Reinventing Fire

I wish I kept a more detailed journal… I have chat logs and emails as a quotidian reminder of my doings, but it doesn’t capture all the great conversations and interesting people I meet when traveling.  This short trip to Tokyo, only 10 days or so, was jam-packed with cool folks with cool ideas.  But now I’m jaunting back to Tokyo from the W3C-Keio office, and then to the airport, so no time, no time…

Maybe on the plane I will sketch out my erstwhile meanderings.  The short version: spoke at Web Directions East (and will speak again at Web Directions North) about SVG and Canvas, was blown away by the other presentations there, hung with cool Web community folks (locals and internationals) who I hope to see again, ate good food, wandered the streets of Harajuku and Shibuya and Asakusa and Ebisu, watched mochi being made at a temple festival and ate the results, met with the Japanese chapter of the SVG Interest Group and some Japanese Industrial Standards folks regarding SVG 1.2 Tiny and further on, and collaborated with my awesome and inspiring W3C-Keio teammates.  Had no access to my cash because of a mixup with Visa/RBC.  Stayed in another capsule hotel, in Fujisawa.

And saw Mt. Fuji two clear days in a row, with lovely warm winter weather.  Sayonara, Japan!

The SVG Working Group met in Ottawa for the SVG 1.2 Tiny Test Fest this week, which went very well.  The Test Fest was sponsored by BitFlash at the Brookline Hotel, which is where the Bilderberg Group met last time I was up here.

With airlines prices being what they are, and anticipating having to rent a car, I decided to drive up instead of flying.  I actually looked into train tickets, but was sorely disappointed… it would have taken 2 days, required finding a hotel room in NYC, and booking a connecting train in Canada, and it would still have been the same price as a flight.  Apparently, Amtrak is not only not ramping up their service to meet what you would think is a growing demand for cheap, eco-friendly travel… they are actually removing passenger lines, because the freight industry controls the rails. What a pity… I would like to have taken a train.

As it turned out, though the drive was long (about 13 hours), I didn’t really mind it.  I kind of enjoy road trips.  I loaded my iPod with podcasts and audiobooks; I loved the podcasts so much, I haven’t even gotten to the audiobooks yet.  This is the first time I’ve ever listened to a podcast, and I am definitely going to subscribe to some feeds (I know, I’m behind the times, but I work from home and normally just listen to NPR or music while I’m driving).  The changing leaves were beautiful, too.

On the way back down, I decided to detour to Niagara Falls.  The only other time I was in this area, as I was roadtripping across the States with a friend (on my way to move from Missouri to North Carolina by a very circuitous route), she didn’t want to go to the Falls, and I’ve been wanting to go ever since.  So, I figured, hey, since I’m in the area… But we worked pretty late last night, so I ended up leaving the hotel just before midnight… I was pretty drowsy about half the way to Niagara Falls, so I pulled over and slept in my car in a rest area.  But that gave me a chance to see a bit of Toronto by day;  I detoured from my detour to see the CN Tower and Kensington Market in Toronto, which seems like a nice city… it’s one of the few major Canadian cities I’d never been to before, so I’m glad I did it.

In Niagara Falls, I did the normal tourist thing, strolling along the walkway above the falls, snapping pictures, and taking the Maid of the Mist boat tour that takes you into the deluge under the falls.  I got soaked, naturally, and the roar was deafening. It was pretty fun.  The falls –American Falls and Horseshoe Falls– are pretty impressive, with the rainbows and towering mist and translucent water rushing over the edge.

So, off to dinner, then I’m hitting the road again back home to North Carolina.

Today, the Large Hadron Collider started its slow proton acceleration to our inevitable doooooom (stay tuned for changing conditions)!  My two favorite doomsday scenarios are:

1. It will produce persistent micro-blackholes, which will devour the Earth in a massive fiery conflagration.
2. It will produce super-stable strange matter, which will convert the less-stable nuclear matter of which the Earth is composed into more strange matter, like Vonnegut’s ice-nine.

I find this kind of dualism comforting.  Whimper or Bang.  Good or Evil.  People are consistent, even in their nightmare scenarios.  God bless you, Robert Frost:

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

As I grabbed our last bag off the carousel, my mobile rang with a call from my sister C.  This was the first I heard about the devastating earthquake in Sichuan, China.  We had considered traveling there, based on a recommendation from a Sichuan local we’d met while visiting the rice paddies, but the stomach flu cut our travel schedule a day or so short.  So, we were never anywhere really near the danger zone (though some did feel it in Beijing, I understand).

Thanks for everyone who contacted us to make sure we were safe.  This adds a sad note to our great experiences in China, with the warmth of the Chinese people and the beauty of the country.  When I visit a place, I get an emotional connection to it, making it more real for me, and I hope we can somehow help… though with so many lives lost, so much destruction, it’s a little hard knowing we can only help the survivors, and then only so much.  M and I feel really lucky.  (Sorry, this comes out rather clumsy, but I don’t really know what to say in the face of something like this… I guess I just wanted to let everyone know we’re safe.)

I was skeptical of Obama at first. I thought his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention was great, but even then people were ready to crown him as the next Democratic nominee. I didn’t think we knew enough about him, that he had a track record to back up his admitted charm and eloquence, even after a couple of years in the Senate.

I think I was wrong.

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Despite a bout of insomnia that kept me up all Friday night, Saturday was surprisingly productive. I normally only see the dawn hours when I stay up late enough, especially on the weekend, and sleeplessness afforded me the opportunity to shop at the Carrboro farmer’s market with M (though she’d gone to bed early and slept through the night).

I was a little frustrated, because while I don’t mind sleeping during the day, there was some house maintenance I’d been putting off for a while that I’d planned for Saturday. The light in the office ceiling fan was shorting out, and the toilet in the master bath was broken. It’s only a 24-year-old house, but I guess that’s normal wear-and-tear. So, after breakfast, I forced myself to stay up a little longer to whip the house into shape.

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I usually work late, and when I have an early meeting, my girlfriend sets the alarm for me after she wakes.  This morning, she asked me if I wanted her to set it.  I sat upright, grabbed her arm, lay back down, closed my eyes, and said, “I thought we were going to help you escape.  They don’t have a replacement yet.  Get some Molotov cocktails… burn the whole place down.”
Naturally, I have no memory of this.  She told me about it when she got home from work.

For the first time, on my third trip to Japan, I saw Mt. Fuji.  M and had I tried to see it from Hakone last time I was here, but the weather wasn’t playing along.

The W3C-Keio team was taking a break out on the patio of the office, talking about how beautiful it was in the fall.  I saw a few mountains under a white-clouded sky, and asked if Mt. Fuji was visible.  They thought I was joking.  They pointed out that it was… and that I should get a picture from the other patio, where the radio tower didn’t get in the way.  As I was framing the shot, still unclear as to which of the mountains it was, my perception shifted… and I saw that the clouds weren’t clouds, but the snow-covered peak of a monstrous mountain!  It was so big, it didn’t even register at first.  It reminds me of the islanders (Hawaiians?) who couldn’t see the European ships off the shore… it was just outside their experience.

Dateline Tokyo.  After about a month, I’m packing up to leave Japan.  It’s been a good trip, but busy… I’ve kept notes and taken pictures, and I’ll be posting a short post-mortem travelogue when I get back to the States.

Well, M and I are kinda sad about our cats, PrettyBoy and Floyd. No, despite the title of this entry, they didn’t die… but we had to return them to their previous foster home. We really loved the furry beasts, and they were fun to have around. But they were clearly not happy about not being able to go outside to hunt; they are big cats with a strong hunting instinct, who clearly disdained proxy toys. They did do some indoor hunting… we quickly “trained” them (or vice versa) to exchange palmetto bugs (read: fancy name for giant cockroaches, a problem when your house is surrounded by woods) for kitty treats (though PrettyBoy objected strongly if I took away the prey too quickly). We tried to let them get a taste for the outside by putting in a cat door to our screened-in porch, but they tore through the screen to get out onto the back deck. The deck is high off the ground, and they seemed to be looking longingly over the edge… we were afraid they might try to jump off, especially in pursuit of a bird or squirrel. We had to stop putting birdseed in the feeder, which was a shame since I liked watching the variety of birds that fluttered around our deck. Despite occasional frustrations (some scratched-up furniture, a prodigious amount of waste product that seemed to exceed the amount of food we gave them, tearing up all our screens trying to get to bugs), the cats had really grown on us, so we were reluctant to give them up… but our upcoming trip to Japan sealed the deal. We knew they wanted to live somewhere they could roam outside, and it just didn’t make sense for us to keep them anymore. So we drove an hour to the home of their previous owner, who gladly took them back (the conflicting cat has since passed away), and offered us visitation rights. His reassurances made us feel much better, knowing that they were going to a place they knew and liked, and where they could hunt bigger game than bugs. We’ll miss them, but maybe we’ll get another cat that doesn’t mind staying inside. On a strange afternote, we stopped for drinks at a convenience store on the way back (near his house), and overheard a guy there who said that the name of the puppy in his arms was Prettyboy Floyd… what an odd coincidence!