luis is a co-founder and social software architect at Infinite.ly. he likes building small web toys a whole lot. More ...

quick links to the good stuff

• 25 First Dates 25 May 2009
• True Crime: Confessions of a Criminal Mastermind 17 Feb 2009
• Finding Your Soul Mate: A Statistical Analysis 27 Jan 2009
• Sex and Schrodinger's Cat 07 January 2009
• An Extended Rant on Heroes 26 September 2008
• Zero Barrier 05 May 2008
• Sweatshop Blogging Economics 08 April 2008
• The Doomsday Singularity 25 February 2008
• Piracy and Its Impact on Philippine Music 21 January 2008
• The Manila Pen-etration by the Hotelier Antonio Trillanes 29 November 2007
• Journey of a Thousand Heroes 17 December 2006
• Shake, Rattle & LOL 30 December 2005

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• 2

  Capsule Reviews, October 2005

  15 Oct 2005

  Gift Anon, Mum’s the Word
  It’s not a big secret that Radiohead is the most influential band of the past 10 years, and you can hear their signature vibe emanating from everyone from Coldplay to Team Sleep to Blonde Redhead if you listen closely enough. But, until now, I’ve never heard anyone actually try to ape the actual Radiohead catalogue, whether consciously or no. Gift Anon is a four-piece from Utah with big Thom-Yorke-painted dreams, and their latest album, Mum’s the Word, is like a collection of songs they wrote in the middle of a Radiohead concert circa 2003. "Panic Addict" is just crazily derivative of "Paranoid Android" (i mean, c’mon, even the title feels stolen, for goodness sake), "Burning Bridges" is like a misappropriated "There There," "Up in Arms" is "2+2=5" without the kick, etc., etc. To Radiohead fans, the similarities are just unmistakeable, and I’m curious as to how the band expected to get away with this.

  Dappled Cities Fly, A Smile
  I have a ridiculous affection for this band, although I don’t completely understand their music. I was listening to A Smile over and over again while waiting around at airports this past week, and it’s impossible not to admire how beautifully indie this collection is. There’s not a single track on this album that was written with "mainstream radio" in mind, and very little of it will make sense to non-indie enthusiasts.  ("Die in Your Eyes" is the most immediately-palatable song, in case anyone is interested.) Crazy like Modest Mouse, joyful like Mates of State, and unabashedly sincere like the best of The Fairways. Great stuff.

  Paramore, All We Know is Falling
  Another female-led emo band for the two or three people out there who like Veda. Paramore isn’t quite on the same level yet, but there are a couple of tracks on this album that really click for me, namely, "Brighter" (download it) and "Here We Go Again." Their vocalist and primary lyricist, Hayley Williams, can’t even drink legally yet, so it’s hard to expect much from Paramore, lyric-wise. Still, it’s interesting to see just how far these kids can take their music.

  Posted in Music | 2 Comments »

• 0

  Random Quote

  14 Oct 2005

  We are what we repeatedly do.
  Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

  - Aristotle

  Posted in Randomness | No Comments »

• 0

  Guttervomit vs. Bangkok (Round 2)

  13 Oct 2005

  Ok, I am officially sick of bargain-hunting in Asian cities. These last three trips our family has been on have basically been extended shopping sprees, and I think my feet and lower back have gone on strike for the duration. (Singapore, China and now Thailand have, at their core, been the exact same vacation, in different timezones.) Last night’s river cruise was a bit disappointing, mostly because the city wasn’t quite as lit up as it needed to be, and there really wasn’t anyone explaining what it was you were looking at. Instead you got live music and a decent buffet … neither of which were particularly bad, mind you. They just weren’t particularly Thai, either. The hotel we moved to (we transferred out of Baiyoke Suite after a couple of hours) was nested fairly deeply in a mesh of side streets and alleyways. The rooms at the new hotel were leaps and bounds better, but I had to step over a drowned rat on my way to the main entrance. Because the traffic is so bad here, everyone is usually late. This morning, for example, Lizz and I got stuck in a traffic jam that had everyone on the street at an absolute standstill for a good 5 minutes. Including pedestrians. So when the travel agency names a pickup or dropoff time, they never say "7 o’clock" or "7:30." Instead they say "7 to 8" or "8 to 8:30." Fortunately, this was nothing new to us. We get that sort of thing at home all the time, after all. And while making our way to the River City dock, we passed a flooded avenue (it had been raining heavily that afternoon). A European couple beside me pointed and simpered as cars and vans and tuk-tuks surged through the calf-high water. This was nothing new either. Hell, this happens here in the Philippines every other week during the rainy season. I was reading through my last post about this trip and realized that I had made lots of comparisons between Bangkok and Manila. Now that I’ve had some time to think it over, I really do believe that they’re pretty similar; Bangkok is easily the most Manila-like city I’ve ever been to. Apart from that incessant praying-bow they make whenever they say "Thank You" (which is really just them hamming it up for the tourists), these people are exactly like us. In fact, I’m working on this little personal theory (which I will save for another post, when I’ve had some time to do some research) that all people are exactly like us. And by us, I mean, everyone. So everyone is like everyone. Yup. That’s my theory. And the key difference between Thais and Filipinos, I believe, is 0.36.

  Best Picture Ever.

  Posted in Photography | No Comments »

• 1

  Guttervomit vs. Bangkok (Round 1)

  11 Oct 2005

  Philippine Airlines has some really junky planes. The overhead cabins shudder ominously as our A300 taxies to its assigned runway, and the whole craft feels like it’s coming apart at the seams during takeoff. I’ve been on over three dozen of these plane rides, and this is the first time I’ve ever felt like talking to my sick bag.

  We touch down at 1pm (GMT+07); Tilly and the Wall sings "We are the living dead/Tat’s the way it’s always been."

  BKK feels like a larger, slightly more polished version of NAIA (not the new Centennial airport, but the classic one we built in the 50s): it’s a bit leaky in places, the flushes don’t always work and the lines are 30-min back-breakers.

  We spend another 45 minutes standing by the exits waiting for our guide to locate the rest of the members of our small tourist group. When the last couple finally arrive, I’m looking for evidence of a premature binge at the airport duty-free, which is the most likely cause for tardiness with these things.

  Our hotel, Baiyoke Suite, is a lot like a 43-story inn, easily the worst four-star we’ve ever had the misfortune of staying in. Not to be confused with its five-star big brother, Baiyoke Sky, the Suite is where I imagine bad hotel rooms go when they die. At about $220 per person for the whole 3-day package (including airfare) I suppose you can’t really expect much, but I was sort of hoping for a sink that didn’t have cracks in the porcelain. Or working air conditioning. Or hell, maybe a fire escape?

  Outside the hotel, it’s like Quiapo on a Monday. The streets are barely wide enough for two cars to pass side-by-side; sidewalks are sprinkled randomly wherever there is more than 2 feet of space between the road and the building facades. Tuk-tuks putter about hunting for passengers and street vendors flick flies off their durian. The only evidence that this isn’t Manila (apart from the sing-song intonation of the ambient jabber), is the monolithic, modern towers that sprout out of nowhere like magic mushrooms on cowshit.

  I spend most of my early evening at Phantip Plaza, the Thai equivalent of Singapore’s Funan IT Mall, or the Philippines’ (former) Virra Mall. Tech-wise Thailand’s prices are only ahead of the Philippines by about a month. (And by that I mean, you could buy the same hardware at the same prices locally if you were willing to wait 4 weeks, given the rather predictable rate at which prices drop over time.)

  After nine, vendors break out the kerosene lamps and the light bulb-laundry lines and the night market comes alive. Basically the same thing you’d see in Divisoria, or Hongkong, or Shanghai, or any place else in the world where bargain-hunting is the major attraction.

  ========

  It’s 11am as I write this; I found a relatively affordable baang that was running megabit ADSL access for 15 Baht/30 mins. That’s just a little bit more expensive than the shops we have locally and it seemed like the best deal I could find without really trawling the sidestreets, so here I am.

  Later this evening we splurged on the 1000-Baht river cruise, which will be either the major highlight of this trip, or the biggest WOMBAT. We’ll see.

  Posted in Randomness | 1 Comment »

• 0

  Back on Thursday

  10 Oct 2005

  Gone for the next couple of days, see you all when I get back!

  Posted in Randomness | No Comments »

• 0

  Cellular Futures

  10 Oct 2005

  I was just reading about how Google is making a pitch to hook up the entire city of San Francisco with free Wi-Fi, and was musing on the implications if such a deal were to push through. 

  There are some very obvious reasons for them to be doing this, namely that they could do some very funky geo-targetting with Google AdSense (coupled with the technology they licensed for Google Maps) to stream ads specifically targeted to the particular street address that you are logging on from. (Imagine sitting at a park bench, and seeing ads for a free cup of java at the coffee shop 10 meters away from you. If that’s not the absolute pinnacle of contextual advertising, I don’t know what is.)

  

  But there’s also another less obvious reason for this, which I think may have a fairly profound effect on the cellular phone industry. If you can blanket an entire city with always-on Wi-Fi, you are giving them free access to VoIP applications like Google Talk and Skype. There’s basically nothing to stop Google, Skype, Vonage or anyone else who cares to try from producing Wi-Fi-enabled handsets that look and function exactly like a regular cellphone, except that it bypasses the GSM networks completely.

  And when you consider that Wi-Fi can handle a much fatter pipe than EDGE (or any of the "high-speed" cellular network technologies), then things like video-conferencing or media-downloading become a whole lot more palatable.

  Obviously, piggybacking on the Wi-Fi networks means you’ll be stranded if a connection is unavailable, but I think this works for people who don’t really move around a lot and can otherwise live without a phone if they happened to be spending a weekend in a rural area, for example. The big draw is obviously that VoIP is free for the taking, with costs incurred only if you’re connecting to a landline or a GSM phone. And if everyone were to start using Google Talk or Skype, it’d take the telecom providers out of the loop completely. Oh, happy day!

  Posted in Hardware | No Comments »

• 0

  Not Sleeping = Bad

  9 Oct 2005

  From the Washington Post:

  The analysis of a nationally representative sample of nearly 10,000 adults found that those between the ages of 32 and 49 who sleep less than seven hours a night are significantly more likely to be obese.

  "The strongest evidence out there right now is for the risk of overall mortality, but we also see the association for a number of specific causes," said Sanjay R. Patel of Harvard Medical School, who led one of the studies, involving more than 82,000 nurses, that found an increased risk of death among those who slept less than six hours a night.

  So either you get fat, or you die. Nice.

  Posted in Randomness | No Comments »

• 1

  Amphibious Housing

  9 Oct 2005

  

  Residents and planners are looking into the future with concern over flooding and heavy rain, an issue that will be compounded by rising water levels from global warming. [...] In response to this problem, the field of maritime architecture is gaining momentum. One notable architect, Koen Olthuis, has created some astoundingly beautiful water dwellings. What differentiates these from standard houseboats is "a patented technique whereby the foundation of the construction can be transformed into a float. A foam core is encased in concrete, with steel cables securing it against the pull of potential currents."

  I really see this kind of home appearing more and more reguarly as the available living space becomes more and more congested. Granted it’ll probably cost tons more to build, so it’s not exactly a "mass-housing" kind of solution.

  (spotted on WorldChanging)

  Posted in Hardware | 1 Comment »

• 2

  Catholic Church Decides Bible Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up To Be

  8 Oct 2005

  So why am I posting, at 5 in the friggin’ morning? Because those crazy English bishops are at it again:

  The Catholic bishops of England, Wales and Scotland are warning their five million worshippers, as well as any others drawn to the study of scripture, that they should not expect “total accuracy” from the Bible.

  This is so ridiculous that I’m having trouble framing a proper sentence to diss this with. Now, I’m not a particularly religious person, so I’m commenting on this purely from an outsider’s perspective. I think it’s particularly telling that the Church is treating Christianity like it’s some sort of brand identity, that can be tweaked and "modernized" to become more in tune with the tastes of a new generation of consumers. You know, like New Coke.

  I mean, I get why they’re doing it, and it’s not because they actually just discovered that the Bible "might not be" all that accurate. I’m actually of the opinion that religion as a social phenomenon has outlived its usefulness and will eventually become something that people practice in private rather than in large, income-generating congregations. Why? Because religion is just a form of control, and it doesn’t have nearly the same weight as it did three or four hundred years ago. The spirituality and personal enlightenment that accompany it are just by-products; the reason religion is so deeply ingrained in our society is because the Spanish used it to scare us into submission all those years ago.

  But I digress. The Catholic Church knows that its time is up, and it’s desperately trying to extend its lifespan beyond its natural limits. Repositioning itself might buy it a couple more decades but mark my words, it’s definitely on its way out.

  Posted in Randomness | 2 Comments »

• 1

  Thailand Ho!

  8 Oct 2005

  I’m going to be in Thailand for most of the coming week, so updates will be pretty sparse. I’m not sure what kind of mobile connectivity will be available once I get there, but if I can use their cellular networks’ GPRS service, I should be at least able to do some mini-updates like I did from Shanghai (jury-rigged moblog posts here, here, here, here and here, if you’re interested).

  Anyway, so I had a little bit of time to kill today (4am is a good time to be blogging, apparently) and found some interesting tidbits about Thailand via Google:

  • The name "Thailand" means "Land of the Free".
  • Most young men are Buddhist monks for a short time and shaven-head monks go out and ask for alms each morning.
  • According to the last census (2000) 94.6% of Thais are Buddhists of the Theravada tradition. Muslims are the second religious group in Thailand at 4.6%.

  • Thailand’s male prostitutes were aged 12-35, and included university graduates, office workers, students and street children. It is said some Thai women were paying upwards of 10,000 baht (243 dollars) per night for the services, which fly in the face of conservative Thai traditions. This trend though has been rather exaggerated in the media. The niche market which until recently had largely focused on a gay clientele, has become increasingly popular with women.

  And here’s the kicker:

  • It’s illegal to leave your home if you’re not wearing underwear.

  Thank God I read that one before I left.

  *I’m also planning on trying out this little travel-hack I read about at Tricks of the Trade last week. Hope it works.
   

  Posted in Randomness | 1 Comment »

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