Thanks to Marty’s suggestion in class, my project 4 team decided to attend tonight’s showing of La Bohème.  This was my first time at an opera, and I was absolutely blown away by  the experience.  The cast expressed genuine emotions to a beautiful soundtrack.  But like Marty foreshadowed in class: the set was magical.

This week Chen and I revisited Bill Buxton’s lecture on Sketching and Experience Design.  I am a sucker for bad jokes, and Buxton used one that stuck for me: “Q: What do Canada and transitions have in common?/ A: They are both dominated by the States.”  For a good portion of the lecture, Buxton harps on the fundamental importance of transitions in design.  He goes as far as to say “experience happens in the transitions”.  The gravity of this lesson struck me when I saw an iPad adjust its brightness.  I watched the user of the iPad interact with the device and then left it alone for a couple minutes.  In an beautiful way, the fully-backlit screen slowly dims like a candle being blown out in the wind.  But then the moment the user touches the tablet again, the display springs back to life like a fresh match striking its matchbox.

I witnessed the importance of transitions again in La Bohème.  The opera begins outside of a house on a stunningly realistic snowy evening.  As they walk inside, the entire stage rotates like a merry-go-round along with their movement.  When inside the house, a glowing light starts to emanate from the frosted windows of the set.  The light keeps getting brighter and brighter, until you see a woman holding a candle on the other side of the window.  This method is how the main actress is introduced (transitioned into the play).  Before seeing the candle, I thought the inside set was going to be an ordinary, static setup.  But the candle added so much depth to the scene.  The only word that I can describe my feeling of the set is interactive.  The play uses a similar method at the end of act II.  There is a large party in town and you hear the faint sound of drummers.  As the party continues, the noise of a band gets a little lounder and louder some more.  Then a marching band appears gaining the attention of all of the characters in the opera and the audience.  This band then walks off the stage and the curtain drops.  Seconds later, the band marches into the auditorium and out of the room.  During Act III, a very beautiful stage transition happened.  Before the transition the stage is a snowy scene with a gate guarding a courtyard.  The stage rotates 180 degrees to a s (yet again) snowy scene of the courtyard. But halfway into the turn, you see a cutaway of a house where people are eating and drinking in a cozy room.  For those few seconds where I watched the joy in the shelter, I felt warm and happy.  But the stage’s arrival at the frozen courtyard felt even colder because of that brief warmth.

After the opera ended, I have started to wonder what I have been missing out on.  My previous experience with the performing arts have been static scenes with curtain drops in between.  But IU’s production of La Bohème shows that there is another way.  With the rotating stage and other show elements, the entire opera feels like one flowing story.  And it makes me wonder how crazy the storyboards were to achieve such an enormous feat.

All in all, I am exceptionally glad that Marty challenged us to attend the play.  And the transitions of  La Bohème made the opera experience for me.

This is what a secure https connection looks like with Google's Chrome browser.

You will notice that most login pages for legitimate web sites use https to prevent anybody in the middle from intercepting your username and passwords.  However, most web sites serve the rest of their pages in http because it’s faster for them (they don’t have to waste time scrambling messages).  You should NEVER fill in credit card information on any page that is not protected with https. Anybody in between can steal your information. Companies like Facebook and Google are starting to figure out how to serve pages using https quickly.

For those interested in securing their information from men-in-the-middle, Google started promoting the https version of their search engine this week for secure googling. Special thanks to my Middle School P.E. teacher Miss Davies for pointing out that Facebook also recently added support for https.

Throughout my three months stay in China, the one thing that has always remained constant is road noise.  Even at 2 am from my 10^th floor apartment two blocks from the street, I can hear the faint sounds of motors, horns, and cars whooshing by in the distance.  When I first arrived in China, the sound constant noise annoyed me greatly.  Throughout my tenure, however, I have become numb to the racket.

The source of this noise is in large part due to the way Chinese motorists drive. While drivers seem to follow driving conventions in order to travel efficiently in the US, drivers in China are more likely to break convention.  I witness a great deal of starting, stopping, passing, swerving, and cutting on roads around Shanghai.  In this way, driving becomes much more reactionary, and the horn is of vital importance and utility for Shanghai drivers.  Standing on Wudong Lu outside of my apartment during the day, I counted how many times I heard a car horn.  In a single minute, I counted five different honks.  Under normal conditions in a similar-type of neighborhood in the US, I would expect to hear at most one honk in the same timeframe.  When I spent a week in Taipei, Taiwan midway through the school semester, the first thing I noticed was nothing at all.  The first observation I made was the lack of road noise.  Despite a comparable quantity of cars, Taipei was a fairly quiet city.  Drivers tended to drive less reactionary and more conventionally in Taipei, leading to less use of the car horn.

A 2008 study of Shanghai living conditions published in the Shanghai Daily cited road noise to be an average of 71.9 decibels during the day and 65.9 decibels at night.  According to the article, this decibel range is considered to be well within the accepted scale of noise pollution.  Another study published by the United States Environmental Protection agency in 1974 defines noise pollution at levels about 55 decibels outdoors and 45 decibels indoors.  Environmental sounds in this range permit spoken conversation, sleeping, working, and recreation which are all staples of daily life.

Assuming that noise levels are the same or higher now than they were in 2008, I wonder what effects such constant noise has on Shanghai citizens.  I am in a lucky position spending most of my time in Shanghai isolated from the traffic noise.  The sounds of the city come to me muffled by the brick walls of my apartment or school buildings.  But I am unsure of what effects the city’s soundtrack has on those that spend most of their days working outside or living in housing without sufficient blocking of noise.  I have to think that many Shanghainese lose sleep during the night because of loud automobile noises.  I wonder how many conversations have been interrupted by the loud cleaning road-cleaning trucks that play songs as they drive by.  Because of this inescapable noise, I wonder what long term stress and health effects this noise has on the citizens of Shanghai.

With all things considered, it is a constant struggle of sharing between bicycles and cars.  It seems that automobiles always gain the advantage in these circumstances because of their inherent superiority.  Along with their inherent superiority, Professor Yu Hai argues that automobiles also gain advantages through policy:

Put taking buses and walking aside first, riding bikes not only fail to enjoy any priority in sharing road, it is even highly restricted in many places.  The road is getting wider, but the bicycle road is getting narrower.  Middle ring road in Shanghai is about 40 kilometers long, in which there is not any bicycle road.  In Shanghai, more than 20% of roads do not permit bicycle riding…which finally leads to more difficulties in getting through the downtown of Shanghai by bike.  Such discrimination in distribution of road resources towards non-motorized vehicles is most unfair and unreasonable. (Yu, H. “The Production of Space and Distribution of Right-of-way”)

Is it fair for automobiles to put bicycles in such a submissive position on the road spaces?  Because automobiles are much more expensive than bicycles, I feel that the power given to cars is another way for those who can afford automobiles to hold an advantage to those who can’t.  I believe this power struggle to be unjust and unequal. Also, when automobiles hold more power on the road than bicycles, it sends a signal to consumers that driving is better than biking.  This thought scares me because of the implications it has on sustainability in China.  More power to the automobiles may lead to more automobiles, which leads to higher emissions.  I hope the city analyzes the power relationship between cars and bicycles, and starts to create policies that favor the pedals.

After reading http://skilldrick.co.uk/2010/11/a-brief-introduction-to-closures/ which linked to the more concise reference http://www.mredkj.com/tutorials/reference_js_intro.html#scope, the moment of clarity came.

Apparently, my frustrations with scope in Javascript was simply a misunderstanding of the var keyword.  Before this revelation, I didn’t really think the var keyword was that important.  I thought it was a way for programmers to say, “This is a new variable that I’m creating.  Not a reference to a pre-existing one”.   Oops.

My greatest hindrance to the blogging community  is the idea of self-branding.  I’ve never known what name, color scheme, or content best represents my ego.  I’ve never been certain of the niche I wanted to hit or the privacy settings I wanted to set.  So here I am.  I’m going to avoid making those decisions altogether.  In a lot of ways, this will be a very selfish blog. I’m using my own name, a stock theme, and you will have the wonderful opportunity of reading my unfiltered mental waves.    I’m going to type whatever comes through my head, and you have the choice whether to read it or not.  My initial estimate is that 90% of what I publish will be misinformed rubbish.  However, the 10% of my brain that is not genoa salami may intrigue some.