RSS and the Demise of Print Media

Many years ago, I would read the newspaper for classes. I took an investing class at Harvard that actually required that we, the students pick up a copy of the Wall Street Journal and read it on a regular basis. Even back in the days when online journalism wasn't as prevalent, I always preferred a magazine. I still like the portability of a magazine and its disposable nature, but I suppose with the advent of digital paper, any adherents to traditional print media will soon disappear.

In that space in between magazines and RSS were a whole bunch of online news sources. CNN was a favorite in that category for me, but soon there were more than I could count, and favorite sources would be eclipsed by a daily influx of new sources. Every once in a while, I would think of a site that I hadn't visited in a while and go visit it, but I never visited one site religiously again after about a couple years ago.

I think it was at about that time that I became interested in aggregations of the best news sources. I tuned into Google News as google became my permanent desktop, I started checking out Digg, Reddit, and using Del.icio.us as a better way to search for interesting content on a certain topic.

I tried out using RSS with Thunderbird, and that was cool, but for some reason, I felt obligated to read everything in my inbox and I didn't like having my inbox cluttered with all that information. Just this year, I started using bloglines, which worked well for me, but today, I've moved over to Google Reader.

I didn't like bloglines because it had such a clunky web 1.0 interface to it. I know they have a beta now, but more importantly, it's a seperate application that I have to log into. One of my favorite things about Google is that they offer such a huge suite of services that you can access using just one password, so why not. The interface is clean and usable.

Here's my .OPML file. It's mostly internet marketing and SEO blogs right now, but if you're into that stuff...enjoy!

A Hellish Commute

I don't mean to bash Shanghai, but sometimes I need to vent,, so I'll discuss my commute:

Every day is a struggle getting to work in the summer in Shanghai. The weather here is hot and humid. Walking around feels a little bit like drowning in your own vomit.

Biking into work is a bit of a nightmare. The main road is covered with these streaks of fluid from where the garbage truck made its rounds. This streak reeks of putrefied sauer kraut. Dumps are simply open closets on the streetside where the putrid smells multiply.

Driving to the subway station is all kinds of hell. Hundreds of bikes crowd around you and there's always some asshole on a motor scooter in back of you laying on his horn.

There are times where you'll have to take a right turn and instead of leaving a lane open for people who need to turn right, people like to rest their feet on the curbs and crowd the entire lane.

By the time you arrive at the station, you're coated in sweat because the weather is so humid, that the hot air cannot absorb another drop of moisture. Walking down into the terminal, there is a hallway that they use to store garbage so it smells like puke.

The subways are so crowded that you would think that people couldn't get on, but they do. This is usually accomplished by a lot of pushing and shoving. Even though you're sandwiched between four people you feel thankful if there is decent air conditioning on the car.

Getting off the subway isn't much better, because you're back in the stifling humidity. There's a set of stairs and an escalator in front of you, stairs on the left, escalator on the right, everyone darts straight across the stairs as if they didn't even exist, blocking access to the stairs and creating a huge traffic jam at the escalator. It's only one flight, is the escalator that much of a freaking novelty?

There's another fifteen minute walk with vendors asking you for "watch, bag". By this time I'm on what should be a nice walking street. Actually, with the big department stores, the street even feels like it's air conditioned. Keeping to the side to get towards the air conditioned portions, you need to suffer the smell of stale urine. You also need to navigate people sleeping on rucksacks.

The rest of the way in only has the putrid streaks that you have to worry about so it's not that bad. The way back is much the same except, it culminates in a car park that I swear is the hottest most humid place on Earth. After a long, hot and sweaty bike ride, you step into hell, and afterwards have to climb 6 floors to finally be home and in the air conditioning once more.

'Nother Drink Recipe

Here's another concoction that my brother and I came up with on a drunk night close to New Year's Eve. That week was a bit of a blur. This drink is money:

Hint of Chambord
Shot of 99 Bananas
Splash of Ginger Ale
Splash of Fresh Squeezed OJ
Thimble of Lemon Juice?
Thimble of something else I can't read



If I ever decipher this, I'll let you know.

Short List of Top Design Firms

IDEO - Check out their namecard design, very cool
Design Continuum
Smart Design - Not usability experts
fuseproject - Good photography concepts, but their site is broken and the design is generic
ZIBA - Interesting innovation ideas for China, I think they actually did their homework
Lunar Design
Pentagram
Herbst LaZar Bell (HLB) - looks like someone took a crap or a dump right on their homepage, but I can forgive them for that since they do industrial design
Altitude - it's ok
RKS Design Inc.
@radical.media
Antenna Design N.Y.
Ralph Appelbaum

BusinessWeek supplied the names

Ultimate Fighting - How Many Mes Could Take One of These Guys

The funny thing is that I asked my friend this question and the reply was that "I don't think any number of me could take one of these guys because none of me would have the balls to throw the first punch".

Chinese Foot Torture

I went away to HuZhou this weekend and I don't know why I do this once in a while, but again, I subjected myself to Chinese foot massage, which I find to be almost unbearably painful. I always have to be somewhat drunk to do it as well, but this time I could've used at least 6 more beers.

The lady that exacted the torture had the strangest looking hands, there were these big gnarled structures growing on her knuckles, I shit you not.

Anyways, the idea is just to find all these sensitive pressure points in your feet and grind them with your knuckles, the only reason I go though is that it feels awesome when it's done. You feel like you're walking on clouds or something, but I seriously suggest about five beers and maybe some strong painkiller beforehand.

I Want to Be Always Exciting

And you're doing a great job... I'm pretty sure she's not wearing underwear?

Best Burrito in Shanghai Hands Down

This place kicks the crap out of any other burrito place in Shanghai, but they only do burritos on the weekends.

During the week, this place spends time kicking the crap out of other sandwich places with a variety of spectacular roast beef and pastrami sandwiches.

http://delinyc.com/

Encrypting your Email

It's actually pretty straightforward to encrypt your email if you have some good instructions, but I couldn't find any so I decided to write my own.

First off, I'm using Thunderbird, and so should you. It's pretty lightweight and it's free. I'm also using gmail and if you didn't know, you can actually configure gmail for Thunderbird. So after installing Thunderbird:

• Install GNU on your system gnupg-w32cli-1.4.3.exe, but if you're interested in security obviously you should check any link I give you to an executable file.
• Install the Enigmail extension for Thunderbird. If you're a firefox user, you may not be happy that you have to actually download the extension and save it first. Then you go to Tools > Extensions > Install on your Thunderbird menu. You can get the extension from this page: https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/71/.
• Now that you have that done, you have to restart Thunderbird, and once you've restarted it you should see OpenPGP on your menu. If not, go back to Tools > Extensions and make sure it's installed.
• Go to that menu, click on preferences, and under the basic tab you'll see an GnuPG executable path that you have to browse for. You're looking for a gpg.exe
  If you've installed it into Program Files, it's probably located at C:\Program Files\GNU\GnuPG\
• Now go back to the OpenPGP menu and click into the Key Management, you'll see a menu item called Generate, go there. Generate a new key pair, throw in a passphrase. It's probably safe to set it so it doesn't expire.
• Now you can go ahead and set up a revocation certificate and put it somewhere safe.
Ok, so now you've set it up and you want to start sending encrypted emails out everywhere. The first thing you need to do is make sure you have some friends that are able to read them. Now, I haven't gone into this in too much detail, but let's suppose your friend has just gone through the same steps as you.
• Write your friend a new, unencrypted email from Thunderbird. From that window click on OpenPGP menu and click attach my public key.
• Have others attach their public key for you.
• Once you have their public key, you can import those keys from the key management section

Now you can start sending encrypted email...

The New XiangYang Market Shanghai

The infamous XiangYang Market on HuaiHai Rd. in Shanghai closed last year. It was a spot heavily traversed by foreigners looking for good deals on some pirated goods. For those of us that have been living here, it was a bit of a nuisance because everyone knows that when you pass by that area, you're likely to be harassed by sales people trying to make a buck off of a gullible foreigner.

It's been mostly moved over to a new area called TaoBao market which is on NanJing Rd. This move has been a huge improvement as the salespeople are mostly confined to a mall area and are not free to harass the innocent passersby. The shops are all neatly contained in glass cubicles instead of the makeshift tent-stalls that they used to be in. I walked through the area without anything more than the usual cries of "watch, DVD, bag" as I moved along the halls.

I passed on one store where I decided to take a look. I didn't have any intention to buy anything and nor did I really want or need anything that anyone is selling. I did however, leave with a pair of sunglasses, a pair of polarized Oakley rip-offs, that were actually quite nice in comparison with the usual load of crap that they were selling.

I started out looking at another pair of rip-offs that started at $220, but even a cursory look showed that the imitation was of very low quality. The lenses were scratched and the paint was uneven. I pointed this out to the sales person and they kept lowering the price. I then told him I wasn't really interested and attempted to move on. I guess he decided to pull out the big guns when he reached into the drawer for his best pair of glasses.

He demonstrated that they were polarized lenses, which I was skeptical about, but I don't see how he could have faked it. There was this little cube which looked like it was stamped with a circuit board. Looking at it through the "polarized" lenses, I could see what looked like two circular magnets. I tested it myself with the polarized and non-polarized lenses and it passed. So I inquired as to the price. This pair was $360 kuai.

That was just way too much to even consider and I really didn't want to spend money. To make a long story short, I got the pair for $60 kuai. I guess there are three major things to keep in mind while bargaining with these guys and those would be:

1. Don't go in there wanting anything at all, and don't show any real interest; if anything, show a reluctance to spend your money
2. The markup on any first price is at a minimum of 400% and that might be a low estimate
3. When you're walking away the price shoots downward so definitely walk away once or twice; there are plenty of other shops selling the same stuff
   

Best margarita ever!

When drinking with a tequilla, you must be willing to go all out. There's nothing you must not be willing to do to. We went out to grab a tequilla the other night and had to decide on something. We wanted something smooth that would be agreeable, and there were three choices, silver, aged, and anejo. I decided on the silver. It's barely aged, almost immature like ourselves in metallic casks. It's a smooth drink, perfect for our perfect margaritas.

For this Margarita, we used a Milagro, which was on special for US25 a bottle. We went for silver specifically for the smooth taste. This particular tequllia was 100% agave.

We decided that for our meal (lemon pepper garlic tilapia with a greek salad) a superior slight rasberry margarita would go perfectly and we were correct.

We bought about a dozen fresh limes, freshly squeezed orange juice, and several sprigs of fresh mint.
As all good Americans should have, we had a freezer full of ice.
The process was confusing at first, but we recommend, actually demand that you go about it in the finest barman tradition by chilling the glass first by adding at least three cubes of ice.

We made several errors in process, but we soon found that it was best to prepare a garnish first while the glass was cooling. To prep the garnish use a long cocktail stirrer. Do not use a toothpick, as we found that to be entirely inadequate. The cocktail stirrer should have two rasberries on it plus one or two sprigs of mint. For us, the mint was necessary. We had to make Mojitos later. Throw these garnishes side as you make one of the greatest drinks known.

First we make our own margarita mix. Do NOT USE A STORE BOUGHT. The mix is simply freshly squeezed lime, orange juice, and simple syrup. You'll find that if you use the store bought mix, it is basically sugar with a little bit of sugar. The entire idea of the our margherita is to cut down some of this sweetness and add something to the traditional margarita. We wanted something other than the popular sugar water mostly known to your regular fuckface all around.

Take the ice in the chilled glass and throw it into a shaker (or grab new ice if you're an ice barron). Add tequilla healthily, and a splash of Chambord, depending. We wanted the rasberry effect, but we could have easily gone with an orange like grand marinier. Both Grand Marinier (I'll cap it here) and Chambord are expensive, don't try to substitute with a brandy whatever you do.

We actually tried a blackberry brandy and tried to mix it with various variations having no luck, but it was emphatically awful. You might be able to go with a rasberry juice, but not puree. We also tried the puree but it was too thick. Obviously, you can see that we took every single precaution. Just drop your drink into the glass, coat them with lime and confectionary sugar avoiding the nasty saltiness you would normally get from a magherita at the end of your drink, and enjoy!