chrisstreeter.com

I’ve had a bunch of ideas recently for my travel page that I’ve wanted to implement.  However, in order to implement them, I’ve needed to rewrite the Javascript that powers the page.  I chose to use the my travel page that I’ve wanted to implement.  However, in order to implement them, I’ve needed to rewrite the Javascript that powers the page.  I chose to use the Prototype Javascript framework due to my familiarity with it and its browser compatibility.  After some time spent rewriting the code, I was able to get the page back to the same feature set (for only like the 5th time).

The rewrite has allowed me to quickly and easily add two new features to the page.  The first feature is the ability to view track segments.  This means that I can have a track that is broken up into segments, and each segment can be shown individually.  Currently, I don’t have any trips that have track segments, but I may start taking advantage of that in the future.

Second, when no trip is selected on the travel page, something interesting is displayed.  Now, all trips are aggregated together and shown on the map.  So so you can get an idea of all the places I’ve been at a glance.  Note that right now the page load is really slow.  I know this and I know why it is slow, and I’ve got plans to address it.

As a final note, I’ve tested the page on Safari 3.1.1, Firefox 3.x and IE 7.  With other browsers, your mileage may vary.  And seriously, stop using IE, please.  It hurts the internet.

For a long time I’ve had a photo section on my site. Initially, I wrote the code that just searched through a directory structure for pictures that I had stuck in there. This worked fine for what I initially wanted, but didn’t scale well. Plus, it was quite slow. At the time, this stressed my PHP abilities and so I searched for better solutions. What I found was the open source Gallery. This solution worked well for me for the past several years. Since when I was hosted on Berkeley’s OCF servers to today’s more robust hosting with my own domain name.

However, I’ve just begun to realize that this solution is no longer viable for me. I’ve realized that my flickr and facebook accounts give me a much greater visibility in a much more social environment. In addition, the point of me having photos on my site was to share them family and friends. At this point now, I would have to post pictures in three places. And since each place has different privacy controls, I couldn’t just post the same pictures to each place.

All this so far is just to say that I’ve decided to leverage the power of Wordpress, and install the FAlbum plugin. So now all the pictures on my site are from my flickr account, which will allow me to more easily manage them. With this change, photos.chrisstreeter.com is now deprecated and has started pointing at the new location of my photos. FAlbum lets you view the photos just fine embedded in my site, but one will have to go to flickr in order to comment on them, which I encourage people to do. As you can see above, I can also now embed pictures from my album into my posts really easily, which is something else I’ve been wanting to do for quite some time. All in all, I think this is a great change.

So I’m actually color blind. Most people who know me also know this, and I always get the same questions over and over: “What color does this look like?” Or, “What color is this?”. These aren’t the easiest questions to answer all the time, because what I see looks normal to me. Red looks like red, blue looks like blue. The hard part comes in when I have to distinguish a color by its shade. For example, if someone put up something that was carmine, I would say that it was red and not know that it wasn’t actually red, but a darker red (for those wondering, I had to look up what pigments of red were on wikipedia). However, if you were to put two swatches next to each other, one of which was red and one of which was carmine, I’m pretty sure that I could tell them apart, especially if there was a sharp line between the two.

The other interesting part is that I can’t match colors. So I’ve always had trouble with picking out clothes, hence my distaste for shopping (for non-electronics items). But that is a different story.

A former co-worker decided to find out more information about color blindness and wanted to see what it looked like for me. My co-worker happened to come across this amazing cross-platform application called the Color Oracle. After running the application on your computer, you can change the entire screen to resemble what a color blind person is seeing. The application simulates three types of color blindness, deuteranopia, protanopia and tritanopia. Wikipedia has some good information on each of them. So back to the Color Oracle. After installing it, if I run it and check out what the three types look like, I’m definitely protanopia. I uploaded two screen shots of my desktop here so you can see how they compare.

The picture on the left is normal vision, while the picture on the right has the protanopia filter turned on. To me, they both look the same. I’ve been really facinated by this application and have been showing to tons of people. Try it out yourself and let me know how it works for you.

After arriving in Singapore quite late and subsequently getting little sleep, the next two days can best be described as me acclimating to Singapore, in more ways than one. Not only is there a 15 hour time difference (midnight in Santa Barbara is 3pm in Singapore), but there is also a hotter and more humid environment, better food, friendly people and more.

So to begin my first day in Singapore, I proceeded to get a cab to the office I would be working at. I had no idea where this office was located; all I knew was the address and the name, “The Comtech Building”. I gave both of these pieces of information, along with the name of the company I was visiting, and got a ride to 438 Alexandra Rd. This was indeed the location of the company I was visiting (there was a big sign for them), but was not the right address. The address I had been given was 60 Alexandra Terrace. The cab driver went inside and asked, then came out declaring this the right place. So I gathered my heavy books and left the cab, which quickly drove off. I asked the attendant inside where to go, and he told me I had the wrong building. So I doubt the cab driver asked him anything. Luckily, the other building wasn’t too far away, which gave me my first chance to walk in the nice Singapore heat and humidity. By the time I reached the right building, carrying my heavy books, I was sweating tremendously. The fact that all buildings are heavily air conditioned sure helped. After kind of cooling off, I proceeded to the right lobby and got checked in, feeling very unclean the rest of the day. The day went smoothly enough, with me coming close to falling asleep during one of the exercises from sheer exhaustion.

Lunch gave me my first taste of food in Singapore, a sea food soup with ‘Mee’ (noodles). It was quite good and I impressed the people in my class with my willingness to eat outside of the usual “American” stereotype foods such as McDonalds and KFC. I would proceed to eat lunch for the next 4 work days in the building’s cafeteria, called BUrP (which is short for something that I’ve no idea).

That night, I had big plans to explore the area around my hotel, however, after getting there at 7pm, I fell asleep pretty quickly, fully clothed. I woke up later around midnight and fell asleep again until about 5:30am, but feeling refreshed.

Thursday, my second day in Singapore, was much less eventful. I ate an extremely expensive breakfast at the hotel (~S$30 == ~US$21), which was not worth it, and would be my last meal at the hotel. I was able to get a cab to the right location this time and arrived feeling better than the day before, in terms of cleanliness and wakefulness.

This day I had chicken rice, a dish Singapore is known for. The basic premise is to take a chicken, boil it whole, and then immediately sink it in ice water. This causes the chicken to solidify a bit and the skin to come off easily. Then, using the water the chicken is boiled in, they make rice, creating very flavorful rice that they stick chicken on top of. One can add a sort of condensed and sweetened soy sauce as well that makes for a delicious meal.

The evening was spent wandering around Orchard road, where my hotel was at, partly to see the sights, and partly to just keep myself awake longer to continue the acclimation. Something that seemed readily apparent how much consumption seems to go on in Singapore. For several miles it seemed that the streets were just lined with huge shopping malls full of (I’m guessing) designer brands. And people were still packing into stores at 10:30pm. Granted, the next day was a holiday, but there still seemed to be a ton of people.

During my stroll, I began to notice how clean Singapore is. Singapore seemed much cleaner than many places even in the US. In addition, there are tons of McDonalds. But even more so, there are more 7-Eleven’s than I have ever seen. Big and small 7-Elevens are everywhere. I makes me a bit sad to see them everywhere as they become the thing that we export to other countries, and become a symbol with which American’s are associated with.

Starting the morning of March 17th, 2008, I began what is my first international trip of the year. I started keeping an even more detail journal of my travels this trip, and will be slowly posting them online here. Below is what I’ve written up on just the trip to Singapore.

After getting back from Mammoth with Green Hills around 10:30pm, Sunday night, I proceeded to pack for my 3 week trip to Southeast Asia. Around 1am on Monday, I was finished (or content that I was finished). 4 hours and 15 minutes later, I was awake. Shortly after that, my sister Megan picked me up for the short journey to the airport. I arrived a fair bit earlier than I should have, but after my debacle with going to India the first time, I didn’t want to take chances. So I got to sit at the airport for a while.

The flight to San Francisco was uneventful and short. At SFO, I only had to wait a short while for my buddy Marcus to arrive. Coincidentally, Marcus was on the same flight as me to Hong Kong, though he would be staying in Hong Kong while I was continuing on to Singapore. I used my skills (ie. membership) to get both of us into the Red Carpet Club, where we hung out for a bit waiting for the flight. Just before Marcus did arrive however, our other roommate from college, Joe, got a ticket to come to meet Marcus and I in Thailand after my stay in Singapore. So now it will be all three of us exploring the Andaman coast of Thailand. Basically, a really awesome time.

For the flight to Hong Kong, I had gotten a business class upgrade. I tried no less than 3 times to also get Marcus an upgrade with one of my vouchers. However, he had a free ticket from airline miles, and the computers would not let anyone upgrade him. So when getting on the Boeing 747 airplane, instead of sitting in my seat, 24H, I sat in 24G. When Marcus got on a short while later, I had him sit down in my seat. For the time being, it seemed as though the staff was buying it. Near the end of boarding, some guy got on the plane and wanted to sit where I was, in 24G, because that was his seat. He was really cool and didn’t ask too many questions, and just moved on, after Marcus almost moved back to the Economy cabin. Unfortunately, upon taking off, one of the stewards counted the number of people in business class and started checking off people from the passenger manifest. While he was going around, Marcus and I came up with a pretty good back story. It turned out that Marcus’ seat was actually 34. So the seat change could have been an honest mistake. Plus we would say that the counter told us we were sitting next to each other on the flight because they had moved Marcus into business class. All this happened right before the flight took off, so maybe it didn’t make it into the plane’s passenger list. After about 30-45 minutes of flight, and us confusing the steward a bit, Marcus had to move to his original seat.

One of the perks of international flights is the free drinks. Marcus took more advantage of them than I did, but the several that I had definitely helped me fall asleep the second time on the 14 hour flight. During the flight, I went to hang out with Marcus twice until forced to move forward to my seat because of the seat belt light. On the flight, I was talking to one of the stewards about my trip, and mentioned that I was going to be going to Phuket in Thailand. He then gave me some great tips about where to go and what to check out.

Upon landing in Hong Kong, the air was some combination of fog, smog, clouds and or smoke. Unfortunately, the air quality prevented me from seeing any of the city as we landed. So my impression of Hong Kong is pretty much limited to the airport. At that time, Marcus and I parted ways for 3 days. He then took off to explore Hong Kong, while I got to go work for 2 days. I went through the security checkpoint and waited for my next flight in the airport lounge. My third and final flight to Singapore was an uneventful trip. However, I did get to sit on the upper deck of the 747.

The arrival at Singapore was a bit early as the plane made good time on the 4 hour flight. Thus I got in around 11:10pm, instead of 11:30pm. But any savings by getting in early was quickly wiped out by the extremely long customs line. In Singapore, there is only one customs line, and after you get your passport stamped, you grab your bags and can leave the airport. I didn’t get asked once to see what was in my bag (though I’m sure my checked luggage x-rayed). This amounted to the easiest, though longest, customs I’d ever been through. After exiting with my bags, I caught a taxi for the trip to my hotel. Along the ride, my driver was very chatty and I was able to learn quite a bit about Singapore from the relatively quick ride. After finishing the long journey, checking in, I was finally able to fall asleep around 1am, only to wake up around 5 1/2 hours later, which was an hour before my alarm clock.

That covers just my trip to Singapore. I’ll leave my first several days for another post to come soon.

I fixed up the RSS link for my site. So now people should be able to get updates more easily.

I just added my GPS log of what I’ve done so far on my trip to Singapore. I also took a quick trip up to Johor Bahru in Malaysia, just across the border of Singapore, for a bite to eat for dinner. So far the trip has been awesome and I’m hoping to post some journal entries soon.

I’ve been recently working on updating my travel page. Part of the reason is that with the old page, everything was done with javascript, and thus was not good for search engines. Plus, it made the page much slower, and harder to work with. As part of the front-end change, I rewrote the back-end. Now, the back-end should be much better than previously and quite a bit faster. The back-end previously was in python, which was running as a CGI script, which took forever. The new version, in PHP, is going to be much more optimized. In addition, rather than loading all the GPX files at once, I now only load one GPX file at a time, cutting down on load time. And finally, now I can link to individual trips.

I’ve got a new domain! I just secured the domain chrisstreeter.com! Previously, I only had chrisstreeter.net, which was nice and all, but .net just isn’t at the same level as a .com TLD. I set up some 301 redirects on my old domain which should make the transition as painless as possible for people.

The only downside is my search engine ranking. I was the number one hit for Chris Streeter on Google and number two on Yahoo. The domain name change will, invariably, affect the rankings, but it is for the best. A temporary hit now to become the number one Chris Streeter now, and hopefully, the number one Streeter eventually.

Below is a copy of an email that I sent out from India on October 18, 2007 about my journey and experiences there.

So it’s now my 4th day in India and I thought I should send an email. Plus, I got sleep last night and am not struggling to stay awake during the breaks in my class. This is a long email simply because I wanted to record this stuff for my own records and figured while recording it, I might as well send it out as a status email. As they say: kill two birds with one stone.

I got into India on Monday morning around Midnight after a very long set of flights (~25 hours of travel time from Santa Barbara to India). The best part was that my luggage was not lost! At the airport, I met my driver (who is my personal driver for the week) who took me to the hotel. By the time I got to the hotel, it was around 1am on Monday. After barely noticing how nice the hotel was, I popped half an Ambien and fell asleep… to awake at 5am. I wasn’t meeting my driver until 8am. I laid in bed for a good hour before conceding that I was not going to fall asleep. I started watching some TV and got caught up on world events in India, Hong Kong and Australia, the three English speaking places nearby that the English news covered. This was of course unless I wanted to watch cricket on ESPN or the other 5 cricket channels covering a repeat of THE SAME MATCH.

Finally I met my driver and we proceeded to drive the 5 or so miles to the company’s office in 30 minutes. This was my first taste of driving in India. It was so late the night before that the roads were almost deserted and I the driving didn’t seem too weird. In Brazil, I thought those drivers were crazy. I’m pretty sure Indian drivers win the craziness battle. I don’t think I’d like to drive myself in India. First, there are motorcycles and mopeds everywhere. Second, the people (men and women) zigzag everywhere. And not just the people on the two wheels! Cars and trucks and busses too! They are apparently allowed to do this because of the overwhelming use of horns. I thought that horns were overused in Brazil, and now Brazil looks like the drivers use their horns as sparingly as possible. Here, excessive horn use seems very necessary because of the way people drive. People need the horn to tell someone that they are about to zip by them, or that the truck in front of you is about to push you off the road as it moves to the left, or that the auto-rickshaw in front of you is going to slow while driving down the center of the road and you want to pass it. In addition, there aren’t many traffic rules, or the rules that do exist aren’t followed. I’m glad that someone else is doing the driving for me. It is interesting that the ~5 miles to the office from my hotel takes at least 30 minutes and up to 1 1/2 hours simply because there are just so many vehicles, motorcycles, mopeds, people and bicycles using the roadways.

Upon arriving at the office, I was presented with a bushel of flowers. Yes, a bushel. I still haven’t decided what to do with them and they are slowly dying in my hotel room. The class went smoothly enough the first day, though some people in the class had a hard time understanding my “accent”, and I theirs. For lunch we had the Indian specialty, Dominoes pizza. This quite surprised me as I was expecting traditional South Indian cuisine. Though the pizza wasn’t bad, I asked my hosts if we could try to stick to more traditional foods since I can get Dominoes in the states (which I did have on the previous Friday night at home). After little sleep and Dominoes for lunch, the rest of the afternoon went by quick. I’m pretty sure this was because I was partially asleep. I can specifically remember points of time where I don’t remember what I had previously been talking about. However, I seemed to be getting the information across fairly accurately, at least from my questions and observations.

Since then, I’ve gotten slightly more sleep. In an effort to adjust to the time, I haven’t let myself go to bed before 10. However, I keep waking up between 4 and 5am. I think it’s the fact that India is 12 1/2 hours different than home, which is like suddenly deciding to be awake the opposite of what you normally do. I’ve tried with and without Ambien with the same success. Finally, last night, I was able to sleep in to a bit after 6 (without the use of drugs), which felt like heaven as I got a full 7 1/2 hours of rest. Today I feel like a new person, and am quite confident I will be able to finish the afternoon fully conscious.

The people here in India have so far been very nice. In fact, they tend to stop walking and stand against a wall and nod at me while saying “How are you today sir? Have a good day, sir.”. It feels a little weird because almost everyone does it, which makes me feel pretty uncomfortable. I really don’t like it when I’m walking, and someone notices me coming, stops whatever they were doing just to acknowledge me. I feel like I’ve been inconveniencing so many people just by walking around. Also, I’ve never been called “sir” so often, by so many different people before. This is really a new experience for me. I guess I’m not used to a life of luxury and service. Between the luxury hotel and the office I’m at, I have constant food and beverage service. At the office it feels especially weird because I think that the engineers I’m teaching don’t even have access to the services I get. And it all happens right in front of them.

In my class, most of the people are very quiet and seem almost intimidated by me. I’m reminded by my experience in Germany while visiting my buddy Jan. Some of the people I met in Germany had never met an American before and were nervous about using their English skills because they didn’t want to be embarrassed. It took some alcohol before they opened up and started talking to me. I get the same feeling of nervousness here with some of my students. I’m pretty sure I’m the first American many of them have ever encountered, and even though English is an almost universal language here (almost every sign is in English), I think the students have trouble getting over their fear of speaking with me.

So far my explorations of Chennai haven’t been too exciting. The sun sets before 6pm, and I get out of work at 6, so I’ve got no daylight to really do much exploring (the mornings have been spent attempting to fall back asleep, catching up on work or reading about where I should go for my vacation days). Last night I did decide to explore on foot around my hotel. I went for a little walk, and got myself into a position I’d like to describe as down a dark road in an unfamiliar place. I wouldn’t consider myself lost, as I knew how to get back to where I had started, but I had gone several miles along the loop I was walking, and so turning around wasn’t an option. Plus, I knew that I was very close to completing the loop since my sense of direction and position is superb. So I had to wander around some sketchy, dark places, with various people staring at me from driveways or the occasional motorcycle honking at me as it past. If it wasn’t for the fact that I had my Nikon and ~$50 in Indian Rupees (a lot of money) with me, I wouldn’t have been nervous. I’m pretty sure I could have taken anybody that attempted to grab my stuff, but I didn’t want the situation to come to fisticuffs. Besides the dark alleys at the end of the walk, the walk was interesting as I got to see a wider spectrum of life in the city. Something I’ve noticed that contrasts with my experience in Brazil is the absence of physical separation of wealth. What I mean, is that in Brazil, there is definitely a poor community and a wealthy community; the neighborhoods are separate. Here in India, I have not been able to see that separation. While the social separation of wealth does still exist, I feel that the poor live right next to the wealthy. I am not sure if that is simply because Chennai is more populous than Rio is, and so there just isn’t space to create that separation, or if there is some other factor I’m unaware of. Even in the newer, supposedly more expensive neighborhoods, there are still government subsidized slums, which apparently rent for somewhere around 100 Rupees per month. These units have a single room that also contains a kitchen. The bathrooms are shared between units. As a comparison, my hotel room is 10,000 Rupees per night. These buildings are right next door to buildings of the same size but where rent can be over 50 times as expensive. Walking around also give one an idea of some of the poverty in India, which I’m really glad I get to see; it makes me appreciate what I’ve got so much more.

Since Chennai is more of a business oriented city, and is a city that was pretty much founded by the British as a trading post, so it doesn’t have many interesting Indian places, I’ve been planning on going somewhere else in India. As of my flight departing for India, I had no idea where to go or what to do. But now I have finally decided what my plans are after my class is over. From some suggestions of students in my class, I’m going to be taking a flight to Delhi in the north of India. Near Delhi is Agra, also known as the home of the famous Taj Mahal. Since I don’t have a specific plan to return to India, I’ve decided that I really should try to see one of the original 8 wonders of the world. I know very few people who have even been to India, yet almost everyone knows about the Taj Mahal, so seeing it in person has to be pretty cool. I fly out of Chennai on Saturday morning at 6:30am and then am planning on spending most of Saturday in Delhi exploring (what, I’m not yet sure), and then all day Sunday exploring Agra, i.e. the Taj Mahal. There are also a large number of other sights to see in Agra as well. Then on Monday, I’ll be flying out of Delhi back to Chennai at 6:30am. Since I have all day Monday to do stuff, I’m planning on visiting some nearby towns/cities to the south of Chennai that have cool temples and cave paintings. Then I come back to Chennai for my 1am flight on Tuesday back to the US. I’m really looking forward to those three days seeing a wider variety of India.

I’ve kept a GPS log of my current travels (from the US to India, from the airport to my hotel, from my hotel to work and from work to my hotel), and I’ve even uploaded that log to my website which you can check out at http://www.chrisstreeter.com/travel. In the right column, click “display” next to the India trip to display the tracks and waypoints. Then feel free to explore where my plane flight went and where some of the places in Chennai I’ve been. One thing that currently doesn’t work with the website is that it doesn’t show gaps in my track log; places where the GPS did not have signal, and so couldn’t record where I was. This is unfortunate because it looks like Iran is blocking GPS signals over its whole country (the line over Iran is very straight when you zoom in on because my scripts just connect the dots, where there is one dot on each end of Iran). The whole time we were flying over Iran, I couldn’t get a GPS signal. However, as soon as we left Iran’s airspace (or very close to leaving it), the GPS signal came back. I’m not positive that the signal was actually being blocked, but it sure seems likely given that the country is Iran. I haven’t done any research to see if this is actually the case, but I’d be interested to know if they do actually block GPS, or if it is possible. I guess Iran doesn’t want any GPS guided missiles or airplanes coming at it. I’m planning on keeping a log of my upcoming journeys as well, and those should be available sometime after I reach home.

So again, was just killing two birds with one stone by writing an email this long, so kudos to you if you made it all the way through.