Today is the day that everything breaks down.

• Laundry machine leaks lots of water. Reason and exact location unclear. All tubes seem attached properly.
• Spokenword feed scanner appears broken, is not updating my podcasts, so I cannot put the excellent latest episodes of TWiT and This American Life into thilo+ or Thilo's Tech Radio.
• Significant loss of hearing due to accumulation of gunk in ear canal. Go to the hospital for a cleaning session, have to do that every few months now. Dusty Shanghai? Too many podcasts? Getting old?
• Back home, find my Time Machine disk having been disconnected somehow in the middle of a backup. After turning it on and off again, it decides that it now needs 182 GB for the next backup, and starts deleting old backups. Takes a lot of time, and turns out to be unnecessary as the following backup only actually took up the usual 4 GB. Rest of the morning having fun with Disk Utility repairing the hundreds of errors that it found on the volume, completely destroying my faith in the validity of the backup.
• Mac mini also broken. Freezes up randomly about once a day now. No crash reports, no kernel panics, no automatic reboots. No problems reported in Disk Utility or Hardware Tool (even after extra-long memory check). Suspect mother board or GPU failure. Erase and reformat drive, plan to reinstall Lion for the benefit of the Genius at the bar. Lion download projected to take 63 hours. Skipping that.
• Arrive at the Apple Store, find the Genius Bar on a one-hour break Does not serve drinks, either, despite the name. Killing time with new iPad not an option, not yet available in China, even though made here. Spend an hour with friendly Genius, who runs some diagnostic tools only he has and reinstalls Lion (does not take him 63 hours). Of course cannot demonstrate freezes. Leave the Mini with them for more tests.
• Bus breaks down on the way back home.

I am going to spend the next two nights in a hospital. No, this is not because of something Windows 8 did to me, I am not sick (at least not yet; spending a lot of time in a hospital seems to be a good way to catch something). I will be keeping company with my son.

Kai has had a stuffy nose forever now, and also snores like a champion. Different types of medicine did not clear things up, and at a recent nose endoscopy (a procedure he very much did not enjoy) the doctors discovered adenoid hypertrophy blocking 80% of nasal airflow, and decided the severely enlarged and allegedly vestigial organ be removed.

This is a very simple (takes just fifteen minutes) and standard (apparently in the 1930s everyone was doing it, and I think I remember I also had it done and that there was ice cream) surgery, but while Wikipedia claims that it is mostly performed on outpatients, the hospital insists that he also stay the night before (so that they can make sure he eats properly six hours before surgery, and nothing after that), and the night after (in case there are complications). There is also a whole array of diagnostics that they routinely run on the day before.

While Kai has to stay in the hospital for these three days, I am not. I will just join him at night, and a couple of hours every day, taking shifts with Cissy and her mother. The hospital is literally just across the street from our compound, so we can be quite flexible here.

This photo was NOT taken three hours ago.

What is going on with the Euro? Most of my income still comes from Japan, and I get a paycheck for the same amount every month. The same amount in Yen, that is, but when it arrives in my German bank account the Euro amount has been consistently increasing (significantly) for quite a while now. That is all good and well, but over the last couple of weeks, my African investments are also coming back with currency exchange gains. In guess that means that Europe is now under worse management than a random selection of African countries.

I am not much of a music listener, and my iPod is mostly used for podcasts, but when I do listen to songs I obsess about play counts.

Probably because I am not much of a music listener I rely on iTunes to tell me what I like and the two smart playlists with recently played and most played songs are essential here. I consider it productive work to set the iPod to shuffle and skip or don't skip through what it throws at me, building up useful statistics in the process. I pause playback when leaving the room in order not to get inaccurate numbers. When I am only listening with half an ear while doing other things and catch myself having sat through a song I didn't like instead of skipping it, I panic. I am concerned if play counts should be recorded at all when I am only listening with half an ear while doing other things. I worry about the loss of information when I listen to Cissy's iPod, and about the implications of her listening to mine. The thing I hate most about the dying battery in our beat-up fifth generation iPod with the broken screen (five years old, but still my main player since I cannot get myself to buy a replacement iPod Touch since that model has gone so long without an update) is that when it suddenly shuts down, it tends to lose play counts. Never mind that I have to continue walking in silence for half an hour and later figure out where to resume playing in the middle of the two-hour podcast episode, I'll never be able to find the three great songs again, that I had just discovered in shuffle mode.

Part Twelve: The Reida Eleven Inch Wall Clock with Thermometer and Hygrometer delivers important data points.

This should help me decide if I dislike the Shanghai weather less in winter (too cold) or in summer (too hot). At the moment it shows an indoors temperature of eleven degrees (very consistent over the last few days). Good that I have an extensive collections of sweaters (that can also be combined into multiple layers), not to mention my Bingjie Keeping Warm Trousers.

The hygrometer apparently does not indicate the likelihood of rain fall.

Everything Thilo feels he needs to overshare ...

I have for a long time already been giving star ratings for every movie I am watching (not too many these days) and every podcast episode I am listening to, and also writing short reports about almost every book I am reading. I am now trying to extend this and let the world know about everything else as well.

I am calling it thilo+, for the moment it is just a twitter stream, but I have some more ideas for it. There will even be limited social features (to the extent that you will be allowed to voice agreement), the project will help sustain my continued absence from Facebook or Google+ (both of which I find quite scary but long the convenience of), and to promote a positive atmosphere it will only include recommendations (i.e. three or more stars out of five).

Pioneer One is a science-fiction TV show about a satellite crashing near the US border in Canada and the team of Homeland Security officers dispatched to investigate it. It has won the Best Drama Pilot at the 2010 New York Television Festival, and if you enjoyed The X-Files, you will probably like this one as well. I would have written about it earlier, but delayed until the premiere of the season's sixth and final episode (which happened last week), so that you can watch all of it without waiting for the next one. That plan did not really turn out too well, since it is quite a cliffhanger ending.

For lack of a better word, I wrote TV show, but Pioneer One has nothing to do with television networks. It is completely independently financed by viewer donations and distributed via BitTorrent and streaming sites. That has been made possible by everyone working for free, and the whole budget being ridiculously low: That award-winning pilot was done for just $6,000, the stated donation target for the whole season was $100,000 (which has unfortunately not been reached yet, it currently stands at $86,175). If you do like it, please donate, for example using Flattr.

For the second season, though, the team has decided to "secure more substantial funding", because they cannot continue working for free and calling in favours forever, they want a bigger budget to be able to scale up the scope of the show, and they need to be able to schedule and produce a whole season without having to stop for months at a time whenever money runs out.

My attempts to buy online music continue to be frustrating.

If you have been flying ANA in recent years, you will have heard (and most likely enjoyed) the music they play during boarding and landing, a song by Japanese violinist Taro Hakase. The track is available in the German iTunes Store, both as part of the album as well as individually. One download (11 MB, 99 cents) later, I was shocked to find out that the recording abruptly stops three minutes into the five minute piece.

This could have been an incomplete download (these things happen quite often behind the Great Firewall), but it did not look that way (iTunes reported no errors, and the progress bar was showing the 11 MB I got from the very beginning). When I nevertheless tried to download it again I had to find out that while the ability to re-download music you have purchased, a feature that has been long-overdue and only recently added as part of iTunes in the Cloud, is in fact, unlike many of these services, available internationally (i.e. outside of the United States), it is still not being offered for Germany. Thank you, GEMA. I complained to Apple about the broken song, they apologized, gave me a refund and said that they will get in contact with the record company (which can take several weeks).

Next stop, Amazon. They have the song on their German website (cheaper, too, just 84 cents), and I could click to put it in my shopping cart, only to find out on a later page that "due to geographic restrictions for the requested product" they would not be able to complete my order.

I never buy music. Today I tried, but they wouldn't sell it to me.

For reasons unknown and on at least three occasions have I over the course of the last few years watched at least parts of Johnny English, and Robbie Williams' contribution to it is quite catchy. The soundtrack is available on the German versions of iTunes and Amazon, but two of the seventeen tracks are not available for individual purchase, and you'd have to buy the whole album for them. At a higher price than for the video download of the movie itself. In the US store, you can get all tracks separately, but of course they don't let me buy anything there.

Mr Prosser's mouth opened and closed a couple of times while his mind was for a moment filled with inexplicable but terribly attractive visions of Arthur Dent's house being consumed with fire and Arthur himself running screaming from the blazing ruin with at least three hefty spears protruding from his back. Mr Prosser was often bothered with visions like these and they made him feel very nervous. He stuttered for a moment and then pulled himself together.

"Mr Dent," he said.

"Hello? Yes?" said Arthur.

"Some factual information for you. Have you any idea how much damage that bulldozer would suffer if I just let it roll straight over you?"

"How much?" said Arthur.

"None at all," said Mr Prosser, and stormed nervously off wondering why his brain was filled with a thousand hairy horsemen all shouting at him.

One in two hundred men alive today are direct descendants of Genghis Khan.

       Queue: CGI-Application-Plugin-AutoRunmode
     Subject: [PATCH] Spelling fix
 Ticket <URL: https://rt.cpan.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=69656 >


In Debian we are currently applying the attached patch to CGI-Application-Plugin-AutoRunmode.
We thought you might be interested in it, too.

spelling.patch

Subject: Spelling
Last-Update: 2011-06-18
--- a/AutoRunmode/FileDelegate.pm
+++ b/AutoRunmode/FileDelegate.pm
@@ -108,7 +108,7 @@
 =head1 SEE ALSO
 
 If you like the idea of moving everything outside of Perl modules
-into seperate files, you should also have a look at
+into separate files, you should also have a look at
 L<CGI::Application::Plugin::TemplateRunner>, which does a similar
 thing for HTML templates and the Perl code needed to provide them with 
 data.
 

Separate! I hate that word. Just this morning I had to look it up while writing a message on some forum (and I had gotten it wrong).

I am flattered, though, that someone is paying enough attention to my module to get Debian to patch it.

Part Eleven: Science says sitting kills. Standing desk seems smart.

There is quite a bit of green between the buildings in our Orient City Garden, but they are converting some of it (as much as they can?) into parking lots:

Before:

After:

A year ago I learned about MYC4.com, the Danish company that provides a marketplace for microcredit loans to small businesses in African countries. I uploaded some money back then, and have been participating in seventeen loans to taxi drivers, construction contractors, shopkeepers, wholesale retailers, printers, tailors, and farmers in Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda. Whereas microcredit is often for various reasons only given to women, all of my loans except for one have been to men. Five of the loans have already been repaid in full, one has defaulted after repaying just twenty percent, the rest are on track.

I am a bit conflicted about whether the whole system is a good idea. During the year, there have been terrible news about a string of suicides in India where people could not pay back their loans, some of those loans they had been talked into by lenders seeking to boost their portfolios. Muhammad Yunus, probably the inventor of microfinance and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, has come out strongly against the recently booming for-profit microcredit lenders, asserting that they are loan sharks that cause great harm. I have to agree that even when no one is talked into loans they don't need, even when the interest rates are tolerable, even when the loans get repaid and local businesses develop, the fact that in the end money flows from a poor community to a rich community seems like a big flaw. In Yunus' original system, there are no outside investors, lending happens within the community.

I was also a bit shocked about the interest rates involved: On top of the interest paid to investors (usually ten to fifteen percent), the local loan providers (that do the actual work of handling the money) charge in the area of thirty percent, and MYC4 gets another six percent, so that the total cost to the business often adds up to an interest rate between fifty and seventy percent. I suppose the best way to change that is to increase the transaction volume, so that a more efficient banking system can develop in Africa.

Financially, I have lost about 13% of my investment because of the defaulted loan (there may eventually be some principal recovered some day, after all a car was given as collateral). Without that it would have been a 4% profit, even though the average interest on my loans was 14.7%. This gap is due to currency losses. At the time, I was actually looking forward to investing outside of the Euro zone, but it seems that there is still more confidence in the Euro when compared to African currencies.

All in all, I am going to stick with MYC4 and double down for the second year.

Today it was Cissy's turn to run, she finished the "2K Fun Run" (2000m) in 17:23 minutes (the medal she got says 8K, though).

Part eighteen: Dolby® 3D Digital Cinema is the right choice for 3D presentations, combining an extraordinary 3D experience with cost-effective compatibility and flexibility.

Had it before the movie, did not have it anymore after the movie. Went back immediately to the cinema, but it was nowhere to be found. Shock. The hardware is easily replaced (in fact, it would be a significant upgrade), but I am really worried about someone messing with my data. Lots of emails, photos, contacts on there. Changing my passwords as we speak (or as I type and you read). And registering all my serial numbers with Apple now.

I hear that a big part of the appeal for women watching something like Sex and the City comes from the clothes, shoes, and handbags that are worn on the show. After a season of the Big Bang Theory, I can relate to that. The shirts! The sweaters! Wolowitz' belts!

I don't watch much TV these days, so I cannot really claim an informed opinion, but here is instead a quote from Newton Minnow, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, the regulator for television in the US:

I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.
You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly commercials -- many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you'll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.

Minnow had just been appointed by President Kennedy, and he gave this speech in May 1961. How fortunate that things have improved since then.