More Beijing Photos

Two of my hobbies - besides collecting key cards - are travel and photography. I enjoy taking the photos, but I don't always get around to doing the post-trip processing (i.e. selecting, editing, posting, and writing about them) that I'd like to do.

The work that funds these hobbies often sucks up the time that I need to fully delve into them. For instance, I selected, edited, and posted the photos from the first trip to Asia last year, but I never got around to writing about them. You can see those photos here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. On the other hand, I haven't even gotten around to the photos from the other two trips to Asia last year.

But I'm on top of it this time with Beijing! I've already posted photos and written about Beijing Olympic Park.

In addition, just last night I completed working on the photos from the Beijing trip. If you want to see those photos but you're in a rush (or can't be bothered clicking through photo after photo after photo), you can see a video I made of them below.

(Click Full Screen button to enlarge)

Alternatively, if you want to see the same photos but you want to see them bigger and at higher resolution and without the cheesy royalty-free music, you can see them here.

Hope you enjoy them.

BTW... For all the other photos that I've posted but never gotten around to writing about, you can see them here.

Beijing Olympic Park

I took on a photography project last week in Beijing. Given the large crowds of people in Beijing, I knew that time-lapse photography would be fun to create and watch.

One essential piece of equipment for creating time-lapse photography is something to keep the camera pointed in the direction you want and to keep it very still. Ordinarily that  piece of equipment would be a tripod. I rarely even use one at home, and I never travel with one.

I was forced to improvise. I had some success using a few 1 yuan coins to prop up the camera at the desired angle. Unfortunately it was a bit breezy, and the wind kept knocking over the camera. I rummaged through my backpack to find something better suited for the task. Ultimately I found that propping up the camera against a water bottle worked exceptionally well.

One thing that I like about not using a tripod in this video was that it forced me to shoot from the ground. I think the shooting from ground level make this video more interesting looking that shooting from 3-5' off the ground.

The other thing about shooting from ground level is that doing so drew a lot of attention from the people around me - or should I say behind me. You can't see it in the video, but the whole time I was shooting, there were half a dozen to up to twenty people standing behind me (and behind the camera) watching inquisitively. Alas none of the people are likely to see the video any time soon. The video is hosted on YouTube, YouTube is owned by Google, and Google is one of the main targets of the GFC.

The cold breezy night and crawling around on the ground reminded me of the efforts required to get the Chinny shot years ago. The big difference in this case was that I wasn't crawling around in penguin poop. :-)

On the way home from the airport, I saw about a half dozen billboards for the iPhone 6. Each featured a striking photo scaled up to billboard proportions. Underneath the photos the caption read "Shot with iPhone 6". [ BTW... I think it sounds totally pretentious the way apple never uses the articles "the" or "an" in front of the word "iPhone". ]

I assume the point of the ad campaign is - at least in part - to tout the high resolution of the iPhone 6 camera. The photos did, indeed, look mighty impressive. But there was one thing that quickly jumped out at me about the photos in the ad campaign: they're all daytime shots.

I love the versatility and portability of shooting with an iPhone. One thing that almost always disappoints me about the iPhone, however, is its poor performance in low light conditions. More often than not, I find any nighttime shots I take to be far less than stellar.

Given the poor low light capabilities of the iPhone, I'm rather pleased with how well this video turned out.

BTW... The video was shot on an iPhone 4S. Thinking of upgrading today. Happy Birthday to me. :-)

Proof Positive - I am the Best!!!

It's about time I started getting credit for just how awesome I am!

( Apologies to the writer of this poster. His/her/their English is much better than my Mandarin. )

vChinese

Why am I in Beijing this week, you ask? I'm teamed up with a co-worker. Our job is to evaluate instructor candidates. As you might imagine, the language barrier can be a bit of a challenge, but that's how I approach it - it's a challenge.

That's "challenge" as in "good", not "challenge" as in "bad".

I've taken it upon myself to learn some Chinese Simplified characters. But as you can see from my notes below, I've been teaching myself a very small subset of Chinese Simplified... Let's call it "vChinese".

(Click to enlarge)

Why did I write "long" as the character for "hypervisor"? I've been transcribing the characters from slides that the instructor candidates are projecting onto a screen. Unlike me, they don't hang out on a slide blabbing on and on for 20+ minutes. I don't want to bust their groove and say, "Hey can you go back a slide? I'm not done clumsily transcribing yet."

For the record, "hypervisor" is 虚拟化 管理程序. Let's see you try to transcribe that on the fly.

Here for your edification – that's just a fancy word for "Brian I can barely read your block-capped English writing let alone your vChinese" – is a legible list of those words/characters:

the:  第

lesson:  课 

storage:  存储 

network:  网络 

application:  应用 

physical:  物理 

virtual:  虚拟

virtualization:  虚拟化 

machine:  机 

architecture:  体系结构 

datastore:  数据存储 

private cloud:  私有云 

public cloud:  公有云 

hybrid cloud:  混合云 

availability:  可用性 

ESXi host:  ESXi 主机 

user name:  用户名 

password:  密码 

lab:  练习 

number:  号码 or 数量  (I haven't figured out the difference yet.)

file:  文件 

and:  和 

hypervisor:  虚拟化 管理程序 

synchronized:  同步

Datacenter: 数据中心

Cluster: 集群
Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN): 主机域名全称 

License key: 许可证密钥
System logs: 系统日志
vMotion migration: 迁移??? 

vMotion: 迁移 (confirm)
Virtual machine port groups: 虚拟机端口组
Uplink ports: 上行链路端口
Virtual switch: 虚拟交换机
Physical switch: 物理交换机
Physical NIC: 物理网卡 

Virtual NIC: 虚拟网卡 

Cisco Discovery Protocol: Cisco 发现协议 (CDP)
Listen: 侦听
Broadcast: 广播
Listen and broadcast: 侦听和广播以及

Disabled: 禁用 Time: 时间
Outbound bandwidth: 出站带宽
Load balancing: 负载平衡
Source MAC Hash: 源 MAC 哈希
IP Hash: IP 哈希
Raw Device Mapping: 原始设备映射
Or: 或
IP Address: IP 地址
Software: 软件 

Hardware: 硬件
Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol (CHAP): 质询握手身份验证协议 (CHAP)
Driver: 驱动程序
Third-party Vendors: 第三方供应商
Most Recently Used (MRU): 最近使用
Fixed: 固定
Round Robin: 循环
Availability: 可用性 Scalability: 可扩展性
Hard disks: 硬盘
If: 如
Clone: 克隆

Snapshots: 快照

Powered off: 关闭时???  关闭???
Powered on: 开机 ???    启动 ???
Boot: 引导
Boot options: 引导选项
Yes: 是???    是的???
No: 否
Applicable: 适用Not applicable: 不适用
RAM: 内存
Compatible: 兼容的 

Source: 源
Destination: 目标???
Bit: 位
Bitmap: 位图
Process: 进程???    流程???
Layer 2 network: 第 2 层网络
On: 上
Prefix in front of number to turn cardinal (e.g. 1, 2, 3) to ordinal (1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd):  第

Operating System: 操作系统  

Balloon driver: 内存释放驱动程序 (literally “memory release driver”)

 Balloon: 气球
Host-level SSD swap: 主机级
SSD 交换
Limit: 限制
Reservation: 预留
Shares: 份额
Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA)非统一内存访问
Hyperthreading: 超线程
Load balancing: 负载平衡
Transparent Page Sharing (TPS): 透明页共享
Memory Compression: 内存压缩
Swap file: 交换文件
Available memory: 可用内存
NIC teaming: 网卡捆绑
Multipathing: 多路径
Traffic Shaping: 流量调整
Resource Pool: 资源池
Selected: 选择Deselected: 取消选择
Task Manager: 任务管理器
Error: 错误
Warning: 警告
Info: 信息
Verbose: 详细
Trivia: 细致

And for my own reference...

0:  零
1:  一
2:  二
3:  三
4:  四
5:  五
6:  六
7:  七
8:  八
9:  九
10:  十

Back in Beijing

I arrived in Beijing a couple nights ago. It is my first time back in about eight years. Much (a.k.a. most) of the Mandarin and Simplified Chinese I've picked up on previous trips has been unused for so long that I'm rusty - very rusty.

But it is slowly coming back to me. For instance, I think I've figured out this poster I encountered yesterday. I recognize the first two characters  北 and 京.

北 (bei) + 京 (jing) = 北京 (Beijing)

FYI...  北 = North and 京 = capital, so Beijing is the northern capital.

I'm also pretty certain that the characters 6 and 0 means 60. But don't quote me.

I think I understand the rest of the poster from context. From what I can tell, the poster says that piddly little firecrackers are not an acceptable way of celebrating CNY 2015.

Given the number of explosions I heard on the night I arrived, setting off fireworks anywhere, any size, and at any time is not only acceptable, it's apparently a requirement.

I've put some photos of my walk yesterday through parts of Beijing online. Enjoy. :-)

Hong Kong --> Okinawa

Woke up around 6:00am. For some reason I had no problem sleeping in those extra seven or so hours this morning. Somehow it's easier traveling westward than eastward. Go figure.

Today was mostly a transit day. Didn't spend much time in HK. Our plan is to spend more time in HK on our way back to the states.

I was disappointed when I saw this sign at the airport today. What's the point of going to HK and buying real stuff? You go to HK to buy the cheap counterfeit stuff.
















My faith in humanity was restored when I read the fine print. Click on the picture to the right to see the fine print.

"No Fakes blah blah blah valid mumble mumble mumble."

:-)














We flew Okinawa today. Rented a card and drove from the airport to Naga City today. First time driving in Japan. GPS made it soooooo much easier than it would have been without it.

Just checked my email and found out that I passed the VCAP-DCA. Woohoo! Time for new business cards!

Sleepy. Have no clue what time it is back home. Probably better not to know. Sleep well, everyone.

Checking in from Hong Kong

Alicia and I are currently en route to Hong Kong. I figured I'd take the opportunity to hammer out a long overdue blog post. 747s provide a (mostly) interruption free environment to concentrate. About the only distraction is the video they're playing. The Tourist looks as dreadful as I've heard.

Now that I'm writing, what to write about? How about returning to writing about our Antarctica adventures? That project has been on hold (sort of) since January 20th - almost two months!. Why the delay?

It's a combination of circumstances. Since returning from Antarctica, I've travelled to Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia. Each of those business trips has been very time consuming. Additionally, I spent a serious chunk of time studying to take the VCAP-DCA exam. Still waiting the results (gulp!). And on top of that, I've been nursing Alicia back to health after her shoulder surgery.

All of these collectively have sucked up a sizable portion of my time. But in my opinion those aren't the main reasons for the delay. The main contributor to the delay has been Google.

NOTICE: I'm about to go on a rant here. If you want to skip it, jump over the <RANT></RANT> tagged section below.

<RANT>

I remember the first time I heard about Google. I was living in San Francisco and was driving down the Embarcadero on my way to Santa Cruz late one evening. I was listening to KQED and they had an interview with two guys named Larry and Sergey. They explained that the name was derived from 'googol', which I seem to recall is the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. Big number.

The interviewer went on to explain that they were two guys from Stanford working on a new search engine, and how this Google search engine aspired to replace Yahoo!, and Altavista, and all the other search engines on the new frontier called the Internet. The interviewer's theory seemed to be that anybody who knew what a googol was had to be smart, and someone that smart could come up with a better search engine. Larry (or was it Sergey) seemed to be of a different mind. He explained that to make a better search engine, they had to return more relevant results. They were so confident that they had achieved that goal that they added a "I'm feeling lucky" button to their page.

I made it a point to 'surf' over to google.com later that evening and check them out.

<TANGENT>Who the heck came up with the mixed metaphor of "surfing the web"? Lame.</TANGENT>

One novel thing that I discovered was how simplistic the google.com web page was. I chalked up that simplicity to two geeky guys who were more concerned with solving a technical challenge than mere aesthetics. I looked beyond the crudely simple page and tried some searches to see how relevant the search results were. Now I don't recall exactly what my criteria was - I don't remember the criteria at all truth be told - but I walked away from my first encounter with Google of the opinion that their search engine was, in fact, better than the competition. And Google has been my primary search engine ever since.

Since that night long, long ago, Google has turned out to be a remarkably successful tech company (but you already knew that). They've branched out in a multitude of directions: Mapping (does anyone use Mapquest any more?), photography/imaging (Picasa), video (Youtube), and email (Google Mail) to name a few. And each time they've managed to tie those technologies to their search/advertising engine.

But (and this is the very kernel of my rant) the vast majority of the time, Google's user interfaces suck. And they suck badly. It's like Lord of the Flies over there in Mountain View and the engineers are ruling the island. Almost every time I look at a Google user interface I'm dumbfounded by the design decisions they make.

Take Gmail for example. Does Gmail have folders? Noooooooo. Gmail has labels. Labels are better, don't you know? If you don't understand why labels are better, you must not be as smart as a Google engineer. I've used labels for years now, and they still irk me. Email threads? We're Google. We collapse threads whether you want us to or not. Want to send a new email? Don't go looking for a "New" button. That would be too easy. I could go on and on, but the worst thing is that Google's user interfaces aren't just clunky and different, they're ugly. Consistently so.

I'll freely admit that sometimes Google surprises me. Take Google Earth. I'll give Google high praise for that user interface. Cool stuff, Google Earth.

But to get back on topic, I turn now to blogspot.com (the website acquired by Google on which my personal blog is hosted). When I first created my blog, I didn't really have any plans for it. I wasn't writing for any particular audience. I mostly started it just to see who would find it. I quietly started it and didn't tell anyone about it. Since my plans weren't all that big, I didn't need anything much in the way of tools for blogging. I just wanted to write and post some of my photos.

Since embarking upon posting my abundant collection of Antarctica photos, I've quickly realized just how awful a platform Blogspot is for someone who wants to post a lot of photos.

One of the pain points is Blogspots lame unwillingness to let you upload multiple photos at a time. I searched for ages to find a way to do it, but kept hitting a dead end. I'd have to keep uploading one photo at a time. Sloooooooow.

I eventually found a somewhat acceptable solution (ironically enough by googling). So that I don't just sound like a total whiner, here's the solution in case anyone else out there is encountering the same stuggles.

When you're on the "Compose" tab and click on the add image icon, that user interface only allows you to upload one image at a time. Forget taking a coffee break while your your 15-20 minutes of photos are uploaded. You have to upload one at a time. PITA.

What you need to do is to click on the "Edit HTML" tab, then click on the add image icon. I'm not sure what the rational is behind this lovely aspect of the user interface, but that's the way it works.

BTW... This workaround still limits you to uploading five images at a time - hardly batch uploading but better than one at a time. There is a Firefox plug-in that allows you to do more, but I want to be able to use whatever browser I want.

Another gripe I have is that once you've uploaded your photos, trying to reposition them is a nightmare. My only workaround for that is to click on the "Edit HTML" tab and do just that - edit my HTML manually. I done entire websites in HTML. But it's 2011. I shouldn't have to edit HTML manually unless I'm doing something tricky.

I could go on and on describing the many ways that Blogspot slows me down. But I'll spare you. Just think "death by a thousand cuts" and you'll get the idea. In this case, those thousand cuts have severely slowed me down. 

One thing I learned running my own company for years is that the most demanding, obnoxious, pain-in-the-you-know-where customers are those you to whom you give your product or service for free. 

In light of that lesson and out of fairness to Google, I would like to applaud all they do and the price they charge. I struggled last night to think of a single time I've ever given a dime to Google. The only time I could think of was AdSense. Or was it AdWords? I never could keep those two straight.

</RANT>

Now that I've gotten that rant out of the system, it's time to start packing up and heading to the airport. From Hong Kong we'll be flying to Okinawa where I'll be delivering a vSphere 4.1 Install, Configure, Manage course.

Huh? Aren't you in a 747? Well I was when I starting writing this, but I eventually drained my battery, landed in Hong Kong, met our friend Titus, took the train from the airport to Hong Kong, checked into the hotel, went out for dinner, collapsed exhausted, slept like a rock, awoke just before 6:00 a.m. feeling very rested, ate breakfast, and now I'm out of time.

When I get settled into Okinawa, I'll finally be updating my blog with more photos from our Antarctica adventure!