Kludge: how to repair paint scratches with nail polish

This information wasn't on the Internet, so I'm putting it there.  Our blue Samsung washer and dryer were badly scratched during the move, and the original color isn't available.  So I blended three colors of nail polish together to match the bastards.  Good thing I painted all those tiny orc figurines in my D&D-playing days!

The washer and dryer are a pretty odd color, a grayish metallic blue.  My first thought was that it must be an automobile paint, but Samsung doesn't offer touch-up paint for it.  Alice suggested we try nail polish.  So I asked her to go to the store and get several colors that were close to her recollection of the appliances.  Out of the six she came back with, I used these:

Here's the color names, just in case you're reading this post because you are actually trying to repair a scratched Samsung WF363BTBEUF washer or DV363EWBEUF dryer:

I mixed four parts metallic blue, one part metallic light purple, and one part nonmetallic dark purple.  Where's a good place to mix nail polish?  On the bottom of a glass jar from the recycling bin, that's where.  I used a small craft paintbrush to mix and apply the polish.  A smaller paintbrush would have allowed me to do a neater job.

Here's the results, with and without camera flash.  The left end of this scratch has been repaired:

The mixed color is so close, it might be hard for you to see the repaired part.  I was pretty pleased, considering that the scratches go all the way to the metal.

Take the matter into your own hands, folks.  Fix your stuff!

DIY Pipe Shelves

We've built a shelving unit in our kitchen out of plumbing pipes.  As you might imagine, it's very strong, which is good because we have a lot of cookbooks.  Alice had seen it done elsewhere, and we couldn't find a prefab bookcase for the space, so we decided to modify the design and give it a try.

We pretty much cleaned out our local Lowe's and Home Depot of 3/4" black pipe tees, flanges, and nipples.  (Tell your inner 10-year-old that a nipple, in this context, is a short length of pipe with threads on both ends.)  The pipe and fittings came to over $300, and the wood and stain came to another $100 or so.  Not cheap, but it would probably survive a tornado.

Black pipe comes with a film of greasy grime all over it, so the project began with an hour or so of scrubbing with Goo Gone.  After that we could handle the parts without looking like we'd robbed a bank.  Here are the two uprights mostly assembled:

Standard practice with black pipe is to put Teflon tape on the threads before assembly to make a good seal.  I did that here even though these pipes obviously don't need to hold pressure; I wanted it to be easy to disassemble and adjust.

I had to make a lot of things happen:  the uprights couldn't look bent or crooked even though there are fourteen joints from top to bottom; the tees all had to point in the same direction; and the flanges (that's the flat round things) all had to touch the wall at the same time.  And to make that more complicated, the walls of this 100-year-old house ain't flat.  Yet here they are, mounted:

Yes, we plan to leave some empty space on that middle shelf so we can reach the light switch.

The left upright luckily was fastened directly to a stud, so it's not going anywhere.  With the right one, I thought 28 drywall screws would hold it in place, but the matchy-matchy black-headed drywall screws I bought are too thick and tend to strip their holes, so they don't have much holding power.  I used some plastic wall anchors and some Molly bolts to secure each flange and it's as strong as the other.

My pride was tempered with dismay when I noticed that the shelves were going to be way off level.  Of course the floor isn't level (duh) but the weird thing is that the left upright is longer than the right one.  I must not have tightened the left one's joints as many turns as the right one.  Oh well:  they go from leaning to the left at the bottom to perfectly level in the middle to leaning to the right at the top.  I'll shim them.  It could be worse.

Meanwhile Alice honed her staining skills on the shelves.  I had bought two 10' 1"x8" boards of southern yellow pine, which I cut into eight 30" shelf lengths.  Alice then sanded them and applied some kind of stinky hydrocarbon pretreatment the store had sold her to prep the surface for stain.  The stain went on pretty evenly and it actually almost matches our cabinets.  Here they are, stained and waiting for polyurethane:

I wasn't thrilled with the unevenness of the spray polyurethane, but it's not like the shelves are going to be outdoors.  Here's the whole assembly:

And finally, below, with cookbooks.  We used to have about twice this many but we edited the library down pretty severely before moving.

Ta-daa!

A day in the life: installing a garbage disposal

Yesterday I installed a garbage disposal in our house.  This is just one of the projects that have been filling my weekends, and which I somehow usually fail to document properly.  This time I got pictures.

A proper "before" picture should have showed the sink with no electrical service under it.  The first step in this process was to bring in an electrician to install the wires and switch.  They're already here in this photo:

Step One of the instructions cheerfully said "disconnect the drain from the sink".  I had no idea how to do that, so I grabbed my largest wrench and started twisting things.  After a couple hours I had removed all the drain pipes that were in the way.  I had also replaced the "Y" pipe that the dishwasher was connected to (upper right) with a straight pipe, since the plan was to connect the dishwasher to the disposal.  Here's what it looked like after Step One:

The next major step was to connect the electrical.  That gray arc of wire housing in the cabinet was very stiff.  It was subtly incompatible with the hole in the disposal:  the hole was threaded and so was the cable housing.  Sounds good, right?  No:  if I turned the cable housing until it was tight and secure in the disposal, it'd be pointing the wrong way in the cabinet.  I had to leave it a little loose, which meant it was also free to swivel.  I secured it with the cable housing's nut on the inside of the disposal and moved on.

Physically mounting the disposal to the bottom of the sink was easier than I thought it would be.  The final time-consuming phase was rebuilding the drain pipes.  Again this was glossed over with a single step in the instructions.  I reused the parts, cutting many of the pipes shorter using a hacksaw.  I had to replace one seal/gasket that broke when I tried to clean the gunk off of it.  Here's the final result:

Careful observers will note that the tee on the right, where the drain from the disposal joins that from the other sink, is lower in the final arrangement.  I had to rebuild all that, twice, in order to get it to fit.

The result is the quietest garbage disposal I've ever used.  It's in InSinkErator "evolution space saver".  I happen to have a sound level meter here, so I measured how loud it is, with the meter at eye level, pointing upwards, one pace back from the sink.

• Quiet house:  40dbA
• Faucet on:  49dbA
• Faucet and disposal on:  53dbA

The numbers changed quite a bit if I held the meter in different places, but the relative values were always about what I listed here.  It's pretty damn quiet.

Elapsed time:  six hours.  Trips to hardware store:  two, not counting the initial purchase.  Costs:  about $180 for the disposal, plus something like $100 or more for the electricians to put in the wiring, plus a few bucks for putty, drain pipes, and gaskets.

Half-life

We've sold a home and not yet bought another, living in a holding pattern until we can move to where we belong.  We certainly don't belong in this apartment.  This purgatory does strange things to me.

I can sleep and eat (and even cook in a limited way) and drive to work, but the things that made my life mine are not here.  I can't put a record on the stereo, I can't shake up a mixed drink, I can't pull a book off the shelf and read.  All of that is on a truck parked in a nameless warehouse.  This is temporary lodging.  And that prevents me, in some subtle way, from starting to really live here in Durham.  I can't let myself move forward until I clear this final hurdle and get into the house that will be mine.

Alice and I were looking at live shows last night and bought tickets to see a band this weekend.  Why hadn't I done that already?  Do I not want to attach the memory of a live show to this apartment?  Do I want to avoid attaching any memories to this apartment - to avoid getting attached to it?  Maybe that's it.  It hurts to make a life in a place and then leave it.  Better to be temporary, to have a half-life, for a month than to really grab it and then have to tear myself away.

Reminiscences of Cleveland

• When I found out what peanut butter tastes like on a hot dog, at the Happy Dog
• The guy that comes to the Barking Spider with his cat on his shoulder
• That time at the Beachland when the disco ball wasn't rotating, so somebody threw their coat at it and it swung crazily
• When a teenager got chased by some bad guys and hid behind my garage freaking out and I asked him if I should call the police but he said no so we chilled until the coast was clear
• Introducing British Brian to Anna C., two people who know everyone else in town but somehow not each other
• The manic energy of the early days of the Cleveland Social Media Club
• Getting hit on by a gay dude right outside my office on the way to my car
• The bloody dolls hanging from the ceiling of the Grog Shop after halloween
• Discovering Liefman's Goudenband at Brewzilla during Beer Week
• The lawncare company that did twice as much work as we asked for, then tried to get us to pay twice the agreed price
• The look of mixed loathing and shame on my hung-over friend's face the morning after my birthday party
• A night flight into Hopkins making a sharp turn around downtown, a perfect view of the town lit up on one of my last trips back

One week until we move, and we're homeless

We had chosen a home in Durham, NC.  The contract was signed, we sold furniture that wouldn't fit in a place with fewer bedrooms, we sold our house and arranged movers.  But the movers will be putting our possessions into storage, not our new home.  We had to back out of the contract.

The house had the right location and enough space, and it was affordable.  It even had character:  reclaimed doors and wood countertops, and artist-made railings.  But the inspector told us that under the surface, it was a mess.  From the shingles to the foundation, there were major structural issues that would cause the house to leak, sag, shift, and crack unless it was repaired under the supervision of a structural engineer.

To move forward with buying the house, we would have had to delay the transaction by who knows how many months while the current owners fixed it.  If we trusted them to fix it.  That's a big if, because some of the issues were created during renovation.  That means the fixes would be made by the same team that left issues in the first place.  And our dealings with the seller's agent were far from smooth:  it would be a fight every step of the way.  So when the inspection report came back, there was no question.  We walked.

I confess I'm a little relieved.  The transaction was a moshpit of incompatible personalities from the beginning.  On the one side, we have my wife and I.  Normally she is assertive about standing up for what she deserves; I often let others get away with things in order to keep the peace.  The second party was our real estate agent, a conflict-avoidant personality like me.  On the third hand, we had the seller's agent who also acted as the general contractor.  This individual was a charismatic pitch-man (which is great for a salesman) and a bully (which is common in construction but less so in real estate agents).  Putting these personalities together resulted in the seller's agent lying through his teeth and browbeating our agent into submission.  Then our agent repeatedly tried to convince us we were wrong about what we had heard the seller's agent say he would do, didn't advocate for us, and complained that we were attacking her when we stood up for ourselves.  That was how it went.  Even before the inspection report, we had all but stopped speaking with our own agent.  So I'm glad I don't have to finish the transaction with those people.

Have you ever told someone that since they work for you, they should go along with your recollection of events - and then had them respond 'I never told you you were wrong'?  It's pretty surreal.

I exaggerate a bit when I say we're homeless.  There's an apartment we can stay in.  So many people travel to my company's worksite that they rented an apartment for visitors instead of putting traveler after traveler up in a hotel.  But it'll take a long time to identify another house, negotiate an offer, and close on it.  We'll be living out of suitcases for at least a month.  But we won't be homeless.  I'm thankful for the safety net.

When in China, eat Chinese food

Eschew the "Spaghetti Bolognaise".  Venture not unto the "Russian Bortsch".  And under no circumstances sample the "Cheese Burger".  But get the "Beef Brisket Noodles In Soup" for $10 and you'll eat it all and order it again later.

I didn't need to be reminded of this, really, but in the past the Baolilai has done a damn fine steak.  Not this time.  It was gristly and gelatinous - on the cool side of rare when I'd requested medium rare - and cost $34 for an 8oz cut.  The revolving buffet restaurant on the 24th floor has slipped too.  When I was here in 2010 I gorged myself on the raw bar.  Shellfish, sushi, this is a port town and it was all pretty close to nature.  They still put out a half dozen kinds of small whole fish which they'll grill for you on the spot, and that's really lovely, but the raw selection has dwindled.

I've been eating lunch at my company's cantinas.  The system goes like this.  If you're a production worker, you live in the dormitories and you get an allowance for three meals a day at the cantinas.  If you're an office worker, you get one meal.  There are two cantinas; the downstairs one has spicy food and the upstairs one is less spicy.  Downstairs you get what a westerner might expect:  chunks that are more bone than meat; thin broth; lots of rice; and vegetables that are mostly preserved rather than fresh.  The upstairs cantina, though ... honestly if I got that food from a sit-down Chinese restaurant in the US, I'd be very happy.  When was the last time somebody made you fresh pasta in front of your eyes, starting with hand rolled noodles that had never been dried or frozen?  I was enjoying one of these lunches when I came to the realization that the food at the cantina was better than half of what the Baolilai offered.  My coworker was shocked when I told him so.  The production workers are a captive market, the food doesn't have to be this good, but it is.

So I've been eating a lot of tofu, and I don't mind at all.  In other news, it has been determined that if I had to eat with chopsticks for a week with no access to silverware, I wouldn't starve.  But it ain't easy to pick up wet noodles with polished metal sticks.

Chaos, stillness, labor

There's a peculiar stillness about an airport at 5:30AM. It's jittery, half-alert, empty of people but full of potential like the gray suction of the atmosphere before a thunderstorm.

I write from Newark airport, killing time through the first of two long waits. The second will be the flight to Hong Kong, 16 hours in a horizontal grain silo hurtling through oblivion at nearly the speed of sound.  In that purgatory it is not easy to lie to oneself. In Hong Kong, I will run the gauntlet of immigration, customs, car, and immigration again into Shenzhen. A car will pick me up at 8:30 to carry me to see face to face the coworkers I've been emailing since June, the last time I was there.

Yes, I've been silent here for a while. In October I agreed to relocate to Durham, NC, where my company has a site. Even before then, my travel schedule had ramped up until I was gone one week out of four, and then came the effort to sell the house. First repairs, then cleaning and cleaning and cleaning again, living in a theme park version of my house and periodically being shooed out for tourists.  Until finally, three weeks ago, negotiations. After that, a mad dash to Raleigh - Durham to tour other people's houses. A funeral. And a trip to China. Last week wasn't the most stressful week of my life, but it was close.

I would have liked to post about the many illuminating and infuriating things we went through to sell our house, but there was too much uncertainty. Now we have a contract to sell our house and (almost) a contract to buy another, so there is nothing left to do but execute plans.

There is a lot to execute. The current house needs repair to satisfy the city.  The next house is smaller by a third, which means trimming our belongings. After moving comes the settling in. And I have to move my lab as well - I thought I'd be able to leave some machines installed at the Cleveland lab, but the space has been promised to others.

So bear with me, please, as I deal. I do plan to continue to post, though I've handed the reins of the Lake Erie Moose Society blogger meetup group to my good friend, veteran Cleveland blogger Heidi Cool.  Watch this space. 

Hospital, interlude, blood

My day yesterday began with a routine checkup at my doctor's office, took a side trip to the hospital after I fainted at the sight of blood being drawn, and, after a brief interlude, ended with actual blood.

My employer gives me a discount on my health care premium if I get a yearly checkup from my doctor.  It's enough to motivate those not sensible enough to do it anyway.  I was in the examination room, a nurse drawing blood, while my doctor for some incomprehensible reason told me what happens to a baby boy's testicles during birth.  (I think we had been talking about hernias.)  But I had a rather brutal vasectomy in my history and I have a general aversion to needles.  I passed out.

Doctors, in my experience, take it very seriously when you pass out in their offices.  My general practitioner, bless his malpractice-insured heart, called 911.

I spent the next several hours in the emergency department at the Cleveland Clinic, my ass getting sore from their Buddhist-spec beds, my phone gradually dying, hungry and dehydrated because I'd fasted for the blood tests.  Eventually they decided that they (or the paint) had observed me long enough and they let me go.

I tried to have a normal day.  I worked, ate dinner, cleaned up the kitchen.  My hands were waterlogged and slippery with lotion.

Alice wanted me to grate some cheese.  Have you ever heard of a microplane?

Thankfully, the corner of my thumb that it dislodged went into the sink, not the cheese.  I gave up on the day and retired upstairs with a quarter inch of tape on my digit.

Rorschach

The two men sat across a table from each other, an incandescent bulb above, in an otherwise unlit room.  The younger man tapped the edge of a folder on the desk to tidy its loose contents and then laid it down.  "I'm going to show you some pictures, Hermann, and I'd like you to tell me stories about them."

The face of the man in the military uniform did not change.  He sniffed:  mildew.  They were supposed to be assessing his mental fitness to stand trial.  He might go mad from boredom in this place.  The cinderblock walls were unpainted, the lampshade metal, even the desk was gray.

"I'll give you an example.  Here's the Mona Lisa.  For centuries people have speculated about her smile.  What was she thinking?  Was she Leonardo's paramour?  Was she happy but simply tired of sitting?  Was she even Leonardo himself, painted in a mirror, with the lady's features on top and his sly smile peeking through?  But it's a very simple picture.  I'll give you some more interesting ones to work with."

The folder opened and a photographic print was passed across the table.  The subject was a rose garden, seen from a point some distance off the ground.  The rosebeds were thick and the paths narrow.  Some were dead ends.  In the upper right, a young man stood in the garden, looking to the right over the bushes.

He picked up the picture and examined it with a barely detectible sneer.  "What does this have to do with my trial?"

"Hermann, I hope you'll appreciate that the tools of the psychiatric profession are sometimes opaque.  I am trying to understand you, and this is my method."

"You needn't lecture me on the study of the mind, boy."  In fact, he was only ten years older than the man with the folder.  "I am one of its foremost practitioners.  All right then."  His hand stroked his chin, his fingers as uncalloused as a safecracker's.

"One day a young student was given a task.  He...."  Hermann looked over his glasses at the younger man.  "She was told to gather a collection of ambiguous photographs.  She is trying to imagine how this task will contribute to her thesis.  She fails, and decides at last that her academic advisor is simply doing what he wants to do without regard for her future, and as usual is simply using her as free labor.  But she has standards, so she passes over the photograph of the moodily lit tube of toothpaste."

The younger man blinked.  "No, you're missing the point.  Stories--well, here's another."  The photograph showed a gravel road with a crumbling rock wall on one side, a meadow behind it, and on the other side a field of freshly cut tree stumps and deep ruts.  The road forked ahead.

"A forest was cleared to make way for new homes.  The landowner photographed the process for legal purposes.  An artist, having no photography skills of his own, found the photo in a public archive and stole it for inclusion in an exhibition of his work.  This exhibition was seen by a professor of psychiatry--"  Exasperated, the analyst took the photo back.

"No, let's continue, this is fun."  With the speed of a pickpocket, he reached across the table and grabbed another from the folder.  It showed a bookcase, with titles from popular culture and from academia, and a near-empty snifter on top.  "Johan was desperate for a commission, but he had no work to show.  He had to build his portfolio, so he began photographing random things."  The analyst snapped the print out of his hands.

"Göring," said Rorschach, "you are on trial for murder on a scale that Vlad the Impaler would disavow. Do not take this process lightly."

They locked eyes. Rorschach: anger. Göring: tight contempt.

"Hermann Göring. Reichsmarschall. 0000021."

Ubiquitous cameras will make it hard to hide...your feelings

Nicholas Carr has written a nice tight piece of speculative futurism called "automating the feels".  The setup:  recently a company that produces corporate training materials came out with software that uses the computer's camera to make sure you're actually looking at their training videos.  Nick picks up that ball and runs with it - read his post.  But I got to thinking about what this kind of technology could tell us about ourselves.

Let's say, as Nick predicts, future communications will have a sort of side channel of emoticons automatically generated by the camera in your phone or computer.  Sort of like a soundtrack, but feelings.  You'd get emails about some project with running commentary about the sender:  "Bored.  Bored.  Bored.  Impatient." It would be impossible to lie about certain things; social niceties such as "looking forward to seeing you again" would come across very differently if the reader knew that while typing that, your expression was "disgusted".

Some people might learn things about themselves.  "The camera keeps telling me I'm angry whenever I text these people.  Come to think of it, it's right.  So why am I still hanging out with them?"  Or, "The computer kept telling me I'm happiest when I'm spellchecking.  Maybe I should have become an editor instead of an engineer."

Presumably it wouldn't be long before AI or fuzzy logic was used to fine tune these algorithms to individual users.  Then your phone would just know that you're annoyed all the time, and it wouldn't bother to say so unless it's, you know, worse.  But that might be doing a disservice to people you correspond with who have never met you.  And the algorithms will get subtler as time goes on.  At first they'll only be able to detect rage and glee, but eventually every emotional distinction there's a word for will be detectable.  And maybe more.  Maybe eventually we'll have to start coming up with new words for emotional states that our computers tell us about but we have no names for.

There are so many possibilities.  In many areas (such as lying), our society functions on an imbalance of available information.  People choose how much of themselves to reveal.  Throwing the covers off that imbalance would be pretty disruptive, the same way the internet disrupted retail markets by making it possible to instantly get the price of a product at every store that sells it worldwide.  Eventually we might have to wear a balaclava just to send a neutrally toned message.  But I'm sure the machines will have an emoticon for that!

The world ended a hundred years ago and somehow it's still ending.

I saw Ensemble HD, a classical music troupe, at the Happy Dog on December 5th, 2012. It might seem odd to review a musical performance that occurred nine months ago, but here I am, thinking about it.

Ensemble HD is members of the Cleveland Orchestra (and sometimes others), and they play classical music at the Happy Dog (and sometimes other places). On this particular night they played the music of World War I. It's worth noting that at the time of the war they didn't call it World War "1", but neither did they refer to it as simply such-and-such-a-war, either. For them, it was the war to end all wars. The music of the time reflected the cataclysmic outlook. Stravinsky wrote the Rites of Spring. Shit was fucked up. So the music that Ensemble HD played was atonal, random, and harsh. The composers and players strove to express the uncertainty of the age.

Most people hate that "modern" music. Rightly: it's not melodic and not euphonic. But that night, I felt the angst behind it. I put my head down in solidarity with my afflicted comrades of a century ago: I can feel the same today. The pace of change we deal with today is like a world war that never ends, it only accelerates.

And so it was that almost a year later, I was sitting in a bar hundreds of miles away and heard "Natural Beauty" by Neil Young. Now, Neil Young is a bozo, but he's a magnificent bozo. He plays guitar quietly and sings in a fragile, imprecise voice, and conveys emotions high and low that stubbly guys worldwide can cop to. He is a musical Kurt Vonnegut.

I had a bit of a moment. And I remembered World War I echoing down through the years to a hot dog bar on the west side of Cleveland. I felt sorry for all those poor bastards living through World War I thinking that was the end of everything, unable to imagine a future. All their strident fragility led to this moment. And to all others to come.

How fast can you write?

I just wrote a 3000-word paper in under eight hours.  I'm kind of chuffed about it.  That's what writers call "banging it out".

It turns out that Word keeps track of not only your document's word count, but also how long it's been open for editing:

I always wondered how fast I could compose when I didn't have to stop and do other things like, you know, check to make sure I'm not wrong.  It's impressive, but not useful, to write hooey at six words per minute.  In the case of this paper, I'd already gone over all the material in other contexts three or four times recently, so I had it all down pat.  I didn't paste in any text, in fact, I even added a couple figures and equations and several links.  Not bad!  If you'd asked me beforehand, I wouldn't have been 100% certain I could even type this fast, let alone compose.

Two cities, two concerts

In the last week I've seen concerts in both Detroit and Cleveland, and I couldn't help but notice how differently people behaved.  TL;DR:  Detroiters clap.

I didn't start going to small venues to see rock bands in earnest until I moved to Cleveland.  The way people act here does vary from venue to venue but I kind of figured this is just normal:  stand where you can see the stage, keep your mouth shut, and do not under any circumstances dance.  I might prefer a little more freedom, but I can deal with it.

In Detroit I saw Swans (again) with the opening act Low at the Magic Stick.  I would have paid good money just to see Low - see their incredible album The Great Destroyer - so I wasn't going to miss this show.  Their set was beautiful, and left me thinking I need to pick up more of their albums.  They have a loud-soft dynamic whose loud bits are a perfect pairing with Swans, but their soft bits are very soft indeed.  The guys behind me must not have seen each other in a while, because their conversation went on too long and got too loud.  In a rare moment of lucidity, I turned around to face them, jerked my thumb over my shoulder at the band, and asked the guys "are they boring you?"  They kept it down after that.  Unfortunately, I'd gotten up early and spent much of the day in airports, so I was too tired to enjoy Swans.  When I left at 1AM, they were still playing.

All the fans in Detroit clapped and cheered loudly after every song, and yelled in appreciation when the band started a song they recognized.  At one point Low said to the audience, "thanks for clapping."  That was what got me thinking about this.

In Cleveland three days later I saw ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead at the Grog Shop.  This was a super high energy rock show in an intimate space, and the band worked hard to fire up the 70-odd fans by climbing down into the audience to play their instruments.  A few people were actually jumping around, but with all that effort and energy, three quarters of the audience was still just standing there nodding rhythmically.  At other equally energetic shows, there have been times where I've gotten into the music and started dancing in place a bit, only to draw glares from people standing nearby.  There is no clapping and little cheering at a typical Cleveland concert.  Maybe one out of ten attendees will yell in appreciation after a great song; the rest stand there like they've seen it all before.  Bands playing in Cleveland must feel like their shows are a flop.

I don't know what to make of all this.  Maybe there's an element of hipster insecurity to Cleveland audiences, a fear that if they admit the show is good, then people will think they haven't seen enough shows to know what's really good.  Or maybe Clevelanders really have seen it all before.  These two cities are too much alike for there to be big differences.  They're both under the gun in more ways than one, and moments of escape are important.  Seeing a rock band should free you, get you out of your own head, wipe the slate clean and reenergize you for when you have to get back to the grind.  Because the grind is waiting for you.  That's why we have rock music.

The "to think about" list

I looked at my to do list today and realized that I only really plan to do, soon, the top three or four things.  But the list is twenty or thirty items long.  I need to be more honest about this.

The last time I had a "to do list" that really worked was when I had a Palm Pilot and I used it to keep track of remodeling a house.  That was tidy.  But in the real world of personal projects that seem important and then fade, or work projects that split and change focus, the linear to do list is messy.

It turns out that many of the tasks that have percolated downwards in my list are things I either can't do yet because of resources, or don't know how to do yet.  If doing something is just a matter of my time and its priority coming together, then that's a real "to do".  If something else is missing, then it doesn't belong on a "to do list".

So I think I'll calve off a "to think about" list.  Then the things I can actually do won't get lost, and there's still a place for problems I haven't solved yet.

Unsolicited product review: Meguiars Clay Bar

If you think "clay bar" sounds like a particularly repellent diet candy, I don't blame you.  It's actually for taking paint smears off your car, and it really works.  I actually posted about it once before, but this time I remembered to take before and after photos.

A few weeks ago my wife lightly scraped a concrete pillar in a parking garage while maneuvering to a newly opened ticket window.  The result was this nasty arc of gray on her deep metallic blue Miata.

yeccch

It looks screwed, right?  When you see that on your car your heart sinks, you just figure it'll be like that forever unless you pay someone with permanently blackened fingernails a grand to bolt on some new body panels.  But sometimes it's not so bad:

blue Miata here

Basically you buy this kit, and inside it there are "gray bars" (here actually white) in plastic bags.  You open one and knead it until it's kind of soft.  Then you flatten it out a bit, spray that squirt bottle onto the car, and rub the bar on it.  Rub it and rub it and rub it.  It took me a half hour or an hour of spraying and rubbing to do this, meanwhile stretching and folding the bar to get a clean surface.  There's other stuff in the kit too, like a soft cloth and some wax, but the clay and spray are the main things.

You do have to be careful not to get sand or hard grit in your bar, because if that grit happens to be at the surface of your clay while you're rubbing, it will scratch the daylights out of your clearcoat.  It's not too difficult.  Just wipe off the car with a paper towel before you start, and don't lay the damn clay down on the ground while you're working.  Put it in the little plastic box they gave you.  Easy!

Shenzhen travelogue 5: door, ass, etc

Leaving Shenzhen, I took a taxi to the ferry terminal.  On the way, we drove alongside this:  an open truck full of half butchered pigs, uncovered, unwrapped.

oink

Their tails flapped in the breeze.  It reminded me, as I left, that the Shenzhen project is a thin veneer of modernity and cosmopolitanism laid over much older ways of doing things.  And in the long run, I and the other westerners, the scientists and managers and vice presidents, don't belong here.  The Chinese government is modernizing China not for us but for the Chinese.  Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.

Shenzhen travelogue 4: avoiding fiery death

Below is an email I sent home in the middle of the trip.

Oh hey I forgot to tell you, I almost got killed yesterday. We were driving to that vendor site and avoided an accident by inches. There was this tanker truck, I could tell it was empty by the way it was bouncing, and the driver was absolutely flogging it. The highway was three lanes each way, we were in the left lane. This tanker came up in the right lane going about 20mph faster than traffic, and moved into the middle lane to pass someone. But the smaller truck he tried to pass got into the middle lane too, to pass even slower traffic. Mr. Tanker was going too fast to avoid rear-ending the guy, so he laid on the horn, locked up the brakes, and drifted to the left towards us. We were about six inches on either side from being pinned between a concrete barrier and a semi, as the road with three lanes briefly had to accomodate four abreast, three of which were trucks. But in the end, there was no contact.

Our taxi driver was a pussy. He left too much following distance from the car in front of us, and he was constantly getting cut off. And he stayed in the left lane. And he should have seen (as I did well before the incident) that that tanker driver was dangerous and stayed the hell away from him.

Traffic in Chinese cities is anarchy, but it works. There's a system, it just isn't the same system that they teach in driver's ed and put on the signs and laws. Traffic on the freeways, on the other hand, doesn't work. There is too much speed difference between the slowest and fastest vehicles, slow vehicles don't stay to the right, and everybody is constantly changing lanes without looking behind them. There's a custom here that you're only responsible for what's in front of you. That's technically true in the US too, but people usually check their mirrors anyway to be polite and because they know the consequences of getting rear ended. Here they don't look first.

Shenzhen and its people: here to stay?

On the day I arrived in Shenzhen, I had a conversation about the city with a native.  We shared the shuttle bus from the airport to the hotel, and I took the opportunity to ask a stranger a question that had been nagging me.  Almost everyone in Shenzhen is in their twenties, so why doesn't it feel like a college town?

My fellow traveler grew up in Shenzhen before the construction began, but he'd spent the last ten years in Washington DC.  I told him that the last time I was here, I hadn't seen a lot of local culture.  In the US, if you had all these young people living in a citys, there'd be a thriving music scene and sports leagues.  Like Ann Arbor, but fifty times the size.  I told him maybe I don't know where to look, but I haven't seen that in Shenzhen yet.

He said basically the young people are working long hours and sending their money home, so there's no time or money left for cultural activities.  Also, they don't feel like Shenzhen is their home, so they don't want to invest in improving the city itself.  They're not there to stay.  They work for a few years and then go back home to establish themselves.  I found this response both depressing and incomplete.  The kids have got to do something on the weekends.  And at their age, this city must be a roiling cauldron of hormones.  They should be competing to get laid in this pan-Chinese cultural melting pot, inventing and discarding styles faster than the Japanese.  But no.  Karaoke is the closest thing they have to a local pastime.

This time I'm seeing more children and old people here in Shenzhen.  Like the city is here to stay.

That might seem like a staggeringly odd thing to say about a city; the only time a city disappears is when the climate wipes out its civilization, right?  But in 2010 the impression I got was more like a colossal factory than a city, although I couldn't put my finger on it at the time.  A factory can close down if a simple business decision is made.

At a Chinese Walmart, are all the goods made in the USA?

And maybe that's why:  all of Shenzhen felt like a business decision. The Chinese government decided to perform an experiment in openness and modernization.  They set aside a tract of land that for some bizarre reason didn't already have a metropolis on it, and they invited foreign companies to come use their abundant labor.  Everybody won:  the companies got trainable production workers at relatively low wages; the workers got what was for them relatively high wages for a few years.  As time went on, the Chinese government ramped up the value added:  first it was only production workers, then supervisors, then managers, then engineers, then scientists and vice presidents.  At every step, foreign companies got the benefit of low wages, and the Chinese employees got training, and the Chinese government got highly skilled people that could be used elsewhere in the economy - to build Chinese companies, for example.  Really, you have to hand it to them.  It was very well managed for a government program!

But by now, Shenzhen has acquired inertia, a presence of its own.  People actually live here, and not just the people that lived in the sleepy fishing village my fellow traveler grew up in.  The production workers sending money back to their families don't call it home, but others do:  the managers and engineers.  If a factory closes down, those people don't pack up and move back to the provinces, they find another factory.  They're here to stay.  But it's still a mystery to me why those managers and engineers haven't created a local culture.

Shenzhen travelogue 2: the rotating restaurant

I ate several meals in a rotating restaurant on top of the Baolilai International Hotel, where I stayed.  I took some pictures as the scenery came and went.

If you were an architect assigned to build a rotating restaurant, how would you do it? Like a lazy susan, with ball bearings? Air bearings, like an air hockey table? Or just a giant greased plate?  Would you use a screw drive to push it along?

View from the rotating restaurant, 12:23 PM

I think that hole in the ground is going to be another hotel.

12:33 PM.  Things at the right edge of this picture were on the left edge of the one above.

When I'm here, I eat a lot of fresh fruit. There are fruits here I simply can't get in the US. Right now, there is something in season that looks like a Rainier cherry and has a similar pit, but tastes totally unlike cherries. There is guava, which has big hard seeds that stick in my molars. Also there is a melonlike fruit with white flesh and many soft small black seeds. Lychees are in season - vendors sell them by the side of the road, there's a stand about every thirty feet. 

Finally, 12:54PM.

Based on these images, it looks like the hotel rotated about 90 degrees in the half hour I was there.  Two hours per full rotation isn't fast, but then again, the restaurant is huge.