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Vacation from Things

I'm taking my first vacation since 2004. That's entirely too long. The leadup to the trip was pretty intense, too: I contracted bronchitis and pink eye, and was sick and exhausted during the few days that I had to pack up an entire 2,000 square foot house into two tiny moving pods.

Moving convinced me that I have entirely too much stuff. Living in our huge house for four years allowed me to accumulate a lot of stuff: outdoor gear, electronics gear, clothing, brewing supplies, tools and other accoutrements of home repair. It was a disturbing experience, one that reminded me of cleaning out my great-grandfather's house after he died (being four or five years old I didn't help much, but I do remember a bit of the enormity of closets full of everything imaginable).

From this day forth I am instituting a policy of buy and toss: for every new 'thing,' I get, I have to jettison things of equal or larger size and mass (whichever is larger). I plan to buy a shiny new motorcycle at some point this summer, which is going to mean tossing a lot of stuff. It's a healthy policy, I think. Laura and I won't have children to clean up after us when we're dead and gone, and moving around while we're alive should be a fun experience, not a stressful one.

I'm still a little uneasy with the nomadic lifestyle after staying put for the last few years. Here is hoping that it gets better, and that a few weeks away from the continental US will fix me up.

In happier news, Laura graduated from WSU! She received her PhD in Molecular Plant Science after a five-year stint as a research indentured servant. Graduating is what prompted us to move. I was rather happy that our house sold so quickly. We had to price it quite low, but it was better than sitting on it for months in my opinion. We're on to Hawaii for a spell, and then Portland for the rest of the summer. That part should be relaxing, indeed!

Singapore

I landed in Singapore late last night. After a few experiences in Hong Kong, I'm starting to get the hang of the Asian cultural thing. My usual habits of inventorying the hotel room always speak volumes about a place: in Hong Kong, the hotel room came with a mini-fridge, hotpot, many varieties of tea, but not much else. Here in Singapore, I get the usual tea hotpot, as well as a hardhat (yes, really), bath robes, iron + ironing board, and a selection of reading material.

Singapore offers choices

Gideon was not to be found in Hong Kong -- no reading material at all was present (not that I mind).

My first day in town has revealed a fairly quiet, clean town without the packed streets that I was expecting. Also, thunderstorms: some rather big boomers are expected all week, which happens to be my favorite kind of weather.

New Homes

I've moved my silly personal blog to a new home. I administer the new server myself, which probably means it will get p0wn3d some day, assuming that it hasn't been hacked already. Le sighe.

Life has been busy for the last few months. I'm enjoying my new line of work immensely. Laura is graduating soon, at which point I will refuse to call her Dr. Laura. After that, we plan to move to parts unknown -- originally it was to be Boston, for a small company called Metabolix, although that won't happen now that the company has pretty much collapsed.

The plan, if it can be called that, is to move to any sufficiently large town with an airport, good coffee, folk music, beat poets, a brewery, and either a good university or agricultural research center. I need to get the smell of wheat and gunpowder out of my thinning pate, and to be in an area with a bit more artist culture.

Hong Kong Exploration

Steep car ride

I've managed to get out and about a bit more in China's better half. After hitting up the Buddha Statue, I took a cable car to the top of Hong Kong Island. The car trip is quite nifty (and the hill is quite steep).

View from the top of Hong Kong Island

I was lucky enough to find some fellow tourists not interested in stealing cameras to take my picture at the top of the Peak Tram. We had quite a few spectacularly clear days for sightseeing. I was certainly glad to get out of the concrete canyons to see what Hong Kong really looks like. It is a city of about 7 million people. I would consider myself to be a bit of a city person (at least, I like good coffeeshops, live music, and the other amenities that the city life provides). Hong Kong is a bit much for me. It is a great place to visit, but more than a month of living there might have me ready to spend some time in the desert.

Victoria Harbo(u)r

Finally, I got to take the famous Star Ferry ride across Victoria Harbor -- at night. Power consumption in Hong Kong must be something spectacular. Not only do most shops have open fronts with A/C blasting, but a nightly light show entertains the tourists.

I go back to Hong Kong in just a few weeks, and hope to check out some of the more nature-y things -- perhaps I'll get to rent a bike and check out some waterfalls.

Mirror World

Fate has placed me in Hong Kong, 15 time zones away from home, literally on the opposite side of the world (well, same hemisphere but 12 time zones) from where I grew up.

The streets

The Mirror World* is a fascinating place. The streets are narrow, the buildings are huge, and my pedestrian collision avoidance algorithms are perfectly mismatched for the locals. I believe that this last observation is due to the natives driving on the opposite side of the road. No doubt this influences more aspects of human behavior than we commonly give credit to. Perhaps I will travel to Great Britain or Australia some day to collect another data point.

It's a hot time of the year to be in town, with daytime temps usually about 32C (90F), with humidity somewhere around 105%. I joke that to deal with any water shortage, you could just put a still on top of every roof.

I managed to hit up two 'cool places,' for an electronics geek that practices atheo-buddhism. The first is Apliu Street, Hong Kong's answer to Akihabara (I've never been there, but I hear that it's better and so I want to go). Shops sell cell phones, ham radios, oscilloscopes, bench vises, and tools needed for reverse engineering electronics equipment. There are repair stands on the street...walk up with a broken cell phone and these guys will put it under a stereomicroscope with a solder rework station and patch it up for you while you wait. The closest that the US has to this kind of store is Fry's, but even that is somehow more, "clean consumerist," than Apliu. I prefer the Apliu, "maker," style more, probably because I love tearing things apart to learn how they work. I wonder why there isn't a book called, "Zen and the Art of Electronics Repair," or something similar.

False Idols

The second cool place is the Tian Tan Buddha, a giant bronze statue. I say that a little tongue-in-cheek, because Buddha statues have always bothered me a little (a physical object to serve as a reminder of the impernance of all things?). Also, there is a gift shop literally inside the Buddha. Quite odd. The cable car ride is pretty nice though, with a cool breeze flowing through the car on a hot day.

I had some weird preconceptions about going to China, none of which turned out to be true. I'm able to connect to my home VPN server and route my web traffic through it just fine (and yay, a home computer is recording all the traffic coming through from China). Getting 3G service was really really easy...I purposefully left my iPhone unpatched and jailbroke it for the trip out, including the carrier unlock. I use a prepaid 3G SIM from 3. US$30 gives me my two weeks of 3G data service so that I don't get lost while walking the streets.

Hong Kong Currency

My last libertarian observation was that the currency is printed by Hong Kong's major banks, which are contracted by the government to do so. Some day, maybe the US will have privately operated printing presses? Who knows...

PS: Mirror World is a fun term that I heard from William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. I first imagined the term to be one of jet-lag. Later, I thought it referred to the left-right driving paradigm. Finally, I came to understand the augmented-reality definition of the term. All of these definitions apply to this trip.