Musings on the Washington Auto Show part 2

This post is going to focus on my current shortlist of cars. I’m mainly looking at hot hatches, along with a few sedans, nothing V8-powered, and mostly four (or 5) doors so that it’s easier to get the kids in and out of the car. I tried out the following cars on my shortlist:

Ford Focus ST

I really like the interior of that one. Ford has finally gotten the memo that small, efficient cars don’t have to be penalty boxes inside, and really stepped up their game on the interior. Great steering wheel, nicely bolstered seats, high-quality materials, and the Sync audio/nav system that we like so much in the Flex. The shifter throw is a little longer than I’d like, but that’s fixable. I’m looking forward to being able to test-drive that one.

Volvo C30 T5 R-Design

I have to say that this one came out of left field. I wasn’t even thinking about this car, and I didn’t realize that Volvo were selling a version of their little hatchback with a 250hp 5-cylinder and a 6-speed. I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Volvos, we had a 740 that was a great car. Not much fun to drive, but unstoppable and very comfortable. The C30 has the very Swedish and very comfortable interior, and (hopefully) will be interesting to drive. It’s a 3-door, but I noted that the seats motor back and forth very quickly, so I think it’d be manageable. I do have to say that the combination of the “male symbol” in the corporate logo and the use of the brand “Polestar” to signify their tuner package would make me think that one might be *ahem* compensating for something, but this car is so small that I doubt that’s the case.

Buick Regal GS

I know, I’m still totally amazed that there’s a Buick…anything on my list. Even 3 years ago, I was saying that the Buick brand should be killed as a part of GM’s restructuring, and in my mind, even considering a Buick would mean that your auto enthusiast card would be instantly revoked. But a lot has changed. Once Saturn was killed off (and it no longer had to compete with Pontiac’s positioning as the “performance” brand), Buick started becoming the US access point for rebadged Opels. As a result, they’ve actually been somewhat successful in distancing themselves from the two decades of cars which were only suitable for those retirees who couldn’t afford a Cadillac – rolling living rooms. The new Buicks have a nice Euro-style entry-level luxury design and sportiness. They’re running commercials that appeal to the driving enthusiast  and they’re putting a 274 HP engine and a 6-speed manual in the thing! I have to say that I was really impressed with this one. It’s comfortable, fuel-efficient, roomy, and the styling is pretty nice with the exception of a couple of fake vents on the body. I still can’t believe I’m seriously considering even test-driving a Buick, but I’m hopeful that this one is more Grand National than Park Avenue.

Audi

I had been considering 3 different cars from Audi – the S4, the A3, and the TT (either the S or RS variant) . One look at the TT in person was enough to remind me that it has a backseat that is simply not usable, so that is officially off the list. The A3 is a really nice car and I like the looks, but it’s very obvious that it’s just a very well-dressed Jetta Sportwagen, and the performance is really not in the right ballpark to compete against the other things I’m considering. I really don’t understand why Audi doesn’t import the S3/RS3. The RS3 has the turbocharged 5-cylinder that they sell in the TTRS, but is infinitely more practical than the TT. It’s not like they’d have to sell a lot of them to recoup the cost of Federalizing the car, given that it’s an engine and body that both are already certified, and a large percentage of the cars that Audi sells are custom-ordered anyway. The S4 is gorgeous inside and out. I really can’t think of another mass-market brand that does ergonomics and interiors better than Audi. The fact that it’s now using a supercharged V6 means that the fuel economy is at least adequate now, at the expense of the lovely V8 soundtrack that I fell in love with in Emily’s old S6 Avant. But it’s easily the most expensive car that I’m considering by half or more, so right now I’m of the mind that I’d have to be super impressed with the car when I drive it for it to justify the significant price premium that it commands over the other things that I’m considering. For what it’s worth, if I bought one of these, it’d likely be a lease, both to reduce the payments and so I don’t have to deal with the prospect of yet another German car that’s out of warranty. Great cars, sure, but paragons of reliability and cheap to repair they most certainly are not.

Mini Cooper Clubman 

I’ve been sort of intrigued by this one since it was announced. The regular Mini is too small, but this one is just large enough that it’s practical for more than 2 people. It has 4 actual seats (well, 2 are still basically kid seats, but that’s mainly what I need right now), the back hatch is actually two doors that open panel-van style, I fit in it quite well, and you can get it with the JCW tuning package that gives you 200hp out of the little 1.6. I’ve driven previous Minis and felt that they handled well but the engine was thrashy, but I’ve heard that the new engine is much better than the old one, so I’m looking to try it again. Hopefully the dealer won’t be such jerks this time either, as my last experience with Mini of Sterling was not one that would make me keen to rush out and purchase a car from them.

Hyundai – For a long time, Hyundai was in the same category for me as Buick, Toyota, Lexus, etc – I couldn’t even name the models or identify them on sight without looking at the badge like I can with most other marques because I simply. don’t. care. But they’ve been steadily improving. Two models caught my eye. The Veloster is a neat concept, with the rear door on just one side, and I really do like the exterior styling, but it’s so, so underpowered that I’m not really considering it, as even the planned turbo version takes the performance from awful to barely adequate, at least on my scale (keep in mind that my current car is 400hp and does 0-60 in 4.6 seconds – I’m a little spoiled in the performance department). However, I’m pretty interested in the Genesis coupe. This is the replacement for the Tiburon, but it’s really in a different class. It shares a lot of styling cues with the Infiniti G37, but it’s not a straight copy. Next year, they’re definitely catering to the enthusiast crowd with the new version – the V6 now makes 345hp and the 4 cylinder makes 271hp, both available with a 6-speed manual, and for a good bit lower price than the Infiniti. I’m still considering a G37 sedan, but that’s another one that is less likely unless it really wows me when I drive it.

Rounding out the rest of my shortlist are the aforementioned Mitsubishi Evo, the Mazdaspeed3, and the Subaru WRX STi. The Mazdaspeed3 is towards the bottom of the list, because it has strange styling, and from what I read, the torque steer is pretty bad and the gas mileage isn’t great. If Mazda puts in some of their Skyactiv efficiency enhancements (direct injection, idle stop/start, etc) before I’m ready to buy, I might give it more consideration, but it’s unfortunately showing its age and being outclassed by some of the other, newer designs I’m considering. I like the STi. I’ve driven my friend Chris’s standard WRX for a couple of hours, and so I know that it’s comfortable for me, and it handles great, but Scooby’s boxer is a thirsty engine even if you stay out of the boost, so the addition of the six-speed and more power to make the (lack of) fuel economy more worth it, plus the active differential to make the handling even better means that I’m still leaning towards the STi if I were to buy a WRX. Maybe I’ll get lucky and they’ll have the new DI flat four from the BRZ turbocharged and ready to go in the STi by the time I’m ready to buy. Not much I can say about the Evo. In a lot of ways, it’s a poor man’s super car – it handles like a mega $ exotic because it’s bristling with technology, but the last time I drove one I was turned off by the turbo lag and the cheap interior. I didn’t have a chance to look at one because Mitsu pulled a no-show, so that’ll have to wait for the test drive phase I guess.

Musings on the Washington Auto Show Part 1

I went to the Washington Auto Show last weekend with my daughter and a friend from church and 2 of his kids. What follows are some impressions.

Those of you that know me know that I’m a pretty huge car buff – they’re so much more than a means to get from point A to point B for me. It doesn’t just stop at cars, though; I’ve had a thing for motorized conveyances for as long as I can remember. I grew up watching Knight Rider, I had posters of Italian exotics on my wall. I come by it honest – My dad has been driving the wheels off of anything with wheels for 50+ years, and before him, my “Grammie” George has been a fan of fast cars too. I have fond memories of riding in my Grandma’s cars (because somehow, they were always hers), with my Grandfather at the wheel. He’d give it the spurs, to my sister’s and my delight, but only after my Grandma would tell him to “stop driving like a fuddy duddy/old man.” From the ’77 Pontiac Firebird in Robin’s Egg Blue, to the Turbocharged Chrysler LeBaron, to the Ford Thunderbird Super Coupe and the Oldsmobile Aurora with the Northstar V8, none were boring cars. My dad, for his part, has had a Dodge Charger 2.2, Chrysler Conquest, a Pontiac Fiero Formula, a Porsche 944 S2 (not to mention Miss Vickie’s Black 944 which is what gave us both the 944 bug in the first place…), and two Corvette C5 convertibles, as well as an assortment of motorcycles (which I have been riding on the back of since I was about 5), and a boat or three.

So I give you that trip down memory lane to tell you that choosing a car for myself is one of those major life decisions for me. I’m not sure that I’m exaggerating when I say that I think I considered my last car for longer than I considered our house before I signed on the line. My wife groans every time we’re due for a car because my standards are so high and it takes so much work. There are spreadsheets, hours of research, and lots of test drives. Case in point, when my 944S was totaled, it basically took me 2 years to figure out what I wanted. I bought an Acura RSX Type-S, kept it for a little over a year, got bored with it, sold it to my sister, and ended up buying my current car, a Pontiac GTO. My wife’s car is paid off January 2013, and while I love the GTO, it is not aging particularly well – bad gas mileage (I average 15-18mpg on my commute, Premium fuel only), interior self-destructing, expensive repairs looming, so I have already started working on my shortlist of cars to replace it. I read two old-fashioned paper car magazines a month, plus one or two car blogs, so I have a good idea of what’s available and interesting, but given my size (and more specifically, the fact that I’m all leg), the ergonomics of a car are nearly as important as how fun it is to drive. The Auto Show is a great way for me to spend some time wandering around, getting up close and personal with a bunch of the cars that I’m considering, maybe discover something I hadn’t been seriously considering, and most importantly, to start eliminating cars that have ergonomic niggles that make them uncomfortable for me. You could call it my initial fact-finding mission.

In order to keep this post from being too epic in length, I’m breaking it into several posts. This is the intro, the next one will cover my shortlist, and the last one will cover the also-rans.

This time around, I’m considering some cars that are a little less powerful, but also a good bit smaller and lighter, so that I get better gas mileage when I’m commuting, but am not trading off too much in performance, and hopefully gaining an improvement in handling over my current car. The GTO dances pretty well for a fat guy, but raw acceleration is still its strong suit. I’d like to have something that is faster than my wife’s Flex Ecoboost (355 hp + AWD), which is a high bar since depending on which road test you read, it does 0-60 in between 5.9 and 6.9 seconds. I pretty much need something with 4 doors, because it makes getting the kids in and out so much easier, but it’s not a hard and fast requirement. Lastly, I want a manual transmission. I simply am not ready to move to an automatic. I don’t necessarily have to have a full manual, as I would consider any of the newer semi-automatic transmissions like a DSG where it’s a robotized manual, complete with a full manual mode and throttle blips on the downshift, etc. but I need to drive it before saying that for certain. I’ve driven enough torque-converter automatics with flappy paddles that delay shifting the transmission for 2-3 seconds after you tug on the paddle to know to say, “thanks, but no thanks” when it comes to slushboxes. 

I don’t think that the hybrid and eco-friendly drivetrains have really cracked the enthusiast market yet (Tesla notwithstanding), because they’re still busily selling every one they can make to those who will happily buy an appliance to get back and forth to work, so long as it gets great gas mileage and is reasonably comfortable. I was really hoping that a few of the newer ones would be different, but so far, not so much. For example, I really like the styling of the Lexus CT200h, but 0-60 in 10.4 seconds is just a complete no-op. That’s slower than a Prius, yet it’s supposed to be the “sporty” hybrid! The Honda CR-Z is another one that looked interesting, I like the styling, but it is still slow (~8 sec to 60) and only has 2 seats. In diesel-land, the Audi A3 still turns in a time of 8.9 seconds to 60. The one possible exception that I’m watching is the Infiniti M hybrid, which has a 5 second 0-60 time while still getting 24/32. It has a CVT and is a big, expensive car, so I think it’s only a second-string candidate at best right now. I will say that I have ridden in a Nissan Leaf, and I’m definitely impressed with the car in terms of room and drive, but it’s not a dynamic ride by any means. I think that it's likely that it'll be the second generation of electric cars before there are serious contenders for reasonably priced enthusiast cars. So for me, this means I have one more round of good ol’ gasoline-powered internal combustion in my future. 

A brief detour into VA politics

I've been published! It's only a 200-word Letter to the Editor, but it is in the Washington Post, which I'm pretty sure still has high journalistic standards, so that has to count for something right? :-)

Every so often, I read an article in the Washington Post that makes me upset enough to say, "I really should write a letter to the editor about this!" Only about 1 time in 5 do I actually do so, and even less frequently do they even consider publishing it. This is at least partially due to the fact that trying to compress whatever it is I'm trying to say into just under 200 words is difficult for me. This means that writing a letter to the editor isn't just a matter of sitting down and firing off a screed - there's lots of editing involved.

Either way, the other night, I read an article about how the Virginia Senate was resorting to arcane parliamentary maneuvering and lawsuits as one party attempted to claim majority control of the chamber from the other. This was due to the fact that there was a perfect 20/20 split between seats held by Democrats and Republicans, due to some key gains by Republicans in the last election. I'm so deeply frustrated with partisan politics right now that this letter was somehow easier to write, and evidently at least someone on the Washington Post's editorial staff thinks I had something useful to say. You'll have to read the letter itself here because the Post has some rules about reproducing Letters to the Editor in other formats and locations such that I didn't think it wise to simply block quote it here, but I wanted to share it with anyone who actually reads this poor, neglected blog.

An editorial note - as you read my letter, please replace "wrest" with "gain." This was a victim of poor editing, where the Post dropped a part of the phrase such that the sentence doesn't make good grammatical sense, I suggested a change in wording, and they apparently only fixed it in the print edition. 

So once again, we're seeing an example of how broken politics is -- instead of coalition and cooperation and compromise, we have parties girding for battle on legislation that is seemingly so distasteful to the other side that it virtually requires a majority in one party to break the inevitable logjam resulting from a vote that splits straight down party lines. And while this tiebreaker vote technically falls to the Lt. Governor, he has already said that he doesn't get to vote in procedural matters (rules making) as well as some of the more likely controversial measures like taxes and spending, so it's not really a tiebreaker in a lot of cases. Therefore, unless we want total gridlock in the Senate this year, there's going to have to be compromise. I'm still wondering when that became a dirty word for lawmakers?

Musings on the Facebook timeline

While I was on Christmas vacation, I took the fact that I had some free time as an opportunity to play around with Facebook's new Timeline feature and write up some thoughts about it. Short version is that it's a replacement for your Facebook Wall that uses a different presentation and different navigation for the information that it contains about you. Unlike many recent changes, it doesn't seem to affect the News Feed, and so there's generally less impact to people in terms of their day-to-day usage of FB, which is a good thing.

So, people might ask, "why fix what isn't broken?" My view is that this was actually broken, and Timeline is a welcome fix (or at least a step in the right direction), and I'll attempt to explain why.

Social networking sites are an online persona. You can put as much or as little effort into it as you want, share as much or as little as you want, and to some extent control the groups of people with which you share different bits of information about yourself and your life. But really it's all about capturing aspects of your life for the purposes of your own reminiscing or to share with others. We've been doing it for years. Some people use physical diaries and scrapbooks or photo albums, others blog (long form) with varying degrees of consistency, the rest of us use things like FB and Twitter as a (short form) way to share bits that are not worth blogging about but are (hopefully) interesting to someone else on the internet. If you use Facebook or Twitter semi-regularly, look back at some of your old Tweets/Status messages and Wall posts. It's an interesting set of snippets of what you were doing, thinking about, etc. Add in photos, links, and other things, and it captures a reasonable view of who you are (or were at the time of the post), your experiences, etc. When I look back on those things periodically, I find all sorts of things that I've forgotten about - little conversations I thought were funny, links that are cool, etc. It's an online trip down memory lane in a way. A lot of the stuff is pretty mundane, but that's sort of what makes it interesting to me, because the mundane details are the most quickly forgotten.

However, social networking sites as a whole have been very bad about emphasizing the ephemeral nature of the medium to the detriment of the historical record that it could serve. They are essentially live streams of what's happening, and they don't have a good method to filter, preserve, or identify things that are more important so that those who aren't on the site regularly (casual users) can still see the things that they would be interested in seeing. The fact that Facebook routinely changes the News Feed UI in an (usually unsuccessful) attempt to present more relevant information and improve the signal-to-noise ratio is a good demonstration of the problem with the amount of information flowing through the average person's feed and its relevance. While nothing actually disappears from the Internet, it does tend to get buried under the newest layer of debris, so much so that the social networking sites often view "security by obscurity" as good enough - if you are embarrassed by that photo, wait a week or so and it'll disappear from everyone's feed and they'll all forget about it. And $deity help you if you need to find an old post in your (or someone else's) history... So the general problem is that it's hard to navigate or search old items, especially if the information is not public, since you can't use Google to search it, and it's presented in a way that's generally not intuitive.

This is where the idea of the Timeline really shines. It makes both managing and presenting the information about you and your life as a historical record much more intuitive and much less of an afterthought.

The main benefit that I see for the Timeline so far is that it's much smarter about the relationship of time to your posts, so it has some new features to manage that chronology more effectively. Most notably, you can enter what FB is calling "life events" that well precede the time that you actually signed up for Facebook, including your birth, times when you have moved, gotten married, trips you've taken, job changes, etc. In addition, you can do things like back-date old photos so that they appear at the right part of your life, so that  high-school yearbook photo can now show up when you were actually in high-school, instead of just whenever you found it and posted it, and you can see the chronological progression of your photos much more easily. They've also more tightly integrated location awareness into the timeline, so that you can see not just when, but also where. This includes a built-in map with pins on it for different places that you've lived, visited, etc, which has been previously managed through third-party applications. This is beneficial because it includes and integrates things like photos and posts, instead of simply being a list that you have to populate and track separately of the places that you've been. And my guess is that as more people "fix" things on their timelines, it'll have the net effect of making the timeline better for those who are tagged in their posts as well, so it'll continue to improve throughout the rollout. But probably the biggest thing is that there's now a Star button that you can click to highlight a given post, such that it gets featured in the timeline independent of what FB's (mostly crappy) algorithms think is relevant/worth highlighting to the average person. Used properly, it's likely to help casual users gain more value from the time that they do spend on the site, because they're more likely to see things that their friends think are relevant.

While the more cynical side of me sees this as a (clever) way for Facebook to entice you to spend even more time on the site, add even more personal information, upload more photos, etc, on balance I do think that it's a useful change. The standard caveats about knowing what is happening with your information before you choose to share it and not sharing things that you will later be ashamed of definitely still apply here.

That said, there are a few implementation details that I found a bit annoying.
First, it appears that all new Life Events default to the Public privacy setting. While it's easy to change them, if you're not careful, you end up sharing a lot more stuff with everyone instead of just your friends and family. This is especially important since some of it might be used to social engineer information that is often used as passwords/PINs like your birthdate, anniversary date, mother's maiden name, etc. Related to this, Facebook has not completely integrated the privacy controls between the timeline and what already was out there - if you go to change the visibility/privacy settings for some items, you'll get a message that those must be changed from the "about" setting page, instead of simply linking the privacy settings together such that you can change them from either place. That's just lazy implementation, and there's no excuse for it.

Second, there doesn't seem to be an intuitive way to link the Life Event entries with the pictures and other posts that are associated with it. It seems to me that it would make a lot of sense to be able to select a group of status updates, photos, videos, etc and create a grouping of them that are associated with that life event (say the birth of a child, a wedding, etc) so that it all shows up in one place. Right now, the closest thing that you can do is to ensure that the location and date information are correct on all of the above such that they all show up relatively nearby in the timeline.

Third, FB seems to be inconsistent about whether you can change the date on a picture that you're tagged in - if someone else posts a "historical" picture of you and doesn't populate the date correctly, you may or may not be able to change the date yourself so that it shows up in the right place on your timeline. I haven't been able to figure out why this is, other than to assume that it's somehow related to the permissions of the post and the gradual roll-out of Timeline support to the FB user community.

Lastly, FB has some formatting enhancements that they need to do to improve the actual visual presentation of the Timeline.  It appears that the design width for your information is 720 pixels, since that's the size of the "cover photo" that they recommend. The problem is that the orientation of posts and photos is static on the timeline. The timeline has two post sizes - half width and full-width. Full-width is for featured posts, half width is for everything else. There is no way to control the vertical dimensions, and there is no way to manage the zoom/crop of pictures posted in individual items. Since most pictures are a lot larger (wider) than 720 pixels, the aspect ratio for display is pretty important. The only thing that you can do is control which portion of the picture is visible in the static matte that the post contains, and that's only on Life Event items, not on photo albums and the like. This means that pictures are routinely cut off or simply can't be used in those items because they don't show what you want them to show. For example, a portrait-orientation picture (tall, instead of wide) is not likely to work because the posts are all set up for landscape orientation. If you're FB friends with me, you can see two pictures on my timeline that show this - the baby picture that I posted of myself (click "Born" on the timeline), and the picture that I posted of me holding my newborn daughter. Both are zoomed in too far to be able to show the whole subject of the photo.

[EDIT 12/31/11] - one additional thing that I've discovered - there is no logical linkage between life events shared by two people. That is, even if I tag someone in a life event that I build (eg birth of child, trip we took together, etc), instead of even giving them the option to use the same life event on their timeline, all it does is show "[person1] was tagged in [person2]'s [life event]." at the right date on the timeline. FB already has the linkage between the two people, it should be trivial to allow that sort of interaction. It's there...sort of, because you can click on the person's name and see their timeline, but you might not see any more information if that person hasn't done anything with their timeline for that event. So this sort of blows my theory about the timeline improving as those around you tag you in posts.


If you're looking for some good info and tips on managing your timeline, as usual Lifehacker has a useful post on the matter.

Water, Water everywhere

Those Who Know These Things told me that I shouldn’t really drink the tap water in Taipei, and sure enough the hotel room was outfitted with multiple bottles of water (free, not the normal 2000% markup), including one in the bathroom for teeth brushing. So I dutifully stuck to bottles, though I’m pretty sure that one or more of the restaurants we hit over the course of the week were serving tap water, so who knows. My point in mentioning this is that it seems odd to me that we fix the “undrinkable tap water” problem by moving plastic bottles around instead of improving the standards of the water supply. But maybe it’s more of a precaution for tourists who don’t have the same gut bacteria and immunity living in Taipei would provide, rather than the fact that the water is actually risky to drink. Either way, bottled water generally seems like a waste to me.

Somewhat related, most of the places I went in Japan and Taipei have automatically flushing urinals. This isn’t surprising in and of itself, they’re becoming more and more common, especially now that retrofit kits are available. What’s strange is the flush logic I observed while in Asia. While most auto-flush toilets wait until you leave and then flush, these all did a short flush as soon as you step up to them, and then flush as normal once you’re done. I have to assume that there is some sort of logic to that pre-flush, since they all did it, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why that might be, and it seems to be a waste of water.

Taipei #8 - Saturday

Saturday dawned bright and sunny, of course it would do that on the day I leave. Cab ride to the airport was uneventful. I rode in a Toyota Wish, which I believe is a Matrix here, but I thought that perhaps it was somewhat like the “Wish sandwich” from the Blues Brothers, in that you wish it was a different car. It’s actually pretty comfortable, but the joke is fun to make. On the ride, I snapped the picture you see here, my cabbie saw 140kph, and I got a better view of the construction work being done to build an extension of the MRT system so that there is rail service between downtown Taipei and Taoyuan airport, which is more than 40 minutes away even in light traffic. Most of it is elevated rail, and it’s pretty interesting to watch it being built.

The highlight of the morning came while standing and waiting to check in. While it may sound like I’ve lost my mind because I'm happy about waiting in line at the airport, the reason it was the highlight of the morning was that one of the screens was showing what the English subtitles called, “Airport Safety Propaganda.” It went over all of the standard stuff, but had the unique angle of using these very ornate puppets which appear to be traditional Chinese string puppets, complete with mouths that open and close, and traditional costumes. To make the anachronism even more pronounced, they go through the security check point, boarding, using portable electronics (a cell phone and a tablet pc) on the plane, etc. As if that wasn’t bizarre enough, the English translation was either done by someone with a sense of humor or is just one more unintentionally hilarious example of Engrish. I wish I could find a video of it online, but so far no luck. I know that a colleague was taking some video, but I’m not sure if it’s been posted or if it even came out well enough to read the subtitles.

Fortunately, because I was with several colleagues from IETF, they were able to get me into the airline lounges both in Taipei and Narita as a guest, so while I waited for my flight in Taipei, I was able to get some breakfast, including a can of Pocari Sweat, which you may remember from Japan. But even better yet, the United lounge at Narita had these great automatic beer pouring robots. You took a frosted glass from the case, placed it in the cradle, pressed a button, and the machine tilted the glass, filled it almost full, then straightened the glass and dispensed foam to give it a nice head. I was so impressed that I took video.  

The flights in and out of Narita were both pretty bumpy this time. Turbulence doesn’t really bother me, but I was somewhat surprised, because it was severe enough that they had the flight attendants in their seats for a good 30-45 minutes longer than normal, and for such a big plane (777), there was a lot of dancing. Another interesting quirk of the 777 – it rains inside of it! During take-off and landing, at least where I was, near the exit rows, the vents above the aisle and near the window drip a significant amount of water intermittently. I’m not sure if it’s because water freezes up inside the vents while airborne and then thaws as the temperature rises, but all 4 777s I flew on this trip did this.

Taipei #7 - Friday

The IETF was trying out a different schedule this time, so we ended up working through what would have been the lunch break in the interest of ending earlier, so no lunch for me. I went back to Din Tai Fung with some colleagues for an early dinner, and it was just as good as the previous time. We fed 4 of us with a huge amount of food for less than $30 apiece. 

After dinner, the weather was “clear” enough to see the top of Taipei 101, so a couple of us headed for the observation deck. I use quotes there because it was actually pouring, but that seemed to keep the visibility a lot higher than the normal drizzle, so we figured it’d be better than nothing. It turned out to be a great view. This was one of the few times where I really wish I had brought a better camera than just the one in my phone – it really can’t deal with those very low-light shots that well. 

Taipei 101’s observation deck has elevators that hit a peak speed of 1010 Meters/minute, and the display in the elevator said that we ascended to 382 meters in 37 seconds. The elevators have an aerodynamics capsule complete with a spoiler on the top and bottom, and they have air pumps to help equalize the pressure for passenger comfort. It works better on the way up than on the way down, as I only had to pop my ears once on the ascent, but it happened about 4 separate times on the descent. 

One of the really cool things about the observation deck is that they have made the building’s tuned mass damper part of the public exhibit, so you can actually see the “Super Big Wind Dampener” in all of its 5 meter diameter, 660 metric ton glory. 

It wasn’t perceptibly moving when I was there, but they do have a pretty cool video of it serving its purpose during a typhoon. – click on “Wind Damper Functioning Film” – sorry, it’s all flash and there’s no way to directly link to it. 

Taipei #6 - Thursday

Today, all 3 of my meals were at the Hyatt, which while probably not as authentic of an experience as going to a local place, isn’t as bad as it sounds. The Hyatt has several really good restaurants where they don’t dumb things down very much for the tourists. Lunch was at Irodori, which is easily the largest Japanese food buffet that I have ever seen. In addition to the standard nigiri and sashimi and rolls, they had a huge amount of other options covering a large swath of non-sushi Japanese foods as well. Where to start… Well, they had some made-to-order rolls, but instead of the standard cylindrical roll, they made a cone out of the seaweed wrap, so it was like a small sushi ice cream cone. They had tempura, they had a noodle bar, where you chose your type of noodles, your broth, and some ingredients and they’d make it for you, they had a raw oyster bar with several types and presentations of oysters, and they had some hibachi-style cooked items, including whole fish if you were so inclined. They also had beef nigiri! Yes, that is what it sounds like – a very thin strip of tender beef (a bit thicker than carpaccio might be) over sushi rice. The flavor was very delicate, and the beef wasn’t chewy like I was expecting it to be, very high quality, very tender. They had a selection of Japanese desserts, none of which I know the names of, but I do note that they aren’t usually that sweet, and often are chewy, with fruit flavors.

Dinner was a group event at the Hyatt’s Shanghai Court restaurant. They gave us a private room that had a couch and chairs for sitting with drinks before dinner, and then a large round table for the 10 or so of us. There was a set menu of multiple courses, and all of it was really good, but I should certainly highlight a few things. Included in the appetizers were some deep-fried sardines. It has been a long time since I’ve eaten sardines, but these were very tasty and not too salty, with a nice delicate crunch. Next was “double-boiled chicken soup with Jin Hwa ham, fish lips, and bamboo piths.” The ham was quite salty, the bamboo didn’t have a lot of taste, but when cooked got nice and tender, and I didn’t run into any strange textures, so I guess fish lips just taste like fish. Another fun one – “wok-fried scallops and cuttlefish with peppers in spicy chili sauce.” Cuttlefish is a lot like squid – very tasty if prepared properly, like eating a dirty rubber band if not. Fortunately, this was well-prepared, tender and delicate. The texture may still be off-putting for some, but I quite enjoyed it. There were several other courses of fish and pork, all very tasty. One of the last courses was “wok-fried asparagus with Gingko Nuts and Fresh Lily Bulbs.” Gingko nuts remind me of a soybean or chestnut, a somewhat soft, pasty consistency, and a mildly nutty flavor. These are indeed the same as the source of the smell when female gingko trees drop their leaves, but they didn’t smell bad at all when cooked. Lily bulbs are starchy and a bit creamy, but pretty neutral-tasting. Lastly, we had “sweetened sago cream soup with coconut and red bean,” which was a cold dessert soup. It was interesting – not something I’d crave, but a nice end to the meal. I couldn’t really taste much coconut flavor, so my hunch is that it used coconut water or similar. 

Taipei #5 - Wednesday

I had a lunch seminar at the conference center today, so I ended up with an American-style box lunch (sandwich, salad, bottle of water). Yawn.

Dinner was somewhat more interesting. Some colleagues from a Taiwanese equipment manufacturer offered to take us to dinner, and they chose a place called FiFi’s, which is a haute cuisine modern Shanghainese and Szechwan restaurant. I deferred to our hosts to order foods that they enjoyed, and so we got to try a wide variety of things as dish after dish was presented. Notable among the different choices was a dish the host said was called “fly’s eye” which was diced meat (pork, probably) along with very finely diced green onions and what I think were fresh (not dried) peppercorns. Another appetizer featured fried shrimp diced up with onion and served inside of a lettuce leaf. Also there was sliced hot beef, which was a Szechwan dish served in an oil-based sauce that I thought was actually soup at first. It was very tender and quite spicy due to the red peppers that were cooked with the dish. We had ma pao tofu, which is soft tofu that has been fried crispy on the outside. As per normal, tofu doesn’t taste like much, but this was pretty good – shows that you can make anything better by deep frying it! Our hosts also made sure to order a specialty of the house, dong po pork, which is braised pork belly. This restaurant served it along with some flour buns so that you could make yourself a small sandwich. Pork belly is pretty fatty, but it was absolutely melt-in-your-mouth tender, and the braise made it very flavorful. Plenty of Taiwan beer to wash it all down, and I learned a toast in Mandarin - Gan bei ("dry the cup"). Dessert was some fried noodles dusted in powdered sugar that tasted a lot like a slightly less puffy and crunchier funnel cake, and a Chinese pancake with chocolate syrup on it.

Taipei #4 - Tuesday

Well, today broke my streak of only eating in Taipei 101. It was actually raining for a change (vs. the ever-present drizzle), and I was pressed for time, so I ended up trying out the Noodle Café in the TICC itself. We got a set of lotus root as an appetizer, and this was basically sliced thin and sautéed, along with some garlic, pretty good. I ordered some Dan Dan noodles, and they were also tasty. Cost about NT$200 including drink, so a bit more expensive than the food court, but since it was a full-service place, that’s expected, I guess. Dinner again had a benefactor, but because one of our dining companions is a bit of a picky eater, the chosen venue was Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse. I’ve never had a bad meal at a high-end steakhouse like that, and this was no exception, but it certainly was in no way a local experience. If you’ve been to one, you’ve been to them all, pretty much. On the taxi ride over, we saw a store called “Skynet Lighting” but no one in the car was able to get a picture before the light changed. 

Taipei #3 - Monday

More Taipei 101 today. For lunch, I tried a different stall. This time I got fried pork with miscellaneous vegetables, came with a side of rice and soup, and inexplicably, a fried egg. The presentation was pretty awesome, especially for a fast-food stand – the meal came out on a metal plate, still actively sizzling, and that was set into a wooden frame placed on the meal tray. Unfortunately, the food a bit of a let-down, especially considering the presentation and now good the other meals I’ve had here were. It reminded me of airline food. The vegetables looked (and tasted) like the cubed carrots and green peas that you get out of the freezer bag, and the pork was bland and dry. However, on the way out of the food court for lunch, we had a few minutes to kill, so we wandered into the toy store. 

While I was there, I saw things both creepy and awesome (and every combination of the two). Along with every Gundam and Pokemon type of thing ever, they had a great selection of Legos, R/C cars, plus a healthy dose of Japanese “kawaii” toys (think Hello Kitty and other cutesy things). 

The creepy stuff was this doll called Blythe which has a disproportionately large head and big anime-style eyes. Now that might make you think of the Bratz dolls, but apparently in that case, the creepy is overpowered by the slutty. This doll isn’t tarted up, so basically it ends up being something that kinda belongs in a knock-off Chucky movie – you know, you hear a noise from the closet, open the closet door and the doll is silently staring at you, so you throw it away, and the next day it shows up on your doorstep, staring at you through the window, and when you turn your back, it turns out to be hell-bent on your death and dismemberment? Yeah, kinda like that...

Also, they had these very weird knock-off Mickey and Minnie Mouse dolls that kind of looked like they cross-bred those characters with a robotic clown. Apparently they’re called “cubic mouth” and they may not actually be a knock-off: 

And last but not least… Manchhichi’s still exist! This store had an entire wall of them, all in different costumes.

Dinner tonight had a benefactor, so while it was still at Taipei 101, this one went a good bit more upscale. We went to a place called DiamondTony’s, which is on the 85^th floor. This is one of the destination restaurants in Taipei, owing to the view and to the high-quality ingredients featured. The meal choices were all “sets” where you would choose from a list of soup, cold appetizer, hot appetizer, entrée, and dessert. They started at NT$3500 ($100US) and went up from there.  My set had Lobster Bisque, a sashimi plate, quail with truffle, and the entrée was an Australian Waygu beef ribeye. Waygu beef is beef made in the style of Kobe beef, but not actually from the Kobe region of Japan, so like Kobe beef, it’s supposed to be the best beef you’ll ever have – extremely tender and flavorful. You’d think that with the combination of a view of Taipei from the 85^th floor and a meal like that, I’d be listing this among the top 5 dinners I’d ever had and raving about it for a long time to come. I feel almost guilty to say that actually, it was a bit disappointing. The quail was good, but mostly tasted like chicken, and the beef was very tender, but it was also quite under-seasoned even after I used the provided pink sea salt, and was not particularly well-seared. So generally, you might say that this is a restaurant known for its atmosphere and its view than for its food. As far as the view goes… This time of year, it’s very Seattle-like in Taipei. While the weather is warm, in the 70s, this week it has been almost constantly drizzling, interrupted with brief periods of actual rain. As a result, most days, we haven’t even been able to see the top of Taipei 101 from the street. It was similarly clouded-in during dinner, so the view was mostly like eating inside of a cloud. You could see some of the city if you walked right over to the window, but otherwise not so much. The folks I ate with are good friends, so we had a great time either way. 

One thing that was of note at this restaurant – it had without a doubt the coolest bathroom I’ve ever had the pleasure of using. The bathroom itself is quite modern and clean in design, but that’s not the interesting part. It is in a corner of the building, probably where an executive corner office would be if this was a corporate space, so it, like the rest of the space, is lined with windows. 

The urinals are on a half-wall facing the windows, so, you get a fantastic view whilst availing yourself of the facilities, especially on the one side, where there are windows to your left as well. I can’t imagine what it’s like when the building isn’t fogged in...

Taipei #2 - Sunday

Today I went back to Taipei 101 food court for lunch, and if it’s possible, it was even busier. Everywhere had a line, and watching for a table was worse than finding a parking space at Costco on a Saturday. I got a great big bowl of noodles with vegetables, pork, and kimchi in broth plus some tea for about $5, and then carried it around for about 15 minutes looking for a table before I gave up and ended up finding an unused bit of counter space at the corner of one of the food stalls and ate standing there. For someone with fairly poor fine motor skills, I’m getting surprisingly good at picking up noodles with chopsticks (at least in order to get them to my mouth in order to slurp them up). The food was again quite tasty – I guess if you’re not a fan of Kimchi it might not be your thing, but I pretty much never met fermented cabbage that I didn’t like, and the Kimchi added a nice sour and spicy component to the broth that was really good.

In what is rapidly becoming a theme (hey, it’s close, there are lots of options, it’s cheap, and the food is good), we went back to Taipei 101 for dinner. While most of the places are just little stalls where you order your food and then find a table in the common seating areas, there are a couple of actual sit-down restaurants. We had a group of 10, so we actually got reservations for a private room at a place called Din Tai Fung, which specializes in dumplings, buns, and other steamed items. They are apparently one-star Michelin rated, and it was definitely worth it. We ordered all sorts of different dumplings with different combinations of meat and vegetables in them, as well as several varieties of Xaio Long Bao, which are a special kind of dumpling that contains a solid filling as well as a bit of broth, and is then steamed. You take the dumpling out of the bamboo steamer tray, dip it in the sauce, which is a mixture of Chinese black vinegar, soy sauce, and julienned ginger, and then place it in your spoon (one of those wide, flat spoons you always get in the Asian restaurants). You use your chopsticks to pierce the dumpling to release the broth and steam (so that you don’t burn the heck out of your mouth), and then eat. Gooooood stuff. Worth noting that they have a US franchise now too. We had a couple of soups, including a very good hot and sour soup and a shrimp wonton soup. There were also dessert dumplings, one filled with red bean paste (sweetened) and another filled with Taro.

I also had my first sampling of the local beer, aptly named “Taiwan Beer” which makes up the majority of the market here. It’s a fairly standard pilsner, but as one of my colleagues noted, it is a bit more full-bodied than most of the other well-known Asian pilsners, almost like a less-hoppy Heineken. The interesting thing about this meal was the price. The way that they work it is that a private room comes with a base price. That is, we can have the room, but we are going to be charged a minimum of NT$10,000. However, the cost of the room itself drops the more food and drink we order, so if we spend $10,000 or more on dinner, the room is free (or put another way, we pay for the room, and up to $10,000 worth of food & drink is free). What this means is that for a party of 10, enough food to thoroughly stuff us all was about $34(US) apiece.  I’ve eaten at plenty of places where the food wasn’t as good and the entrée alone cost more than that.

Taipei #1 - Saturday

I''m staying at the Grand Hyatt Taipei. It is a nice, if fairly standard business-class hotel across the road from the Taipei International Conference Center (TICC) where IETF is being  held. According to The Internet, which is never known to be wrong about such things, it’s apparently haunted, and has several different tapestries hanging in the entry hall that are supposed to ward off evil spirits and protect the home… 

Breakfast is included in my room rate, so I tried out the buffet this AM. As with other places I’ve stayed in Asia, it’s a huge buffet with a combination of American, European, and Asian breakfast items. So this morning I was able to have: crispy bacon (they made a point to label it “crispy” and indeed it was), honey baked ham, and I could have had an omelette, a crepe, etc if I so desired. However, also on offer were Chinese buns and dumplings, and miscellaneous hot Chinese food items that you wouldn’t normally consider breakfast.  I remember really liking the buns and dumplings from Beijing, and well, I can get an omelette anywhere, so you can guess what I went for. By far the most exotic thing I tried was something called “century eggs” available either by themselves or in shredded pork congee, If that list sent you directly to read the Wikipedia link, don’t feel bad, the only part of that I recognized was “pork” too. Congee is basically rice porridge, and is not all that flavorful by itself, but the pork was a nice addition. The Century Egg in the congee was more of a textural element than it was a flavor, as the pork was the main thing you tasted. I also had a century egg by itself. The egg white was translucent and brown, and had the consistency of gelatin and very little flavor. The best way I know to describe the yolk was that it was “distilled” egg yolk – more concentrated flavor, but you were more aware of the sulfurous and other off-tasting compounds in the flavor profile too. That is to say, it wasn’t bad, but not something I’m likely to crave. They also had a section of fresh honeycomb set up with a tray underneath it, so that you could cut off a section of the honeycomb yourself, and if you wanted, you could get some additional honey from the tray.

 I had some carrot juice this morning, but I hear that it constitutes murder, so I probably should enjoy it sparingly. J

Here's a great picture of the Taipei skyline from a Flickr user. 

If you click to make the picture bigger, and look just to the left of Taipei 101, there is a building with red square lights around the top windows. That was across the square from our hotel, so that gives you an idea of where I was staying. This was taken from the opposite direction (on the hills overlooking the city to the east). My room faced west towards the mountains.

The downside of today is that it’s been rainy and gross much of the day, and I haven’t been inclined to go exploring given the weather. One of the things on my list was to go up on Taipei 101’s observation deck, but the visibility is so low that I think that would be a waste of time and money, so that may have to wait. I did go out at dinnertime and check out the mall at Taipei 101 (it’s basically across the street from my hotel), and it was so misty/foggy that you couldn’t even see the top of the building from the street, so my hunch was correct. 

 The mall is pretty amazing though – it’s 5 floors of all high-end designer shops (Bulgari, Tissot, DeBeers, Emporio Armani, etc). However, the reason that I went over there was to grab some dinner. They have a huge food court on the basement level, probably 40 or 50 different restaurants, including a McDonalds, a KFC, a Subway, a Cold Stone Creamery, and an Auntie Anne’s pretzel place. It’s very busy, and a bit of an assault on the senses, especially for a jet-lagged tourist. Rest assured, dear reader, that I didn’t punk out and fly 10K miles to eat at McDonalds. I found a Japanese place called Momoya, and got a set (combo) with Shrimp Tempura and Udon Noodles, plus a Kirin for about $8.50. It was a good amount of food, and pretty tasty. I saw one of those sushi places where you sit at the bar and take things off of the conveyor belt as they go past, but it had a pretty good line, so maybe I’ll try to hit that some other time. 

24 hours of traveling, part 2, NRT-TPE

Picking up where I left off, in Narita airport...

They delayed boarding slightly due to an aircraft change, and as I checked in they noted that my seat no longer existed. Fortunately, they re-assigned me the equivalent exit row seat, so I was in good shape. The announcements on the plane go tri-lingual for these flights, English, Japanese, and Mandarin. It’s interesting to listen to them back to back like that. We sat on the tarmac at Narita for about 45 minutes, which also made us late getting into Taipei. 

Customs and immigration was a breeze. It actually took me quite a bit longer to get my luggage than it did to go through immigration. I was curious to see if they were going to say anything about my passport, because while the US (and many other countries) are not required to have a visa to visit Taipei, their visa/entry rules require at least 6 months’ validity remaining on one’s passport. My passport expires on May 27 2012, so I had a margin even from the end of the trip, but I definitely had to double-check to make sure I didn’t have to renew before I left, and they didn’t say anything.

The word from Those Who Know These Things is that not a lot of places in Taipei take credit cards, taxis definitely don’t, and outside of hotels, an Amex (my corporate card) is a useless green hunk of plastic. So, I needed to get cash. Bank of America participates in the inaccurately named Global ATM Alliance so that you might have a chance of getting money internationally without paying exorbitant banking fees. Europe, ok, Canada, no problem. Africa, Central and South America, Caribbean, etc are a bit hit or miss, especially since BoA only recognizes reciprocal relationships with a bank in its home country (that is, Deutsche Bank in Germany is ok, but not in Poland, etc). Asia? [crickets] Nada, zip, zilch. BoA at least has a direct affiliation with China Construction Bank so that you can get money in China (I used it last year in Beijing), but it’s not applicable to branches in Hong Kong, and they have nothing in Taipei, so I stopped at the first ATM I saw. My general assumption is that it’s still cheaper to get local currency via an ATM than via the currency exchange in the US, and I’m not keen on traveling with a large amount of USD to change once I get here anyway. In general, I sort of feel like if you fancy yourself a global (or even National) banking player, it shouldn’t be my problem that you aren’t where I am when I need money. I can understand hitting me with a charge if I am too lazy to go even slightly out of my way to get to the closest BoA (or affiliate) ATM within a certain distance radius, but if you don’t have *any* options for me, you shouldn’t be charging me for the “convenience” of accessing my own money. If you lose money eating the other bank’s fees, that should be your incentive to get a reciprocal relationship set up, or get some ATMs deployed. But given that this is the bank that thought it would be a good idea to charge $5/month for people to, you know, use their debit card for actual its intended purpose, I’m not holding my breath.

There was a huge line for the taxi stand, due to the fact that several international flights had landed at about the same time, and it was pretty late. I wasn’t really keen on waiting in the line, as it looked like it was actively losing ground (far fewer taxis taking people out of the queue than new people entering), and it was already 11pm local time, meaning that I'd been up for 26+ hours straight. So when someone came up to me and tried to sell me a taxi ride as I was trying to find the end of the taxi line, I accepted, despite my better judgment. I knew that normal taxi fare from the airport to downtown was usually NT$1200-1300 (which is usually meter fare + tolls), so when he offered a NT$1400 flat rate, I figured the extra $3-5 US was worth the convenience of getting to my bed that much quicker. The fixer made a call on his cell phone, walked me over to the arrivals curb, and within 2 minutes, up drove my cab (Toyota Corolla, I think). I noted that the driver slipped the fixer a bit of cash, so I guess it benefits both of them. Fortunately it was a licensed cab (though the driver didn’t match the picture on the license) just running off-meter. In 40 minutes or so, I was at my hotel, receipt in hand, and I daresay that the driver was more responsible than some of the cabs I’ve had to/from Dulles. I didn’t see anything notable in terms of cars, but that probably had a lot to do with the fact that it was rainy and late on Friday night. I did note two things on the ride – a lot of the trucks and buses have LED lights that flash or change color (blue, red, green, white, etc) to make them more visible, either aesthetically or for safety reasons, and there were a few places where some construction of piers for the new MRT (Mass Rail Transit) extension to connect Taipei with the airport had created some low overhangs, and they were festively decorated with yellow LED rope lights instead of low clearance signs.

24 hours of travel, part 1, IAD-NRT

This is the first in a series of posts about my recent trip to Taipei, Taiwan.

IAD-NRT leg was long. Really long. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly long it is. [apologies to Douglas Adams]  I mean, no matter how many times you see the 14 hour flight time, and even though I’ve done that flight at least 3 separate times now (6 if you count roundtrips) I always forget just how long that actually is. It’s so long that I: read a novel and a half, two magazines, ran my laptop battery totally dead doing work, ate two meals and a snack, dozed off for a bit, and the flight still wasn’t over. 

I don’t really sleep on planes, not because I have to “help them fly” or anything, but I have a bit of a catch-22. I’m 6’4” and most of it is legs. Since I can’t remove them to stow them in the overhead bin (or worse, gate-check them because they won’t fit in the bin), I usually try to get an exit row or bulkhead set so that my legs still work when I get off of the plane. But on most long-haul flights (777, 747, etc) the exit row and bulkhead areas are where people go to stretch and are usually right near the lavatories, so there’s always noise and light and activity, not conducive to sleeping without chemical aids. Also, I can’t seem to sleep sitting up – I can’t do it in a car either.

You know, people are fond of joking about us living in the future, as in “we live in the future, where’s my flying car, jetpack, hoverboard, etc”  but really, on flights like that, my response is always “we live in the future, where’s my suborbital (or supersonic) flight?” This is also put into sharp relief because typically while on these excruciatingly long flights, I’m reading some near-future sci-fi/cyberpunk novel where people can be on the other side of the world in a matter of a few hours. Being able to get to Asia in half or a quarter of the time (aka, not having it eat a full day) would be such an improvement. Remembering a documentary I saw about the Concorde, I continue to be disappointed that we actually took a step backward in commercial air flight evolution, and are still using tech that is nearly 50 years old. However, I’m becoming convinced that just making traditional jets (those that fly at 30-60k feet) fly 2x or 3x the speed isn’t really the right way to go. There just doesn’t seem to be a way to make that efficient enough to be cost-effective, considering thrust, heating, and noise problems that limit your potential routes at those altitudes. Taking the thing to the edge of space (say 300k feet) and letting the earth rotate under you would be far more effective, the key is getting the launch/takeoff to the point where that is cost-effective, and getting the whole thing to the point where it’s routine. I keep hoping that Virgin Galactic and others have concrete plans to take their nascent space programs beyond the “rich-man’s bucket list” stage, but I understand that this initial trip to nowhere is probably necessary to bankroll the R&D to make it accessible for us commoners who can’t reliably get their companies to spring for a business-class ticket to Asia, let alone something exotic like a suborb. I do wonder if anyone’s done the math on what the break-even point would have to be for some of the longest routes to make it cost-effective for business travelers (or even just executives) based on the value of their on-clock time.

While I didn’t have to go through customs and immigration in Japan, I did have to go through security to get to my transfer gate. A couple of interesting observations – the English translation of the posted notice to passengers made me chuckle – “…In order to prevent hi-jacking and other acts of aggression, all passengers will be required to undergo a security check for hand-carry items and parsonal [sic] effects…” As with every other country outside of the US, you don’t have to take your shoes off in security. However, I noticed several pairs of slippers in the hand-search area, so that if they pulled you aside for a secondary search, you didn’t have to stand there in your socks.

I actually made it through Narita in enough time that I could have made the earlier flight to Taipei, (I know this because I went to that gate only to discover it was the wrong one) but I didn’t want to risk losing my exit row seat and having to wait for my luggage, so I didn’t try to get on that flight. Instead I killed an hour or so charging my phone and laptop and taking advantage of free WiFi. Sprint actually has CDMA roaming agreements in both Tokyo and Taipei, and sends me a helpful text message to tell me the local dial code, per-minute and text rates, and also that mobile data is not available except with GSM “World” phones. But since the alternative is my throwaway 2G Nokia with a prepaid SIM, and the 12 hour time difference makes it unlikely that I’ll be using my phone except in emergencies, that’s ok by me. I do miss the data access though. Perhaps I should look into a secondhand Android GSM phone for traveling…

China trip 9 - Creepy Internet Stuff

I’m going to digress into Internet Geek land for this post, apologies to those who aren’t interested, but I do have some friends that I think will be keen to read about my experiences, and I tried to keep it pretty non-technical, so it may appeal to others as well.

As you’re no doubt aware, PRC has a love-hate relationship with the Internet. They want to embrace the technology and the connectedness it represents, but they view it as a threat because it is a means for people to undermine the sovereignty of the State by exposing its citizens to “propaganda” in the form of ideas that run counter to the official State view of the world. Access to many things that the censors deem unacceptable is blocked via the “Great FireWall of China” which is in the path of nearly all Internet traffic entering or leaving the country. Things that are blocked include most social media sites, sites considered to be injurious or dissident to the Chinese government (see also my experience when researching Tian’anmen Square on Wikipedia), obscenity, etc. Further, traffic is usually logged and sniffed, so that they know who is trying to reach things that they ought not be looking at. In the past, I had heard that common VPN tunneling techniques were blocked, because this encrypted and therefore obfuscated the traffic, allowing the end user to bypass these controls. However, until the conference started, I’ve been using the hotel network, which allows VPN, so I can connect back via my company’s network in the US and use the Internet as if I was sitting in my office. Obviously, latency to go from Beijing to Kansas and back out to my destination is high but manageable. Probably won’t be streaming any Netflix, but VoIP works passably – called home via my company's MS Unified Communications and only noticed the occasional artifact. Now, I’m not sure if they started allowing VPN in the more international tourist-friendly hotels because it was becoming so commonplace for international travelers to need to use a VPN to reach things at work, or if they simply don’t care anymore because they have devices capable of breaking the crypto. I’d like to hope that it’s the former, because the latter gives me the heebie-jeebies. I’m still changing passwords on the sites I accessed while I’m here when I get back, just to be on the safe side.

Along those same lines, IETF has had to do things a bit differently in the way that they set up their networks for the conference. In most locations, the IETF brings in dedicated access, sets up open wireless in all of the common areas, and often takes over the conference hotel’s in-room connectivity, because well, you can’t have 1000+ Internet geeks descend on your average hotel with its average assumptions about how much bandwidth is enough and have it end in anything but tears. Our average usage is somewhere north of 50mbps now. They’ve been making a secured (WPA2) network available for those who don’t use a VPN and would like to not have their wireless in the clear, but it’s not used as extensively as the open AP. This time, there is not exactly an open network. There is a network that you can connect to without authentication, but it redirects you to an authentication page where you have to enter your credentials from the conference to gain access, sort of like when you have to sign into a paywall on a non-free wireless network. There is also an 802.1x authenticated network in both the hotel rooms and the conference area. This is because one of IETF’s requirements is that their network be allowed unfettered access to the internet – i.e. no firewalls allowed. I’m not convinced that this translates to no sniffing or logging, but there’s at least no blocked content. Therefore, the Chinese government is requiring IETF to limit access to attendees only. While there are a lot of Chinese nationals attending the conference (over 1/3 of the attendees), I guess that the assumption is that they would have the same level of access if this was being held elsewhere, and therefore there is no additional risk. Plus, I remember seeing news items that the Chinese government was requiring its citizens to run filtering software locally on their computers, so perhaps they’re simply controlling it that way.

Additionally, the conference is having to be much more strict than usual in controlling access to the meeting itself. Normally, people don’t much care if you aren’t always wearing your badge, especially if you are well-known as a regular attendee at IETF meetings – you won’t be challenged as to your registration when you walk into a meeting. Here, there are hotel staffers posted at the entrances to the conference areas that are checking badges to ensure that only registered attendees may enter. I’m thinking that this may have had something to do with an early contract scuffle that the IETF had with the conference hotel.

Originally, the hotel had a line in the contract saying something to the effect of, “if any attendee says anything prohibited by law, we reserve the right to terminate the contract and kick you out.” IETF obviously balked at this, and did a survey of its members to find out if they would attend a meeting held in China with that condition. The overwhelming response was no, because IETF is very much a meeting where open discussion is important, and that would have a serious chilling effect on the tone of the meeting. This gave them the leverage that they needed to tell the hotel in no uncertain terms that they could either have that line in the contract and have no conference, or they could remove that from the contract. Since the proceedings of the meetings are very much on the record (posted on the internet), I can see why they would want to ensure that no one outside of the conference be given open access.

Memo to all of the people who are quick to accuse members of our government of being socialists, fascists, or Nazis simply because they support an agenda you disagree with: Go to visit an actual socialist country with a truly repressive regime for a little while, and stop taking your freedom to complain about the government for granted, especially when you use that freedom to say things that are chosen for their hyperbolic impact without much thought to their veracity or their ability to advance rational debate on the matter.

As it is, part of me wonders if this blog won’t eventually lead to me showing up on some dissident watch list and being denied a visa renewal should I ever want to return to China.