Picture, if you will, that you arrive in Shanghai. You check in to your hotel and decide to take a walk around the city with your travelmate. You walk from block to block and get a lot of strange looks. This is fine: you're a different race from, well, seemingly everyone else in this city, and although you have been exposed to multiple races since a very young age, you recognize that not everyone has had this opportunity. Just wait, things haven't gotten weird yet.

You sit down on a pathway next to the river that runs through Shanghai. It's a very busy pathway, filled with tourists (of mostly Asian decent) who are checking out the river and the general scenery.

What you (foolishly) don't know, hypothetical-person-representing-me, is that you're about to become the main attraction in Shanghai.

People start taking photos of you. In a very not-subtle way. Usually, they "craftily" point the camera at their friend who stands near to you, and then obviously point the lens directly at you, and snap a picture, and then walk off together, glancing over their shoulder at you several times. We even had an english-speaking girl come right out and ask us: "Can I take a photo of you guys?" And just about every single group who walks by does the over-the-shoulder, whispering to each other, glancing back at you, thing.

So you and your travelmate begin to discuss why over two dozen people (really!) are taking photos of you over a period of a few hours. That's when things decide to get even weirder.

They start with an old man approaching your travelmate and calling him an "very attractive young man". They continue when a guy with a bandage on his forehead stands near to you, looking very suspicious, for about ten minutes. Eventually you say outloud, "I wonder if the guy standing right there for ten minutes speaks English", and he turns around, sees you looking at him, and runs off. Then a random guy comes up to you with a piece of paper and asks if the two of you can write some messages for his buddy who's birthday it is soon. (And you both pretend that you can only speak French.) Then four guys across the pathway, with a creepy amount of electronic equipment on them, begin whispering to each other and glancing over their shoulders at you, for about an hour. And when you leave, one of them follows you into the crowd until you and your travelmate take several strange quick turns to lose him.

Welcome to Shanghai. Where people love taking photos of you, watching you, being overall very creepy around you. I'm not usually very paranoid about such things, but in my half-day in this city, I've come to realize that we're the subject of conversation waaaaaaaaaaaaay too much.

Current theories include:

• Blonde girl. Let's see what happens. (But why aren't they staring at the other qualifying tourists?)
• My travelmate may look like a certain prince. Haha.
• We clearly physically look like tourists but have none of the other tourist qualifications -- we were sitting in a single spot for several hours, had no cameras, not even a bag on us.
• They fed us drugs on the plane and we're crazy.
• Who knows!!

Another day of nothing but tourism tomorrow. Let's see what happens.

Typhoon Krosa is headed towards Shanghai. Depending on the timing of the storm, our flight out of here towards Beijing tomorrow may be cancelled. There's been heavy rain for a few hours now.

"If we're gonna be stuck here", I said to my travelmate, "we should go see if we can find a monopoly set or something." Suddenly being on the gazillionth floor of this hotel doesn't seem quite as cool as it did when we arrived.

With a radius of 300 kms and winds gusting up to 227 km/hr, this Category 4 typhoon may require us to pick up scrabble as well.

My travelmate and I were interviewed by a member of the korean press about Google and 20% time and the intergroups and all sorts of fun things.


Though it's impossible to tell (unless you speak korean), this article's about us. Yay. Go us!

Some of our quotes (I'm told) include: "Autonomy and flexibility come from mutual trust among colleagues and between the company and employees." and "Peer recognition is worth more than money."

You said it, Korean-speaking-me.

Good idea: when the customs official asks you "what are you bringing back?", and you're not importing any goods, you say "nothing".

Bad idea: when the customs official asks you "what are you bringing back?", you (having just been on a plane for twelve hours and crossed even more timezones than that) reply, "knowledge...experience..."

That's how you get the "PLZ EXTRA SCAN THEM" stamp on your customs form. And for once it wasn't my fault that we ended up in the "extra scan" line.

I told mellblom that I needed entertainment, and here's the link he provided. Wicked. Did the job.

Tomorrow evening there will be wedding bells and toasts all 'round, for fLufFy and CPwr are getting married.

I first met fLufFy when she was leading a debate class, about ten years ago. I was still a youngin' in high school, and she one of the seniors, and I believe the topic of debate was "are red smarties the best?" Later that year she'd often driving me home from school with a little finger puppet ("sherpa monkey boy") who sometimes would seize control of the steering wheel (when he wasn't dancing, of course), and hijinks would inevitably ensue.

I first heard about CPwr from her when she described a cute young man in her aikido classes, a few years later, who she was developing a crush on and wanted to ask out, but wasn't sure if he was single or not, and needed to do some detective work to find out. He was graduating from UofT with the same degree that I wanted to enroll in (cognitive science & AI) so I immediately took a liking to him.

Since then we've been through countless brunches, swiss chalet nights, buffyathons, and more brunches still. We've debated public vs private schools, discussed politics and videogames, eaten our weight in french toast and petite dejeuners, and fallen asleep in puppy piles.

In many ways, they've already been married for years now. For me, this ceremony is less about them saying "let's start something new together" and more about a chance for their friends and family to take some time to celebrate a wonderful relationship that they've already been enjoying for years.

Plus it's an excuse to look all fancypants for an evening, hang out with friends from around the globe, and eat cake!

For those of you who know 'em, be sure to send 'em a congratz. For my part, best wishes and have tons fun in the years ahead! I know you will.

From the guy who brought you that awesome Web 2.0 video, here's some food for thought about the way we categorize information.

Google just announced a new shuttle stop riiiight outside my apartment.

Imagine a happy panda. Now imagine a happy panda that doesn't have to walk up and down a goddamn mountain twice a day in order to get to and from work.

Yeah. That's me.

According to a new government report, the US terrorist watch list is now over 750,000 names, and growing at a rate of 200,000 new names per year.

That means that during business hours, the government is adding one name to the list every 37 seconds.

You know those action movies where the guy in charge of the action station says something like: "I want a list of everyone who's driven a blue car through new york city in the last ten years! Go go go!" and you think to yourself, "Man, I'm so glad that's not my job. I wouldn't even know where to begin."

I imagine that being onboard Team Appending Names To Terrorist Watch is something like that. "Every 37 seconds I want to see a new name on this list! Find the terrorists! Go go go!"

It sounds to me like these names probably aren't being collected and examined very thoroughly. It's much more likely that some dumb algorithm somewhere is doing something like scraping Google results for the keyword "terrorist" and hoping that amongst the hundreds of thousands of false positives, they'll get some real names.

Apparently 53,000 people on the list have been stopped repeatedly when entering the country for extra screening, though not denied entry to the country. They just get stopped and questioned to see how terroristy they seem. Hmm, stopped whenever they go through airport security, eh? Sound like anyone you know?

From BoingBoing:

Recently police at the Vancouver airport were attempting to question a recent immigrant that could not speak English. They tasered him after 24 seconds of speaking with him.

He died from the tasering while his mother waited at the baggage carousel. That's ... insanely disturbing..