Last Friday we took valdelane's mom to the night zoo for her birthday. I took a few pictures.

Is this bird's hat not excellent?

These photos are for rezendi. The full set is here.

Last weekend I noodled around in the San Ysidro/South San Diego border region for a couple of hours. San Ysidro was not as accessibly photogenic as I'd hoped, and I probably missed a lot by being in the car. Parking is a premium quantity and there were few places to pull over without pissing a bunch of people off. If I go down there again I'll take the trolley.



View into Tijuana from atop a hill in San Ysidro:


Slightly sketchy motel signage:


After that I went on to Border Field State Park. I paid my $5 entrance fee to a ranger with a faintly Midwestern accent. She thanked me, saying "We're hoping to stay open". I drive on, passing a group of teenage boys on bicycles.

It's a beautiful, sunny, beach-going day but except for me and the cyclists and a few other people here and there the park is basically empty-- or, I should say, empty except for us few civilians and the Border Patrol. The place is crawling with the green-and-white SUVs of the Border Patrol, parked on top of hills, lurking in turn-offs. In contrast the Mexican side of the beach is full of people lounging and enjoying the day.

As advertised, the park goes all the way up to the border:



And the fence snakes over the hills for miles:



Monument to the establishment of the border after the Mexican-American War:



The fence is new as of the last year or so. It used to be that you could go all the way up to the monument, but I had to stick my arms and camera through the fenceposts in order to take the picture. A guy notices this and comes over to chat a bit. He tells me that this park used to be a popular gathering place, where families and friends divided between countries would meet up to visit, play, and pass gifts and snacks back and forth. No longer.

Leaning up against the metal fence, gazing across the border, I spy my counterpart on the other side-- a slender man in a long-sleeved shirt leaning up against his side of the fence, gazing across the border. Two pickup-truck loads of black-clad Policias Federales bristling with guns drive around the parking lot. Looking back to see the fence winding its way over the hills, I'm struck by the feeling that it's there as much to keep us Americans in as it is to keep the Mexicans out.

Here's the strange part. The border fence goes all the way into the ocean-- okay, fine. But look at the condition of the fence:





Did they run out of money before finishing the last hundred feet? Are they just not taking this project seriously? I don't understand.

A couple of rather frivolous peeves:

• I'm nominally interested in growing my hair out a bit (there's not too many ways a short-haired person can change their hairstyle except by growing more hair (my work environment is a little too conservative for "interesting" colors)). I realized a few days ago that the last time I grew my hair out from being this short was when I was in college and a) didn't care that much what my hair looked like and b) didn't have money for regular visits to a good stylist. Since that time I've gotten both more vain about my hair and less tolerant of coiffure awkwardness. It's already starting to get kind of awkward and poofy and generally irritating, and maybe I should just not mess with the hairstyle that has served me perfectly well for the last 4 years or so.
  


• As a software developer, one of the things I'm periodically reminded of is that it's often not the big, flashy features that have the most impact on user satisfaction. For example, a user recently went out of his way to compliment us on a minor enhancement that took me maybe an hour to write, while large feature upgrades representing weeks' worth of work go by seemingly without notice. I think a similar concept applies to bugs. No one likes a showstopper, of course, but it's the little things that really seem to get to people.
  
  This leads me to my actual peeve, which is about the Blackberry OS upgrade that RIM pushed out a month or two ago. Display of Chinese characters works now, which is cool (and would have been useful when I was actually in China and trying to view Chinese websites) but doesn't do a lot for me on a day-to-day basis. They made the user interfaces to the mail program and web browser a little snazzier. BFD.
  
  In exchange, the device as a whole is slower and more prone to locking up. To my great annoyance, two simple functions that I use a lot are now flakey and unreliable. Like many people I use my cell phone as a watch, and after the OS upgrade the clock display does not always update properly. Even worse, the alarm clock will now occasionally simply fail to ring the alarm. So, now I have a nicer email interface but don't know what time it is and might be late to work in the morning.
  
  These are not flashy or technically difficult items, but they are an important part of my user experience with my phone. RIM, I shake my fist at you.
  

Is there a word (non-English is fine-- perhaps a nice German compound word?) for the sense of despair that comes from working hard to complete a difficult or unpleasant job, only to realize that one will have to repeat the job in the very near future-- indeed, that the job is never really done?

I just spent an hour scrubbing the kitchen floor, washing dishes, degunking the stove and burner covers, and cleaning the sink. Shortly I will begin making dinner, which will produce more dirty dishes and sink mess. I am only ever done washing dishes for a short period of time, and despair of it.

Actually I get a pass tonight since I'm cooking for valdelane and she will wash the dishes because she is an awesome spouse, but you get the idea.

I'm going to try journalling my workouts for progress tracking and accountability.

( for the curious )

In honor of my having a working camera again-- got something in my environment you'd like to see a picture of? I'm taking requests. I might be willing to travel a little for it if I think the idea is especially cool, I haven't noodled around in the car for a while.

Last night I dreamed that a friend lived in a house that was part of a train system. The house was a real house-- two stories, wood siding, kitchen, living room, I think even a yard-- but it was set on wheels and ran around on a train track.
Even though the friend owned the house, it was still part of the transit network and went to different stops on a schedule. I think it even had a whistle to toot. There was a conductor and passengers would sit in the living room (which had appropriate seating) for the ride.

Via cellio by way of Language Log:

Dear Lazyweb,

I have a bunch of lemon pucks (what's left over when one squeezes all the juice out of the lemon). I'm making some of them into Moroccan-style preserved lemons, but that requires "# of lemons for juice" > "# of lemon pucks that can be preserved". What else can I do with them?

Are Underworld worth seeing these days? They're doing a show up in Oakland in August and I'm thinking about whether to go up for it. Dubnobasswithmyheadman and Second Toughest In The Infants were important parts of my personal soundtrack for some while, but I didn't find Beaucoup Fish or 100 Days Off all that compelling and I haven't kept up with them for the last several years.

Via sasha_khan:

I have two Dreamwidth invite codes. First come first serve.

Earworm of the week:

1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry. Redditers of the time are not impressed due to the lack of tail call recursion, concurrency, or proper capitalization.

Read more (thanks to jcreed).

I think Twitter is rotting my brain. I like pithy commentary as much as the next person but lately, putting together a coherent essay or story seems quite difficult-- Look! A monkey! (Excuse me, I have to tell the internet about the monkey.)

Right. Got a post you'd like to see? Tell me, and maybe we can spend a little less time in the Short Attention Span Theatre.

Dear Lazyweb,

I need to replace my digital camera, which bricked after my impromptu ocean swim last month. I really liked that model (Fujifilm FinePix F30) and was figuring I'd just get the most recent successor model (the F100), but it seems that FujiFilm has joined in the megapixel inflation wankery (at the expense of image quality) and the current model isn't nearly as good as the old one. I might just see if I can snag a used F30 from eBay, but please tell me if you know of a current model compact digital that does well with the following priorities:

• Good image quality in low light conditions</i>
  
• Low noise


• Good macro mode


• Doesn't tend to over- or undersaturate colors


• Long battery life

Behold, I have joined Dreamwidth (almost 8 years to the day since I joined LJ, heh).

http://zare-k.dreamwidth.org/

What is this Dreamwidth thing all you kids are talking about? Do I need one?

Wired: Went to the beach at Sunset Cliffs this afternoon. Nice warm sunny day with a slight breeze. Got a couple nice pics of the tidepools.
Tired: Took an unintentional swim in the ocean. I'd sat down on a rock to rinse out my shoes and a big wave came along and swept me right off into the water.
Wired: The water was warm for mid-April. My wallet and cellphone weren't in my pocket.
Tired: My camera was. Pretty sure it did not survive, and I really liked that camera.

The ocean is always full of surprises.

This was the shortest part of the trip so I don't know why it's taken me so long to finish writing this up. Full set of pictures is here.

We had a little trouble getting to our hotel from the train station. It was a small place tucked into a hutong neighborhood. Travelocity failed me and didn't provide the exact address, a map, or street names written in hanzi. Our cab driver was patient with us and did manage to get us there, but after all that fuss the place was kind of awful. The bathroom reeked of mildew due to poor drainage, staff came bursting into the room in the morning without knocking, and it must have been a stop on some neighborhood tour because groups of tourists came tromping through a few times. So, if you're ever thinking of staying at the Beijing Courtyard Hotel off Goulou Da Jie (Drum Tower street)-- don't.

Hotel-related irritations aside, I found the surrounding neighborhood quite charming. This is going to sound pretty Western-chauvinist of me but my initial reaction was "Hey, this feels like a real city neighborhood!" Where after my last visit (summer 2002) I described Beijing as being tiled with endless drab apartment buildings and "stuff shops" (small stores selling drinks, snacks, and cheap miscellany) and punctuated by historic sites and intimidating government buildings, on this visit I felt that the area around the Drum Tower was actually a place I wouldn't mind living. The main street bustled with cozy neighborhood restaurants (one of which served the best dry-fried string beans I'd ever had) and shops. It was also pretty close to the subway which has been substantially expanded and spiffed-up. Again, many places were closed for the lunar new year but there was some interesting signage:





Storefront graffiti:


Photos of sample work in the window of a tattoo shop:


To my delight there was even a cafe serving real espresso and croissants. Cafe Zarah's founder lived in Germany for some time and they had a collection of German magazines available to browse. Thus I, an American, sat in a Beijing coffee shop reading German articles about Chinese politics.

One of my favorite sights on the entire trip was the Dongyue Daoist temple. The temple has a collection of dioramas that show a theology depicting the universe as a giant celestial bureaucracy with a different department for administering longevity, rebirth, punishment and reward for deeds done in this life, sickness, different animals, weather, on and on. valdelane has the complete list of departments here.



Department of Rain Gods


Punishment Department




I also went to the Temple of Heaven Park. I really should have skipped the temple complex itself-- by that time I was suffering from a bad case of Chinese Historical Site fatigue, it was absolutely packed with people, and much of it was temporarily closed off anyway because some bigwig was visiting.



I should have just hung out in the surrounding park to do some people-watching. These folks are perched on the wall playing card games.



I also saw groups of people playing musical instruments, singing, and doing calisthenics.

On my last day in the city I decided to do a little shopping and went to the Wangfujing Bookstore. It is a palace of books, at least six stories tall, and packed with volumes on all manner of subjects. History, current events, economics, law, a couple of shelves devoted to the works of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. Books on arts, photography, and music. A good three-fourths of a floor devoted to books for English-learners, often quite specialized-- English for graduate students, English for hotel employees. Giant areas of fiction. Several sections of books for students taking exams. A section of books aimed at women, but (unfortunately I had to judge by covers most of the time) they looked more like "Chicken Soup for the Soul" glurge than books for feminist study. If there was a section on sexuality, queer issues, etc I didn't see it.

Culinary highlights: yes, Beijing-style roast duck really does live up to its reputation. I endorse the Da Dong Restaurant in the Sanlitun district. We had duck liver pate, stirfried greens, "two flavor" silken tofu served in spoonfuls, half a roast duck, fruit for dessert, good tea and a bottle of wine all for about $50. And oh, the duck-- crispy skin to dip in a bit of sugar and slices of succulent flesh to arrange on pancakes. Delicious.

Speaking of Sanlitun, I know this mascot is just for some glitzy development project but I thought he was cute. Also, God help us all, you can go to Hooter's and Sizzler there.



On our last night we went to a little bar on one of the hutong streets. I think it was mostly an excuse for some friends to hang out together and make a little money on the side. They had three large Siberian Huskies lounging about and played American rap music on the stereo.

Finally it was time to return home. The new Beijing international airport terminal is so big it should have its own weather system. Unfortunately, while it's spacious and airy it's also short on traveler-friendliness-- not much to eat past the security checkpoint, shops selling expensive duty-free goods but no books, toiletries, or snacks, miles and miles of gates with moving sidewalks that only go one way.

Miscellaneous differences I noticed when comparing my 2002 visit with this one:

• The ambient standard of living is a little higher. People's cars are nicer-- fewer Chery QQ deathtraps. City streets are a little cleaner.There's still plenty of poverty and decay around though.


• I saw many people with pet dogs, from large fluffy winterized breeds in Harbin to compact apartment-sized breeds in Chengde and Beijing. This I also take as a sign of increasing prosperity.


• Like I described above, in some ways Beijing feels more like a livable city. The subway system is now quite nice. In some areas though it's even bigger and more intimidating-- vast boulevards of cars, big city blocks, big malls and development complexes, big government buildings, big big big.


• Foreigners aren't as much of a novelty any more. One of the biggest annoyances of my first trip was being gawked at and "Hellooo!"-ed constantly. That happened very little this time. Black people are a rare enough sight in China that I've gotten asked "Are there are a lot of blacks in the US?" a few times there, but a couple of weeks after I got home I read an article in the New Yorker about the large number of African traders and businessmen that have moved to Guangzhou in the past few years.


• There is definitely a burgeoning middle- to upper-middle class consumer economy. Credit cards are coming into wider use. Sure hope that works out better for them than it has for us.


• My own Chinese-language skills sure aren't as good as they used to be. I don't think I ever told anyone that my hovercraft was full of eels but conversation was not as fluent as before. By the end of the trip both the speaking and reading skills were starting to come back to me, just in time to leave. Oh well.

Last week valdelane and I went to see the La Jolla Cow Parade. Here are a few of my favorites (see full set):

Triumph Of The Will










Tribal Bovine




A group of kids were also looking at this cow with us. "Look!" exclaimed one. "He has a pierced udder!" "She has a pierced udder," I said. "Cows are female." "Whoooah" said the kids.

Pictures from our trip out to Anza-Borrego earlier this month. The meadow flowers were pretty this year but we missed the cactus flowers (my favorite) by a week or two. Full set on is on Flickr.

On Wednesday night we went to hear the Faroese folk metal band Tyr as part of the Pagan Knights tour. At the show I learned that:

• True Scottish Pirate Metal is a music genre. Alestorm are the self-proclaimed kings, a title for which I suspect they have little contention.


• A keytar can be metal (see above).


• There is a style of dancing that consists mostly of people pushing, shoving, and running in to each other. (Can you tell I haven't been to a lot of rock/metal concerts?)

In any case it was a good time. Tyr's music is pretty sophisticated and the meld of folk music traditions with modern instruments and style is interesting. Definitely worth a listen.

--
Dept. of Just Not Getting It: I discovered Hulu recently (I know, I'm behind the times). They have episodes of Battlestar Galactica available. Great! The catch is, there's an eight day delay between the time the show airs and the time it's available on Hulu. BSG is a weekly show. And yet entertainment execs are shocked, shocked that people just download stuff on BitTorrent.

--
Dept. of SoCal Culture Clash: One night last week I went to pick up some Mexican food for takeout after work. I had on a black button-down shirt and black pants. The counter guy asked me where I work and I told him "up in Sorrento Valley". "No," he said, "what restaurant do you work at?" "Huh?" says I. "Oh, you're wearing all black, I thought you must work at a restaurant."

Okay then.

I have one longstanding travel ritual, which is that I always buy a copy of Wired at the airport (if available) before getting on the first flight of a trip. I read the magazine on the plane. I know that I could get a year's subscription for the price of two storebought issues, but that's just not how the ritual works.

Readers, what are your travel rituals?