April 24, 2008
A weekend hop back to Switzerland after three months in India, and the caveman brain somehow handles the teleport just fine. The difference between the two countries is summed up perfectly the moment you walk into Zurich Airport's train station. After a winter of warm dust, one morning of European skiing administers a lesson about what 'mild spring sun' actually means.
April 10, 2008
In India the starter kit is a cook, a driver, a house boy and a nanny, and nobody bothers with polite euphemisms. We only really needed the house boy -- 48 hours a week of him, apparently. Trying to share him with a co-worker triggered an unexpected negotiation, because the man was studying business and had clearly thought about the math. He drives a hard bargain on rickshaws, too.
March 10, 2008
It's 2008, the Democrats have two strong candidates instead of the usual one, and they look likely to snipe at each other right up to the point where McCain quietly wins. Here is a plan that fixes that, locks down the White House for the next twelve years, and rewards both candidates more handsomely than waiting their turn. Why twelve and not sixteen? There's a constitutional reason.
March 09, 2008
India is cheaper than Switzerland by a factor of about 4.5 -- unless you're tall and white, in which case the multiplier wanders. Rickshaw drivers seem to think 150 rupees is the universal answer regardless of distance. The Lonely Planet warning about touts adding to prices, though, deserves a closer look. Whether they actually do depends on a small detail of the commission structure.
March 04, 2008
Last week Douwe likened Indian traffic to rock-paper-scissors, then realized the analogy was broken: a cow sits unbeaten at the top of the pyramid. Bad game design. Then he saw something on the street that completed the circle, and it involved a creature that apparently never got the memo about which animals are holy.
February 24, 2008
Getting across Hyderabad makes Zurich feel like a village green. Buses beat cars, cars beat rickshaws, nothing beats cow, and auto-rickshaw drivers will invent reasons not to use the meter. On the ride back from the airport, Douwe finally got one to agree to the meter. Halfway home, it mysteriously went dark.
February 04, 2008
At tourist spots in India, strangers keep asking to take Douwe's picture. Not with the monument behind him; with him as the monument. A field trip to Warangal turned into full Beatlemania: handshakes, autographs on banknotes, an impromptu speech about how much money he makes. One kid told him he looked like Brad Pitt. He really doesn't.
January 30, 2008
Decades ago, Byte magazine floated a theoretical idea: a program that could spread between floppies like a virus. Surely nobody would actually write such a thing. We know how that went. Now scientists are inching toward artificial life, and Douwe has a guess about who will eventually push the button — and why.
January 29, 2008
Fifteen years ago in Goa, the only Indians on the beach were the fishermen. Now the beach belongs to crowds of young men, jet-skis everywhere, signs warning you not to abuse children. An Indian friend asks Douwe what Western people actually do at the beach, since lying around motionless seems strange. He has a hard time answering.
January 27, 2008
If cleanliness is next to godliness, India is firmly on the godliness side: temples everywhere, but tidiness is not the country's forte. Switzerland wins this round. Douwe ends up with an empty coconut outside a temple and politely asks the guard where the bin is. The guard's solution is elegant, immediate, and not what he expected.
January 23, 2008
India is a guy country. Not in the obvious way — when European feminists were burning bras, India had a female prime minister — but in the sense that whatever you need, there is always a guy. Douwe tries to book train tickets online, fails, and discovers an entirely different system that runs on text messages and parking lots.
January 21, 2008
Years ago the European Commission set out to unify power plugs across the continent. Rather than pick the type used by half the union, they proposed designing a fresh standard equally bad for everyone. Mercifully it died in a drawer. Meanwhile in Hyderabad, with six competing plug types, Douwe spots a much simpler fix the EU somehow missed.
January 20, 2008
India's low-cost airlines are thriving, and at the airport everybody dutifully lines up for security. Nobody empties their pockets. The metal detector beeps for everyone, and a man-line and woman-line each get a personal pat-down regardless. Douwe, the dutiful European, empties his pockets first — and discovers what happens to the only passenger who doesn't set off the beep.
January 17, 2008
Western addresses are declarative; Indian addresses, a colleague tells Douwe, are procedural — directions rather than coordinates, with all the common words helpfully dropped. Flagging down strangers to ask directions is standard practice. After two days of confused rickshaws to the Google office, he discovers the man who picked them up from the airport wasn't quite who they assumed.
January 14, 2008
Another trip to India, another all-nighter spent cleaning the apartment. The first time around, my brother and I had stared at an atlas and decided overland looked doable. Lonely Planet helpfully informed us that hitching across the Arabian Desert was 'only for the hardy.' Then came the Iranian visa, which arrived with its own peculiar twist.
January 09, 2008
Posting frequency has been, let's say, gently approaching zero. In 2003 it was daily; Q4 of 2007 saw exactly one post. So, the classic blog move: a fresh-start post promising it'll all be different from now on. There are reasons to believe me this time — a new platform, and a slightly larger change of address.
November 25, 2007
Airlines love sentences that start with 'for your own safety.' The lifejacket speech reassures us, even though over the Atlantic it's mostly theatre. But the rules keep getting sillier — a flight attendant once told me my iPhone's music was interfering with the plane's computers. Why do Boeing and Airbus tolerate this, after working so hard to convince us steel boxes can fly?
August 22, 2007
Visited Countries has always been the most popular thing on this site, and over the years people have asked for all kinds of features. My favorite request: split Canada into provinces, but merge Germany, Italy and France since they're basically the same thing anyway. A more reasonable suggestion led to something new — finer granularity, hand-picked destinations.
June 25, 2007
A fun little tool my brother seems to be involved in: every URL on the domain is a tag cloud, and visitors are prompted to add more tags, which automatically link to each other. Add typed links and you'd basically have the semantic web on a single page. Neat hack, though with one or two rough edges worth grumbling about.
June 16, 2007
Booking an Amtrak train to Niagara Falls, I found a discount code: V185, good for 10% off. Every other code I dug up online had the same form — Vxxx. So obviously the question became: what does V186 do? V187? Nine hundred numbers is a lot to try by hand, but Python doesn't mind tedium.
When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.