About a month ago I bought a pair of speakers (epos ELS3) and stands second hand via the ubber-useful asiaxpat.com .  I got them for HKD 1200 and new they would've been HKD 3000 plus.  

I really liked them when I first got them, they're really my style: neutral. Don't try and "enhance" the music, chances are what you think is an "enhancement" isn't going to work for me.  If you mr. speaker can't produce bass at 60Hz don't try and make up for it by giving me more 120Hz, you're just making everything mushy.  Just give it to me straight up please.  

But recently I've been having this impression that they have been less than what they were when I first got them.  It seemed like an overall degradation that I couldn't quite pin down.  Was it that I was just becoming used to them?  Perhaps all those months of listening to 1" iPod speakers while in India made anything bigger seem wonderful.  Perhaps I was loosing my golden ear?  Perhaps was Debbi having solo dance sessions while I was out of the house and cranked the tunes till something got a bit worn?  

Alas no, it was simply an impedance problem.  I've got a line running from the audio output on the rear of my computer to a small amplifier to the speakers.  On the front of my computer I also plug in a headset for using Skype.  The problem being that there's only one line amp in the computer that powers both the front and rear jacks.  So when the headset is plugged in the impedance is halved (oh crap, or is it doubled, I'm shaming my 1 year of electronics engineering technology training).  The amp for the speakers is expecting standard line-level impedance and doesn't do well with anything but.  Pull out the headset and the volume jumps by 3dB and we return to glorious high fidelity.  

Ever wonder how the world works?  Here's a clear concise explanation that makes a complex system easy to understand.  It's a 20 minute video in which sustainability expert Annie Leonard explores the global materials economy and its impact on economy, environment and health.

http://storyofstuff.com/

Wow!  This seven minute video, MUTO, is of pictures animated on public Buenos Aires walls. Created by BLU.

(Found via Creative Generalist)

Thursday was Labor Day.  As a Chinese holiday it is described as being "no less celebrated than Chinese New Year's Day".  I had shuffled my schedule so that I could have it off with Debbi.  We were going to have a lazy day off together.  Wednesday night Debbi had me head down to the island to meet up with her and her co-workers for dinner.  I showed up at our meeting spot and Debbi is waiting all by herself, no co-workers.  She pulls out a set of tickets, and says "I've booked us a trip to Macau for the night".  Wow.  I did not see this coming.  

We rode a jet foil across the Pearl River Seaway.   Jet foils are cool.  Its about as smooth as riding a train, and fast too.  And once we arrived in Macau we went to our hotel, the Mandrin Oriental.  Quite the place.  Debbi had booked us a holiday package that included one night, dinner, and a 2 hour couples treatment at the spa.  The food was excellent, and it was the nicest room that I've ever stayed in.  

We got up the next morning for out spa visit.  Our treatment consisted of a 20 min full body scrub, 30 min soak in a sangria bath (that's right, we bathed in red wine), and an 80 min full body massage.  Now I have never been to a spa, or even a massage therapist, the idea of having another woman with her hands all over me seems... undesirable.  But let me tell you, as good as your partner is at massage, there's really no comparison to a professional (unless of course your partner is a professional masseuse).  And the fact that Debbi was lying on the table next to me made things less unnerving.  It would be nice to get one of those weekly.  However that would be prohibitively expensive.  After the massage I spent a good hour between the sauna, jacuzzi, steam room and shower.  

I was then ready for a nap, but alas it was not to be, we had to checkout.   I was exhausted for the rest of the day.  I'm not sure if having an intense massage is actually tiring, its more that it relaxes you so completely that you need to sleep it off.  But since we were only in Macau for the day, we needed to see the sites.  

For those of you not up on your city states, Macau, like Hong Kong, is a pseudo independent nation.  Formerly a Portuguese colony, it is now going through a 50 year transition back to Chinese rule.  Macau is known for its odd mix of Chinese and Portuguese culture.  To walk through the city you see images that in your mind are not meant to be together.   You can walk into a Catholic church during mass and see several Chinese reciting the liturgy.  Huh?!  Macau is also the new gambling capitol of the world, because Vegas is so blase.  We walked the old town during the afternoon, had a tasty dinner at a Brazilian cafe, then we decided to go try out the casinos.  We spent 10HKD (1.50 CAD) on slot machines and decided that it wasn't much fun.  So we headed off to find dessert.  Then back to the ferry terminal for the journey back home arriving at 11.  

It was a whirlwind tour.  Very exciting.  And a complete surprise.   

Apparently its been a long time since we've transfered photos to the internet.  Here's a bunch including Chinese New Years and a bigger Caper.

-dave 

Now we like to think of ourselves as two people who are very inclusive, we push the boundaries of convention, and we try to break out of the molds of the stereotypes that we find ourselves boxed in.  

However, yesterday Debbi came across this really funny blog: Stuff White People Like.   It's only been in existence for 2 months, and there are already 87 posts on what defines white people (albeit it's probably only white people between the ages of 20-35).  Looking through the full list we find that between the two of us 67/87 of these things apply (or did apply at some point) to us.   This means that we are 77% white.  Geesh!  Maybe we are more run-of-the-mill, white bread, plain jane, ordinary, vanilla, regular white people than we realize.  

• #87 Outdoor Performance Clothes ✔
• #86 Shorts ✔
• #85 The Wire ✘
• #84 T-Shirts ✔
• #83 Bad Memories of High School ✔
• #82 Hating Corporations ✔
• #81 Graduate School ✔ (well Debbi's strongly considering anyway)
  
• #80 The Idea of Soccer ✘
• #79 Modern Furniture ✔
• #78 Multilingual Children ✔ (err, someday maybe)
• #77 Musical Comedy ✔
• #76 Bottles of Water ✔
• #75 Threatening to Move to Canada ✔ (or back to Canada)
• #74 Oscar Parties ✔
• #73 Gentrification (Yeah we've lived in Bankview, Inglewood, and Conought, but everyone else there is white too)
• #72 Study Abroad ✔
• #71 Being the only white person around ✔
• #70 Difficult Breakups ✔
• #69 Mos Def ✘ (Mos who?)
• #68 Michel Gondry ✔
• #67 Standing Still at Concerts ✔
• #66 Divorce ✘
• #65 Co-Ed Sports ✘
• #64 Recycling ✔
• #63 Expensive Sandwiches ✔
• #62 Knowing What’s Best for Poor People ✔
• #61 Bicycles ✔
• #60 Toyota Prius ✔
• #59 Natural Medicine ✔
• #58 Japan ✔ (No Hong Kong is not in Japan, but there are several cultural similarities)
• #57 Juno ✔
• #56 Lawyers ✔ (we're not really into lawyers, but we certainly do over analyze things)
• #55 Apologies ✔
• #54 Kitchen Gadgets ✔
• #53 Dogs ✔
• #52 Sarah Silverman ✘ (Sarah who?)
• #51 Living by the Water ✔
• #50 Irony ✔
• #49 Vintage ✔
• #48 Whole Foods and Grocery Co-ops ✔
• #47 Arts Degrees ✔
• #46 The Sunday New York Times ✘ (maybe we would be if we didn't live on the exact opposite side of the world)
• #45 Asian Fusion Food ✔
• #44 Public Radio ✔
• #43 Plays ✔
• #42 Sushi ✔
• #41 Indie Music ✔
• #40 Apple Products ✔
• #39 Netflix ✘ (given the lack of late fees in Canada, there was really no need)
• #38 Arrested Development ✘ (Arrested who?)
• #37 Renovations ✘ (This is more our parents' domain)
• #36 Breakfast Places ✔ ✔
• #35 The Daily Show/Colbert Report ✔
• #34 Architecture ✔
• #33 Marijuana ✘
• #32 Vegan/Vegetarianism ✔
• #31 Snowboarding ✘
• #30 Wrigley Field ✘
• #29 80s Night ✔
• #28 Not having a TV ✔
• #27 Marathons ✘
• #26 Manhattan (now Brooklyn too!) ✔
• #25 David Sedaris ✘ (David who?)
• #24 Wine ✔
• #23 Microbreweries ✔
• #22 Having Two Last Names ✔
• #21 Writers Workshops ✔
• #20 Being an expert on YOUR culture ✔
• #19 Traveling ✔
• #18 Awareness ✔
• #17 Hating their Parents ✘
• #16 Gifted Children ✘ (one step at a time)
• #15 Yoga ✔
• #14 Having Black Friends (We're from Alberta, does having Asian friends count?)
• #13 Tea ✔
• #12 Non-Profit Organizations ✔
• #11 Asian Girls ✘
• #10 Wes Anderson Movies ✔
• #9 Making you feel bad about not going outside ✔ (At least one of us does...)
• #8 Barack Obama ✔
• #7 Diversity ✔
• #6 Organic Food ✔
• #5 Farmer’s Markets ✔
• #4 Assists ✔
• #3 Film Festivals ✔
• #2 Religions their parents don’t belong to ✘
• #1 Coffee ✔

I'm waiting in Newark international for my connecting flight back to HK, and I just want to sleep. Its been six days since I arrived and I never got past the jet lag. I want to be sleeping right now, I should be sleeping right now (HK time), but I don't think they'll let me do that in this restraunt that I'm waiting in. Furthermore for every hour we get closer to the scheduled departure, the real departure gets pushed back an hour. By the time I actually get settled on the plane I'll be wide awake since my body is alternating from tired to awake every 4 hours. This has been the story all week. So I'm significantly more insane than when I left. Oh and the other reason for that is because I've been hanging out with Drupal geeks all week.

Some of you wanted to know what the highlights of the conference were. The rest of you might want to stop here, before you get confused / bored to death. It was pretty crazy: 1000 people excited about making great websites for everything from little blogs, to internal university wikis, to ginormous news sites. There was even a 14 year old kid there leading a session. I was nowhere near that smart at 14. Actually I'm still not that smart.  I only got to see a small sliver of the presentations.  At any given time there were 5 sessions and 6-12 smaller scheduled discussions, not to mention all the unscheduled discussions.

First day:

Drupal Multimedia - you can do so much with multimedia content in Drupal. However it seems that I'm already familiar with the techniques so I didn't learn much here.

Keynote - Dries Buytart - Drupal Project Lead - The reason Drupal has done so well is because this dude has such an accurate vision for where things need to be in 5 years, what our next challenges will be, and how to lead such a huge community to get through those challenges to where we need to be.

Mapping business requirements to Drupal modules: a gap-fit process - Boris Mann is a very smart guy in this area. Hopefully I'll be able to utilize some of these approaches to deliver a product that better matches our users' needs.

Panels 2 and Nodequeue - Earl Miles is the author of so many of the essential Drupal modules. He showcased a few cool techniques in the new versions of these modules

Drupal in China, the how, who and why - I had nothing to do with this session. There are three other groups of people that have recently setup offices in mainland China. I got a chance to meet (or re-meet) them all. Hopefully I'll be able to get some advice from them on how to build a Drupal User Group in Hong Kong.

News Industry Meetup - food, beer, and drupal talk

NGO Meetup - more food, beer, and drupal talk

Day Two:

Client work kept me occupied for the first half of the morning. But then:

Keynote Speaker: Chris DiBona - Google Open Source Programs Manager - Explained all the reasons why Open Source is poised to succeed. There is no longer any question.

Performance tuning and optimization of high traffic Drupal sites - most of this stuff was sysadmin related that was a bit over my head. I was hoping for more delth on query optimizations.

Skirt.com : Affiliated content for magazines - these folks have taken a different approach to the problem of affiliate sites in a multisite configuration. If I had known about this before we did politicker.com, we might've headed in a different direction.

Drupal powering hosted services - I felt like there's some hosts out there that are kicking Advomatic's butt in the areas of new techniques (though this isn't my area of expertise either, so a lot of this went over my head). But with that said, I don't think any of them are working on the same scale that we are, and if they are, they aren't focused on just Drupal.

And then more client work in the evening

Day 3:

I slept through most of the morning. It was probably a good thing.

New JavaScript in Drupal 6: AHAH and Drag and Drop - There's some new rad stuff

Creating custom workflows for Drupal applications - taking advantage of core hooks and context - This actually had nothing to do with workflow, it was about context (site sections) and how to maintain context as the user browses to different pages. These guys had some great ideas for Drupal 7.

Scalable Theming: Theming for 100s of node types, CCK fields and views - Some great ideas here. I'm gonna write up a best practices doc for Advo.

Evening - Just hung out at the hotel. We needed a bit of downtime.

Day 4:

A Developer's Assistant - Using Coder for Module Developers and Maintainers - I already knew that coder rocks, but it also does some cool stuff in terms of module upgrades. As a case study we used coder to walk through an update of View to Drupal 6.

Information Architecture to Drupal Architecture - apparently I went to this. Don't remember a thing about it though.

Hostmaster 2 - This Birds of a Feather (small table discussion) was awesome. Bright/Raincity are re-starting hostmaster from scratch. This install profile has some really revolutionary tools to mange 1000s of sites accross several servers from a single master site. This obsolutes my multisite_maintenance module. Unfortunately there isn't working code yet (though this might have changed since yesterdays code sprint). I'll be looking in to this for politicker.

Zen and the Art of Drupal - some of the lullabots did a great presentation on how to ensure that your contributions to Drupal last for the long term.

Wrap Up - The winners of the site showcase were anounced. Advomatic had a few in the honourable mentions, but no winners this year.

Evening - shopping. Had to get some presents to take back.

Day 5:

Code sprint - It was real cool to be working in the same room as 400 other developers. I met a lot of smart people and had a chance to ask people questions face to face. I spent my day writting unit tests.

Phewf! I'm tired.

Everyone but me is sick right now.  My dear wife every two years gets this itchy rash all over her body that lasts for about a week.  Apparently its been two years since the last incident.  Cause: unknown.  Cure: unknown.  She spends most of the night awake scratching.  It's pretty terrible.  And our dear little puppy has this issue where every day he spends 30 seconds dry heaving.  Then he's fine and back to running around and biting my ankles.  Very bizarre.  

But they're both snoozing right now.  They look so darn cute.