Personal
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31 Days Later
I’m back from China, and just in time for the Victoria Day weekend! I’ll post some thoughts and pictures from China later – but first, I just found the contrast in weather that we experience here in Toronto in a 31-day timespan to be pretty interesting. We went to the zoo just over 4 weeks ago, and suffice to say it was cold:
They may look nice and warm, but the reality is, we were a little under-prepared and didn’t bring gloves. Luckily, ingenious kids are more than capable of deriving a makeshift solution to the problem – Linxi figured out how to help Olivia with the no-gloves issue:
Just 31 days later, and our trip to the zoo was looking noticeably different:
In fairness, there was a downpour of rain while we were at the water playground inside the Toronto Zoo that almost sent us home; fortunately we stuck it out and things were quite nice after that.
I talked before about having wide angle lenses, and I’m sure glad I did in China – more on that later – but the one place in the world where having the 2.0x teleconverter attached to the 70-200/2.8 (making it effectively into a 140-400 f/5.6) is useful is the zoo. I used this combination on the D3, but Wen also tried it out on his D90 (the crop factor of which gives it effectively 600mm of reach!). It was quite effective for getting up-close shots of animals while still being far enough away to avoid any danger of being eaten, or stomped (both are at the maximum reach of 400mm):
The tiger, of course, was behind a cage – but with that kind of zoom, you just don’t even see the out-of-focus cage grill that’s in front of the camera. With an elephant, 400mm is so much reach you don’t even get the full elephant anymore – but you do an get an interestingly detailed cropping of one (as always, click for a bigger image):
I’m not sure I’ll use the TC all that often, since it’s at odds with my non-photographer goals of really just taking pictures of the people around me, but it’s certainly a better way to get to 400mm than the $10,000 Nikon 400mm f/2.8!
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How to confuse an illiterate pedestrian
I’m currently in Beijing, China on a business trip; one of the nice things about my job is that it’s allowed me to see places that I’d likely never otherwise have had the chance to see. The travel has a downside, of course; usually I just go to the same places over and over again, and often those places have little of interest other than the office that I happen to be visiting. Also, while in the past if I was coming some place that was new, I’d seriously think about buying a 2nd ticket for my wife and extending the stay a little, that’s no longer really practical now that we have kids. Still, Beijing is new and I’m thankful not just for that, but also that a last-minute agenda change provided enough free time to take a vacation days while I’m here.
I’m sure I may have more things to say later, but for now I wanted to pass on a tip for how to confuse an illiterate (and unprepared) pedestrian. As of late, when visiting a place, I tend to look up where I’m headed before leaving and a rough plan of how to get there, but then I just walk without really having directions, a map, or a GPS (unless it looked really confusing, or I’m on a tight timeline). I prefer this both because I tend not to walk the same route too many times, and because you also tend to walk unremarkable but very local streets, as opposed to simply popular/large ones.
Of course, if things go very wrong with this approach, there’s always a backup – ask someone, use the GPS on my phone, or even get in a taxi. Also, many major cities have maps all over the place, so you can get your bearings. But in Beijing, I saw a new trick with maps I hadn’t seen used before:
(sorry for the tall image, it was the only zoom level that showed the English names). After visiting several places of interest – Tianamen Square, the Imperial Palace (Forbidden City), Jingshan Park, and Beihai Park – I decided to head back to the hotel, having been on my feet for quite some time by that point. was directionally pretty straightforward, but I checked the map anyways, as I was walking along Dongsi West. Now, Dongsi West is itself interesting; it’s only about 500m in length despite being a “major” road; west of that, it’s called Wusi St., and east of that it’s called Chaoyangmen Inner St. One might thus understand why you might omit labeling the street on a map. Indeed, the map I was looking at had no “You Are Here” type dot, and just had a single road labelled “Dongsi” (without a direction), and which ran north/south as you see above. I knew for certain I wasn’t walking north, so I re-calibrated to the belief that I was walking south. Which of course, I wasn’t, thanks to a junction in which three of the four roads can have the same name!
To cut a long story short, I wound up walking considerably longer than the shortest path back to the hotel, finally caving in and using the GPS in my phone to get my bearings. Still, it was certainly an interesting walk along the way, as I wound up in some really run down alleyways, with poverty on display that was an unbelievable contrast to the Rolls Royce, Lamborghini, Ferrari, and Aston Martin dealerships that are all a 3 minute walk from my hotel (which wasn’t that far away). Unlike the tourist areas where people pounce on you, trying to get you to ride in a rickshaw or spare some change, the people I saw in this neighborhood seemed genuinely surprised to see a foreigner. Frankly, other areas of Beijing felt more like any other big city; these alleyways felt more authentic, more distinctive, and more like China as I had imagined it.
So I’m glad I walked a different path, and learned about a little trick that I won’t be falling for again :).
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Rogers – All About FAST
I saw this ad today from Rogers, which makes me laugh a little. But fume a lot more.
There are 31 words in the above ad, even counting the subtext. In that span, they manage to use the word FAST five times. I guess I should be happy to be with Rogers (for mobile and for residential Internet) then, since they’re so concerned with speed!
I switched to Rogers from Bell/Sympatico because I was paying for 7Mbit/s and getting 2.4Mbit/s – even after being put through an inconvenient modem swap that didn’t seem to do anything. At the end of 2007, a program called Marketwatch on CBC (Canada’s largest broadcaster) did a segment on this – and found that Rogers delivered 92% of promised speed for a 7Mbit/s plan, whereas Bell was way behind at just 16% of a 5Mbit/s plan. Rogers SVPs were internally boasting about those results! The segment was here: http://www.cbc.ca/marketplace/2007/11/21/speed_bumps/ (the actual video doesn’t play anymore for me).
Good thing I switched, right? Internet being as critical as it is for me, I got both services installed before cancelling service with Bell. Indeed, Rogers delivered what it claimed; dslreports.com showed close to the full bandwidth being delivered. Alas, that was then – and this is now:
I’m a Rogers High Speed Extreme customer, paying for a 10Mbit/s plan. Getting 16% of what I pay for, like Bell customers apparently enjoy, would apparently now be an improvement.
No, nobody is siphoning off my Internet connection – or else I would hit the bandwidth caps that are imposed on all Rogers customers, and they’d be charging me. No, I’m not running BitTorrent or any other peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing software, which Rogers is known to throttle. I even understand that Rogers has apparently messed up their P2P throttling implementation and mistakenly throttled low-bandwidth games like World of Warcraft – and presumably also Starcraft 2, which I play frequently, and in which I suffer frequent, annoying network disruptions; Ars Technica posted about this a month or so ago.
But the speed issues don’t stop there; YouTube used to work nicely at 1080p (and still does, for the rest of the world) but now generally struggles at 720p – and sometimes even as low as 360p. Gametrailers.com similarly stutters even at low-definition – I guess they throttle video, and throttle games, and double-throttle videos about games! Oddly enough, the high quality 720p HD video on Vimeo generally seems OK, so even this appears to be the influence of some kind of intentional traffic shaping.
As if that weren’t enough, Rogers insists on pouring salt on the wound with ads like this:
Is this like when clothing stores mark up their merchandise by 50% and then say “everything must go, all merchandise 50% off”? Heck no, because the clothes would still be a good deal (50% off the marked up price would be 75% of the original price)! This is more like noticing that video and gaming are slow, and Rogers saying “Slow? You’re seeing the boosted speed – you should see what we reduced regular speeds to!”. Given that Rogers already stated to the CRTC that they had issues with gaming and couldn’t fix it anytime soon, it’s amazing that they simultaneously asked the marketing department to run something like the above. “We can’t make it fast, so at least let’s make people think it’s fast!”.
Given their stated P2P (i.e. “downloading activities”) throttling policies, I take the above to mean that even if Rogers fixes the current issues, you get 10Mbit/s to read plain text E-mails and websites; for everything else you get 1/10th of that, which they may generously boost up to 2Mbit/s – at their discretion, of course.
So let’s finally come back to LTE – Roger’s site for this is http://iwantmylte.ca. It claims speeds up to 150Mbit/s – a full 15 times faster than my Rogers High Speed “Extreme” residential Internet (it’s extreme all right… extremely slow), and more than 100 times faster that my actual throughput with Rogers right now. Heck, maybe I should just get a wireless plan and switch to that, even at 5% of what they claim it should be a win! Speaking of plans…
Clicking the picture above will let you see Rogers plans for yourself; you’ll immediately notice that they’re all called “UNLIMITED VOICE & DATA PLANS”, but none of them are actually unlimited – indeed every plan is defined by exactly how limited it is. Oh, but you get an unlimited number of Facebook status updates, and all the 140-character tweets you can eat, that explains it!
That 1GByte plan is the largest plan that Rogers offers; additional data is $0.05/MB. If Rogers delivered on its 150Mbit/s promise, then you could use up your entirely monthly allotment of data in 53.3 seconds. Oh, and after that? Just $0.93 per second – 56 dollars per minute – in data overage charges. Where can I sign up?!
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How many kids do I have again?
Sometimes, I forget:
With this and all the bottles you see in the header image I use for the blog, we’d have been equipped if we got triplets instead of singles with each of our two kids. Still, you never know when this many kids toothbrushes may come in handy:
After all, you might want to have a distinct toothbrush for each tooth (only four teeth are visible here, but a couple more are hidden).
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Looking out the window…
Some fog that rolled in during the middle of the night turned an otherwise dull view out of our window into something a little more interesting:
