Surfing the Luminiferous Ether

On my recent trip to Montreal for the IEEE, I had a weird credit card experience. I went to pay with my American Express card, which has a silver magnetic stripe on the back. When the waiter brought back the check, he had an old-fashioned carbon copy receipt.

He explained that AmEx cards with a silver magnetic stripe, like my Costco cash-back card, were of a newer design, and the process for reading them caused their card processing machine to crash. The could process the new-style AmEx cards in the machine, but the transaction would crash it and they would need to reboot. Unsurprisingly, it’s not a very fast machine and the reboot time is lengthy. Therefore, while waiting for AmEx to supply a patch that fixes the bug, they were running all the new-style cards manually.

The moral of the story: all software has bugs, and software is everywhere. Therefore, expect to find bugs everywhere, even where you least expect it. (A friend who was doing research involving automobiles once told me that essentially all new automotive features are software, so it accounts for an increasing fraction of the cost of newer cars.)

How much do I like Interop? To answer that question, I usually point out that it’s in Las Vegas, but I go anyway in spite of the venue. I’ve made the the annual Interop pilgrimage nine times in the past decade. Last week at the close of the show, I made my way to Mix, the nightclub on the 64th floor of THEhotel in Las Vegas. The view was astounding, in part because you can look down at the bright light on top of the Luxor.

As with almost every other city I’ve been to, Las Vegas looks better at night. From Mix, I assembled a four-shot panorama of the Strip. Here’s a small excerpt from it:

The photo was made possible by my new Canon SLR. I didn’t try taking a tripod up to the nightclub, and in any case, there’s a glass wall that I had to shoot over. To handhold the camera, even rested on the glass, required that I pull out all the tricks to keep the image steady. The shots were all taken at a speed of ISO 1600, and I’m sure that the fact I was using an image-stabilized lens didn’t hurt.

If you found the shot above attractive, you might be interested in the Las Vegas gallery, which also includes a couple of photos from the House of Blues Foundation Room at the top of the original Mandalay Bay tower.

On the way to the IEEE meeting, I looked at my ticket. Due to the vagaries of airline fares and schedules, I was forced to connect. American Airlines flight 802 goes from Dallas to Montréal, where the meeting is held. Somehow, it seems appropriate that I’m taking flight 802 to the 802.11 meeting.

(Somberly, I should note that American Airlines no longer operates flight 11.)

On this trip, I read somewhere that about 80% of Hong Kong is undeveloped. You’d never know it if you spent time in the traditional tourist areas on the Island or Kowloon, both of which are uniformly tall. when I first visited Hong Kong in the early 1990s, Mong Kok was the most densely populated area in the world, with a density equivalent to shoving New York City into Central Park.

The Po Lin Monastery is in a remote area of Lantau island. The MTR stops well short of the monastery. Many guides will tell you that you need to ride a bus from Tung Chung station, but there’s a new cable car that goes almost straight there over the mountains and takes about a third of the time (though it costs five times as much).

The most famous attraction is the gigantonormous Tian Tan Buddha, shown here with humans to make its immense scale obvious:

More in the Po Lin gallery. There’s more to the monastery than the Buddha. A short walk over a paved trail will bring you to the Wisdom Path, a poem carved into tree trunks arranged in a figure-8 loop.

There are multiple wireless networks at the Hong Kong International Airport, but most of them cost money. If you want free access, go to gate 2, which is right underneath The Wing, the Cathay Pacific business-class lounge. You can hop on the free network without being in the lounge, and the signal strength is very good since it’s not walled in on the level above.

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.

Several years ago, I took an introductory economics class from John Mutti. One of the basic principles that was discussed frequently, but often hard to illustrate in a concrete way, is that the relative abundance of capital and labor influences the mix of the two factors that will be used in any business.

I’m in China right now, where labor is relatively more abundant than in the United States. An economist would predict that businesses would use more labor and less capital, and you do get hints of that in the amount of labor used by hotels and restaurants. (I once ate at a restaurant in Jinan with a colleague, and the two of us were served by six staff members.)

Walking around yesterday, though, I saw the best example yet: pay phones. I’m used to pay phones being things you put coins in to get a dial tone. They’re sturdy, well-built devices that have to stand up to the abuse of patrons. As a result, they’re quite expensive (payphone.com will sell you one for $489, as I write this). Pay phones, as I understand them from my experiences in the developed world, are capital.

Not so in China. Here on the street, there are “public telephone” booths, which combine both traditional coin-operated phones and a table with several regular phones overseen by an agent. If you want to make a call, you pay the person inside the booth, and you get to use the phone. Here’s an image from the street yesterday. A woman is paying for the call she just made, and I believe the woman in the white hat is zipping up her wallet as she walks away after a call of her own. It’s exactly the sort of thing that an economist would predict. When labor is more abundant, it can substitute for capital. In this case, the labor of the person inside the booth is substituting for the capital equipment to collect coins.

(Some of the booths even have signs that read “public telephone,” but sadly, not this one.)

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.

This week’s issue of The Economist has an article about London area airports. They write:

The airport consistently ranks near the bottom in surveys of quality of service and passenger satisfaction (see table). Terry Jones, of Monty Python fame, crooned his worries over Heathrow’s baggage-retrieval system in the 1980s and little has changed since then.

(The lyrics to the song are precious, because they put worry about the Middle East on par with baggage claim at Heathrow.)

For the record, the table has selected quality rankings for 35 international airports.

I can agree with most of these. I’ve been to Seoul once, and it was a wonderful airport. I’ve used Hong Kong regularly, and my only complaint is that when I arrive on the San Francisco-Hong Kong flight from Cathay Pacific, it’s too early for any of the restaurants or shops to be open. I don’t understand how DFW makes the list for a good airport. The international terminal is very nice, but if you have to transfer to a domestic U.S. flight, you’re dealing with a Texas-sized airport that’s a pain to get around in.

The source for the survey is the Australian Airports Association, but they don’t collect the data. The best I could find was a reference to the Airports Council International’s program to measure Airport Service Quality. However, in a March 2007 press release, they say that Kuala Lumpur’s airport finished third. I went looking for the data because Moscow is legendary for bad airport experiences, so for Heathrow to only beat Moscow by two places says volumes. I used to like Heathrow, but that was before I was stuck using it as a business traveler. (I guess visiting London on vacation makes anything seem good!) It’s cramped, outdated, and I find that I frequently use the word “metastized” when referring to its layout.

I’m flying to Orlando for the IEEE today. Unfortunately, a cross-country trip burns the whole day on the airplane, so I had to catch a 7:40 am flight this morning. On Friday morning, American Airlines helpfully sent me this e-mail:

From: American Airlines [americanairlines@info.aa.com]
To: Matthew Gast

It’s that time of year again - time to set those clocks ahead an hour. And this year, Daylight-Saving Time arrives even earlier. So, after you pack your bags and review your itinerary Saturday night, don’t forget to “spring forward”. We don’t want you to miss your flight this Sunday.

While I’m pleased that they felt the need to notify me, e-mail is the wrong way to do it. My e-mail box overflows with spam and mailing lists, so there was no guarantee that the message would get to me.

“Unexpected” changes are one of the reasons I signed up for flight paging to my cell phone years ago. (American could learn a few lessons from United. United pages any flight with my frequently flier number, whereas on American, I need to manually create notifications for any flights after pulling them up on the American site.)

I didn’t rely on my mobile phone this morning, and that’s good. American didn’t deliver my flight page at all for the first flight of the day. Curiously, they did deliver the notification for my second flight while I was in the air on the first one. Furthermore, T-Mobile’s automatic time update didn’t hit the phone’s clock until about 6:30 this morning, so it was also lagging by an hour.

My old-fashioned alarm clock came through again. As I was leaving the house, I noticed that my NTP-connected machines (Myth and Asterisk) had correctly updated their clocks, but the VCR that pulls the time signal from PBS had not.