curious to get on one of these things just to see how they handle. At $5000, though, I’m not likely to be able to try anytime soon.
Actually, I can see a number of uses for the Segway.
Many of these scenarios assume that you’re starting and stopping often on relatively short trips. Unfortunately, with our surroundings being designed with the automobile in mind for the past 80 years, the concept of fewer trips involving longer distances is what we have at the moment. Perhaps future communities could be designed with transporters like the Segway in mind?
Also, my thinking here is only considering it’s uses in America; it’s likely to be far more useful in other countries where the cities developed before the automobile was invented (such as Rome) or where most of the population doesn’t even own an automobile yet (like Beijing).
The strangest headline I’ve seen in a while: Bill Gates Welcomed with Huge Condom.
From the article: The world’s richest man smiled when he saw the giant air-filled condom in India’s rising technology hub of Hyderabad.
An essay detailing the experiences of another Westerner who recently visited China. My observations are eerily reminiscent of these.
I’ve been an avid user of My Yahoo! for years now. From time to time, I would try out other “portals”, like Netscape’s and Yahoo’s, but they never seemed to have as many features or be as easy to use as Yahoo. I’ve stuck with them for more than four years now.
But today I discovered My Way, which seems to be ready to do to portals what Google did to search engines. It’s got lots of features, with a clean design and no banner ads or pop-ups. From what I understand, it’s from the ashes of the Excite portal, but they’ve really done a great job of getting it ready. It’s worth checking out.
China is a country much better known for its tea rather than its coffee. Green tea is served immediately when you enter a restaurant in the same way water is served here, and many people carry around jam jars with tea leaves at the bottom filled with hot water. However, it was in a hotel in Xi’an where I had the pleasure of tasting the best cup of coffee I have ever had.
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For the past two weeks, I’ve been on vacation in China, visiting family and tourist traps. Thus, the nearly complete lack of updates in that time, except for the lone entry on November 6, which I made while still there on my family’s Internet connection at home. (By the way, they get cable Internet access at home for a mere 40 yuan a month, or about US$5! Amazing!) I’ve put up another album of photographs from the trip.
In addition to staying with my parents-in-law in Taiyuan, we went to Xi’an for two days on a guided tour and stopped in Tianjin on the way. (We flew through Beijing but didn’t really stay long enough to do anything there.)
I hope to publish a series of essays on my trip with some observations I had about the Chinese culture from an American perspective. I said I would do this last time and never got around to it then, so don’t hold your breath on this one either.
Even though it’s only 6:30am, I’m at the office now. Both Hong’s and my sleep schedule are all out of whack right now. Got roughly 4 hours of mediocre sleep on the plane ride over, then 14 hours of sleep on Saturday night after returning, then only 3 hours of sleep last night. It’s kinda nice riding into work at 5am though; traffic is minimal and there’s no wind, so even though it’s colder than at 8am it doesn’t feel as cold. I wonder if I can keep up this early morning schedule for long.