We humans have gone too far as a civilization.
Time to pull the plug, folks. This just isn’t gonna work out anymore.
Portrait image orientation in Mac OS X, and how to fix itThis took me quite a while to google around and find this, so maybe it will help someone else out. Any time I take a picture with my digital camera and transfer it to my Mac, every app within OSX is reading the EXIF orientation information and automatically orientating portrait-style pictures. What this means is that when you turned your camera sideways to take a picture, OSX knows that and shows the picture to you in portrait mode, so it looks oriented correctly to you. It does this in photoshop, preview, Finder, everything I’ve found at least. The problem with this is that the picture *isn’t* actually oriented that way, so when you go to upload your pictures to the web, or put them on a disk, or email them to a friend, they’re going to be sideways. If you don’t feel like writing a shell script to cycle through your images and read their EXIF data, then use transjpg or imagemagick to rotate the pictures and then wipe the exif orientation info, then just do the following. Assuming you’re multi-selecting a batch of photos and then using Preview to scroll through and look at them, whenever you get to a portrait oriented picture (look at the thumbnail), go to Tools -> Rotate Right. Then go to Tools -> Rotate Left. Its confusing, I know. You’ll start with the picture looking correct to you, then you need to rotate it one direction and then rotate it back, to the way it was. Then close Preview, and it will ask you if you want to save the images. Say yes. What this actually did was do an image transformation to rotate the data itself, then wipe the EXIF orientation info, but you’d never know that just by looking at it. But, once you upload the image anywhere it will always be oriented correctly. First World Problems!Some people on this fine planet of ours are pretty well fucked from the get go. For the sake of brevity lets just pass on by those poor saps born without a face or an extra arm or something. There’s kids in africa born into abject poverty who don’t live past 2. There’s kids in India who grow up wallowing in filth. Make it to your teens in singapore and you get sold as a sex slave. Or in china, where you get to spend your life in a factory stapling together Nikes. People living in mud huts, or catching malaria, or getting aids, or living in the desert, all sorts of just awful crap can befall people living in under developed countries. In fact, and lets be honest here, pretty much the huge MAJORITY of people living in 3rd world places really don’t have much of a chance to make an outstanding life for themselves, at least compared to a middle class person living in a westernized country. So lately I’ve just found it kind of amusing the kinds of petty things people complain about. I think we all do it throughout the day without even noticing it. It’s actually pretty funny, so I’m going to start keeping a log of the good ones I hear. After each quote we come across on this blog post, just imagine a group of rambunctious 6 year olds throwing their hands in the air and giving their best bwaa-bwwaahhh faces and in sing-songy voices going “Uh - Oh ! First Woooorld Proooooblems! ” These are all actual quotes from friends or family that I’ve heard recently — names were changed to protect the innocent though.
Whats harder for a startup: Hackers learning to run the business side, or Suits learning how to code?In determining what makes a bootstrapped startup fail versus one that succeeds, I often think about what really are the critical points that make or break the project. At least, in regards to the “web2.0″ model where you just write some SaaS website that ends up getting a bajillion users and you drive off in your Maserati. This all probably in no way applies to a startup thats say, trying to build reusable rocket ships. You know, those funny startups that actually aim to make a physical product. From my perspective, there are three major components that all have to be in line for success to occur:
Now in all honesty, those first two always seemed to me to be inconsequential. Hell, #1 practically isn’t even a requirement, considering all the awful, horrible products I’ve seen advertised on tv for $20 german rags, and they certainly seem to be making a profit. Ideas, it seems, are rather a dime a dozen. Everyone has a great startup idea, and in reality 1000 people before them thought up the same thing anyway. Great ideas are great, but great ideas do not a startup make. Now the technical aspect of it, I’ve always kind of taken for granted as well. At least in the circles I run in, everyone is technical. The only cost to coding the website is simply the time it takes to code it — the technical difficulty of these things is rarely above trivial. In fact its always been a generally assumed truth that the reason there are so many web startups is because the barriers to entry for making a web startup are so shockingly low. Anyone can whip out a text editor, check out extended-bort and add some CSS styles. Its much harder to say… boostrap a startup that makes a new kind of microchip processor, or a new kind of windshield wiper. To me, the coding of a startup’s site is the least of my worries. The business part, especially the sales, is the part I’ve always known I’d need help with. I just don’t have that skill set, I don’t have the connections or the rollodex of magical leads that will buy a license. I don’t reallly even know how B2B sales pitches work, how to get the ball rolling. My marketing, accounting, and hiring knowledge is limited to twitter, quickbooks, and monster.com. So from my perspective, the business end of it certainly represents the biggest hurdle. However I realized today, that for someone from the opposite side of it, the technical coding of the site is now a high barrier to entry. They have to raise capital in order to hire programmers and be able to pay them to see the fruition of the project. At that point can you even consider it bootstrapping? It turns out, of course, that both requirements are equally critical to the success of the startup. With no technical competency, your business people have no product to sell. With no sales people, your fantastic product will sit there with no clients. Stalemate. The question then, is whats easier: for the technical person bootstrapping their own website to learn the business aspects? Or is it easier for an MBA grad, with zero technical background, to be able to pick up a book and suddenly be able to have the ability to write a scalable, full stack web application, along with all the SA hats one has to wear to even get the thing running…. and then throw on some creative abilities as well for CSS and logo design. You can guess which side I’m throwing my bets on. The technical bootstrapper will at least be able to get his product into creation before needing any serious VC backing. And probably even through grassroots marketing get some customers via word of mouth, twitter, blogs, hell just emailing out around to people. The technical bootstrapper may not be very good at executing the business side but at least they can take a stab at it and hopefully get some revenue coming in, learn the ropes a bit, and then be in a good position to either hire a sales/business person, or take VC funding and hire a sales/business person. Maybe I’m dead wrong here. If you’re a budding CEO of a 1-person startup with a great idea, maybe you’ll easily be able to go out and find a team of developers who know what they’re doing to build your idea for you, and get paid in stock options to boot. Maybe it will be an awesome website that will hockey stick its way into revenues within 90 days and get that 1% share of that $6b market you know about. I just don’t see it. With no technical competency to bootstrap yourself with, you’re stuck unless you give up the bootstrapping idea and go get funding of some sort to be able to pay out salaries and wrangle up some nerds. Suddenly, making a web based startup doesn’t sound like it has low barriers to entry, at all. Unable to uninstall capistrano even though its listed as installed? Here’s how to fix thatAt some point my installation of capistrano here in OSX got corrupted or something. Either way, whenever I would try to run `cap deploy`, on a project that everyone else could deploy just fine, I’d get an error message like this: Brians-Laptop-2:railsapp brian$ cap deploy /opt/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:636:in `report_activate_error': RubyGem version error: capistrano(2.5.5 not = 1.4.2) (Gem::LoadError) Which was weird for a couple reasons. One, the capistrano gem that was frozen into the rails project was specified to be 2.5.3. Capistrano 2.5.5 (which this was saying I had activated) should have run just fine that way. But then second, where was this 1.4.2 mention coming from? Nothing in the project talked about capistrano 1.4.2. So, taking a look at my installed gems, it gets even more fun. Brians-Laptop-2:railsapp brian$ gem list | grep capistrano capistrano (2.5.5) Well, lets just uninstall that sucker. ERROR: While executing gem ... (Gem::InstallError) Unknown gem capistrano >= 0 Wooo fun. Gem list says I have it, gem uninstall says I don’t. Anyway, finally figured out that at some point capistrano had been installed to my home directory. Something like ~/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/capistrano/blahblahblah. Thats the one it was somehow using. So, delete/move that .gem directory. Then if you actually look at the stack trace from the original `cap deploy` command, you’ll also notice something similar: from /Users/brian/.caprc:1:in `load' Well I don’t know wtf this .caprc file is doing in my home directory either, but get rid of that too. Finally, there, I was able to `sudo gem install capistrano` and correctly install capistrano ( 2.5.5 ) to its correct location. From that point, cap deploys should work just fine. Hope this helps anyone else googling around for the same arcane set of keywords I was. I don’t know your status, I can’t hear you sigh. I’d dare to find out, but its not in the API. 144 days ago How to make Flex and Rails maintain your Facebooker SessionThis might possibly be a firefox specific issue. If you’ve ever been building a Flex-based Facebook application and are using Ruby on Rails on the backend, you may have come across this problem. When your Facebook application first loads your SWF from the Rails server, its actually being proxied through Facebook. Which means the first request has all your vital fb_sig data, as well as your facebooker session object through which all your API calls are going to be made. The fun part is that any subsequent Flex -> Rails calls that are made asynchronously are going to get a brand new rails session, for some reason. And that session is not going to have any of the facebook specific connection information, which means its basically like you’re not on facebook at all. So the way to fix this is to just go ahead and pass your originally created session ID into the FlashVars that get loaded along with the SWF on the first page load. In our main controller’s action that is loading the SWF we already have it setup to pass some flash vars along, so I just added one more:
Then don’t forget to pass those vars along to your fb:swf tag:
Now in your flex app, whenever you do any kind of call back to your Rails server, make sure to tack that session ID onto the request parameters. The default way to access it would be something like
But your Flex environment problably has accessors to the flash vars differently. One last note, is that if you want that session ID to actually be recognized on the Rails side and used instead of creating a new session, you need to attach it to your request as a named parameter called “_session_id”. Note the leading underscore. Of course if you’re like us, your session key is actually renamed to be “_{RAILS_APP}_SESSION_ID”, which means you need to pass that along to your flex app in the flash vars as well, otherwise it won’t get recognized. There’s probably a reason why the sessions aren’t getting maintained by default, but hell if I know what it is. Turn up those headphones yall, its about to dropSomeone needs to get Timbaland and T.I. to make a new single based on this:
Anyone got their phone number? Actually I think Young Jeezy would do a remarkable rendition of it. How to give Java developers a bad reputationWow, this is just unfathomably hard to read. Some guy finds it imperative to rewrite the bugzilla project in java, wants the bugzilla developers to help him with it, and can’t understand why its the stupidest idea in the history of stupid ideas. Disclaimer: I don’t know WTF I’m doing… but I decided to do this anyway. It can’t be that hard, I said. Those old japanese guys can do it, I said. It’s horrendously expensive in the restaurants, I said. So, yesterday I drove up to Buford Hwy & 285 and went to some international farmers market that was so secret and mysterious that they don’t even have a name for it, or a sign indicating its an actual place of business. It’s just a beige, faceless building. You walk in, though, and its a conglomeration of various regions of the world’s fresh produce and food stuffs. It smells like they mixed fresh ground maize with goat tripe and doused in teryaki sauce. I went to the back where they have a huge fresh fish market and picked up 1 pound each of sashimi grade fresh salmon and sashimi grade tuna. A couple ripe avocados and a shaker full of that crazy delicious bonito + sesame seed + seaweed + MSG concoction that makes sushi oh so good rounded out my cart. I came home, and noticed the only rice I had was some white italian style rice. Oh well. Its just rice, it can’t be that different. I cooked it up extra sticky, then laid it out in a flat layer to sit in the freezer for a bit and get nice and cold. Molded it up into the correct size, then got out my sharpest knife and went to work on the salmon and tuna and avocado. The result: Click for full size. I’m serious. Its worth the click. Do it.
Yeah, I had to use a measuring cup for the soy sauce since I don’t have any of those little dishes. And yeah, I found out right at the wrong time that I do not own any chopsticks. So I ate with my hands. Mattered not. It was so. fucking. delicious. And I used maybe 1/10th of the fish! It was 10x, no, 100x better than any schlep old man Ru San peddles out during his weekend lunch buffets. The salmon was so creamy and coated my mouth with that delicious umami taste that you only get with super fresh sushi. Time to go cut up some sashimi and just stuff myself. This is like the cookie monster falling into a cookie factory, or Robin Williams stumbling across the DEA’s cocaine locker. If you like electronic music in any capacity, click this linkhttp://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/ It, quite literally, visually and audibly maps out to excruciating detail all the branches, genres, sub genres, sub-sub genres and various outshoots of pretty much all electronic music. The great part is it has tons and tons of samples for every single granular genre. I’ve always liked some kinds of electronic music, and hated others, but never really knew labels for them outside of “jungle” vs “house”. The above site has really helped me nail down the specific sub genres that I’ve always loved, and just never knew the names for. Its crazy how much there is, it’s probably gonna take me 2 hours to go through the entire list. Plus you get to listen to cool music the whole time. Well, some of it isn’t cool. But thats what makes it interesting, to so define in such fine detail what kind of music you specifically do and do not like. How to install the Shoulda rails testing frameworkSo you’ve decided to start using Shoulda instead of Rspec or Test::Unit in your latest rails project? There’s one step you might not think to do, which strangely is absent in any of the Shoulda documentation. After you `sudo gem install thoughtbot-shoulda` … Don’t forget to put require ’shoulda’ at the top of whatever test classes you write, otherwise you’ll get “undefined method `should`” all over the place. There, I saved you 4 hours. Sennheiser CX300 Earbuds ReviewSince I started my new job back in april, I was first having a 30 minute walk. Now that I’ve moved to my new place I still have a 15 to 20 minute marta ride. So either way, I’ve been listening to my mp3 player everyday on the way, whereas before I really rarely used it. I used to have a pair of Nike behind-the-head headphones. The earbuds on those were hard plastic and hurt my ears, really a waste of money. Then I picked up a pair of Koss or Joss or something earbuds on amazon that were really cheap. While owning them, I thought they were fine — though I did think the sound was a little muted and kind of sounded closed off. Well those broke after about a month or so, and I decided to step it up and get a pair of Sennheiser CX-300B Earbuds, as the reviews for those were a lot better. Compared to my previous earbuds these are amazing. The sound clarity is hands down better, the bass response is much stronger and the highs are crisp and clear. Plus they feel really solid in my ears, and came with three different sized silicon plugs for different sized ears. I can jog in them and they never come out, they’re great. Only downside is that the cord itself is a little on the short side. I haven’t encountered an actual problem yet with using them and they wouldn’t reach, but I would if they were any shorter at all. Just don’t expect to sit on your couch and plug them into a reciever on the other side of the room. Plus, they work on iPhones/iPods straight out of the box, don’t need an adapter or anything. I paid $38 for them last month… and for some reason they are selling for $19 now. What the hell! Click here to get them on Amazon… Sennheiser CX300-B Earbuds (Black) From the end of the tunnelI don’t think anyone ever actually walks all the way down to the end of this platform. It was kind of eerie.
What a dreary day
I put on my shoes to trudge out in it, as Hobbes the Cat lay curled in the blankets, Veterans Day ParadeNot quite the turnout one would suspect. Or maybe it is, considering its a dreary tuesday morning.
I feel like I should be eating a walnut & caramel covered apple or something. The singularity has been breachedI always said, when someone finally figures out how to make buying music easier than stealing it, thats when people would stop stealing it. Back in the day you had to drive to a store and buy an actual CD, un wrap it, ugh, what a pain. Napster was 100x easier than that. But then they shut down Napster, and Kazaa got filled up with malware, and IRC was *always* a pain. So for a long time there I didn’t download anything at all. But then Bittorrent came along made things bearable. A solid check mark goes for getting whole albums at a time … but then you had to get whole albums at a time. So last night I was wading through google trying to do mp3 searches of open directories and it was just getting me no where. It seems spammers and squatters have setup camp on that whole methodology. Then on hype machine, I happened to notice there was indeed a button for “Buy now on amazon”. It was only $0.99. I figured, F it, its worth $0.99 and amazon is DRM free. One click later, and here comes the download. So I guess they finally did it. Buying music is easier and more convenient than stealing it. Congratulations music industry, you’re figuring things out. Slowly. Whoa.We just had a firedrill here in 101 Marietta, and after walking down all 17 flights of stairs, we were funneled outside. And just who happens to be standing there, speaking on his cell phone? You guessed it, freaking Al Sharpton.
Yeah, WTF is what I said too. How freaking random can you get. Well that went fast30 Days of Bootcamp sure did seem to fly by. But, I made it, and had perfect attendance. Our group started out with 45 (or was it 60?) people, and by today, the last day, we were down to like 16. All in all it was a really great experience. It was incredibly hard, but totally worth it. I ran varsity cross country in highschool, and it seems since then I haven’t been in any kind of group environment like that, until bootcamp. The instructors were great, the workouts were dynamic and challenging and everyone was really cool. I think in all I’ve lost about 8 pounds. In 4 weeks I think thats actually bordering on unhealthy, but I ate almost perfectly clean the whole month with no cheating, so combined with the intense workouts every single day, I’m not surprised. I’m definitely going to go back. They have 3-month passes that can be used any time over the next year. I’m going to try a month or so on my own though, and see if I can take what I’ve learned and continue the same regimine on my own. I seriously doubt it, but we’ll see. Makes sense to meLauren: Do you know why my monitor makes a weird noise when certain images are displayed? Brian Culler: Probably an improperly de-compiled DLL buffer overflow thats causing polymorphic packet separation across the distributed NAND gate interface, resulting in a frequency phase discordance pattern. Lauren: how can it be fixed? Brian Culler: Probably just need to regenerate the SSH keypath instance tokens and remount the eth0 virtual hertz sync daemon. Lauren: you’re just making up words! Brian Culler: Those are real words. Software developers should rule the worldSoftware developers should be in charge of running things because we literally spend our days solving complex problems. Our careers are built around being able to objectively and efficiently analyze problems, continuing on to design elegant solutions for those problems and then implementing those solutions in a fashion that produces results. We should hold the internet hostage until the world governments hand over the keys to running the place. I’m pretty sure we could get everything figured out in a couple of years. The current class of people running things (eg, “politicians”) are fucking things right up bloody well. Morons. Maybe someone can explain this to me?So with this huge financial / mortgage crisis, there’s a huge “plot hole” that I’m just not understanding. Perhaps I just don’t have all the information, but as I believe the situation to be:
So here’s the part I don’t get. Based on a quick google search, the foreclosure rate is 5.8%. So basically 6% of people aren’t paying their mortgages. Doesn’t that mean 94% of people ARE paying their mortgages each month? Isn’t that a massive, immense amount of reliable, continuous, stable cash being pumped into the finance industry? So you’re trying to tell me that the *entire* financial industry is going to “grind to a halt”, and that banks will have “no money” to make loans to people, thus sending us into some sort of death spiral (that apparently is all going to hit by next week unless we do the bailout) that will destroy the world economy? All of that because 1 out of every 20 mortgages isn’t getting paid on time? Seriously? If the above truly is the case, then fuck your $700,000,000,000 bailout. If the firms and the brokers over leveraged this bad debt and other dumb bond insurers insured it and now it is biting them in the ass, tough fucking luck. 94% of homeowners continue, each month, to pay their mortgages just fine. “Banks” aren’t going to run out of money because they only sold off the “bad debt”, they should still keep on getting paid from their good loans, right? I guess I’m just missing the connection between all the securities firms and brokers whining and crying saying they made really really bad bets and gambles, and that somehow translates to banks with good loans on their books not having money to loan to Joe Anybody on Main St USA trying to take out a small business loan. I’m sure I don’t understand all of this. But it sounds like such a damn huge SCAM is all. Especially with quotes like this:
Ah, great. So you don’t really know who the money is for; You don’t know why you’re giving it to them; But you know it has to be a lot. Fantastic. Maybe someone can explain to me what happened to the idea of letting companies fail when they run their companies poorly? Week 1 downSo its been a week since I started bootcamp. General observations, in list form: - Its really, really hard - Waking up at 5:15 hasn’t been as difficult as I thought it would - I don’t know if its my imagination, but I can already tell a difference. Not appearance wise, just in my body’s ability to handle the workouts. The first day I literally thought I was going to die. By friday, even though the workouts got progressively harder each day, I felt like I could manage and control things better. Yes, I felt exhausted the entire time, but I was able to cognitively go above it and still push myself. Once I got my heart rate into those upper limits of where it can go, I felt I could stay there without keeling over or puking my guts out. - Being in the group is a major motivational factor. Never in a million years would I be able to workout by myself and push myself into the physiological zones that occur when you’re being pushed there by 60 other people. - There is a significant difference between knowing how to eat completely healthy, and actually doing it on a daily basis. My friends make fun of me because I sound like a wikipedia article (or maybe an infomercial) when I talk about nutrition, but I’ve never followed really what I knew one needed to do. Getting 3 sheets to the wind on friday nights usually led to ordering bacon, cheese, and chili covered tater tots. As a result I thought I’d share a couple meals I’ve made that, while being 100% perfectly healthy, taste so damned delicious that it makes me feel guilty for eating them.
- Another thing I realized is that this program might quite possibly pay for itself. Most everyone I’ve talked to has balked at paying so much money just to go workout in a public park, which anyone can do for free. But, due to the fact that I’ve sworn off alcohol for just this month, I realized it might come close to evening out. I never really pay attention to how much things cost, but when you have a beer or three as standard routine a couple weeknights throughout the week, not to mention actually going out partying/tailgating on the weekends, it really adds up. Case in point, I went out friday after work for a coworkers going away party. I had a salad with chicken, everyone else had pizza and several drinks. My total was $11… I looked around, everyone elses was $45-$55. Which used to be normal to me. Then again last night, went to a grill type sports bar to watch the GT game where people were pounding down the pitchers and mixed drinks, meanwhile I just had my one entree and water. Again, I probably saved $40. Multiply that all up by 4 weeks and its going to come darn close to balancing out the cost of Bootcamp! Or if not, it will certainly take the edge off of it being so danged expensive. And of course again, one has to concede that these are all things I could have done anyway. I could have simply stopped drinking on my own and woken up at 5:15 am on my own and worked out on my own and kept a log book of what I ate on my own, all for $0.00. But I’m a realist, and I recognize the effect that the bootcamp “environment” can have on one’s motivation, which is something that just can’t be reproduced on your own. So yeah, so what if I could have theoretically done all this? We all know I wouldn’t have. Its pointless to talk about things that could happen, instead we should objectively analyze empirical past evidence/trends and then base our behaviors on that reality. OBC Day 1I’m not going to pretend I’m “14 year old girl”ish enough to actually make a daily log of this thing, but I am just going to mention it. Today I started the Atlanta Operation Boot Camp program. It consists of 30 days of workouts, most of which take place at 6 am at Piedmont Park, as well as a comprehensive nutritional plan and guide. It was more to just do something different and challenge myself than reach any specific health goal. So today was the first day, which just consisted of the “PT” test, to guage our current fitness level. At the end of the 30 days, we’ll do the same test again and go “oOoOoO” over the improvements. I ran my mile in 7 minutes and 55 seconds, did 22 pushups, 32 situps, and 20 dips. The fastest mile I’ve ever ran was 5:20 during highschool, and I in no way hope to get back down to that level. But I would be happy with a ~6:30 or so. The schedule went something like: Overall, good first day! You’ll be selling books at the airportMusic takes on, literally, a whole new perceptory dimension when you listen to it with high quality noise cancelling headphones. Audiophiles worldwide, you are vindicated. This does not bode wellSo I got a parking ticket a few weeks ago, and finally got around to paying it this morning. The Municipal City of Atlanta has a nice website that allows you to pay your tickets online. Here is the email confirmation, verbatim, I got after processing the payment:
Now I know some highschool kid probably coded their website in Frontpage, but damn at least run the output by a copy editor… so I went to china one day
And the night before I left, I came down with some kind of strep throat, fever, flu type thing. I woke up the next morning to get on the plane and it had only gotten worse. I spent the next 22 hours of my life travelling in the most agonizing, never ending prison of pain and suffering that I would not wish upon anyone. I could have been floating in a pool of marshmallows and I still would have been in uncomfortable stress; instead I was locked upright in a coach seat in the back of a 747 passing by the arctic circle. Oh — and they decided to play, through everyone’s earsets and on all the tv screens, Fool’s Gold (starring matthew mconehwhatthefuckhisnameis) to top it all off. But, I get ahead of myself. It all started nicely enough: the plane ride there.
And then the view from my hotel.
And this part wasn’t really quite accurate:
Yeah, more like the maglev took you to the farthest subway station away from the city, requiring you to change lines (with all your luggage) several times to get anywhere noteworthy. Brilliant planning for all those travelers coming from, you know, the airport. While there we went to convenience stores, a lot.
The 40oz beers were seriously like $0.31 a piece. Add to that the complete absence of any kind of open container laws, you end up with a good time walking around. We visited a temple…
Oh wait that is just all the faux temple built up around it full of people selling cheap chinese crap to you. Ah, here’s the temple.
… which was also full of people trying to sell cheap chinese incense crap to you. Glad to know they keep some things sacred. Lunches were always served with boiling hot green tea. Nevermind that it was 95 degrees with 100% humidity everyday.
Those receipts were cool though. Anytime you paid for something, the receipts had little scratch off lottery ticket things on them. All of mine said “thank you, try again”. But, they have pizza huts:
And crazy big shopping malls.
Communism? What communism? Here I am drinking my communist water bottle…
In front of all those communist built skyscrapers and financial towers. Oi… We took a ferry ride across the river…
Good to know they forbid explosives. I’m sure those signs keep things safe. Some of the tallest buildings in the world are there…
As is some of the tastiest food.
Those dumplings were the best dumplings I’ve ever had in my life. But, like french fries, were really only good freshly out of the steamer. Yay for steaming hot food to go with our boiling hot green tea in the middle of the scorching hot day! But it was worth it. They had girls who apparently liked english writing but didn’t read or write it themselves. Sucks for them, funny to me.
Ok hon, I’ll try not to breathe you. Thanks for the heads up. They had many nice parks,
But I doubt this would pass OSHA inspections…
Later, we paid $75 apiece for 1 pint of paulaner
Or at least, $75 chinese dollars. Which is like $10 USD. But, dave says thats still expensive. We opted to get some more of those $0.30 beers from a convenience store and just walk around instead.
Later I went to the top of one of those tallest buildings in the world.
And looked right down the middle of it.
Glad to know more signs are keeping us safe
Gotta watch out for those psychotics carrying their baleful biology. We managed to make it to the science and technology museum, which was hands down amazing.
And not even china can escape microsoft’s incompetance.
Hey guys I found china’s nukes!
Just fooling, those are simply models. You think china would just leave their nukes sitting out in a museum? Boy you are gullible. We ended the trip with a last visit to the Bund.
Where I couldn’t help but admire the sites with good friends.
It was a great time. Well, aside from the flight back. That totally blew. Literally. But the rest of it was fun |
