May 2008 ArchivesMay 13, 2008Great Firewall slideshowYesterday I mentioned that Network World had run a Q&A (with me) about how the Great Firewall of China does and doesn't work. Just now they've put up a nice conceptual slide show on "How the Chinese Internet is Different from Yours," here. Worth a look, and includes at least one thing I didn't know before. Earthquake accounts from foreigners in ChengduAfter the break, two first-person accounts of the earthquake and its aftermath, from foreigners in Chengdu. These are long and, to me, vivid in their detail, but skip past if you're not interested. I'm providing them here for real-time documentary purposes. Continue reading "Earthquake accounts from foreigners in Chengdu" » May 12, 2008Pre-quake scenes of Sichuan provinceLast summer, from villages in the hills of Sichuan province near the center of yesterday's earthquake. These are the kinds of people who have been affected: 1) Ethnic Tibetan children playing on the way home from school (click for larger): 2) Other children getting a ride home in a truck: 3) Men waiting for a bus: 4) Dr. Tang Chunxiang, who has lived at the panda reserve in Wolong for more than 20 years and who told me, "The more I know the panda, the more I love the panda." As best I know, there has been no communication with that reserve since the earth quake -- road blocked, telephone and internet lines down, wireless phone coverage out. Update: according to CCTV at 7:30pm China time, the pandas in a base outside Chengdu, and their care-takers are fine, but there are not yet reports from the main panda reserve in Wolong.
Interview about Great Firewall in Network WorldIn the new issue of the tech journal Network World, I have this Q-and-A, with Carolyn Duffy Marsan, about the workings, weaknesses, and evolution of China's "Great Firewall," expanding on this article in the Atlantic two months back. Earthquake coverage on Chinese TVMost of the channels on the (state controlled) CCTV are running the normal game shows, Olympic warmups (especially torch-relay updates), teen music shows, etc. But the CCTV-1 news channel is having all-out coverage of the earthquake in Sichuan province. Brief cultural notes: - The coverage included a long segment of premier Wen Jiabao reading a speech about his deep concern for the people of Sichuan, from aboard an airplane en route to the disaster scene. Background: after the country was paralyzed by unexpected snow storms in February, the leadership was criticized for a Katrina-like slowness in dealing with the problem. Prominent coverage now of the main officials responding immediately to this disaster. - News channels from Taiwan, which we are watching in alternation with the mainland coverage on CCTV, have extensive video footage from Chengdu, estimates of casualties, etc. So far no on-scene video footage that I've seen on CCTV-1, and no casualty figures. (The state news agency, Xinhua, is saying that 7600 people, or more, may have died.) Channel-surfing, we see that the German, Japanese, and Korean networks are also running Chengdu footage. It could have been on CCTV when I wasn't watching, but it's certainly not featured. CCTV is mainly running telephone interviews with correspondents in Sichuan and talking-head analyses in the studio. Possible background: controlling coverage within China until being sure exactly how the story should be presented. (Update: just saw a 20-second video clip from Chengdu on CCTV.) - To help place this disaster: it is in almost exactly the same area I described in this article about the Wolong Panda Reserve, northwest of Chengdu, and this slide show about the reserve. A long, twisty road from Chengdu to Wolong, which had been undergoing years of reconstruction, passes right through the earthquake area. I assume it could be a long time before it is restored to even its perilous previous condition. Good luck to all in Sichuan, including Dr. Tang Chunxiang and his colleagues in Wolong. Earthquake in ChinaI previously had posted a quick item about the minor disruption in Beijing this afternoon after the earthquake hundreds of miles away in Sichuan. In light of the emerging reports of possible large loss of life, including children, I thought it was better to remove that and simply express sympathies for these latest probably-rural, probably-poor victims of natural calamity. May 11, 2008Evil in BurmaI have not said anything about the disaster in Burma, because I haven't had anything to say beyond "It's a disaster." And, that people should call the country Burma -- as the Bush Administration, Senators Clinton, McCain*, and Obama, and the Washington Post do -- rather than Myanmar, the term chosen by its junta and now accepted by CNN, NPR, and the New York Times. My wife and I have been to Burma several times over the last twenty years. The first time was in the summer of 1988, around the time of the August 8 uprising and subsequent bloody repression of monks and students. The most recent was a little more than a year ago, a few days before another bloody round of repression. Like almost everyone who has been in the country, we have viewed its regime as a peculiarly pre-modern and backward form of evil. It does not seems capable of thoroughly-organized evil and repression, as in the old Soviet system. Rather it displays a benighted, superstitious, and almost unthinking indifference to whether its people suffer and die. A minor illustration would be the decision that effectively bankrupted many Burmese people and helped bring on riots 20 years ago. This was the out of the blue decree that most denominations of Burmese currency, except those in "lucky" denominations like 45 and 90 kyat, would be valueless. The major illustration is of course its refusal to allow relief workers from around the world to spare tens of thousands of Burmese people disease and likely death in the wake of the cyclone. Unfortunately, saying that the regime is evil doesn't automatically indicate how to help its unfortunate people. Invasions -- even for humanitarian purposes -- should be a very last resort. And without spelling out the whole reasoning, the U.S. is not in a great position now to be organizing an international invasion force, no matter how noble the cause. As the international frustrations of the last week have suggested, the main option is the unsatisfying one of putting together as much pressure from as many sources as possible, including China**, to force the regime away from its outrageous refusal to allow aid workers in. (*About McCain: if it really is true that he has given a major convention role to a lobbyist who represented the Burmese junta, McCain needs to dump that person forthwith -- or be pilloried for not doing so every day between now and the election. Update: I see that the lobbyist, Doug Goodyear, has just quit the convention job. Next, maybe giving back the $300,000+ the generals paid him, to a human rights group? **About China: the latest outrage by the Burmese generals should not become the latest reason to threaten China with an Olympic boycott or disruption. The Chinese government has some influence over the Burmese regime -- but just some. It is better to make China part of the solution to this problem, by pointing out that a regime's refusal to save its own people is the strongest possible reason for an exception in China's "non-interference with other sovereign states" doctrine.) A year ago, during the time of riots and crackdowns, I posted several pictures of what Rangoon looked like just before the fighting began. Here and after the jump, a few other pictures from that time. _________ 1: Village on the Irrawaddy delta, south of Rangoon, showing why a storm surge would do such damage. (Click for larger version that shows pagoda):
May 10, 2008Correct link for VisionWall/Envision -- in China environment articleThe June issue of the Atlantic has started to reach subscribers. Not me in China yet, and not a number of friends who've written to ask about it. But enough to remind me to add one point of clarification. In this issue I have a long narrative article called "China's Silver Lining," arguing a case I had not at all expected to argue before trekking across the country to see a variety of anti-pollution efforts. The argument, in brief, is that the environmental situation here is less uniformly disastrous than most outside discussion assumes -- and that recognizing where, why and how much it is improving (and where it isn't) is crucial for taking the next big steps forward. Those next big steps, in turn, are necessary so that Chinese industrialization doesn't kill everyone in China and half the people in the rest of the world. You can judge for yourself. (Subscribers will get it in the next few days; online edition goes up in a couple of weeks.) Here is the additional info I am thinking of: In the article I tell the story of a Canadian-based company whose Chinese operation is called Envision, and which is making a radically more energy-efficient form of window glass. Unglamorous innovations of this sort are significant because Chinese buildings standards have been so grossly inefficient that it takes dramatically more energy to heat or cool a new building in Shanghai or Beijing than its counterpart in a similar weather zone in Europe or North America. Thus merely installing different glass could, over time, spare China the need to burn millions of tons of coal. The window company I'm mentioning is a small part of a larger drama, and I am not trying to advertise it in particular. Several people have asked how to find out more about it, which might not be obvious from the story. Outside China, it is known by the name VIsionWall, and its site is here. FWIW. May 9, 2008New, "official" GTD blog siteTwo or three years ago, David Allen, father of the "Getting Things Done"/GTD approach to life, started a personal blog. He kept it up for a couple of months and then, no doubt realizing that this kind of daily fritter was at odds with his larger message about sensible use of your time, put it to sleep. (My 2004 Atlantic article about David Allen here; recent item about GTD-type software here.) In the absence of blog-world messages from The Man himself, many other GTD-related blogs have continued to spring up. That's all to the good -- but a few weeks ago Allen and his team launched their own blog, straight from GTD Central. It is called GTDTimes and is worth checking out. Free book idea: the torchI hope some energetic writer is working on a short narrative book about China, centered on the world pre-Games tour of the Olympic torch. Unexpectedly the tour has turned out to be a vehicle for getting at countless important and interesting themes about the country. The ways in which it has "arrived," and the ways in which it hasn't. What it understands about the outside world, and what it obviously doesn't. What the outside world, in turn, perceives and mis-perceives about China. The role of genuine nationalistic pride, and of government-engineered nationalism. And much more. At least if I thought such a book was coming out, it would be a reason not to scream each time I come across the CCTV channel that seems to be devoting 24/7 coverage to the torch, as it makes its way through a new city in China every day from now until the opening ceremony on August 8. Two images to get the research going. The first, as specimen coverage, is the front page of today's China Daily, noting the torch's ascent of Mt. Everest. The second, via my friend Liam Casey in Shenzhen, is the crowd that greeted the torch there -- and Shenzhen, remember, is a city that is geographically and culturally about as far distant from Beijing as you can find in China, the far-southern outpost of pure manufacturing-based market-mindedness. If this many people are being let off from the factories, something is going on. Academics, journalists, belle-lettrists -- it's open to anyone. If you do write the book, please just mention me on the "I'd like to thank..." page. #1: China Daily, today. #2: Shenzhen, yesterday: May 8, 2008For the record, more views on DayJetAfter the jump, via general-aviation news central here at its temporary HQ in Shaanxi province, China, another perspective on the DayJet situation. (Original Atlantic article here; recent news updates here and here.) This is from Bruce Holmes, a prominent figure in my story (and in my 2001 book Free Flight, about the innovations that gave rise to Day Jet, SATSair, and similar companies.). He presents the "slowdown in growth is good for long-term success" outlook. Several other interesting items have arrived, which I'll add after I check with the senders to make sure they're meant for "publication." May 7, 2008The China price (updated)My wife's new favorite food is fresh yogurt, which comes in individual ceramic pots at the local grocery store. (Full one in the middle; already-enjoyed ones on the sides.) The pots are about four inches tall, and quite solidly made. Empty ones could serve as nice little vases or general knick-knacks and could easily go for a dollar or two apiece, or more, in a U.S. housewares store. Here each yogurt plus its pot costs two and a half RMB (35 US cents). It's either two RMB (28 cents) for the yogurt and one-half RMB (7 cents) for the pot, or vice versa. My wife didn't remember which the sign said. We're building up quite a supply. Maybe the foundation of a specialty-import business if we can get them back to America? The spirit of Chinese entrepreneurialism is infectious. Update: Several correspondents have usefully pointed out that the pots can be returned for a deposit, just like beer bottles. Makes sense! It turns out that my wife knew this (I have never bought them myself) but just didn't mention it to me! Now I know -- the real communications problems are within one language, not across language boundaries -- and we can haul a bunch of them back to the store for pockets full of cash. Further, and more positive, on the DayJet storyThanks to my friend Mary Grady of AVweb, an update -- and a somewhat brighter perspective -- about yesterday's news on layoffs at DayJet. The update, from AVweb's Russ Niles, here. It includes, among a lot of other material, this point, very consistent with what I reported in my current Atlantic piece: There is a business there. Iacobucci [Ed Iacobucci, CEO of DayJet] signed up 1,500 members, more than 500 actually flew and 50 flew more than 10 times. Whether it can survive fuel prices, the vagaries of the economy and the inevitable attack from the airlines if it gets too successful are questions that will be answered as the company progresses. There is so much talent, of so many different forms, at the company that I give them the benefit of the doubt. Nerds only: pulling the plug on XobniI mentioned two days ago that I'd liked the idea of the spiffy Outlook-indexer Xobni, but that when I'd tried a beta version in January it had slowed my PC to a point of paralysis. The new release has been getting a lot of buzz, so I thought I'd try it again. No dice. After two days of torpor I have just taken it off the machine. Made the already-glacial startup process of Outlook (under Vista) almost interminable. Used so many CPUs and -- especially -- so much memory that the computer wasn't good for anything else. Could just be me. Could just be my computer. Could be the evil Vista (on the computer where I installed Xobni). Could be entirely different for you. Just reporting my experience. And maybe it's not just me. When you uninstall Xobni, it asks you why. The choices: "Please tell us why you uninstalled so we can improve: I checked 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 9. But when they have a new version...
May 6, 2008A gracious note from Hillary Clinton (updated)Despite the opening crack about Indiana as a "tie-breaker" and the "this will really look bad in the history books" hammering on the gas-tax holiday as the big issue for America, I thought that was a surprisingly gracious-toned and party-spirited "victory" speech by Hillary Clinton just now. Few gratuitous digs at Obama; actually mentioning his victory in another state, which she has often spitefully refused to do; going out of her way to say that she would work for Democratic victory no matter who is the nominee (as she expected Obama would); and a valedictory-gratitude tone to those who have supported her. Sen. Clinton's ability to take radically different tones day by day -- "I'm so proud to be here with Barack Obama" one day and "Shame on you, Barack Obama" the next -- is generally not such a charming trait. But here she showed its main advantage: conceivably it will allow her to turn on a dime and sound just as sincere in stumping for an Obama-led Democratic ticket in the fall as she has sounded in each of her manifestations through the primary campaign. (And, yes, I mean to say "just as sincere" rather than "sincere," "fully sincere," etc.) PS: Bonus points to her for saying "Burma," not Myanmar. PS #2: I see that my colleague Andrew S. sees this a different way. Hey, diversity in Atlantic-blog world. UPDATE: Obviously this counts as gracious only if she follows the logic of the results and leaves the race now, or at least calls off the kind of campaigning that does the Republicans' work for them. Not about NC/Indiana: significant air-taxi updateThe excellent industry newsletter AVweb has just reported that DayJet, subject of this story in the current Atlantic, is scaling back expansion plans and laying off (an undisclosed number of) employees. Here is the story from AVweb: Start-up air taxi operator Dayjet has announced it will "scale back" its immediate growth plans and lay off employees in all areas of its operations. In an email release today, company founder and CEO Ed Iacobucci did not detail the numbers of people let go. Iacobucci blamed weak capital markets and not the company's early performance for the decision. He said expanding the company to the point of profitability would require a $40 million capital infusion and he apparently couldn't find that money. "I won't dwell on this point, but suffice it to say that given the current state of the U.S. capital markets, the timing of our planned financing could not have been worse," he said. Iacobucci said the "proof-of-concept phase" the company is now in has proved the market is there for the small-jet people mover system he envisioned but it has to grow from its current fleet of 28 aircraft serving 11 "Dayports" to as many as 50 aircraft branching out from up to 30 hubs to be profitable and that's why it needed the $40 million. While DayJet seems confident that it will eventually find the money and markets it needs, the larger question might be what the delay in doing so will do to Eclipse Aviation. DayJet is reported to be Eclipse's largest customer with orders for 1,400 of the estimated 2,500 aircraft on Eclipse's order book. Calls requesting comment from Eclipse were not immediately returned. When I was at the DayJet headquarters three and a half months ago, the company was hiring like crazy and talking about its month-by-month expansion plans in cities served, passengers carried, and aircraft in the fleet. At the time it had five (I think) "DayPort" centers -- bases from which flights go to a variety of smaller cities. Apparently it has now grown to 11 DayPort centers serving 60-plus cities. The plan that was laid out to me was to get to 30 DayPorts serving 100-plus cities by the end of the year. Whether this is a "growth slowdown" or an actual cutback, and what it portends, I obviously don't know. For now just passing on the news. The horrorCCTV just ran a news feature on the nightmare possibility that someone might copy the official broadcast of Olympic events and then distribute it in a pirated or unauthorized form. The newscaster pointed out that this would be in flagrant disregard of the intellectual property rights of the Beijing Olympics themselves and of CCTV, the official broadcaster. I can barely imagine the horror of some group in China copying someone else's proprietary material and distributing it outside the proper channels. (Below, from the latest trip to the local video store. Click for larger version.)
May 5, 2008Nerds only: Giving Xobni another try (Updated)Back in January I tried the beta version of Xobni*-- a new system for indexing and arraying your email within Outlook that is now getting a lot of attention, thanks to a rave in the NYT yesterday. (Or, "this morning," US time.) In the beta version, I found it so incredibly CPU-intensive and greedy for system resources that it brought my PC (ThinkPad T60, 2Gb RAM, 4GB "ReadyBoost" RAM supplement) nearly to a halt. True, this ThinkPad was running the hated Windows Vista at the time, so it was looking for any excuse to halt. And true, I was asking it to index many GBs worth of old Outlook .PST files. But I unloaded Xobni, thinking: wouldn't it be nice if this actually worked. Several friends say that the new version works better. We'll see. And this note is also a teaser for the omnibus, final MacAir / MacMini / ThinkPad compare-and-contrast exercise later this week. UPDATE: Xobni still breaks my T60 laptop. Consumes so many CPU cycles and memory that everything else stops. Will un-install, reinstall, and try one more time. * Xobni's name has the same etymology as that of Shanghai's beloved local beer, REEB. Reeb is of course "beer" spelled backward, and... "Stupidest policy ever" contest resultsHundreds of entries later, the results are clear. An absolute majority of contestants spoke in favor of ... mandates and subsidies for ethanol use as the stupidest manifestation of bipartisan public policy in the last 50 years. There could have been a recent-events bias in this choice. (We all think that today's athletes are "the best ever," and so too with stupid policy decisions.) Still, the sentiment was strong, and so was the reasoning. I quote from the lucky subscription-to-the-Atlantic winner, Justin Cohen, who himself begins by quoting his father Reuben Cohen on the stupid aspects of this policy. The Cohen-Cohen team is chosen winner because they entered early, and because I have decided to show a bias in favor of collaborative family efforts: "I think bi-partisan support for ethanol is more stupid [than the McCain-Clinton 'gas tax holiday' plan], because it's actually harmful and because it not only panders to the public ... worse it panders to a special interest group (Midwest farmers and their regional politicians). It's harmful because: 1) it helped to catalyze higher levels of food inflation, 2) it consumes as much energy to make and distribute as it provides, 3) it deflects attention from developing trying sound policies to enhance our energy security, 4) it didn't allow for removal of taxes on the import of truly energy efficient ethanol produced in Brazil from sugar, and 5) it's a such an extreme example of government disfuntionality it causes people like me to become truly disillusioned with the political process." I would add on my own that, to my limited understanding, most of the money for ethanol goes to large corporate farms and trickles down and around through agro-business, with only minimal impact on small family farmers (the ones our politicians claim to support), making the whole venture politically disingenuous in addition to economically-unsound and environmentally dubious. After the jump, a list of some other popular nominees. Where I can think of some reason why a particular suggestion didn't end up the winner, I include that in parentheses. Thanks to all! And God help our country. -------- Continue reading ""Stupidest policy ever" contest results" » Air-taxi update, propeller plane divisionMy article on DayJet in the current Atlantic is about an air taxi service that uses new, efficient, relatively cheap small jets. For several years, other air taxi companies have opened up using new, efficient, and relatively fast and comfortable small propeller planes, notably the four-seat Cirrus SR-22.
Traditionally, the use of the air cab service has been a remedy for driving trips of 2-5 hours, not a replacement for other forms of air travel. However, 2007 saw a shift with a significant number of new SATSair customers using the point-to-point air cab operation as a solution to their hub-and-spoke airline frustrations and woes, in fact decreasing the door to door travel times. Several economists and aviation experts have written me to say that, in principle, the air taxi model just can't work in the long run. Too expensive; market too small; and so on. Could be. I'm just reporting that at several companies it's working now. May 4, 2008Real-time report: Olympic ticket-ordering systemThere are various ways in which China will be tested to see if it is "ready" to host the Olympics. For instance: Then there is the general and hard-to-pin down question of simply handling the Olympic-scale volume -- for traffic, crowd control, whatever. One proxy is the system for ordering Olympic tickets. Residents of China (foreign and Chinese) had their third opportunity to order tickets starting at 9am China time today -- 45 minutes ago as I write. My wife and I are trying to order some tickets to the rowing events, where (a) huge numbers of tickets are available, and (b) we have some friends involved in the competition. After the jump, a real-time chronicle of how it's going. (Update: summary of chronicle below is that two and a half hours after the experiment began, the transaction failed and the web site invited me to try again from the start. Five hours after that, at the end of its first business day of operation, the system still wasn't working. Obviously the ticket system is overwhelmed by the volume of traffic coming at it all at once. But that brings us back to the original question about being ready to handle the predictably huge, surge-style peaks of Olympic-related volume. We'll see...) Extra-final update: Success! At 6:45pm China time, only nine hours and forty-five minutes after first logging on, I landed three bargain seats for the rowing heats, @ 20RMB ($2.85 -- the 30RMB seats must have been sold out). End of the chronicle. Continue reading "Real-time report: Olympic ticket-ordering system" » Beijing must-see: "Tibet of China, Past and Present"This week the "Cultural Palace of Nationalities" in Beijing -- 民族文化宫 in Chinese, also known as "Cultural Palace of Minorities" -- opened an exhibit on the history and future of Tibet. Let me just say: if you want a quick but thorough immersion in the prevailing Chinese view of this issue, you could do far worse than to spend an hour or two here. The historical part goes under the general heading "The Feudal Serfdom of Old Tibet." The narrative introduction begins, "Before 1959, Tibet was a feudal society of serfdom, darker and more backward than European slavery in the Middle Ages." The more contemporary part is under headings like "New Tibet Changing with Each Passing Day" and "Emancipated Serfs Become Masters of Their Homeland." As documentation for the historical perspective, the hundreds of pictures in the exhibit include some of tortured serfs from the old days, and a photo of what appear to be two nearly-whole human skins -- one of an adult, one of a child -- from what is described as a human sacrifice of serfs in the olden days. (I'm just telling you what's in the exhibit, and I am not including a photo of this item.) For the modern part, there are pictures of the progress and prosperity of today's Tibet. Here is a modern Tibetan herder, with a fridge full of beer:
Continue reading "Beijing must-see: "Tibet of China, Past and Present"" » May 3, 2008Shorter version of preceding "Outlook flaw" postBased on all available feedback, the problem is not that I'm missing some tweak or setting in Outlook. It's that the program has a basic design flaw in the way it handles "all day events" -- for instance, St. Patrick's Day occurring on March 17. Apparently Outlook provides no way to assign that event to the entire day itself. It is designed to assign it to a 24-hour span, so whenever you change time zones, you're screwed. The 24 hours that had run midnight-to-midnight now go 3am-to-3am. This is a design decision worthy of Clippy in its user-unfriendliness. Oh well. Now at least I know. But please, Microsoft folk, can't you do better than this? UPDATE: Here's what is really objectionable about Outlook's approach. The system's display suggests that there IS a difference between an "all-day appointment," like St. Patrick's Day being on March 17, and a 24-hour appointment running, say, 1am to 1am. The all-day event displays as a single line on your calendar; the 24-hour appointment spreads across every one of the hours included. But in their underlying architecture, it appears that there is no difference at all. An "all-day" event is just another 24-hour span, which happens to display as a single line if you're in the same time zone you were when you created it. To the best of my knowledge, this is different from how, for instance, Google Calendar handles the issue: GC treats "all-day" events as conceptually separate from other 24-hour appointments. The Outlook design decision seems unwise to me, because of the frustrations it creates. But its display decision goes beyond being unwise to being outright deceptive, since it suggests a distinction that the program itself does not support. (It would be as if Word, in certain conditions, displayed a passage in italics, when really the words were all stored as plain text.) Can't someone on the Office team do better than this? May 2, 2008Nerds only: There has to be a fix for this flaw in Outlook, right???? (Updated)Here is something that has driven me crazy about Outlook for the ten-plus years I've used it. I can't really believe it's insoluble, because that would mean that the program has a more glaringly troublesome defect than others we know about. But I haven't found the solution -- and I'll offer the traditional bonus of a year's subscription to the Atlantic to the first person who can tell me the answer, which I'll share. (Sincerity alert: these are actual paid-out-of-my-pocket bonuses, not company freebies.) The problem involves Outlook's handling of time zones. Continue reading "Nerds only: There has to be a fix for this flaw in Outlook, right???? (Updated)" » Bright side #5: interesting GTD software, including for MacI am a long-standing devotee of the David Allen "Getting Things Done" (GTD) approach to life, as I first described in this Atlantic article about him four years ago. We've become friends and stayed in touch since then too, which at least for me has been very enjoyable. Plus, since long before the Atlantic wrote about him he has been a loyal subscriber! The GTD Way mainly involves habits of mind and action, but it also places a lot of emphasis on having the right tools, gizmos, and gimmicks to support those habits. Over the years I've used a variety of software to set up GTD-based systems on my computer. Ones I've liked include Results Manager and Chandler. The one I keep coming back to for my own purposes, more than a dozen years after I started using it, is the idiosyncratic but powerful Zoot. Zoot is PC-only, and for that matter text-only (no graphics etc), but it runs flawlessly on a Mac under VMWare Fusion. Here are three more to bear in mind, with different strengths and idiosyncracies of their own: Continue reading "Bright side #5: interesting GTD software, including for Mac" » "Stupidest policy ever" contest interim updateSwamped with very good -- ie, very stupid -- nominees. Tabulation of suggestions, which I found interesting in their breadth, and announcement of gala prizes as soon as I can manage. Thanks all around. Though this makes me feel somewhat worse about the achievements of American democracy. May 1, 2008The bright side #4: Why I've missed the (English-language) Chinese pressMay 1 edition, China Daily, state-controlled voice to the outside world:
Headline, in case you can't read it: "Happiness abounds as country cheers." (Click on photo for larger version.) Lead paragraph: "Across the country, people yesterday celebrated the 100-day countdown to the Olympics." Picture is of Tibetan university students in Lhasa rejoicing. There are serious aspects to the enormous gap between Chinese and international coverage of the Olympics, Tibet, etc -- but for another time. For now it's great to see these publications in top form. |
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