Surfing the Luminiferous Ether

Today before dinner, I stopped at the Man Mo Temple on Hollywood Road in the Sheng Wan area of Hong Kong. The temple was built in the 1800s to honor Man, the god of literature, and Mo, the god of war. Incense is the food of the gods, and so there is plenty of it to keep them from going hungry. The temple uses coiled incense, so the effect is like a building full of smouldering lampshades:

There was so much incense that I could only stay in the temple for a couple of minutes before my eyes were watering too badly to see straight. Click the picture to go through to the main gallery and see more.

I’m in Guangzhou, speaking at the China Education & Research Network conference. I gave a slight spin on my talk from Abu Dhabi, but the experience of being in China is a world apart. Here are a few snapshots from toting my camera:

During the trip from the railway station to the hotel I’m staying at, the vehicle I was in merged on to an elevated highway. As we were merging, I saw a bicyclist pedaling along with a trailer, with a dog sitting on top. The mental image was so unbelievable that even though the camera was powered up, I still had to swing around and take the picture out the rear window of the minibus.

After registering with the conference, I went for a short walk in the neighborhood of the hotel. To cross the streed, pedestrians need to cross a right-turn lane for cars. Even small pedestrians aren’t safe from cars that take the turn very fast, though they do at least appear to swerve for toddlers.

Traffic lights are also advisory. I’d heard the sound of whistles from the twentieth floor of the hotel, but it wasn’t until I got down to street level that I realized that traffic cops were directing traffic, even though the intersection of two six-lane roads has a traffic lights.

I have a four-year old Nikon Coolpix 4500 that I’ve owned for a bit more than four years. It’s served me well over that time, and it’s visited four continents in my search for the perfect shot. Unfortunately, it appears to have picked up mad camera disease on my recent trip to London.

When I went to power it up tonight to take a photo of a magazine spread, I was greeted with a black LCD screen. At first, I thought that I’d left the lens cap on, so I reached to take it off and I realized that it was already off. It almost looks as if the shutter is stuck closed. I get the normal markings on the LCD screen, but the image is always all black. I can use the viewfinder to see photos from my trip to London two weeks ago.

When I attempt to take pictures, I hear some mechanical noises from the lens area. The shutter sound isn’t quite as crisp as it usually has been, so it seems as if it the shutter is not opening.

I’ve written to Nikon tech support with a description the problem. I hope they can help, but if the camera is done for, I will probably buy that digital SLR that I’ve had my eye on.

It certainly has taken me long enough to start my own blog. I’ve been at it since December 2002, when I first started blogging for O’Reilly.

Professionally, I’m a network engineer, which means that I’m a plumber for your data. Fortunately, when networks have trouble, the results may be ugly, but at least they’re generally sanitary. I took up residence in Silicon Valley after graduating from college and worked for a series of security companies. During those heady years, I liked to say that “I help build the Internet,” which generally worked as an explanation until the Al Gore “inventing the Internet” controversy. In those early years of my career, I learned that network address translation is evil, and that just sticking a firewall up doesn’t make your network secure.

In 1999, the large company I worked for acquired a little company that made wireless LAN hardware. I thought that 802.11 was the coolest technology I’d ever worked with. In those days, it was enough to walk up to somebody with a laptop and an 802.11 card, ask for a website, and pull it up in a browser. Even though it wasn’t fast, and certainly wasn’t secure, I knew I had to be a part of it. I now work on 802.11 full time, and I’m a voting member of the IEEE 802.11 working group.

Somewhere along the way, I had to prove that my liberal arts education was good for something more than just engineering, and I wrote a few books for O’Reilly. The only one that most people have read is my book on 802.11, which is now in its second edition. Writing is good for a variety of reasons. For me, one of the most tangible benefits is that it keeps me busy learning about new technologies. In 2005, I spent a good chunk of my free time learning about HDTV by using MythTV. To keep myself busy in 2006, I decided to start running Asterisk at home to learn about VoIP.

In my career so far, I’ve held a variety of positions that have required a great deal of travel. Leaving my own country has shown me that there’s a whole world out there that lives differently from me, and it’s been one of the best ways to help me appreciate where I do live. I started with most of my travel in Europe, though lately, I’ve been spending more time in Asia. Sadly, the list of the fifteen countries that I’ve visited does not yet include either Italy or Ireland.

While I’m traveling, I often take photographs. I have no professional training, so I rely on the large capacity of memory cards to take lots of pictures and throw most of them away. In this space, I’ll only be showing off the few pictures that are worth looking at.