July 23, 2005
The Friendly Skies
If you have a lot of friends, that is.
The WSJ had a look at the A380 at the Paris Air Show. While the geeks are all excited about the massive super-jumbo finally taking flight, the WSJ reporter looked at it from a more prosaic view, namely that of a world-weary business traveler. From that particular viewpoint, the cavernous main cabin doesn't exactly promise first-class luxury.
To me, it looked like long lines.
Putting up with the cattle-car treatment is all well-and-good when it's an hour flight in a 150-person 737. Not so promising when it's a 12-hour trans-Pacfic marathon. Still, would be kinda cool to fly in the big plane. Once anyway, if we're talking economy.
July 18, 2005
Summering
Amazing how the MRT becomes echoingly empty in the morning now that school's out. Would probably be a couple of hours later before the kids get out of bed to play. Of course, the afternoon commute remains just as crowded, as the commuters mix in with the students running off to their cram school classes.
They posted the college entrance exam answers in the newspaper for the anxious. The English questions were simple enough, but I had no clue on the Chinese questions, especially the ones about classic texts. Even had some trouble with the math, since I wasn't familiar with the Chinese technical names, plus it has been a while since Algebra 2 (damn Mr. Depasquale). I'm just glad it's all over because the GF got a job preparing exam papers to be sent out. It's good money (NTD 30K for two weeks' work), but they get locked up for two weeks with no outside communication at all. She couldn't even bring her MP3 player because it had FM radio built-in (one more reason to get an iPod). But there's lots of young people in there and the atmosphere is more like summer camp than Chinese sweatshop. Fun.
July 03, 2005
Gibs
Yay, a Gibberish redesign. There's even new content. Even a podcast featuring folks from that particular little social cluster. Unfortunately the podcast page seems to be in RDF format rather than the RSS 2.0 format that the new iTunes podcasting feature requires. Frankly, if the podcasting process isn't iTunes-easy, the content out there is not really worth the trouble. Although I may change my mind once Morning Becomes Eclectic goes up along with the rest of KCRW's offerings.
More posts are good, but for fuck's sake why the hell does anyone want to type markup code into a teensy-weensy HTML text-field control is beyond me. If I have to code my text, might as well as go straight to LaTEX. Not like the geek-wanks who use it for their trivial little reports with the occasional bold or italic and pretty hyphenation, but a real damn research paper with footnotes, figures, references, and equations. Lots of equations. Really complicated equations. With divs and grads, with tensors and differential geometries thrown in for decent measure.