Reading (For Dummies)

Mirror World

Fate has placed me in Hong Kong, 15 time zones away from home, literally on the opposite side of the world (well, same hemisphere but 12 time zones) from where I grew up.

The streets

The Mirror World* is a fascinating place. The streets are narrow, the buildings are huge, and my pedestrian collision avoidance algorithms are perfectly mismatched for the locals. I believe that this last observation is due to the natives driving on the opposite side of the road. No doubt this influences more aspects of human behavior than we commonly give credit to. Perhaps I will travel to Great Britain or Australia some day to collect another data point.

It's a hot time of the year to be in town, with daytime temps usually about 32C (90F), with humidity somewhere around 105%. I joke that to deal with any water shortage, you could just put a still on top of every roof.

I managed to hit up two 'cool places,' for an electronics geek that practices atheo-buddhism. The first is Apliu Street, Hong Kong's answer to Akihabara (I've never been there, but I hear that it's better and so I want to go). Shops sell cell phones, ham radios, oscilloscopes, bench vises, and tools needed for reverse engineering electronics equipment. There are repair stands on the street...walk up with a broken cell phone and these guys will put it under a stereomicroscope with a solder rework station and patch it up for you while you wait. The closest that the US has to this kind of store is Fry's, but even that is somehow more, "clean consumerist," than Apliu. I prefer the Apliu, "maker," style more, probably because I love tearing things apart to learn how they work. I wonder why there isn't a book called, "Zen and the Art of Electronics Repair," or something similar.

False Idols

The second cool place is the Tian Tan Buddha, a giant bronze statue. I say that a little tongue-in-cheek, because Buddha statues have always bothered me a little (a physical object to serve as a reminder of the impernance of all things?). Also, there is a gift shop literally inside the Buddha. Quite odd. The cable car ride is pretty nice though, with a cool breeze flowing through the car on a hot day.

I had some weird preconceptions about going to China, none of which turned out to be true. I'm able to connect to my home VPN server and route my web traffic through it just fine (and yay, a home computer is recording all the traffic coming through from China). Getting 3G service was really really easy...I purposefully left my iPhone unpatched and jailbroke it for the trip out, including the carrier unlock. I use a prepaid 3G SIM from 3. US$30 gives me my two weeks of 3G data service so that I don't get lost while walking the streets.

Hong Kong Currency

My last libertarian observation was that the currency is printed by Hong Kong's major banks, which are contracted by the government to do so. Some day, maybe the US will have privately operated printing presses? Who knows...

PS: Mirror World is a fun term that I heard from William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. I first imagined the term to be one of jet-lag. Later, I thought it referred to the left-right driving paradigm. Finally, I came to understand the augmented-reality definition of the term. All of these definitions apply to this trip.