Friday, July 17, 2009

How to annoy local businesses, foreign tourists, and other sovereign states

So the mental giants currently running the Canadian government have decided to require visa applications on visitors from Mexico. On the surface, this seems like a good idea: there are thousands of individuals from Mexico who overstay their visas each year, essentially bypassing the refugee claims system.

The problem with it, is that Canada normally plays host to over a quarter of a million Mexican tourists that pump hundreds of millions into the Canadian economy, so as anyone with a brain can point out, imposing the visa requirement to deal with a fractional percentage of people is a classic example of a boneheaded move.

Further compounding the problem is our government's decision to execute this with almost zero warning to the public. This kind of knee-jerk, consultation-free decision making is rarely appropriate in a representative democracy.. I can think of the income trust move as something that arguably had to be done in a quick manner. The new visa requirements, on the other hand, have managed to:

  • Ruin existing travel plans.
  • Harm Canadian businesses in a season when tourist money is usually received at a time when it is badly needed.
  • Massively increased the workload of the Canadian Embassy in Mexico City, to the point that apparently, everyone is busy processing applications.
  • Piss off future potential Mexican tourists.
In retaliation, the Mexicans were nice enough to just require visas from our diplomats.. the diplomatic equivalent of a slap across the face. In a similar situation, the Czechs recalled their ambassador.. the diplomatic equivalent of flipping you the bird and headbutting you in the face. The Czech situation promises to be a bit more overtly irritating to average Canadians, as the EU contemplates retaliatory visa requirements for Canadians.

Link: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/visa-decision-leaves-tourists-in-a-panic/article1218678/

Kindle: Big Brother?

Amazon has basically confirmed that I will never ever ever buy a Kindle. They've been going out of their way to pitch them as an awesome alternative to actual books. In some senses, they're right: they're environmentally friendly (assuming the enviro-cost of printing a book including trees, shipping, etc exceeds the up front cost of making a Kindle and downloading it), they're convenient, they're possibly even cute, possibly even portable, and if the technology keeps improving, might one day be as pleasant to read as an actual printed book (non-page flippy feeling aside).

Amazon's big problem, aside from the Kindle's absurd up front price, has been convincing people it's exactly like books. Amazon is basically a shopkeeper in Vietnam insisting the Kindle is: "same same" as the book I'm holding.

Sounds great right?

Except that last night, in something that approximates irony, Amazon remotely deleted every purchased copy of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm (you can't make this shit up) and refunded the money. The word is that the publisher got cold feet about e-books, and Amazon helped them assuage their fears.

As the blogosphere has pointed out, this is like a publisher getting skittish and arranging for the bookseller to bust into your home after a purchase and taking it back from you, leaving you a cheque. This sounds ridiculous because it would never happen: there's no reason to do it, and it's wildly impractical, to say nothing of illegal. It could never happen if the Kindle were actually book-like.

But what happened here demonstrates why the Kindle is nothing like a book. The situation is the same: a publisher got skittish and wanted the books back. The differences? Amazon had a reason (they got bullied by the publisher and caved), it wasn't that hard to do (they had the technology to delete stuff post-purchase), and they presumably had the legal rights to do so (I can only imagine what the end user license agreements on that are). Same same, but different.

The practical compu-nerd in me can't help but wonder why the post-purchase deletion option even existed. If it didn't, Amazon would have tied its own hands and prevented themselves from being bullied. "Sorry, the book is out there.." they'd reply, in a tone reserved for publishers who got itchy about that whole 'printing press' technology, "...we can't go break into their houses, even if photocopiers make you a little skittish."

The actual computer-nerd realizes that it's something that would be fun to put in as a feature. "Not only can you put books on there, but you retain master control and can delete them! Woohooo!"

And outside that realm there's the realization that people in the content creation/distribution business (be they book publishers, movie producers, software developers, etc) have been shifting this idea of ownership out of our hands for some time.

Those of us playing PC games saw this awhile ago: I can buy a video game, but I can't give anyone else a copy. That sounds reasonable. But sometimes the technology means I can't even lend it to a friend. It sometimes means I can't play it at all, such as when my Red Alert CD developed a hole in it (CDs, as you know, aren't permanent, they eventually start to degrade), and the copy protection refused to play without a working disk in the drive, and I was given the option of paying $15 for a new replacement CD. Thanks, but no thanks.

So our concept of ownership has already been slapped in the face and we seem to be okay with it. We still buy video games and we still buy DVDs. What's new here is that it's not about video games or movies or music. It's about books. Trusted technology that changed the world in a bygone era and trigger feelings of nostalgia that are hard to replace. Most of us have a relationship with books that's a bit more emotional, more memory-filled, than the one we have with video games or DVDs. Amazon's been trying to get us to let go of page flipping by trying to make it seem as close as possible to the old thing. Their actions fly in the face of this effort.

And that's why I'm not buying a Kindle.

Link:

NY Times: http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/some-e-books-are-more-equal-than-others/

Monday, July 6, 2009

Back to Halifax

So we've undergone a temporal warp dear imaginary audience. I have not posted since Vietnam, and much has happened since then. A quick summary might include:

1. I returned to Canada.
2. I graduated from law school.
3. I am renting a place in Toronto, occupancy to begin August 1.

Right now I'm in Fredericton, NB, on the way back from Ottawa (brief stopover on the way to Toronto). I can't wait to see my girlfriend again. Is that lame? Am I now lame?

Yes to both, and strangely enough I don't actually care.

Note to Self: The drive from Ottawa to Fredericton is WAY longer than 7 hours. Boy did I miscalculate.

Monday, May 4, 2009

Why translation engines are awesome

I bought a cell phone here. I dialed a number to see how much money I have left. It printed stuff out in Vietnamese. I'm using Vdict.com to figure out what it means. The translations are brilliant. Google kind of makes sense. EvTran is bizarre beyond belief:

Quy khach Co 41844 Dong Trong Tai

Khoan chinh va 46701 Dong Trong Tai

Khoan Thuong. Thoi han su dung den 07/08/2009.

First Result (by Google):

You have 41844 line in.

Primary and Drilling 46701 line in.

Khoan Thuong. A restricted lifetime den 07/08/2009.

Second Result (by EvTran):

Convert khach Shrink 41844 intra-aural arrow-root.

Adenoid vegetation drill chinh 46701 intra-aural arrow-root.

Drill Thuong. Dung verdigris su Spindle is laced 07/08/2009.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Fried Rice and German Paramedic May Cure Sprain

I'll try to keep this brief detailed updates to follow when time permits:

  • I'm in Hanoi now.
  • Shortly before leaving I sprained my ankle in Saigon.
  • Emily's friend Caroline is a paramedic.
  • I definitely failed to bring the tensor bandage I considered bringing.
  • Caroline knows of something called Emulgel, a contact cream that reduces pain and swelling. Between early ice, the cream, Caroline's brilliant bandage wrapping, and my paranoid obsession with elevation, I now feel as though my ankle is fine.
  • Unlike Saigon, almost everything in Hanoi is closed at night and the streets are dark and eerie...
  • ... but you can find food if you limp around long enough.
  • My ankle only started to feel fine after I ate fried rice so maybe it helped cure my sprain.
  • Monday, April 27, 2009

    Cu Chi Tunnels

    P1000256The Cu Chi Tunnels were a series of tunnels in southern Vietnam used by the Vietcong to fight off American forces. They're located a short distance outside Saigon, and they're a popular visiting point for tourists.

    8:30 a.m. and we're on a bus fighting it's way out of Vietnam through insane traffic. We're on a tour with some 20 odd other people, and Mr. Binh ("Mr. Bean", as he likes to refer to himself) is telling us the story of his life. Naturally, I'm not able to verify anything, but can only recite his life story as told.

    His goal was to be a doctor, but the war interrupted his plans. His mother had concerns for his safety and sent him to the United States to be with his father. A dual U.S. citizen, he trained with the U.S. Navy, since his father was American.

    He says he never saw actual combat, and after training a large part of his work was recovering remains of US soldiers along the Mekong Delta. After the war, he was arrested and spent 4 and a half years in a re-education camp where the communist officers running the place were apparently quite friendly and explained a lot about their tactics used.

    By the time he got out, his family home was seized, all the money in his accounts went missing, and his 7 siblings had fled as boat people. With no way to contact his family, and his mother having passed away, there wasn't much left for him, so he worked as a smuggler to survive, smuggling luxury goods into the country past the U.S. embargo.

    Then something happened. Bill Clinton came to visit Vietnam and normalized relations, ending the embargo. The internet and Coca-Cola come pouring into the country. Shortly thereafter, he is tracked down on the internet by some of his siblings, who were looking for the brother they left behind.

    Later on he got a job as a tour guide which he continues to do to this day. At some point, one of his clients offered to help him publish a story about his war experiences, "Three Moons in Vietnam" which was published in London. And one of his brothers, who works for NBC in New York, wants to help him publish his biography. He's doing well, and he's proud of his children, the oldest of which is on finishing his father's dream and becoming a doctor.

    He really likes Bill Clinton for dropping the embargo, and was pleased about John McCain's recent visit to Vietnam, emphasizing that the war is over and that everyone gets along now. With the embargo dropped, communications was available and his siblings have gotten in touch with him.

    He thinks Oliver Stone movies are crap, and he hates how it bashes the Americans. He insists the Americans had no choice either once they were there. He isn't a fan of Ho Chi Minh, but respects him. He explains why: when the Vietnam War broke out, various communist countries offered to send their forces into Vietnam to fight against the Americans. While Ho Chi Minh accepted financial and technical assistance, he refused to let non-Vietnamese fight, recognizing that it would trigger a much larger war and probably believing that this was a nationalist struggle for an independent Vietnam, not a battle between ideologies. Sure enough, the Wikipedia entry on Ho Chi Minh points out that as a young man, he wrote to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, asking him for support in expelling the French from Vietnam, wanting to found a free Vietnam on the same principles as the Declaration of Independence, but was ignored. It was Soviet and Chinese assistance that helped expel the French during the Indochina War.

    But, enough history, on to the actual tunnels.

    They're insane. They span for kilometers underground, consist of as many as three levels at some points, metres below ground, with regular air vents and zig zags (similar to trenches, to make it more difficult for attackers to shoot straight down the line).

    The tour itself begins with a bit of a weird propaganda video. Not only is the content of the video rather campy (black and white, extolling the virtues of the people who fought against the French and the Americans, all in black and white), but it's played on a very small monitor at the far end of a huge hall, making the experience that much weirder.

    P1000236Then Mr. Bean shows us a map detailing the extent of the Cu Chi tunnels. They go all over the damn place, and apparently at one point the Americans had even built a military base on top of the tunnels itself, without realizing it. Wikipedia claims there was shooting going on there, that the VC would take potshots at soldiers in the base, but Mr. Bean disagrees. He says that, according to the communist soldiers guarding him in prison, that they'd go and steal weapons and supplies, and sometimes food and beer, from the base at night, but that they would never open fire from inside, because they didn't want to reveal the location of the base. Because the 5.56mm round used by the M16 was smaller than the 7.62mm round used in the AK-47s, the VC were able to modify stolen M16 bullets for use in AK-47s.. or maybe it was that they'd modify the AK-47 itself, I don't really know, the point being that there was a handy source of ammunition located directly above the Cu Chi tunnels at one point.

    The tunnels spanned all the way to the river, which was used as an escape point. The three levels of the tunnels served various functions. The top level was used for combat and movement. The middle level was used primarily for communications, with runners going back and forth. The lowest level was intended for escape. The top level was often setup in a grid formation to avoid traffic jams, so that if some fighting was occurring in one area, the maximum number of soldiers could get from A to B. Regular air vents, carefully concealed in bamboo rods, were shot up at regular intervals to maintain circulation.

    P1000229The multiple levels and directions of the tunnels served another, more sinister, purpose. Like the jungles around them, the tunnels were loaded with traps. There's a bit of a gory exhibit showing some of the common traps used by the VC. A lot of them involved taking metal spikes (the raw material obtained courtesy of bombs delivered by the Americans), coating them in feces or other disease causing substances, and leaving them hidden under a trap door, or shooting out of the sides, or in all manner of unpleasant systems.

    P1000235The tunnels, aside from the obvious advantages of mobility and access, provided the VC with the ability to snipe the Americans from almost any direction. Mr. Bean took us to a patch of ground, saying "This is one of the sniping tunnels, it's very small".. and looking down we couldn't see a single thing. Sweeping aside the stuff covering it revealed a tiny little door, barely a foot wide, that led into the Cu Chi tunnels. Apparently snipers would crouch in here, then pop up, snipe at someone, and dive back down. The odds of finding the hole were small, and even if it was found, the sniper would be long gone.

    As a result of this kind of activity, American efforts to combat the tunnels were fairly intensive. They tried flooding them, gassing them, filling them with petrol and setting them aflame, but these methods were grossly ineffective, probably because the tunnels were so expansive, but also because the multiple levels allowed the VC to easily block off a tunnel that was being flooded, etc. Some parts of the tunnels were actually intentionally underwater, so that people had to swim up into them, providing an easy escape directly into the rivers, etc.

    The next effort involved sending men down there. Unfortunately the tunnels are tiny. They're cramped and claustrophobic, unless you're very small, which the Vietnamese tended to be (at least compared to the average American soldier). According to the propaganda video we watched, some of the fighters were actually women villagers. We had the opportunity to climb through the tunnels, and Cam immediately recognized her claustrophobia, offering to meet us on the other side. THB and Caroline gamely tried it, but THB was moving so slowly through the tunnels I couldn't help but burst out laughing.. and either my laughter or the narrow darkness of the tunnels led her to escape out the exit (the sample tunnel you climb through actually had additional exits every 30 metres for tourists to get out).

    Mr. Bean also pointed out another way that the small size of Vietnamese soldiers helped: the Vietnamese have this weird squatting ability. They can squat down, and sit on their lower legs, with their feet flat on the ground. They can actually sit like this and even fall asleep in this position. In the jungle you could be right beside a fellow crouched like this and not even notice him. Apparently the VC would practice firing from this position.

    The American soldiers sent to fight through the tunnels (known as "Tunnel Rats") were smaller men, normally latin american or filipino in ethnicity, and their casualty rates were extremely high because of the large number of traps I described, plus the fact that they were no doubt being fired upon in unfamiliar tunnels. Being a Tunnel Rat seems like the worst job in the Vietnam War.

    The next strategy involved training dogs and sending them, but again the traps were so seriously gory, and the casualty rates of the dogs so high, that their handlers would eventually refuse to send them into the tunnels. Furthermore, the training of the dogs involved teaching them to attack people who smelled like the Vietnamese, and the dogs wouldn't attack anyone who bathed in american soap or smoked american cigarettes, etc. The VC began stealing these sorts of supplies to mask their odour from the dogs, and began using vietnamese smells, such as vietnamese food, as lures to their dog-killing traps.

    Bombing was also frequently used, although most of it was less than useless. The earth around the area is clay, and the bombing only turned the tunnels into hardened ceramic bunkers. The real success came with bunker-buster bombs that were able to bore through the ground and explode sometime after penetrating. Still, the use of these bombs required a degree of accuracy in targeting the actual tunnels, and while the VC were afraid of them, they came too late and too infrequently to neutralize the threat posed by the tunnels.

    I suppose the moral of the story is that, between the Indochina War, the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese intervention into Cambodia, and the brief skirmishes with the Chinese, is that you probably don't want to get in a war with the Vietnamese. The tunnels are testament to the morbid ingenuity of their forces, exploiting every possible advantage against a more modern army.

    Saigon Traffic, Jason Stratham, and Sim Cards

    Everyone who's travelled around a lot of Vietnam describes Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City on the maps, though everyone who lives in the city or around it calls it Saigon) as "dull".

    Maybe it's my first time in Vietnam (or Asia, for that matter), but my impression is anything but. Traffic is, as advertised, a psychotic morass of motorcycles. Most intersections are literal free for alls, an orchestra of motorcycles and cars and bicycles traveling in every single direction, to the left or the right of each other, sometimes (though rarely, and only in certain spots) cutting corners on sidewalks if necessary.

    P1000176Crossing these streets requires a little bit of faith. You step into traffic and everything weaves around you. Just go slow and steady and let the traffic flow around you. If you freeze, you could get stuck there for awhile. Honking is a tool to inform moving obstructions on the road that you're behind them and they need to move out of the way, or a warning to let them know you're coming close and they better keep steady, so it's nearly constant.

    Some intersections have lights. These lights, from what I've seen, are obeyed. The problem is that traffic doesn't yield, so pedestrians on the blessed side of the lights still have to take that leap of faith because some of the traffic with the green light is turning in your direction, and they're not stopping at all, and they're not changing course unless you're already in the way.

    I think I got the hang of it pretty quickly. It might be that the trip to New York honed my skills, though really it's a different kind of game. New York drivers can stop on a dime. If the Vietnamese can, they sure don't. If I ever plan a heist, I want a driver from Vietnam. Cam said she prefers Jason Stratham, which I had to concede was probably a decent choice. But let's assume he's busy and outside of our price range: then we'd go Vietnamese.

    The sea of motorcycles that never stop has one huge benefit: teleportation powers. You can find one anywhere. Anyone on a motorbike is happy to give you a ride. So for about a dollar you can cover huge distances in a vehicle that keeps moving irrespective of the traffic. The catch is you have to be willing to sit on the back of a motorbike, speeding along (they give you a helmet, update: Saigon always has helmets. Not the case in Hanoi, where nobody seems to wear helmets).

    The locals multitask their butts off, the driver moving along while the person in the back is on their phone chatting, or hawking wares, or reading, or eating, or more often just sitting there, but not gripping the driver's shoulders with a death grip, for which I would have a reputation if there were any less than fifty trillion gazillion billion jillion of these bikes (called xe oms) around.

    I also discovered that, again, as advertised, the prices you are quoted are exorbitantly high unless you demonstrate you know what the going rate is from day one. I'm not into the whole bargaining game, so usually if a price is unreasonable I just say no thank you and go somewhere else. The cyclo drivers here are the worst, in my experience. Or maybe they're just the best bargainers, I don't know. The xe oms were easier to work with, in my experience. The added benefit was the ability to get to places whose locations you were unaware of. I only had one driver who had to be shown my map for lack of knowledge of the city. It happened one other time, but only because my pronounciation of Vietnamese appears to border on the cryptographic. "Hong Hoah Hotel" comes out sounding, when they say it, "Hong hu-wa" or "Hong hwa". But when I try to say the same thing, I get blank stares. I suspect it's an inflection thing. Or my crap hearing.

    Favourite Moments

    P1000211P1000214
  • After getting hosed by a Cyclo driver, I sat in the park facing the Cathedral and foolishly thought I could read my Vietnam guidebook in peace. 30 seconds later, a girl approached me and tried to sell me postcards, eventually I got her to go away. It's a bit early to be sending postcards, what with me still having frequent internet access. Then another fellow, Malaysian in origin, in turned out, came by and just chatted with me. He had a guide badge on his shirt so I expected a pitch, but we just had a pleasant conversation for awhile.. he came to Vietnam and met his wife while working here years ago, and he's been living in Vietnam for the last 35 years. He was shocked when I spoke good english, and was curious about the fact that I was asian and living in Canada. I suppose they do get a lot more asian tourists from Asia around here. In the end it turns out he thought I was Vietnamese in origin and was wondering why the hell I was reading a guide book. Unfortunately, our conversation was interrupted by a shoe shiner who rushed in and tried to pitch some cleaning and repairs for my shoes. I tried to explain to him that the shoes were dying, that we had to let them die, and that it would be cruel to do otherwise, and eventually he went on his way.


  • In the MobiFone (Vietnamese telecom company) office, I was treated like royalty by extremely helpful staff who made what was basically a completely byzantine pay-as-you-go sim card purchasing process involving 3 different people at different booths. The security guard, who looked like he was 14 (and, strangely enough, looked a lot like my cousin Laurent when he was younger) led me around from place to place, and though he spoke almost no english, was able to understand my concerns and went out of his way to act like the patron saint of customer assistance. The girl at the counter even kindly opined that she'd drive me to my next location, but she had to work.



  • After my xe om driver takes a phone call while driving (The verb "driving" doesn't quite do justice to how fast and furious we were moving. Let's just say it involved things like performing an insurance-voiding hairpin turn beside a bus, cutting across traffic without slowing down in the equivalent of what would be running a red light in Canada, but without the light.. basically recklessly not yielding), and I release 50% of my death grip on his shoulders just long enough to check that my helmet is in fact still properly attached to my head, he drops me off at my location then apologizes because, although he had promised me a ride back, he had to go get a beer with a friend. It wasn't any inconvenience to me, since xe oms are everywhere, and I have huge respect for anyone with their life priorities straight. :)


  • Things I learned:

    1. Pho 24 is, as the guidebooks say, a Pho chain. It's not spectacular. It's not crappy. But it is, well, basically overpriced Pho in a probably more sanitary environment. You feel like you ate at a MacDonalds, but you got Pho, which I suppose is better, but I'm not sure why.

    2. Shoe shining is the world's largest non-skill skill in a very warm, laid back tourist area. Nobody is wearing footwear that needs shining. Even if they did, they're tourists, and not at the Bellagio.

    P1000213 P1000215
    3. The French post office across the Cathedral is quite pretty, and the Vinaphone people will happily take your sim card back if you realize your phone is still locked because you're an idiot.