OS X has an odd window manager. One of its oddest quirks is how unpredictable the green maximize or ‘zoom’ button can be. Different applications have customized zoom behavior and often its not the behavior I would expect or choose. Who, for instance, would want their terminal app to zoom its horizontal dimension as well as its vertical?
JDSmith came up with a Vertical Zoom applescript. It maximizes the vertical span of the active window without touching the horizontal. I tend to use it on Terminal and Safari. I recommend you change the hardcoded Y value at the top of the script to 1600. OS X converts Y values larger than your screen to your screen’s limit.
Another quirk of OSX is its stinginess with customizable hot-keys. I bind the vertical zoom script to F13 and Command-F12 (for the small keyboard) with Spark.
I managed a 7 hour layover in Beijing, so all I managed to see was the forbidden city.
Tienanmen Square is a huge empty expanse of flat stones. Mao used to stand a million people in there just to have a chuckle at being leader of all China. Its surrounded by soviet inspired architecture and sitting in the middle of it is Mao’s reliquary hall containing his remains preserved in stasis.
The forbidden city really is a small town within Beijing. Huge halls that now contain museums surround even larger ornate buildings and vast empty plazas. The city gives echos of its past power, but denuded of the live processes that would surely have filled it while it was active. It might be cheesy, but I think historical re-enactors would help fill the vast and dead feeling courtyards in the forbidden city.
I was reminded I was in Asia on the way back to catch my plane when my taxi driver pulled off the highway to urinate against a tree.
I only managed a couple snapshots of Beijing.
Geoff and I took the train into Shanghai for the weekend. In between Chinese cities the landscape alternated between abandoned communes, and freshly stamped out planned communities. Five hundred units of the exact same house arranged in maddening tessellation. The families I saw on the streets and in restaurants were odd inverted pyramids of attention. Grandparents and parents all focused on one single child.
I hadn’t seen many pictures of Shanghai, so the quantity of inventive, colorful sky scrapers that appeared all around us surprised me. The 1930′s architecture of The Bund has banker’s granite fortresses standing shoulder to shoulder with each other. They form a stolid line of columns that look out over the river over at the new growth appearing every year in Pudong. China is pouring money into Pudong to see how many crazy looking multicolored steel and glass buildings its can stuff in one small area before cosmic fish mistake it for a reef and start swimming about it.
Other than touring The Bund, Pudong and Nanjing Road, we didn’t have time for much other than drinking formaldehyde free beer. A barmaid we talked to wanted to know all about the USA. “Is there really a problem with racism against black people?” Every time China is in our news, we feel obligated to mention Tibet or Falung Gong. I think Chinese news compulsively mentions that the US keeps huge populations of black people in rape cages for smoking joints.
Photos of Shanghai.
I went to China for work a couple months ago. It was my second time in China and I got to visit much more central urban places. My workplace was in Hangzhou, a small city of six million people built around an enormous lake. It felt like walking around a city of one million in a rich country with an excess of tall apartment buildings and hotels. Geoff figured that it was indicative of the fraction of people there with enough disposable income to patronize shops and services.
Every horizon was prickly with cranes pulling up dozens of new high rises. Little patches of old asia were still around, but I almost missed the narrow alleys of vendors and people squatting to play cards or eat noodles entirely in the cities. There wasn’t much street food in the parts of China I saw on this trip. The traditional markets were there under old cement communist bunkers, taking cover from the shiny new towers. Several times a day small colorful bursts of fireworks pop off over the sky, likely launched by individuals. Occasionally larger barrages go off that might be part of a corporate or government event?
On our daily commute to work we often couldn’t see across the river through the smog. Due to the oppressive pollution, the Chinese have outlawed most petrol fueled bikes. So the scooters are all silent electrics with a few propane models scattered among them. We did see a cop on a proper 450cc motorcycle.
The overall level of wealth in Hangzhou was greater than I’m familiar with from southeast Asia, but there’s clear economic disparity. There aren’t legions of beggars in Hangzhou. Actually, there were hardly any beggars. The wealthy were far more noticeable. Buick is doing quite well there. Owning one of their vehicles is a status symbol. The VP of my company’s China office had a personal driver for his. There were plenty of Audis and BMWs on the road. A Ferrari was parked on the sidewalk outside my office building. We saw Porsche’s, Maserati and an even a Bently on the road. Near our hotel was a Rolls Royce dealership. Geoff commented that he saw more exotic cars in Hangzhou than he has in San Francisco.
With an inexhaustible cheap labor pool a great many people are paid to stand around. At the entrance to restaurants two girls would hang out like curtains and sometimes two more inside just to usher you to the host. Standing around all day doing absolutely nothing, the girls look more look bored and dejected than attractive. Men who are paid to stand around look a little better, mostly because they’re wearing security uniforms or are actually in the military. Standing at forced attention masks their brains melting under the excruciating tedium.
Despite the plight of the underclass, one of my favorite things about China is how assertive the women are compared to other Asian countries. I’m guessing its a product of communist egalitarian ideology. Its quite pronounced when you compare it to the rest of Asia, where women are very subservient, basically do most of the work and reap few of the rewards.
Some photos of Hangzhou.
We were feeling weary of Guatemala and considered moving on to El Salvador, but we pressed on to the huge Lago de Atitlan, which sits in the highlands a couple hours west of Antigua. Its a very large ancient volcanic crater lake surrounded by three volcanoes and several Mayan villages. American hippies believe the Lake and its “mysteriously triangular volcanoes” are the site of a “spiritual energy vortex” and are somehow “linked” to several other famous places on earth. The energy vortex has psychic healing properties and so hippies have colonized the area since the sixties.
When the bus dropped us off in Panajachel I was immediately and firmly convinced of the existence of the energy vortex. I had an unshakable feeling that I’d been there before. Rather than being linked to the pyramids at Giza or the ruins at Macchu Picchu I’m sure that there’s a cosmic link between Panajachel, Phan Ngu Lao, and Thanon Khao Sahn. The rasta hats with dreadlocks sewn onto them, the impossibly banal T-shirts and the supernaturally terrible food can only spring from the same mystic source. I’m sure parts of Goa and Bali are just as scummy. Backpacker ghettos will steal your soul and make you hate the human race in an amazingly brief period of time. It is imperative that one spends as little time in their vicinity as possible.
So we got across the lake to the tiny village of Jailbolito and based ourselves amid the gardens of Volcano Lodge and terraces of Casa del Mundo. After running around Guatemala, lakeside time in hammocks reading and bird watching was very welcome. We paddled around on kayaks, swam and visited several of the little Mayan towns by taxi. We got caught out on the lake in the thunderstorms and watched the clouds bang short straight bolts into the lake while the thunder echoed back and forth off the volcanoes.
We took lots of pictures and and some video of us playing with spider monkeys and coatis.