I wish I could give you this feelin’
enj + foblander present:
Over the break I pirated Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro and cut my teeth on this little skate video. Using tools like those for a project like this is kind of like using a backhoe to scoop ice-cream, but why settle for anything less than the best?
It’s Jimmy and I skating on campus, with a cameo from a random guy I saw skating in China. Oh yeah, and there are robots.
I’m back, after two years I’m back in Tianjin. Man its good to be here, but things are different and in a lot of ways.
One of the most obvious changes is my environment. Buildings have popped up everywhere, construction is underway all around the school. The small 2 story 20 room dorm I stayed in 2 years ago is being torn down as I write this to make room for a 12 story 400 student building. The foundation of a skyscraper can be seen from our 9th floor classroom, and every day the crane is busy. The scaffolding of a gigantic hotel takes up 3 blocks closer to downtown, but you can’t see any of this if you ride the brand new subway. The small shopping street where I used to buy cheap tshirts and bootleg movies is now a market underground because they built a building on top of it. I scored some nice addidas sunglasses for about 5$ there the other day.
Then there is Beijing. A huge city, beautiful, clean and dirty at the same time. Saturday it rained water weighed down with soot, then Sunday the sun shone so bright Florida AND California should be jealous. As far as change, I cannot attest to anything more than that it has taken place. It probably changed with each trip I made 2 years ago, and with all the money being poured into the city for the Olympics change is everywhere. I know that next time I go back to Beijing, maybe in a couple weeks, I will most definitely be bringing my skateboard to hit up the smooth sidewalks, marble ledges and crazy structures.
As far as how things have changed personally, I’m not sure I could fit it all on this webpage. I’ll try to give a glimpse, and expand upon it as the trip continues.
One amazing event was meeting my uncle, Yip. I had met him briefly once 4 years ago in Holland, but this time Nathan and I really got to meet him. He is a close friend of my late grandmother in Holland. He grew up there from 12 years old and originally comes from Hong Kong. After running a succesful restaurant business in the Netherlands he has sold them and moved to Beijing recently to pursue other business opportunities. When we arrived in Beijing International Aiport on Friday June 22nd, he picked us up. He took us to his (very nice) appartment to freshen up. Soon afterwards we had a nice dinner at a nearby restaurant. We had fish cooked with a pepper that numbs your mouth, shrimp exquisitely wrapped in a way I can’t describe, delicious beef and several other dishes I don’t know the name of. We ate with Yip’s sister and friends, most of which spoke Dutch. It was quite an experience to speak mostly Dutch on my first day in China.
What we spoke about was also very interesting. I felt totally at home with my uncle, and I really liked some of the ideas he made clear to me. One piece of advice I am trying to appreciate is to always give 100% to the situation at hand. He said he used to be thinking about 5 things at once wherever he was at, trying to plan and manage his business. This cost him a lot in terms of the time he spent with others and the activities he was busy with. If one instead focuses all of their energy on the present situation they can recieve much more from it, in terms of enjoyment or value while the stress of other obligations and thought processes melt away. This has become very valuable advice in the context of being RA, while I’m trying to take classes and enjoy my time in China I am also constantly supposed to be helping other students and arranging things for them. This makes it very easy to drift off in thought trying to plan or account for things while I should be pulling all the enjoyment I can from a good dinner with new friends, or absorbing all the chinese I can from class in the morning.
Another valuable point came out of a discussion about leadership. Yip has been a manager of companies as well as the owner of a busy restaurant, so he should know a thing or two about leadership. When I asked him if he had some tips about leadership he made a very clear observation about what leadership actually is. It isn’t a personality trait, and it isn’t something you strive for. Leadership is a byproduct of giving all your energy to solving problems and providing for a group of people. If instead of worrying about leading people, you take action to solve their problems and give them the resources they need to accomplish what they want, you end up leading in the end. A leadership personality is different, these kind of people can’t be wrong because they are expected to lead. Everybody is wrong sometimes, so a leadership personality will not only lead people to success, but also to dissaster.
This made me feel a lot more comfortable with a lot of aspects of what I want to do with my life. I don’t really consider myself a leader or a person with a leadership personality, but what I do like doing is solving problems, and solving them for lots of people at once. So if leadership is not a prerequisite for this, but rather a byproduct I have much more chance of being successful.
That about sums up my first day or two and the thoughts that came up. We are already almost done with our 2nd week, so there is still lots more to cover. As RA and student, as well as trying to meet and learn more and more, I stay pretty busy. I went an ungodly 5 days without internet this last week, and things might not get any better in that respect.
So I hope everyone is having a good summer, and till the next time I get on the web!
-Ian
Check out this short essay I wrote:
This Xmas I spent a week in Ellicotville, NY with my awesome family. Among family activities and snowboarding, we also played with some clay. This post is to showcase the work of my lil sister, Laura. She has a creative mind, if not a little demented 
You may also see some work of my cousins Evan and Kraig, and my brother Nate in there. They did “knife” and “Sword of Damocles.”
Enjoy!
This essay was conceived after reading about the recent AOL search data leak. A comment about the tragedy of people making light of such a privacy violation lead me to think deeper on the subject. The tragedy. The comedy.
If you ask any person if they care about privacy, they will respond positively. Yet why does it seem that society does not care about privacy? I submit that people are more willing to sacrifice other people’s privacy than they are to protect about their own, hence the aggregrate attitude towards privacy is one lacking any serious enforcement.
I can think of several possible reasons for this. The most important one being that privacy is a hard concept to define universally. My best definition of privacy is the control over one’s personal information. Information can be anything from a person’s naked self, to a person’s thoughts as well as a person’s actions. This control is often maintained by avoiding observation by others, yet sometimes it is simply the expectation that others will not observe.
If that is an acceptable definition of privacy, the control over one’s personal information, how does that fit into our society? Freedom is our society’s most cherished concept. Freedom can be defined as being free from the control of others. One of the most important freedoms we have is freedom of speech, which means we have the right to share information without being subjected to the control of others. This presents an obvious conflict with privacy when that information is personal.
The definition of privacy is further muddled by the fast pace at which technology is advancing. In the past privacy was possible because means of surveillance were very primitive. Here it is important to note that authority and where it lies has a large impact on the debate of privacy. In the past one’s privacy in regard to the public eye could only really be violated by somebody with social authority, because there was no means to prove otherwise. One’s privacy in their personal space could only be violated by a direct observer. Today technology has advanced to the point that one’s privacy in their own personal space can be violated remotely, and furthermore, they can be brought into the public eye without a social authority. Image, video and audio recording all allow for cheap and efficient observation. With the advent of the internet, privacy is decaying at an exponential rate.
The internet has decentralized information, and it continues to decentralize it at a more and more efficient rate. Recording equipment is incredibly cheap, and the means to spread recordings is almost instant. All it takes is bad intentions and a little bit of determination to violate a person’s privacy in ways most people find incredibly uncomfortable. Now we see firsthand how betraying search results can be, how loaded with personal information. We are sending this information voluntarily and it is certainly being collected.
So if all the means exist for a Big Brother situation, or worse, for every citizen to be a big brother, what do we do? How will giving people control over their own information help if they are giving it away? Besides search engines, using credit cards at chain stores tells volumes about a person. We want credit and we want search, we want cameras and we want camcorders, but we have no experience mandating behavior when it comes to these things. There are no laws on the books against aggregating voluntary information, no laws against making recording equipment, and we don’t even know if we want those laws. Laws fighting technology have a pattern of failing, the only hope seems to be mandating responsible use of those technologies.
However if we mandate responsible use of those technologies, we are conceding part of our privacy already. We are conceding control to the organization who holds the data, to the person who weilds the camcorder. Are we ready to do that? Do we already do that? Ask yourself how comfortable you are and realize that privacy cannot be taken for granted. Then ask yourself if its really all that bad.
Your culture is being destroyed, everything from you childhood is irrelevant and the nations children are being systematically destroyed.
Yeah right!
It sounds bad when put like that, but it seems to sound more rational when people say that videogames are leading children into a life of depravity.
I implore you to read this short Wired article highlighting the mistaken predictions or analyses made in history regarding new forms of entertainment.
I could go on a rant about people preserving culture, but I would probably just end up offending more than provoking thought… I will just say I believe that basing an action solely on preserving culture is pointless and almost guaranteed to have selfish motivations.
Keep your eyes peeled before I peel ‘em for you!
I’ve been really busy with work and school, but even more busy with homebrewed projects. David and I are going to be coming out with a few sites this semester. From rapping to textbooks, you wont know what hit you until your browser has downloaded the javascript, and by then it will be too late…
This semester will be our launchpad. Keep watching.