So, I’m asking around the office today, where Mandarin is the first language of several people, and opinion seems to be that Google China’s license renewal (described here and discussed here) was a win for both sides.

To break it down a little further and provide some context: Google decided at the beginning of this year that it was no longer willing to run a Chinese language search that complied with Beijing censorship rules. It had been doing so since 2006. The change came after Chinese agents reportedly hacked into Google, stealing information on Chinese dissidents as well as technical information on Google’s login system. Google’s response seemed clear enough to me. If you won’t play nicely, we’re taking back our toys.

But what’s actually been going on since March was a little unclear to me. The Google announcement spells it out fairly clearly, though. They’ve been working to relocate the Web search portion of their business from google.cn (Google China) to google.com.hk (Google Hong Kong), splitting it off from other applications like music search and text translation that could be provided locally. For several months they automatically redirected requests for Google China over to Google Hong Kong.

What made this a significant and ballsy move is that Hong Kong is a separate legal jurisdiction. The territory was restored to China by the UK in 1997, but it remains largely autonomous and has different political and economic systems. By renewing Google’s Web license, China effectively endorses their right to do search according to Hong Kong’s rules and suggests it will not prevent users from accessing the Hong Kong site. Google says this means their China search is no longer censored–I am told “less censored” may be more accurate–and so they will be pleased to continue to do business there.

There are caveats, of course. China’s Internet has some built-in filtering, but it can be overcome with a little technical saaviness. Much as GMail can be accessed over HTTPS to prevent snooping, Google search can be done over HTTPS to prevent network filters from seeing and blocking keywords. I understand China permits the former, so they would presumably permit the latter.

What does China get for allowing this? Well, the technicalities of the compromise may be important. As of now, visitors to google.cn are not automatically sent to the Hong Kong site; they have to click a link to google.com.hk when they want to do search. Other services are provided directly by google.cn. Wired and Reuters both suggested that this was a concession to allow Chinese authorities to save face. Mel once explained to me the concept of “face” and its importance in China. If it was a matter of face, then face was probably more important than any handicap that extra click imposes on google.cn as a Web portal.

That said, Google still arguably gets a lot more out of the deal than Beijing does. China doesn’t want to lose Google. Some industry figures there have stressed its importance, and the importance of a more open network, as both a source of innovation and a bridge to the West. What they worry about, I think, is a force for change that they can’t control. That could lead to turmoil, rather than growth and improved foreign relations. The fact that they’ve taken this first step is encouraging to me.

Given that this is in response to something I recently read, let me preface by saying I love my friends for who they are, and that diversity of opinion is a wonderful thing. Nor is it your fault per se that the organizers of causes you endorse use some language to which I might object.

That said, I clench my teeth a little when I read conservative advocacy that uses the phrase “Obamacare”. At first, I couldn’t put my finger on why this sounded so inappropriate, almost pejorative to my ears.

Here’s my take on the matter. I believe it is the duty of opposition movements to win respect for their cause by not lowering the tone of debate–this is what distinguishes a politically serious coalition from a counterculture. You are free to disagree with the terms of the act, free to argue it won’t achieve its ends. Argue even that it costs too much; I disagree with some of the estimates I’ve seen from conservatives, but I’m also very ready to admit how little I know about the numbers.

Not only is Obamacare a silly label, it denigrates the millions of Amerians who helped put President Obama in office precisely so reforms like this one could be passed. HCR is not of, for, and by Obama. His administration put forward an implementation of an idea whose time had come. Of course, health care professionals want to serve human beings with compassion and without qualification. Of course, we want them to do so.

Does this notion imply some degree of socialist leaning? Sure. I would say the same of any form of mandatory insurance, even auto insurance, where the math is different but the result is similar. Anyone who wishes to use the highway system has to buy in, and while getting into accidents raises your premium, it never adds up to what you’d otherwise have to pay if you were unfortunate enough to total somebody’s Bentley.

Life happens. And sometimes it brings expenses that are hard to account for. Our own system of patents and copyrights allows the makers of lifesaving medical technology to all but name their own price for serving us. If we’d tackled that issue some years ago, tackling this one might not have turned into such a pricey proposition. As it stands, a productive member of the workforce has limited options when he suddenly becomes dependent on that technology. I was lucky enough to be employed and have good insurance. I’d need a six-figure salary to make room for my medical expenses if they were out-of-pocket. Under Obama’s legislation, I can afford to turn my attention to other concerns. And that’s my tuppence.

<3 y’all.

Thanks to Bolt, I’ve got about five hours with slow but working Internet, with nothing much to do other than get caught up on mail and sort out my thoughts.

I didn’t come here with any mission, or any questions in mind, just the thought of being away from work and responsibilities for a little while. And maybe of giving the City a fair, open-ended look now that I’ve acclimatized to living near a major city.

When I was younger I couldn’t imagine life anywhere other than a medium-sized suburb of a medium-sized city like Albany, with safe, quiet streets, and entertainment options within a half-hour drive. I don’t know to what to attribute that smallness of vision–complacency?–but I know it influenced me against applying to MIT and some of the California schools.

I’d been to NYC several times, of course, usually day trips, so my opinion of city life was largely informed by midtown Manhattan. Tourist-ey midtown Manhattan, awash in traffic noise, swarming with people and overlooked by the gigantic Macy’s and JCPenny and the towering office buildings beyond. That is no place for a child who gets vertigo standing in the state legislative chambers in Albany, who wants to flee the picnic table whenever honeybees take interest in his soda.

Subsequent impressions have been more favorable, though the circumstances have been strange: fumbling with maps en route to a Halo 2 preview event on FDR Drive, racing through the night in the company of a panicked classmate, meeting a professor outside her second home in midtown.

The most “normal” trips I’ve made there are probably the visits to my relatives in Brooklyn. These have always been short stays; the Park Slope brownstones may be roomy, but they’re not that roomy.

So it was good to find myself back there again, in an under-explored borough of the city with time to kill. I only wish the August heat could have eased up a little. Boston is spoiled on air-conditioning compared to NYC, and the more extensive New York subway routes are balanced by the extent of the city itself, and it’s a discouraging surprise to have to walk 1-3 miles a day in that.

I was reminded too of how freaking practical smart-phones are. Nikki has one, and I don’t. What she can do on the fly, on unfamiliar routes, requires me to spend a half hour planning at home or the Internet cafe, and can easily become a day-trip. TV commercials may prefer to highlight Twitter and games, but for navigating New York, Google Maps and Hopstop are indispensable. Not to mention mobile IM, so you can compare notes with friends wise in the ways of public transit.

That said, I’m happy with what I managed to accomplish this week, especially when you consider that we spent a couple nights partying (New Yorkers are crazy like that). I got to enjoy some of the local cooking and produce, hung out with Roy at his and Judy’s place, got in some work hours, did karaoke, visited the Stonewall Inn, and went clothes shopping in SoHo.

I saw some amusing things, including the weird graffiti for which Williamsburg is known (pics when I get the chance), and a magician in the subway platform. I took my breakfast at a place that makes vegan egg sandwiches a la Uncanny Valley. And I derived some amusement from the tragic hipness still abundant in New York advertising, particularly for movies and TV shows.

I leave knowing there’s a lot more that I might have made time for, if I wasn’t preoccupied with the sweaty heat or worried about worrying about how much time I should leave as cushioning. But that’s life, innit? So as a result I will think about my schedule back home, maybe think about donating the extra clothes that are keeping me from putting away all my laundry, start budgeting for new shoes and a new phone with a data plan.

And then put on my underarmour and my new sneaks and run all over the place

For every job, a tool. You want to live in the city that never sleeps, you have to know where your towel is. I now know I can holiday there, which is saying something. Beyond that, I dunno. I have unanswered anthropological questions about this city and its population. They seem awfully stressed. Olin’s “choose two” principle might apply here, with last call at 4AM and controlled substances easy enough to find, although some of the yuppies mitigate it by sleeping late and working late. For myself I’d worry about that. And it makes the residents a bit… tetchy sometimes.

But I see the charm that the place has, too. Stuffed in there somewhere between the misfunctioning AC that turned the 1 train into a sauna, the pervasive smoke of hand-rolled tobacco and the skeezy shop owners on Christopher St. It’s a sincere kind of place, in its way, where you can strike up conversations with passersby and not be treated with suspicion. Or content yourself with people-watching: there’s as many shapes and skin tones as people, many of them sporting cool body-art. It’s a place where you can feel alone, or not, as desired, as simply as if you were adjusting your sunglasses.

Just try not to think about the garbage, or about being covered in sweat, and you’ll be fine.

It’s about time I made another entry, and incidentally I kind of feel like this is all I’ve got energy for right now. It’s not that I’m having a bad week per se, just that I’m on the cusp of getting a number of fiscal type chores done, and with my meds where they are, I’m back to actually feeling the appropriate level of dismay at the procrastination and ongoing unproductiveness to date. Also I stayed up too late last night and release today was a bit of a slog. I mean we didn’t even cook tonight, we used Foodler, and I still feel as though I did actual work (ok we did some dishes and stuff but whatever).

Nevermind you that. Things are good. I’m going home this weekend for a time-adjusted Seder. I got in a little extra cardio at the gym and felt good. We went shopping at BJs on Sunday and made bison chili that I was able to spread out over two days of deliciousness. It’s nice feeling like we actually have enough ingredients to work with.

Oh yeah, and we saw Morrissey, who is friggin’ sweet.

Who, you may ask, is this Morrissey fellow? You shut your mouth. He is human and he needs to be loved. Er, I mean… he’s an Irish an English singer who fronted alternative band The Smiths in the 80s and has enjoyed rabid fandom in his subsequent solo career. Wikipedia calls him “sardonic and literary” and also “iconic” and a bunch of other things.

I’ll start my own observations by pointing out that the picture on his own site (see above link) speaks volumes. Nevermind the baby in his arm, it has nothing to do with anything. The first thing you notice in concert is yes, he is in fact that unreal. Well-dressed and full of himself, he moves well, as rock stars were expected to in the 80s. The second thing you notice is how good he sounds.

His whole band, actually. Morrissey’s on-stage energy is matched by the energy of their sound. They’re impeccably mixed of course, and overdriven with precisely the right gain. Heavy but versatile, in strong contrast with the generic British pranggggg of the Courteeners when they opened the show. I’m reminded again how it always seems the opening act gets dialed down a notch–maybe so the main act will seem heavier, maybe just to spare the audience’s ears, I’m not really sure. At any rate, what I’m trying to say is that Morrissey sounds just awesome.

His voice… is just amazing. It’s commanding and moody and earnest. And because he’s clearly well-trained and well-traveled, I catch most of the lyrics on the first listen (this can be dicey business with Brit rock, as it was with the Courteeners’ thick, drunken Manchester). It reaffirms some of what I’d been able to piece together about Morrissey as a person, and I see why Nikki digs him. He’s clever and strange and expressive and self-effacing and bitter and extremely political (Irish Blood, English Heart is among his better known ones).

Particularly weird is his ability to be self-effacing and narcissistic at the same time–this seems to figure heavily in his showmanship. He spends a lot of time bemoaning love lost, or never had. It’s a motif that seems to extend the length of his career. The Smiths gave us How Soon is Now?, which remains a crowd favorite in Morrissey’s stewardship. You can take it as a gay thing, or apparently a witch thing (TV seems to favor the latter), but first and foremost it’s about loneliness and alienation. Read the lyrics. I’ll wait. See? And yet at the same time, he’s all about the fan service, as losing his shirt and pissing off security to reach into the audience seem to be part of the routine. Because Morrissey is nothing if not devilishly handsome.

Money well spent, that’s for sure. The one major downside, I found out that these running shoes really don’t offer such good support for long periods of standing. Not a specialization I would have thought of; what am I gonna do, buy standing shoes for the next time I spend four hours standing and stomping at House of Blues? Or maybe just get some calluses. I dunno.

This should be the first of several posts looking back on my vacation. I’m sure as hell not going to get it all out in just one or two.

I know all the less-than-fun at the beginning and end of your vacation isn’t what you remember in the long run, but I still kind of wish I’d picked another time to come down with sinusitis.

Partly, it’s the fact that being malaised made me really unproductive in my first two days back on the job. Partly it’s the difficulty of concentrating on what I want to describe to y’all. Partly it’s that I’m throwing my diet out of whack in an attempt to heal faster, right when I’d like to be providing a nice baseline for my trainer. She has so little to go on right now, that she asked if I was a vegetarian because there was tofu in yesterday’s lunch and dinner.

As of 730 EST Friday however, I’m feeling about 50% better. Alka-seltzer and spicy food kept me going, but it was my workout that actually helped me begin to clear my mind. I’m still running on 7 of 8 cylinders, but I’m breathing a little easier.

Now we’re listening to NPR’s “curmudgeon corner” criticizing the papers for beating the dead horse of Obama’s inauguration being historic. I actually thought about this when I was in the nation’s capital. The word “Historic” was absolutely everywhere. And it did get a bit annoying, but not because there was any doubt that it was the right word.

I doubt any other word would have better summed up the feeling in Washington, D. C., because it was so complex and wondrous. “Watershed” has a nice ring but as exposition doesn’t get you much further. Analogies fare better; somebody, possibly Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, described it as part Woodstock and (I think?) part religious revival. These aptly address the human aspect – fraternal and borderline rapturous – but there was another level to the ceremonies, and that’s what the papers are trying to do justice.

There was weight in the moment. Weight on a personal level. A sense of participation, as though it was not just Obama but we were also taking an oath of office, that we co-owned the moment by being there. And in it, we felt… momentous. That’s a good word for it.

Change isn’t about a destination. Part of the reason news anchors’ questions seem stupid and their platitudes stilted in moments like these, is that news has to be framed around axioms that make sense to whoever’s watching. Old injustices and hatreds don’t die, they just get stretched out into the feather-light arm of the asymptote, where their importance in the equation becomes less visible. The dreams of our founders, and indeed of the good Doctor King, are immeasurable and without end. They don’t stop on the outcome of any one election.

But–and I’m resisting the urge to quote Malcolm Gladwell here, because I begrudge the effectiveness of his studiously non-technical analogies–there are qualitatively important points in the evolution of a complex system. In human systems, you can sometimes sense that special quality.

If Sunday’s message was “We are One”, then Tuesday’s message might have been, “We are the Hammer”.

Thus, awe gives way to elation in watching a political machine stop in its tracks, as that one crucial cog is knocked free. A lot of what Obama will be doing in his first days, any left or center-left politician in his place might be doing–removing the religion filter on aid dollars, halting the 911 show-trials, putting the Bush doctrine as far (and loudly) behind as possible. These things change like the drapes when power swings in our two-party nation. What we’re feeling now is a sense of alignment, even alliance with the force of history, that gives us hope they will come to characterize a wider and lasting change.

This feeling only grows stronger as he speaks. When he begins to make individual policy points, the crowd responds, “yes” or “amen”. The subtext shifts gradually from “it’s about goddamn time” to “thank you” to “wait a minute, did he really just say that?” to “OMG I LOVE THIS MAN”. By the end, people are crying and cheering and jumping up and down and generally failing to cope with how nice this new America sounds.

It sounds just like the place we’ve always wanted for ourselves.

Next, pictures.