Unintuitive Python Behavior
2008 June 25
Curious about the Google App Engine, I started playing with it, which meant writing code in Python.
Unicode support in Python seems to be a tangle of confusing function names, source code file encodings, backslash escapes, the letter "u" before strings, and probably other things. Together, this smells to me like the language originally didn't support Unicode, but wanted to keep backward compatibility with pre-unicode support scripts.
Guard, Tiananmen
2008 June 24
Car Crash
2008 June 23
A typical automobile accident in China, and typical dispute resolution: people stand around and discuss or argue until some agreement is reached. Crowds gather, bystanders start piping in…
Shangri-La, Yunnan, China
中国云南迪庆州香格里拉
Puppy Update
2008 June 23
There are two puppies left, out of the litter of five. Tiny #1 and Tiny #2 died the afternoon and evening that Zhuoma left for Weixi, which was the day after Jumbo had suddenly ballooned to about 3x their size. I think they got out-competed for milk.
Small died two nights ago. I had been trying to micromanage him into living the two days previous to that, but he simply wasn't eating.
Small girl waiting for Olympic torch
2008 June 15
Little girl with olympic flags and China stickers waiting for the Olympic torch to pass by
Shangri-La, Yunnan, China
中国云南省迪庆州香格里拉
Little girl with Olympic flags
2008 June 15
A little girl decked out with stickers, headband and flags waiting for the Olympic torch to pass by
Shangri-La, Yunnan, China
中国云南省迪庆州香格里拉
Hada Race
2008 June 14
Hada fetching horse race. The goal is to pick up as many of the hadas (Tibetan silk cloth) as you can as fast as you can without falling off your horse.
Shangri-La, Yunnan, China
中国云南省迪庆州香格里拉
Hada Race
2008 June 14
Monk Burning Prayer Flags
2008 June 13
It’s expensive to renounce your U.S. passport
2008 June 13
It's the coverage of the random but useful stuff like this that I really like about the Economist (and non-mainstream-American media in general)
. . . become law by June 16th, any American who wants to surrender his passport has only a few days to do so before facing an enormous penalty.
That penalty is buried in an innocuous piece of legislation with the veto-proof name, Heroes Earnings Assistance and Relief Tax (HEART) act.
