Random Thoughts

I'm not quite sure what to write today so it will be a bit of a stream of consciousness.

I saw a man on a subway platform today repeatedly slapping a woman (presumably wife or girlfriend) in the face. It was truly horrifying. I thought we were all supposed to be desensitized by violence in movies, games, and the news but the sheer brutality of it was absolutely shocking. I mean this is something I have literally never seen before in my life. Hours later, it still makes my blood flash boil thinking about it. All I could think to do was to start screaming at this guy in a language he didn't understand, indicating by gestures that he could try it on someone else, but the subway doors had closed and all I could do was grimace and talk myself out of taking the next subway back. Apparently domestic violence is a big problem in China.

Only three weeks to go before my departure from China and (much like my last job) I don't really want to stay but the departure is still sad. I won't miss the slow, spotty Internet. I won't miss ordering bottled water. I definitely won't miss the pollution or the heat. I won't miss the one channel of English propaganda on television, or the staring, or the spitting, or the manually controlled traffic lights that don't give pedestrians enough time to get across the road, even if you get a head start before they go green.

What will I miss? I don't exactly know. I'll miss the cheap taxis and cheap beer. I'll miss the variety of food choices (at least compared to where I'm going next!). I'll regret not having got the most out of the country (no travel!) and not having learned enough of the language to even have a basic conversation with the taxi drivers. I'll miss the way something noticeable has changed every single time I go outside. But these all seem insignificant and I think there's something more to it. Or could it be just sentimentality because it was "home" for a while? It may take some time for me to figure this one out... and I think I may be back sometime to see a bit more of the country (maybe they'll have fixed the traffic lights!).

One final observation: I seem to be getting restless. It's been 5 or 6 months since I went on leave and this appears to be a pattern. When I returned from Europe in July of 2002, it was just after Christmas that I started working at UBC. When I returned from Australia, it was about 5 months before I started working at Emily Carr. And I became restless in Australia after about five and a half months of being there. It seems that's about as long as I can stand being unfocused (at least in one place). Julia commented that for her it would be more like a few hours but it's good to know what my limit is.

It's raining, it's pouring...

... the Old man is... yeah well it's really raining here again this morning. This is serious heavy rain (and I come from Vancouver, so I know whereof I speak). And the thunder and lightning is setting off car alarms again. It's really cool to live somewhere where storms are accompanied by huge rolling thunder crashes and the tremendous, powerful cracks of lightning bolts.

With the exception of the tropics, I have never been anywhere where it rains so much during the Summer. For a month or more now, we have been saying we should follow everybody else and buy umbrellas to hide away in a pocket or a bag. But it always feels like we're about to leave and the rain has to stop... sometime. It doesn't seem like it's going to.

On the bright side, it does seem to help keep the ground and the air clean. I wonder how much of it is caused by meteorologists seeding the clouds (they also apparently have technology in place to reduce the chance of rain for the opening ceremonies if necessary). The western media is acting like they've only just been made aware of the air quality problem in Beijing and its potential impact on the Olympic games. All construction in the city is slated to stop this Sunday so we'll see if that makes any difference. Sadly, as a result, streams of migrant workers are packing their few possessions and returning to their home provinces for the duration of the games. I say "as a result" but of course it is equally as a result of the desire to maintain "security" and a "clean" city for the games.

On a related note, I heard a news story on the World at Six on CBC saying that spectators would be searched for banners, flags, and noisemakers and that they would be confiscated. "No flags?", thought I, "That's kind of lame." After allowing this misconception to carry on for the length of the story, they added the extra detail that only flags smaller than 1m by 2m would be allowed. Who the heck needs a flag bigger than that?! Imagine you are sitting behind the guy with a flag bigger than that! Sheesh... Apparently umbrellas will be allowed, which seems like it may be a good thing.

It feels like the anticipation in the city has, if anything, declined over the past few weeks. I really felt like it has been growing since I arrived (maybe it was just my anticipation) but, as the last details get sorted out, I just don't feel any excitement. Oh, sure, there are a few more banners, the signs for the Olympic traffic lanes are going up, and workers are setting up venues around the city with big televisions for people to watch the events. People even lined up for hours at the bank to receive newly-printed 10 RMB notes with the Olympic stadium on them. But I just don't sense the excitement. I'm guessing it will turn on by decree.

The Rain!

It's 9:00am, Julia left for work 2 hours ago, and I'm listening to the morale-building going on outside one of the real-estate offices across the street. The workers in the office building kitty-corner to us often file out and do calisthenics in the parking lot early in the morning. But every morning these real-estate agents line up in two rows (one of men, one of women) on the sidewalk and do cheerleading routines involving chants, clapping, singing, and hand gestures, often to music.

The heat and humidity are already up; the former due mostly to two rare days of clear skies over the weekend. I no longer trust my key-chain thermometer as I have long suspected that it always reads between 27 and 29 degrees. I attribute this defect to the photograph I took of it maxed out at 50 degrees in northern Australia nearly 3 years ago. Google, however, says it is 27 degrees and 74% humidity right now... not bad for nine in the morning. It's amazing to me that a place can be this humid in the summer (wait for August!) and so dry in winter. If the heat doesn't dehydrate you here the air conditioning will and I wake up every morning with a dry throat.

The clear skies this weekend probably came thanks to the rain on Friday (rain seems to settle the fine particulate pollution). Julia and I met for dinner after work on Friday and then decided to go to a movie. As we emerged from the restaurant, it began to rain lightly. As we emerged from the taxi and sprinted to the cinema, it began to rain heavily. Forty minutes later, as our film was about to start, they informed us that Cinema 6 was being shut down because of water flooding into it and that we could get our money back. Upstairs, parts of the street were now flowing like rivers as the rain alternately poured and paused in 5-minute cycles. After half an hour trying to find a taxi that was (a) empty, (b) willing to pick us up (not sure why this is a problem), and (c) closer to us than to somebody else looking for the same thing, we gave up and walked to the subway. Unfortunately the subway was closed, due (as far as we could tell) to flooding. Tiring of waiting, we crossed the street and attempted to decipher the bus system. We did eventually manage to get close enough to home that we could walk the rest of the way, having become wet enough by then that we'd given up caring about staying dry anyway. In total, it took us two full hours to get home... this city doesn't deal well with heavy rain.

I bowled a 162!

For as long as I've known Julia I've been trying to get her to go bowling with me. It's not like I bowl often but it's fun occasionally. Well we finally had the opportunity last weekend at a social event organized by Julia's company and while I couldn't knock down more than 9 pins to save my life in the first game, I managed nearly all strikes and spares in the second as I found my stride. People said I had "good form" which I guess I can only attribute to a few years of regular curling; I did feel pretty consistent.

Sunday was a busy day for us. Julia had uniform measurements and team building with her hospitality staff, then we had lunch and bowling, and then we had a few hours to kill before she and I went to a noodle and dumpling cooking class. Unfortunately, we really only had a demonstration and a little practice of the noodle pulling so I still can't claim to have successfully mastered the art but at least I have an idea how the dough should feel. The dumplings, or jiaozi, were quite successful: pork-and-celery and egg-mushroom-and-bok-choi. And I had left overs for lunch!

In other news, I'm currently struggling under the weight of decisions regarding employment, flights out of here, and their destinations so more to come once those are settled. I won't go into all the details of the complications of obtaining a Russian visa but, after a frustrating experience with the Russian embassy in Kuala Lumpur coloured by view of Russian hospitality, I have essentially decided to put off my trans-siberian trip for another occasion.

We're nearly within a month of the Olypmics here now so the pace is accelerating. Julia is busy at work, we have our spare room rented out, and I have an accreditation that removes the need for me to leave the country one last time. The new subways are nearly open and construction sites are racing to get their landscaping done and their walls down before the construction ban kicks in a few weeks from now. Should be interesting times ahead...

RSS Feed Change

Just a quick note to anyone (Steve) who may be reading the feed for this blog: I've decided to start using FeedBurner, mostly just to provide email subscription for people who don't know what RSS means but also because I'm curious. I've been told that many news aggregators don't follow redirects, so you may need to update your feeds to the new URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/BlogDotFitzellDotCa

And for anyone who would rather receive an email when there are new posts, use this link: http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailverifySubmit?feedId=2122389&loc=en_US

Bash: using the read command

While I normally use awk or sed to pull a piece of information I want out of a line of text, it doesn't work as well when you need multiple pieces of information. Well it works fine for displaying multiple pieces of information, but if you want them in variables to use later?

I once wrote a script that used declare to do the equivalent of this:

declare `w | head -1 | 
  awk '{ print "DAYS=" $3 " " "USERS=" $6 }'`
  # now do something with $DAYS and $USERS

Ewww... Now I know there's a better way: the "read" command. You could do something like this:

w | head -1 |
  (read -a FIELDS
  #do something with ${FIELDS[2]} and ${FIELDS[5]})

You can also do like so:

ls -l | tail -1 |
  (read perms dunno user group \
      size month date year file
  echo "$user: $file")

You can even loop over all the lines of input. Let's take the /etc/passwd file as an example. Since that file uses a colon as a separator, we first need to set the IFS variable which determines what characters are used as field separators.

cat /etc/passwd | (IFS=:
   while read user pass uid gid desc theRest; do
      echo "$user: $desc"
   done)

As pointed out here, this is also one way to deal with a file containing a list of filenames that may have spaces in them:

cat list | while read f; do
  ls -l "$f"
done

Teenage Voting

I was reading an article on ChangeThis.com about the education system in the US and there was a quote that read:

Our educational system is the only major institution in our country that officially recognizes autocracy (in contrast to democracy) as its principle type of government.

I don't think that's correct. Rather, the education system is one of the few major institutions to deal essentially entirely with children; and children are dealt with pretty much universally as if they were living in an autocracy. That got me thinking about engaging teenagers in democracy. I wondered if there mightn't be some forward-looking European nation that included the under-18's somehow in the process.

The only case I can find is a BBC article stating the the Isle of Man has lowered their voting age to 16. This seems a reasonable enough action to me, despite the call by others (one example from a Maclean's article parodied here) that the age should be raised to 21 because "young people today have essentially tuned out". Yeah, preventing them from voting will really help them tune back in.

New York City apparently proposed a bill to lower the voting age to 16 and so have California and a number of other states, but as far as I can find, none have yet passed. The arguments in favour include: getting teenagers used to voting; that they pay sales and, often, income tax without any control over where the money goes; that they can be tried for crimes as an adult after 16 but can't affect the laws; that 18 is a bad age to start voting because students are heading off to college and have too much other stuff on their plates; and (most important to me) that they have more invested in the future than anyone else. I'm not even that old and I already have a slight trepidation at trusting "kids today" to cast a vote, but I'm still young enough to remember that I had perfectly valid and rational opinions in highschool.

I don't even know if you need to lower the voting age. The Californian bill initally proposed that "each 16- or 17-year-old's vote count as half an adult vote and each 14- and 15-year old's vote a quarter" (reference) but that was dropped before the bill was floored. Or what if, for example, everyone over 12 but under the voting age (whether it be 16 or 18) was invited to the polling stations and given a different ballot to cast. It would have the same choices but would only be advisory: the results would be reported, which would provide feedback to government, engage youth, and introduce them to the voting process. If you're concerned about children just voting randomly or following their parents (not that it really matters: adults do the same anyway) there could be a place on these ballots for written comments. They're informational anyway and what better way to get feedback from interested youth. I don't know... just a wild idea.

My favourite quote was in an article discussing a California bill to preregister 16- and 17-year-olds so they would automatically be ready to vote when they turn 18. A Republican assemblymam who was against the bill says:

The truth is, when you're young you tend to think like a liberal. As you get older and wiser … you tend to become more conservative.

Ha! So we shouldn't even help register young people to vote because they'll be liberals! The article goes on to say that Democrats killed legislation to require voters to show photo ID, and that Republicans killed legislation to allow citizens to register on voting day.

This makes me want to start my normal rant on party politics and career politicians, but I won't. In the end, though, the issue isn't so much specifically about youth. It's about politicians who have been elected by the current system being reluctant to change it. Whether the issue is proportional representation, holding polling days on weekends, or reducing the voting age (all of which could potentially increase voter turn out and the accurate reflection of their vote), the status quo seems just too tempting.