Jason’s Random Thoughts

An interesting thing happened today. My long-time friend from Norway arrived in Japan for my upcoming wedding and, despite knowing this person for over seven years, we’ve never actually met in person. That is … until today. While some might find it odd that someone I’ve only spoken to online would be invited to my wedding, and others might think it just as odd for this same person to make the long flight from Norway to Japan, the fact that she’s done it only goes to show that friendship is not something that needs to be nurtured through real-life activities.

Yuni (which is not her real name), and I have been talking on IRC since 2001. Over the years we’ve shared triumphs, defeats, miserable moments and incredible highs. Despite the distances between us, ranging from just over 100 km when we were both living in Ontario, to over 10,000 km when we were living on two different contienents, we’ve always been close friends. So it should come as no surprise that she and I could get along just great in person, just as we could online … but it does.

Are We Wired More for Communication Than Reality?

It would have been unthinkable to consider someone whom we’ve only corresponded with in a disconnected fashion a close friend more than half a century ago, so why has it changed? Pen pals have existed as long as written language and some type of postal service, but somehow I doubt that these distant people would have been invited to a wedding, much less come from half-a-world away to attend. Yet with the advent of the internet, this is happening more and more all the time.

Reiko and I had a long-distance relationship for almost two years before I made the trek from Canada to Japan. At first, we actually found it more difficult to communicate in person than online, even though we had met in our countries quite often over the years we were “seeing each other” online. This, of course, became less of a problem as the weeks went on, but it nonetheless makes me wonder if the human brain is more wired for ethereal communication than it is real communication.

Or perhaps it’s just me.

I often joke and say that I live on the internet. This was certainly an apt thing to say during my bachelor years in Canada. I would often spend at least six hours a day on the internet, communicating through IRC, MSN (if I had to) or through a game such as Age of Empires. Over time, I learned to immerse myself into the online realm and see online persona’s as though they were real people. Sure, there would often be fake people … guys pretending to be girls for attention, people complaining about some tragic event that never actually happened … but we see this just as often in real life situations. Just like reality, we learn to spot these fake people from afar and keep our distance. Like the old mantra says: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

But with so many people slipping into their own little online worlds, becoming the very person they want to be seen as, are we seeing the emergence of a society where our geographical locations no longer matter? Are we seeing the emergence of a very real global society, where we can make real friends (and foes) from afar, and trust them just as much as the person who we grew up with?

The Fading Line

In my mind, there is no difference between a person I talk to online and a person I talk to at work. Sure, the communication medium is a little different, but aside from this, we’re still sharing information and receiving lots of subtext.

With face to face communication, we receive cues from a person’s facial expressions and body language. Online, we can see these same cues in the type of language used, the number or type of emoticons, and the general structure of the sentences. Regardless of whether we’re across the planet, or across the table, these little signals are things that we learn and identify the more we talk to someone. On top of this, most of us are sharing our pictures online, so we have a face to attach to a nickname or internet handle.

Regardless of whether this picture is real or not, it goes a long way to making someone a little more human in our mind’s eye … which is all that really matters when we’re seeking out a conversation or sense of belonging.

But is this a good thing?

This is a subject I’ve tried writing about on several occasions and have often failed miserably. Heck, this post here isn’t even worth hitting the “Publish” button over, but I’d like to get some opinions.

Yuni and I met at the Nagoya Airport, and it felt like I hadn’t seen her in 2 days … which is accurate because I was talking to her online only two days before. My other friends had landed 36 hours before her and, despite not seeing them since July of last year, I hadn’t realized the amount of time because I had spoken to them before they boarded the plane. The same is said for any one of my friends and family. I can literally go years without seeing them, thanks to the ease of the internet.

People all over the world are now using internet on cell phones … communicating with others while en route to school, work, or wherever they need to go that day. Social networks are still booming, with many people under 25 belonging to several networks and building incredibly rich and interconnected personal networks (which could do wonders for a person entering the work force, or looking for opportunities in other parts of the world). Every aspect of our lives is becoming far more connected, and far more shared. It’s reached the point where many of us could be exiled on that island Tom Hanks was stuck on in Castaway and, so long as we had a stable internet connection, we wouldn’t even realize that we’re no longer living in a populated part of the world.

In the next ten years, we’ll have technologies that will enable us to remain connected throughout the day, with micro-displays embedded into our glasses, or manufactured into contact lenses. We’ll be able to transmit our thoughts to portable machines that will then transmit those same ideas to the ever-growing mesh that is the internet. As we continue to adapt and leverage these tools, many of us will stop working individually and start working cooperatively. A company could hire one human, and gain the knowledge and experience of seven, eight, or tens of thousands!

An exciting time indeed.

What are your thoughts on this ever-blurring line between the online world and reality? Should clear separations continue to remain? Do distinctions no longer matter?

It’ll be interesting to see what the future has in store for the ever-communicative human race.

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What a lucky day!  Yesterday, three good friends of mine came to Japan from Vancouver for my wedding, and tomorrow another will arrive from Norway.  It’s always good to share one of the happiest days of our lives with close friends, and I’m really glad that these four could make the trek from such a long distance.

On top of these good times, though, I had a new HP iPaq 211 delivered to me all the way from Canada!

I love this little device!  It has everything I could ever hope for in a PDA.  From WiFi, to decent internal storage, to a nice happy battery, to a screen that actually accepts the characters that I write on it.  This little tool is going to save me an awful lot of time in the near future as I start writing more posts, and uploading them throughout the day (on various sites, of course).

That said … I’m in need of a good application that will let me write blog posts and upload them to a WordPress-based site.  There are quite a few out there, and I’ve talked about them in the past, but none of them give me the full range of features that I’m looking for.  What I would really like is an application that does all of the following:

• stores every post I’ve ever written, published and draft (offline editing and creation is a must)
• integrates easily with some of the plugins that I use regularily, like the All-in-One SEO tool
• allows me to schedule posts
• allows me to download updated information from FireStats
• allows me to quickly search and link past articles
• allows me easy drag and drop image handling functionality
• uses a miniscule amount of resources (however, the database might require a few megabytes of storage space)
• allows non-Roman characters, such as Hirigana, Katakana, Kanji, Hebrew or whatever other language people might use
• is easily translated for non-English users (localization gone wild, so to speak)
• handles PDAs with QVGA and VGA resolutions … maybe even SVGA for people using larger devices
• integrated spell check and, potentially, an open-source grammar check tool

There might be a few other functions that I’m forgetting about … but these are just some of the things I’m considering.  Because the iPaq 210-series PDAs all run Windows Mobile 6, I already know what software tools I can use to code up an application to suit my needs.  I’ve also done a bit of ground-work on writing applications that can upload to a WordPress-based site, which doesn’t seem to be too difficult at all.  So that leaves me with just one last question: what would other people want to see in an application like this.

I know that there are a few other software tools out there that will let people write and upload content to their sites from a PDA, and I also understand that PDAs are not too popular (which means that I should probably get a Nokia phone and write something that would work on Symbian), but I’ll still ask for a little input from you about what features you would want to see in an application like this before using it yourself.

I’ll be sure to let you know in the next few days how the upgrade from a 5 year-old iPaq 2210 to a sleek new iPaq 210-series PDA has worked out for me.  The two will be compared in a side-by-side, and will be written from a usability standpoint, rather than a technical one.  Anyone can throw around specs and shoulda-coulda-woulda’s, but is it worth the upgrade?

I’ll be sure to let you know.

Feel free to comment or send me an email about what features you’d like to see in a mobile WordPress-based blog editor.

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It’s hard to believe how fast time flies.  It seems like just the other day when I was sitting at my desk in Vancouver, looking out the window, and wondering what the next year would bring.  Now, here it is, already the end of April.

Reiko and I will have our wedding ceremony this Thursday, and the first of our foreign guests arrive today.  Because of all the preparations that we’ll have between then and now, I will not be able to tend to this site very much.  That said, there are a few scheduled posts that are complete which will slowly trickle online.  One of them even deals with the newest version of WordPress (2.5.1), which seems to like my webserver quite a bit more than the previous release.  I’ve been working with it quite a bit on one of my test sites and, despite losing most of my tags and needing to do quite a bit of cross-database data exchange through MySQL Query Browser, it’s starting to look like a solid improvement over the initial 2.5 release.

Hopefully my next upgrade attempt won’t explode in my face, though.

So, on that note, I need to drop some things off at the new house and run off to the airport to receive some guests.  I’ll be sure to take lots and lots of pictures over the next few days and, once the wedding is over and things have settled down, I’ll be posting a few hundred pics to the image gallery (which is about to be drastically upgraded).

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Many Canadians who watch TV or pick up a newspaper to read the latest installment of the Western protests against the Chinese Olympic torch relay must be pretty pleased with what they see. People from around the world are apparently pursuing the noble cause of helping the Tibetan people gain independence from the oh-so oppressive Chinese government. What’s disheartening, though, is that the biggest victims of this hypocritical posturing will be the very people these protesters are trying to “set free” as a new wave of Chinese nationalism is unleashed upon the sparsely populated autonomous region.

The story most of us have been told about Tibet is as black and white as they come. The West is trying to protect the human rights of the innocent Tibetans who have recently lost their independence to the oppressive Communist government of China. Because of this, people around the world who try to present themselves as being politically aware decry “Free Tibet!” and make an ass of themselves at every media-saturated opportunity. The leaders of many nations, hearing this cry from their voters, then try to shore up votes by deciding to boycott the Olympics’ opening ceremony, which does next to nothing to aid an otherwise landlocked nation gain independence.

What’s really interesting about this, though, is that not one Western nation has ever challenged China’s sovereignty over Tibet.

Ever.

A Mile In Their Shoes

Let’s, for the sake of argument, look at this very same situation through the eyes of a well-educated Chinese person. Historical records show that China has held dominion over Tibet for over 700 years. The amount of control has certainly ebbed and flowed over the centuries, but this is equally true for most other parts of China. Central control of the capital has never been consistent, and this inconsistency of Chinese rule over Tibet mirrors that of the centralized government.

That said, China has been in control of most of its territories longer than most western nations have existed. More importantly, the Chinese remember quite clearly the last efforts to separate Tibet from China during the 40’s and 50’s when British and U.S. CIA agents were caught encouraging Tibetan independence when China was still weak. The Chinese have very clear memories of British perfidy, having been forced by the Brits to accept opium as payment for high-quality tea. The Opium War, when Hong Kong was also seized by Britain, is a distant and forgotten memory in the minds of Western citizens, but the humiliating chapter in Chinese history remains a fresh wound to millions in China.

When protesters scream for the freedom of China’s autonomous regions, it’s perceived as rubbing salt into this still-fresh wound. Almost no educated Chinese person believes that the European or North American governments are pursuing this cause because they actually care about the fate of the Tibetans. Instead, they are convinced that these are only the latest efforts to dismember and otherwise destroy an emerging Chinese global power.

Distrust Of The West Is Not Limited To Terrorists

Is this cynicism to Western human rights campaigns justified? To understand, let’s continue to look at this situation through the eyes of an educated Chinese person. America, led by former President Richard Nixon and his NSA advisor Henry Kissinger, fell in love with China right when the nation was recovering from the destructive Cultural Revolution that started in the 1960s. During this time, human rights were barely mentioned.

Fast forward thirty years, when the Chinese were experiencing their best quality of life in centuries, American and European concerns focused on China’s human rights deficiencies. Make no mistake here; Western interests drive Western policies towards China, nothing more.

But this isn’t the only reason China doesn’t trust their mostly-Caucasian neighbours. Let’s remember what happens every time foreign leaders visit Beijing. Virtually all of them spend most of their time trying to sell American and European products to China. Then, as an afterthought, they’ll quickly say that they have to mention human rights issues because when they go home, the citizens of their nations will expect to hear that the issue was raised.

The Chinese leaders were given a very clear message about this routine: this is a Western tradition that you can safely ignore. The very leaders that scream the loudest for human rights in China, coo the softest in Beijing. Looking at this display of obvious duplicity, it’s not surprising that Chinese leaders have little respect for their foreign guests who insist on making grand gestures on human rights to their domestic audiences. This would be no different than allowing Chinese President Hu Jintao to visit Canada and issuing a demand to Prime Minister Stephen Harper to stop lying to his citizens about his military spending ambitions.

The Real Cost of Uneducated Protesting

The real tragedy here is that the true victims of these violent and messy protests will be the Tibetan people. So far, even though the Chinese record of rule over Tibet is less than perfect, the Chinese leaders have tried to preserve autonomy for Tibet. It’s also true that, in theory, there is no fundamental disagreement between the position of the Dalai Lama and the Chinese government. The Dalai Lama is advocating autonomy, not independence. The Chinese government also believes in autonomy. The official Chinese government policy paper on Tibet says that it regards exercise of regional ethnic autonomy in areas where ethnic minorities live in compact communities as a basic policy for solving the ethnic issue.

Western leaders should try to narrow the gulf between the Dalai Lama and the Chinese government rather than wedge it ever further. Only quiet and reasonable diplomacy can achieve this. Allowing idiots with pickets to make an ass of themselves on camera will only lead to the emergence of a stronger version of Chinese nationalism, and we can see it take shape already. Should this happen, Tibetans will be one of the first to suffer. They stand to lose every benefit to their current autonomy grants them, which means much less freedom in the long run.

This is the true price the Tibetans could pay for the uncontrolled actions of uninformed Western peoples.

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With all the news and outrage over the nation’s history of human rights offenses and oppressive maneuvering, China’s leaders issued a plea asking the world to stop mixing sports and politics. This comes as the possibility of a general boycott of the opening ceremonies by various governments gains momentum, which threatens to seriously jeopardize the excessively symbolic song and dance where China positions themselves as an emerging world power with a central role in the planet’s affairs. What China doesn’t seem to realize, though, is that sports and politics have been closely linked for thousands of years.

One obvious example is found in the 1936 Olympic Games held in Germany. There was far more Nazi propaganda during the two weeks in Berlin than there were games. The same can be said for East and West Germany’s decision to send a unified Olympic team in 1990. Germany is not the only nation to use the Games for political reasons either, as Japan, Russia, Brazil, Colombia, and the United States have all done the same.

To say that international sports and politics could be separated in today’s ever-interconnected world of sensationalist media than it was 70 years ago is so far beyond optimistic it’s deemed idiotic.

Beijing was granted the dubious honor of hosting The Games due to an abnormally imbalanced mixture of politics, economics, bribery and greed. What we see in the biased media today is just the culmination of prejudice, hypocrisy, incompetence and a damn near criminal lack of foresight on both sides of the Great Wall.

The protests and demonstrations occurring around the world on the Tibetan and Xinjiang insurrections should come as no surprise. Just like the UN, the Chinese government is just not capable of self-reformation. The nation had bribed the hardest to get the Olympics as a means to an end, and nothing more. In this case, the end involves an incredibly choreographed symbolic opportunity to celebrate their status in the world, while also showing the planet’s leaders that China is willing to take on a giant role in international affairs. That said, with the surprises in Tibet and Xinjiang, the nation’s leaders have resorted to the traditional tools of authority: turning their citizens against the foreign threats beyond their borders.

Ignorance Is Bliss

What I find odd is the “what did we do?” attitude exuded by political leaders, such as Hu Jintao. China has only recently come out of their 1000 year self-imposed isolation with the hopes of being part of the global village and, while the world is in a better position to solve problems if everyone has a place at the table, the Chinese have yet to fully understand what it means to be a fair and balanced society. This isn’t to say that any other nation has a perfect political and social system in place, because that would mean my ignorance bordered on the ludicrous rather than just near-sighted idealism, but the communist regime within the Great Walls often encourages their people to hold massive demonstrations against anyone that would dare to say that China’s collective gas doesn’t smell like a fresh bouquet of roses.

Of course, Western nations are just as guilty of hypocrisy and incompetence. The IOC hadn’t even finished their speech granting China the luxury of hosting the 2008 Games before America and several European nations started slinging the monkey dung. They argued that China held human rights, democracy and a fair standard of living in low regard, while at the same time building massive factories to pollute the land and hire the cheap labor at a fraction of what it would have cost in their home nations. It does make one wonder just what the western governments expected of China, though. Were they expecting the massive nation to suddenly become America 2.0? Built on the same foundation of classical democracy, equal opportunities, and referring to itself as “one nation under God” ?

Anyone who actually thought this would happen was either the king of wishful thinking, or incredibly stupid.

In China, the Status-Quo is the Way To Go

For all its ups and downs, China is a status-quo rising power that does not want to infuriate the international scene just yet. At the same time, although they are beginning to see the cracks in their political system, they’re not quite at the point where instituting some type of reform is necessary. Western nations also need to keep in mind that China is not likely to bend to foreign pressures. If anything, they’ll start putting restrictions on the number of exports and foreign-owned businesses within their borders. For better or for worse, many of the world’s largest companies are in bed with the Chinese, and they don’t want to push too hard for fear of disastrous reprisals.

Just like we saw with Germany in the half-century after the Second World War, no amount of external pressure will turn China into the country the West wants to see. The only way this ancient and proud nation will reform their political system or improve their human rights record is if they realize that their lack of fair laws and proper enforcement jeopardizes their long-term goals of being a respected key member of the global village.

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