Surf Roots, Software Thoughts

It only took nine days.  Jim’s bike was stolen off of the street in front of the Google office.

We’re going to go to the second-hand market today and look for it.

Today is a sad day.

Another photo update:

I tried to capture more of the street mayhem — red lights being run, drivers driving on the wrong side of the street, streets being shared by pedestrians, bikes, cars, busses, etc.  I love it!

Also pictured are Jim and I at the Bund, which overlooks PuDong, the financial district, along with the torrential rain that shortly followed.

We’ve made really good friends with the staff of Bell Bar, a bar that Christophe stumbled upon and dragged us to.  The guys and gals that run that place, Jimmy and HongMei and Amay and Jimmy’s girlfriend, are totally rad and really fun.  We’ve been hanging out a lot with them lately.  Jimmy whipped up some wild flaming shots, composed of Kahlua, tequila, and a Chinese liquor.  We drank them out of a straw — totally delicious.

Lastly, I wanted to capture the resourcefulness here.  Take a look at the photo with the tricycle stacked with cardboard.  The streets are riddled with tricycles, which are essentially junk transportation that locals can hire.  These guys are amazing at stacking their tricycles with more shit than you can imagine.  It’s totally insane.  But what’s more insane is that they hop on the seat and ride away.  So cool!

Surprisingly enough, I tend to eat a few times each day.  I make a point to explore new places; usually the non-English speaking places are the best.  Street vendors are also good.  Anyway, I got some new eats and stories:

I’ve talked about Noodle Man before.  He’s got the best noodles in town.  We’ve made pretty good friends with him; he let Christophe cook some noodles, mentoring him along the way.  His buddy, Meat-Stick Man, is also doing well.

People don’t use napkins here, and the restaurants usually charge you money if you want them.  Toothpicks are of the highest quality and can be found at nearly all restaurants.

WEIRD FOOD UPDATE: I ate pig intestine.  Jim and I went to a hole-in-the-wall joint that spoke Shanghainese, which is much different than Mandarin, the dialect that Jim speaks.  We pointed at a few different vegetables and got a stir-fry with rice.  The stir-fry had some interesting meat that I knew was weird; I didn’t want to find out what it was.  I speculated that it was octopus head or squid, but Jim realized it was intestine.  I immediately agreed with him, when I realized the circularly cut, squishy meat completely resembled intestine.  It was actually really good.

Also on the weird food update is potato with caramelized sugar.  It was astonishingly good and unlike anything I’ve ever had.  It’s apparently very popular in the Northwest.

Lesson learned: don’t try to leave a restaurant with a beer.  We ordered two beers and planned on finishing one on the walk home.  The waitress grabbed us on our way out and told us in Chinese that they need to keep the bottles.  I think they get a refund on them if they recycle them, just like in Berlin.

Jim and I, both having commuted on our bicycles while living in Seattle, convinced one and other that it was time to commute via bicycle in Shanghai.  For various circumstances, I decided against purchasing a bike and instead renting one for the weekends, while Jim bit the financial bullet and bought a bike.

The buying process was fun; it started and ended on a Tuesday evening.  We started by visiting a scooter shop in hopes of finding a bike shop.  The owner hopped in a cab with us and drove us to a series of bike shops.  He hung out with us while Jim and the salesman looked at various bikes.  Jim purchased a bike and lock for 415 Yuan ($60).

For the remainder of the week, Jim would peddle the two of us to work, while I sat on the rear cage, feet slightly dragging, ass padded by a makeshift cardboard cushion.  Bike parking at work is 6 Mao ($.08); everyone leaves their bikes outside with their back wheel locked to their frame — no one locks their bikes to stationary objects such as poles and fences.  For a few days I rode my skateboard and held on to the back of the bike.  Either one of these configurations — two on one bike and skateboard-dragging — made the locals stare and laugh at us.  The ones that spoke English would ask us where we were from or what we were doing here.  All at least gave us a smile and accepted us to their road.  We’re just two white dudes on one bike, occasionally one skateboard and one bike, weaving around Shanghai.

Tandem biking may be fun, but it’s not so convenient.  I rented a bike for a weekend, and Jim and I tore around the whole city.  We found some great food that we would have not otherwise found, and smiled as a large city was tamed.  As chaotic as Shanghai streets are, biking through them is actually easy.  Everyone is good at avoiding everyone else, as long as you understand that cars and scooters have precedence over you, even if you have the “right of way” (ha, if such a thing existed here).  Honking fills the streets, but the horn is used to let others know you’re there, not to tell others you’re annoyed.  I almost felt safer biking in Shanghai because traffic moves slowly, drivers are all very biker-aware, and most side streets have very few cars on them.  I would argue that at least 25% of all side-street traffic is biking.

Bonus story: Jim tried to get one of our local girl friends (friend that’s a girl) on the back of his bike, but she hesitated.  She said that wealthy girls don’t ride bikes, only poor girls do.  We thought this was interesting, because we each respect people who ride bikes in the US.

Advice: eating dumplings on the back of a bike can lead to dumpling shirts.  See photos.

The server that is serving this blog is a monster.  It’s also connected to a monster connection.  I purchased a Dell PowerEdge 1950 thinking Cellarspot would succeed, and I colocated it on a 100mbit connection.  Well Cellarspot didn’t succeed, and now I have a dragon with nothing flying on its back.  I need some advice on what I can do with this thing.  Here are the options:

• Purchase a DreamHost or SliceHost account, take my machine out of colo, and sell it
• Sell my machine and internet connection as a packaged deal
• Sell services such as game server hosting (CS, BF2, etc), FTP, etc
• Install SETI@HOME and stop complaining, knowing I’m helping science
• Something else?

I’m inquiring about this because I’m tired of spending a lot of money on a system that isn’t used to its fullest potential.  However, I love having the freedom of my own machine.  Plus just being able to say I have a colocated rack-mount scores points with the ladies.  Haha.

What do you think?  Do you need a service that requires a practically dormant monster?  Do any of your friends?  Reply in a comment or shoot me an email: alexloddengaard -at- gmail -dot- com.  Here are the specs just in case:

• Dual 2-core Xeons @1.6GHz w/ 4MB cache
• 4GB Buffered ECC DDR memory
• 2×250GB SATA, hot-swappable HDs in hardware RAID1
• Redundant, hot-swappable power supplies
• 100mbit connection, hosted in Issaquah, WA
• 20GB monthly transfer
• Currently running Ubuntu

Jim and I went out once or twice this week to grab some night imagery.  He’s working on a Shanghai video project, while I’m just taking a bunch of photos.  Take a look:

The street food in Shanghai is unreal.  You can feed yourself for easily less than $2, with food that is guaranteed to taste great: dumplings, fried bread, tofu, noodles, vegetable sesame bread, fruit, etc.  Jim and I have wandered all over the place; we’re utterly amazed.  I love street food, despite it being slightly sketchy.  Check out some photos.

But before photos, I got a bonus story: Christophe knows a guy we call “Noodle Man.”  Noodle Man has a little cart in a little community of other food carts.  He serves up the best street noodles in town, and the dude next to him, “Meat-Stick Man,” serves some MONEY meat scewers.  We had scewered chicken heart.  Ewwwwww!

My new found respect for Matt Damon first came with the “I’m Fucking Matt Damon” video:

Then came his opinion on Palin:

He has a sense of humor; he’s not affraid to make fun of himself; and he and I share similar political stances.  Plus his movies are unbelievable.

Bonus video:

I just finished reading Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy.  The first book, also a motion picture, is The Golden Compass, followed by The Subtle Kinfe, and concluded with The Amber Spyglass.

Wow was this trilogy AWESOME.  His Dark Materials has a special place in my heart right alongside Harry Potter.  I couldn’t put the third book down, and I greatly enjoyed the first two.  This is a fantasy trilogy, where Pullman creates a wonderful world with all sorts of mystery, adventure, and wildness.

His Dark Materials is a must read if you’re a fantasy fan and if you enjoy Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings.  I LOVE IT!!!!  Every few chapters I would throw the book down and run around skipping and clapping.  Holy shit.  I still think HP7 was the best thing that ever happened to me, but these books are WILD!  Just as I wish I was Harry Potter himself, I wish I was Will Parry running around with Lyra Silvertounge.  Who wouldn’t want to?  She’s hot.

Check out the box set here.

Jim and I went out one night to capture some imagery.  As we’re hanging out doing this and that, a kid comes up to us and gestures that he wants us to take a picture of him.  He’s carrying an empty cup, but we didn’t really think anything of it.  We took some photos with him, showed him our equipment a little, and just hung out and talked.  Jim speaks a pretty good amount of Chinese, so he was able to communicate with the kid.

Anyway, after about 10 minutes of hanging out, the kid decides it’s time to beg.  He starts telling us how hungry he is.  He starts grabbing our hands and hugging us.  As he walks beside us we hear his money clanking around in his pocket, though he refuses to speak to us about it.

Lesson learned: if a kid is super friendly with you, get ready for some begging.  We caved and gave him a few singles for the photos we took with him.