Adventures of a Vagabond

As a member of the modern workforce, I find myself driven by this almost carnal urge to handle problems, fit things in, and take on extra responsibilities. These are the values that were espoused to me as the keys to success. Do More! Be Better! Act Faster!

For me, it’s quite hard to turn off this way of life. In fact, I’ve found it much easier just to brand it and turn it into the de facto way of living. “I live an edge-to-edge lifestyle” or “I’m hellza busy this week” or “I have something going on.”

And truth to be told, I often find positive reinforcement and gratification from this lifestyle. “Life is so much more boring when you’re not around to plan stuff” or “way to live it up” or “you always know what’s happening in town.” And so it goes.

Honestly, it’s no surprise that when it came time to do the quick and simple planning for my Europe trip, I found myself saying: “Well, I’m going to pubquiz on Thursday night, I’m headed to the Cotswolds on Friday, back Saturday, out to Geneva on Sunday, and back Tuesday morning before flying back to Beijing on Tuesday night. Hmm, well, I fly in at noon into Heathrow on Wednesday, how about 6p under the clock at Waterloo station?” Actual conversation.

So here am I am, writing this on my flight to Geneva, and wondering, wait a minute, where’s the relaxation and slowing down part of this holiday? I’ve been in a GO MODE before I even landed, calculating when and how long I should sleep for to minimize my jetlag and maximize my schedule. I’ve had multiple instances of dashing home to change and drop off stuff just to dash out again to make a meet up.

It’s not sustainable. One cannot continually exhale in life and dash from one thing to another. It’s almost guaranteed that a wall is lurking somewhere in the future. Therefore, I’ve decided to extend my trip by a couple days, leaving on Thursday instead of Tuesday. I won’t have to dash back after flying back into London from Geneva just to dash back out to the airport to fly back to Beijing. And I plan on taking the time to just sit, have a good espresso from Fernandez & Wells, people watch, and read.

 
Square in Soho

The New York Times has a cool infographic highlighting unemployment rates per-country across the country – really shows where the recession has hit hardest.

It may be surprising to you (it was for me) to see that Oregon has been harder hit than the financial center of New York, given the cutbacks in banking. Discussion on the some of the mailing lists I’m on peg this on big impacts in the housing market affecting the timber industry.

Tangentially, Business Week rates Portland, Oregon as the #1 unhappiest city in America.

Overall rank: 1*
Depression rank: 1
Suicide rank: 12
Crime (property and violent) rank: 24
Divorce rate rank: 4
Cloudy days: 222
Unemployment rate (December 2008): 7.8%

Ouch.

I keep finding good stats on Gallup.

OK, this is really fascinating. Given that statistics on church attendance and the number of people that believe religion is important in their lives is fairly constant, the perception of the influence of religion is all over the map.

Why is this? Looking at the list of major events in 1969, Nixon was in the thick of the Vietnam war and instituted the first military draft that same year.  I can’t figure out a good reason for 1994 and 1995. In the last 3 years we’ve been headed for the broadest gap in 14 years. Was this due to the failure of the Bush Presidency and that administration’s close tie to Christianity? Maybe I’m simplifying the issue—I fully admit I’m not old enough to have deep knowledge of the current and cultural events of those periods. Comment and let me know what you think.

However, it does bother me that the core of Christ’s teachings get lost in the political noise. Christ is not about some particular stance on Israel, abortion, and stem cells. The way of Christ is a way of living—love your neighbor, be humble, the first shall be the last, all that stuff. I can’t imagine how this would not be influential for those who call religion an important part of their life.

Look at this:

What exactly are churches teaching out there?? Even regular attendees aren’t getting something applicable.

If this was my workplace, I’d be asking some direct questions—tell me what parts are working and what parts aren’t working. What do we need to do more of? What do we need to do less of? How can we make the message applicable?

Recently, our consumerism has caught up with us. The economic downturn has longer to run. The recovery is going to take even longer. If there was ever a time for people to hear the story of putting others before ourselves, living generously, sharing, and caring, now’s the time.

I recently discovered the website of Gallup, the polling firm. Not only do they have a really cool site, but their content is both free and fascinating. An unbeatable combo!

For the last week, my friend Ken from Switzerland has been staying at my apartment. Recently, we got into a discussion about the separation of Church and State and how the US espouses this ideal, but it isn’t at all done in practice. I brought up the point that a country is made up of it’s people and that the electorate is primarily Christian. But really, is it? This led me to do some research. For all the focus of the Christian viewpoint in politics, does this represent a large percentage of the people or a concentrated group of people with a (relatively) well-organized PR story?

• 78% of Americans believe in God or a higher power.
• 42% of Americans attend church regularly.
• 56% of Americans believe that religion is very important in their lives.

I should caveat that religion and church here is defined generally–that is to say, inclusive of Judaism, Islam, and others. To get additional context, we can look at this.

Answer: Yes, there’s a substantial (or majority) group of Christians in America. In continuing my conversation with Ken–I feel that while much of our politics are religiously influenced, I don’t think it’s a full or complete lean to one side. We have a healthy dose of being influenced by other thinking and certainly this country has never faced anything like an Inquisition (the Red Scare was political more than religious).

(Full Disclosure: I consider myself Christian, though I often don’t agree with the stances of the Christian viewpoint.)

25 things you may or may not know about me–this is currently a popular Facebook meme. For those of you reading this as a Facebook Note–watch out! I’m coming to tag you! 

After more than 4 years (holy cow!), the long overdue overhaul of MikeLu.org has arrived.

For years now I have administered and maintained my own server hosting my blog. This has been getting tedious–the constant necessity of updates to WordPress, dealing with directory permissions, seeing bits of my page stop working as APIs were deprecated, and most of all, the time necessary to keep everything in shape, was getting to be too taxing. While I’ve always been proud of designing my own site and desired one day to re-design it, my life simply no longer has the time for me to do this.

Enter WordPress.com. I realized yesterday that using WP.com as a blog service provider alleviated me of all my administration hassles for the price of going with a pre-designed template. This is a small price to pay, considering that the majority of my readers arrive via RSS or Facebook Notes. And because I’m staying on the same platform, bringing across my old blog onto the new service was painless. Not to mention that the core of the service is free. Only an additional $10/yr provides the domain redirection and allows http://www.mikelu.org/ to continue functioning as I want. Win!

Welcome to version 5 of MikeLu.org–still Adventures of a Vagabond, as my bags are still never put away for too long.

Driving home from an epic first day of skiing at Crystal. (Blogging thanks to my new Sansumg NC10 Netbook tethered to my iPhone via PDAnet). Beautiful day at Crystal today, this morning was crisp, sunny, with nearly unlimited visibility. One of the most beautiful days I’ve ever seen on the slopes, I wish I had a picture, but my camera was too far buried and I was too excited dropping runs.

Clouds rolled in very quickly over lunch. We saw them in the distance from the windows and the entire ski resort was engulfed before we walked back outside, with blowing snow on the ridgetops.

Driving on I5 back home now at 6:10 and the tire ruts are clear, but everywhere else is accumulating snow. Roadway is cold–snow isn’t melting but getting blown to the side.

Update 7:20p – Made it home safely. Snow is coming down but wind is still pretty calm. Terribly cold outside right now, Weather Underground reports 25 degrees, which probably felt colder since my clothes were still damp from skiing the last time I was outside. The big question is whether the wind is going to pick up tonight…this snow is non-specacular, but a windstorm + snow, the full on blizzard, would be quite epic.

Came across this on walking up to Cap Hill this afternoon. The aftermath of a snow storm in Seattle (I’m here on business) is legendary. I usually like to say that everyone freaks out when a few inches of snow hit the ground, but the melting and re-freezing process here turn streets into ice sheets. Combine that with some hills and you get some spectacular action.

http://www.komonews.com/news/36458659.html

In the last four months, I’ve been to Lijiang, Qingdao, Shanghai, Ningbo, Suzhou, Chengdu, and a week in the Xinjiang province on the various weekends that I’ve been in town. Clearly I’ve been keeping up my traveling habit. But I’ve been experiencing a new feeling on my most recent trips…my patience and tolerances are much shorter than normal. I suspect that my brain is working overtime here in China—every day is a new adventure and there’s so much to learn. My surroundings and daily activities are taking up more brain capacity than normal and putting me on a bit of an edge.

One of the clear side effects that I’m perceiving is that I’m more picky about the places I’m staying at. I still love the whole hostelling concept, but let’s be honest, most hostels are not the kind of place that you would choose to relax and detox. It’s part of the traveling experience and the fun.

How can I relax and enjoy the experience at the same time? I’m certainly not going to be paying to stay at the Shangri-La a week at a time.

I recently discovered that one of the keys to managing my experience while traveling is how connected I am. Being in front of a computer for a bit of time is quite enjoyable to me and being able to catch on blogs, friends, and personal e-mail is actually time well spent. When I traveled around the world a few weeks ago, there was always a day out of a week where I would take it easy and find myself in an Internet Café catching up.

These days my trips are more sporadic, denser, and I’m never traveling alone. So I got myself an Asus Eee PC 901, a little “netbook” class machine that that can be thrown in my bag when I jet out the door. It’s about $400-450, has a little Intel Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, 20GB SSD, and mated to a 9″ screen. Tininess is beautiful. For its specs, it runs the pre-beta Windows 7 build like a champ (more on this another time) and has a good 4-6 hours of normal usage battery life.

This past weekend I took it on the trip to Chengdu and carried it around in my everywhere shoulder bag. When we decided to take a detour to visit and relax for a bit at The Coffee Beanery, my favorite café in Chengdu, there was no pang of regret of not being better prepared.

My only issue, and one that I’m experiencing right now as I type this, is the keyboard, which is an epic fail. This keyboard is probably 70% or so of a normal laptop keyboard and it shows—I’m dropping keys all the time. It’s unacceptable. I’m going to be swapping out this model and upgrading to the Samsung NC10, which has a 10″ screen and a 95% keyboard. From there it’s netbook nirvana.

…just can’t be beat.

I know I haven’t written much, but with the weather the way it is, I choose to enjoy life.

Back another day.