Last week, Megan and I went to the opening ceremony of the first electric vehicle charging station in North Carolina, on the corner of W. Hargett and Dawson in Raleigh.

Megan wrote up a short blog post about it, and we talked about what this might mean for the future of our national infrastructure.

We have a Prius, so if we got an electric car (I like the Nissan Leaf, and not just because they use SVG on their site), we would probably use the hybrid for longer trips, so we could refuel easily. But in 10 years, that might change. Since it takes around half an hour to fully charge modern electric cars using the class 3 charger (the heavy-duty one), and 4-6 hours using a class 2 charger, electric road-trippers will need something to do while they wait. Megan mentions this in her blog:

Would owners of this type of business be motivated to install charging stations as a way to attract customers and hold them captive while their car is charging?

I could see a whole new class of businesses that cater to waiting customers, that charge the charging, so to speak: movie theaters, theme parks, mini-zoos, gaming parlors (multiplayer videogames or casinos or both), strolling gardens… activities that emphasize a more leisurely pace of travel. The return of the roadside attraction!

Here’s to the retro-future!

Text in SVG is text. Visually, you can use webfonts like WOFF or SVG Fonts (where they are supported, like in Opera or the iPhone) to make it look cool, and you can style both the stroke and fill to make it all fancy, or apply filters to pop it out or make it glow or give it a dropshadow, but it’s not just a raster image like many text headers… it’s human- and machine-readable text, as nature intended.

So, SVG is translatable, right?

I wanted to make that point in my talk yesterday at Web Directions East, here in Tokyo, so I thought I’d translate my slide on text in SVG
in real time (note: click the down arrow to step through the bullet points). But testing it beforehand (I’m glad I did some prep), neither Google nor Bing even try to translate it. Yahoo’s Babel Fish at least returns the original page, though it doesn’t take the extra little step of doing any actual translation.

Lame.

Why don’t they translate it? Bing offers this helpful explanation:

What text formats are supported?
Html and Text. The viewer will not translate text on images, in PDFs, or in Flash graphics and animation. It may also not translate some dynamically generated text, such as in cascading menus.

I expected this to work, since Google now indexes SVG; as I mentioned in a previous blog post, I made a test page back in 2002 that sorta conflated the two services, indexing and translating. But obviously, these are two different tools, and need to be fixed separately.

It would be easy to fix, I’d expect… simply add SVG to the list of allowed file types, and translate the text content of each element, just as they do with HTML. If they actually special-case different element types, that would add slightly more work, but not a lot… just as with the task of indexing, you would pay attention to the content of the <text>, <tspan>, <textPath>, <title>, and <desc> elements.

It’s ironic that this doesn’t work, because on my way back from Lyon last week, I happened to meet Bert Esselink, the author of a book on localization who works for the translation company Lionbridge, and he and I chatted about how they use SVG extensively for their translation work.

In the end, I just had a native speaker translate a couple of text passages (the automatic translations were apparently not very good) and included them in my slide, just to serve as a placeholder. But I’m hopeful that soon I can demo the automatic translation live. It would be especially useful to people looking at SVG infographics, to be able to see charts and graphs in their native tongue.

Today has been a good day for launches! In my last post, I mentioned the successful launch of the W3C Audio Incubator Group, which I’ve been working on for a few weeks.

The second launch is a bit more visceral. When I realized that there would only be a few more space shuttle launches, Megan and I decided that we would try to see one if we could. This occurred to me about a month ago, but I wasn’t sure we could fit it into our schedule. But this week, Megan had to cancel a long biketrip, and that opened up a spot for us to drive down. So, we drove ten and a half hours to Cape Canaveral, slept a few hours in a cheap hotel, and got up early (for us, 8:00 AM is really early) to drive to Jetty Park, which was already crowded by the time we got there.

But we still landed a good spot right on the waterfront across from the launch site. A few low clouds threatened the launch early on, but it cleared up by early afternoon. A passing Korean car cargo ship gave us a little anxiety, fearing it might block the view, but it cleared in plenty of time.

Finally, the countdown blared out of someone’s radio, and the whole waterfront chimed in. 5… 4… 3… 2… 1…

We were pretty far away, but the rocket flame was impressively bright in person, and when the sound reached us, we could almost feel it. This is the final flight of the Atlantis, which makes me a bit sad. I’m ambivalent about retiring the shuttles… single-launch rockets are probably a cheaper option… still, it’s drawing to the end of an era, and I hope we keep pushing forward. Gauss-gun launch rails, anyone?

So, it was a successful launch, which makes me glad. Definitely worth the trip.

We did come away from it with reddened, painfully sensitive skin. I assert that this is rocketburn, not sunburn. Need a higher Rocket Protection Factor next time.

What a fine day! Most importantly, of course, America has a new President, a man of dignity and intellect, who selects his appointments on the merit of the candidate. And if that weren’t enough, Megan and I were there to bear witness (along with two million of our closest friends) to this historic event.

We were active during the campaign, canvassing and donating, and obsessively reading Electoral-Vote and FiveThirtyEight. So, since we live relatively close to DC, we thought we would come up to see whatever we could of it. We didn’t plan anything at all, but we got pretty lucky, I have to say!

First,  an old college roommate, Dave, got back in touch with me via Facebook a few months ago; we said we’d try to get together soon.  We missed each other I was in town last month, but we talked on the phone, and he offered us a place to stay if we were in town for the Inauguration, which we were considering then.  We decided at the last minute to take a day off and take him up on his offer, and he’s been an incredibly gracious host, waking up early to drive us to the metro station, and picking us back up.

Next, we decided to eat at Ben’s Chili Bowl last night.  We stumbled on this place a few years ago when I was doing some consulting up in DC (for a special-needs school and the Navy Criminal Investigative Services, two great tastes that taste great together).  I love vegetarian chili, and this place does it up right (as you might surmise from the name)… and it has that great diner feel.  I had seen on the news that Obama had eaten here a week or two ago, and apparently Bill Cosby did as well.  But I was not prepared for the lines… we waited in line for two hours to get in, the line stretching back into the alley and cops directing nearby traffic!  But we had nothing else to do that night, and we stuck with it on a whim.  And it paid off in a really unexpected way.  A guy came in (I don’t know exactly who) who was handing out free tickets to the Inauguration.  We hadn’t event tried to get tickets before, since we knew how in demand they were.  But I approached him and asked him for a pair… he was surprised we came up from North Carolina without them, but handed them over with a smile.  As it turned out, they were not just to the general admission area, but to the Blue Gate into a section of the White House lawn.

Our luck took a slight tumble, when we first took a wrong turn out of the subway station, then after we found our way back to the right gate, we got shunted into what turned out not to be the “blue” line, but just a “blue” line.  We stood in that line for a frigid hour and a half, barely moving, until we finally ended up in what was actually the line for the gate… about 50 people wide and several hundred deep… and which we could have entered directly, rather than wading through a mere tributary.  By the time we go up to the security gates (and it was a real crush at points), and then on to the viewing area, the garden wall was already lined with people sitting along it, and the stairs up were packed.  Megan is less assertive than I am, and wanted to stay were we could catch an occasional glimpse of the jumbotron.  But I could glimpse large gaps in the crowd on the other side, so I took us to a “breach” in the wall… a knot of people climbing over a narrow section where nobody was sitting.  Once we were over the wall, there was actually quite a lot of space open… the stairs were just a bottleneck nobody was willing to move away from.

In the spot we ended up, we couldn’t really see the screens, but we could see, in the distance, the rostrum itself, with the tiny but visible figures of the people.  A little surprisingly, the crowd booed when Bush came out, and serenaded him with “Na, na, na, na… hey, hey, hey, goodbye.”  We listened the Aretha Franklin with respect and joy, and to Perlman and Ma with quiet reflection.  And we saw Obama take his oath of office, and give his grave but hopeful and poetic speech… saw it with our own eyes.

After most of the crowd had left, we were able to actually go up near the lectern, and take photos.  Colin Powell was giving an interview about fifteen feet away (and 20 feet up).  We saw Bush board his helicopter on the screen, and watched it rise over the White House and disappear into the distance.  Megan said she felt a surge of emotion as it flew away; I just waved goodbye.

Leaving the grounds, we wandered though chaotic streets to the Air & Space Museum, which we’d heard was open.  It was… and it held hundreds of people getting out of the cold, sitting and lying and sleeping and eating.  It was a strange sight.  We looked around a bit, rested, used the toilets, and then took off to find our way to a Metro station.  L’Enfant was packed, so we went down to a further one and got on with little wait.  We enjoyed an Indian dinner, gushing with other patrons, and then hit the trains again.

Back at Dave’s place, we watched the news coverage, and found out just how fortunate we’d been to get in at all, much more as close as we were.  We watched the oaths and speeches again, this time with close ups.  It was a remarkable trip!  We came up here with very little idea of exactly what we would do, and stumbled into a great Inaugural experience.

Megan and I travel back to my hometown of Jefferson City, Missouri every year, at least at Christmas and sometimes in the summer when we can, to see my family; most of them still live within an hour or so of where we grew up.  Xmas get-togethers are always fun… with a family my size (I’m the youngest of twelve), we have to rent a hall, and the adults do a playing-card white elephant gift exchange (the kids do an open Kris Kringle).

Since Megan is in graduate school this year, and has a longer break than when she is working, and I can work from anywhere I have a Tube connection, we decided to make it a little longer than usual.  En route, we visited a couple of friends and a few cities.

First stop was Maryland, where we stayed with my friend and former housemate Ben.  Sadly, he can still kick my ass at Worms, our favorite Dreamcast game.

Then on to Pittsburgh, my first time there, to visit my high-school friend Jello (not her real name, and more innocent than it sounds), who just recently returned Stateside after years of teaching English in Japan and traveling the world.  She lives in Little Italy, and we shopped around in old Italian groceries (delicious Amaretti cookies!), and drove around the city visiting a few sites.  Our last night there, we visited the Warhol museum (he’s from Pittsburgh).  I’m not a huge Warhol fan, but the museum is very good… we started at the top floor, and they have a Ronco/Popeil/advertising exhibit that establishes the context for Warhol’s emergence.  It was nostalgic for me, seeing a lot of those old products and advertisements… they even had a Veg-o-Matic like we had when I was growing up!  The other floors featured various selections from Warhol’s works (I didn’t know that he had TV shows, or that he founded Interview magazine), and it was all well done.  I appreciate him more now, in the same way I appreciate Simulationist art from the 80s (which, frankly, he probably inspired); he clearly influenced American pop culture.  I was a little disappointed that the bathrooms didn’t carry over any Warhol themes… maybe different primary colored water in all the toilets, or life-sized pictures of people on toilets pasted on the stall walls.

The next day, we drove three hours to Columbus, Ohio.  Having grown up in an obscure state capitol, I have a fascination with them, and eventually I’d like to visit all the state capitols.  We visited the capitol building there (quite nice), taunted some Scientologists a bit (at a local Scientology Org) while looking for a veggie-dog stand, and stumbled on an absolutely delicious vegan restaurant, Dragonfly Neo-V, where they grow their own ingredients in a small stacked garden out back.  Next time we’re in the area, we will definitely take time to make a stop there.

Then on to Indianapolis, Indiana, where we stayed the night with a friendly soul we met through Couch Surfing, the Internet Age’s answer to hitchhiking.  Karla was also a Vonnegut fan (and a voracious reader with a great bookshelf), and she showed us Vonnegut’s childhood home; it’s not preserved at all, and is rented out and in poor repair, sadly.  We also wen to the capitol building (closed, unfortunately) and a war memorial, and the children’s museum where they had a Chihuly hanging tower.  The weather was hellishly cold, with a sub-zero wind chill, but we had a good time anyway.

Then it was on to Jeff City, where we stayed a week and a half.  Through the magic of Facebook (that horrible but useful site), we met up with some of my old high-school cohorts (many of whom I even remembered, and all of whom I was glad to see, and some of whom are now Megan’s Facebook friends… oh, Facebook…). We played board games with my friend Seth, and had pitched dart-gun battles.

In addition to all the normal family-and-friends stuff, my sister Cynthia and I arranged to interview my mom about family history.  We used Garage Band’s podcast feature, for all the geeks out there… just set it on a TV tray in front of her while we asked her questions; it seemed to work fine.  She told us about the cultural climate back when she was young (she was born in 1921), about her family and my dad’s, about the Depression and the War and the family fire, about her job as a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse (the last throes of that part of history, dying out as rural kids were more and more being shipped into town to go to school, the final steps toward American urbanization), about how she met our Dad, and all the places she’d lived, and how they had bought a parcel of land in the early 50s from a farmer on the edge of town who was auctioning off his farmland as lots (the beginnings of suburbanization), and about how Dad (a WWII veteran) left the service just in time to avoid going to Korea, and about all Dad’s jobs.  I wish we’d been able to do this with my dad.

And that farmer who sold his land, the land that I grew up on, that all my siblings had lived on, with the woods and the trails and the secret forts and rope swings… that farmer’s yellow house still stands, I’ve passed it by car and on foot hundreds of times, and never knew.  Who will know a hundred years from now?  To whom will it mean anything at all?

Leaving town with the Prius loaded down with another scad of books from my earlier days, stored now in Seth’s basement (his grandfather’s old shoe repair shop) until I can haul them back home, we drove to Megan’s uncle and aunt’s.  (No thanks to Google Maps, which steered us wrong again and again in a way that seems to have gotten worse.)  We stayed there over the weekend, and her uncle gave me a glassblowing lesson (that’s his trade); I made a horrible little shot glass, with his help.  It’s ugly, but it worked well enough to drink moonshine from the next day when it had annealed.  I doubt I would ever be any good at it, but it was fun to try, and I’d like to try again.

And home.

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.

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.)

We stayed in sleek Shanghai for several days, recovering (first M had the stomach flu, then I played the copycat the next day, though with much milder symptoms).  We saw the impressive Shanghai Museum and the amusingly propagandistic Museum of Urban Planning, shopped in a trendy hutong and in the shops outside (and inside) Yuyuan Garden, walked the Bund and saw the Pearl from across the river, and spent a rainy day in art galleries, all with free lodgings, bikes, and frequent use of a driver.  Our hostess was very gracious, which I hope we can repay when she visits her daughter (our friend K) in Chapel Hill.  I worked a bit, too, attending a few telcons and answering some emergency emails.
But we’ve been back in Beijing for a few days, seeing a few sites we’d missed the first time we were here.  Today we saw a Taoist temple; it was quite a welcome novelty after seeing so many Buddhas in temples and museums… I’m as weary of images of Buddha as I was the ubiquitous “Madonna and Child” motif after months traveling Europe years back.  We also visited a small unrestored temple with gorgeous carvings and statues… they had the original intricate paints, not the cartoonish solid-colors of most of the refurbished temples we’ve seen here.

I was surprised at first to see so many active Buddhists praying in the temples here, since I thought most religion was wiped out in the Cultural Revolution, as it largely was in Soviet Russia.  But M pointed out that the larger number of religions here may have led to a more adaptable approach… Communism is just one more bureaucratic religion that will be absorbed into China, the latest of many.

We then went to a huge bookstore, bustling with hundreds of people; I was hoping to find some English-language translations of Chinese science fiction stories, having read some Soviet sci-fi stories in the past and being interested in the Chinese take on it.   No such luck, though we did get some music CDs and a novel about the Mongolian steppes.

Finally, we ended our stay in China in teahouses… first in one in a hotel, then, coincidentally, dinner at another in the lakes district.

We rented a taxi van for the day at the Xi’an airport, along with a Danish couple we met there, to take us directly to the terracotta statues before going to Xian proper.  We had only a day here, and wanted to make the most of it.

The rows of warriors were truly staggering in scope.  Apparently some 600 sites have been discovered, according to the guide we hired.  Qín Shǐhuáng líng, the man who united China in 221 BCE, believed his soul would return to the clay, so he created not just legions of soldiers to serve him in the afterlife, but an entire army infrastructure, including a command and control center and camp followers.  I was reminded of Ozymandius’ two-fold message, and of the Pharoahs.  But he scale here is more vast.

But the driver turned out to be another Fez… he drove us not to our hotel afterward, but detoured to a silk factory… so we could get him a commission.  Then he futzed around taking us to our hotels, with the end result that M and I were too late to see the museum we’d planned on.  We raised a little Cain, and he relented and took us to another site, the Big Goose Pagoda, and got us a guide there.  I was thrilled to find there a shrine to the monk Xuánzàng, the real-life inspiration behind the novel I’m reading, Monkey (an abridged version of Journey to the West, I found out).

We also missed walking on the wall of Xi’an.  But we did get to see the very cool Muslim quarter and the bizarre Chinese mosque there.  The streets of the bazaar outside were so much like Morocco that we’d have found it hard to believe we were in China.  What an odd confluence of events.