e-Meddling

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal Asia published what was probably an editorial from the regular WSJ entitled "e-Meddling" which, perhaps, opened my eyes to the future of the Internet:

International bureaucrats and assorted countries are struggling to wrest control of "Internet governance" from that old unilateralist bogeyman, the United States. There's only one problem with this picture: Cyberspace isn't "governed" by the U.S. or anyone else, and that's the beauty of it. But if the United Nations gets its way int eh coming month, the Web will end up under its control.

While it may be nothing more than another charge against the UN by the right, Googling "united nations" and "internet" did bring up a dozen or so stories, not exclusively from the right.

The WSJ-A editorial goes on to explain that, to the extent the Internet is governed, it's done by a nonprofit organization called Icann which administers the "root zone file," assuring that any domain name is assigned to only one Web site. That's the extent of "governance" over the Internet.

Real "governance," one the other hand, writes the WSJ, could bring oversight of content .... For an example of how the Internet is governed, look no further than the strict limits China -- one of the main proponents of "internationalizing" the root zone -- places on Web sites that promote or even discuss democracy.

While the UN's Working Group on Internet Governance says it would respect freedom of expression, the WSJ is skeptical -- and so am I.

But that won't surprise anyone who knows me. The libertarian in me says to naturally distrust government when it proposes regulating speech.

On the other hand, if UN oversight of the Internet would reduce all that spam in my inbox.....

And you think people hate G.W. Bush

Practically every day since I've been here, there have protests outside the presidential palace, calling for the removal of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (usually "Gloria" or "GMA" for short in the press). Three days ago, police used a water cannon to break up a prayer rally and protest led by several influential priests, elevating the story to the top of the front page for the past several days.

Gloria's view is that the people are tired of the protests. "I'm asking everyone to continue with their work, avoid participating in illegal assemblies and mass actions being pushed by those with self-serving interests and whose only objective is to bring down the country," she said in Filipino, translated to English by the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

The Inquirer continues:

But Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez was his usual self, saying some of [the protesters] were nothing more than publicity seekers. "I am appalled ... that [the water cannon was used], but I do not condemn the reaction of the police because they're being pushed to the wall. Maybe some who were sprayed with water may have wanted it so they would land in the papers," he said.

This all stems from Gloria's alleged cheating in the last election and the supposed illegal removal of the popular former president Joseph Estrada. I haven't been here long enough to figure out which paper is pushing which agenda, but the feeling I've been getting from Filipinos I've spoken with is that the anti-Gloria feeling is widespread among the working class. She's the pro-business candidate, while Estrada, a former movie star, plays the role of populist.

Inquirer columnist Conrado de Quiros, in explaining why his column focuses so frequently on the presidential mess, wrote:

Who doesn't want variety? ... But I always go back to GMA: Because she is there. Because she should not be there. ... The problem is not whether GMA has done good or bad as President, it is whether she has a right to do good or bad as President. She is not the President. The problem is not the conduct of her rule, it is the legitimacy of her rule. The problem is not the quality of her rule, it is the fact that she is ruling. She has no right to. You cheat in an exam, you are expelled from school. You cheat in elections, you are jailed for life.

Most troubling, I think, is the presidential banning of the freedoms of speech and assembly. de Quiros says the country has been "conscripted into silence."

That is what is the killing of the impeachment complaint, the ban on rallies (against GMA, there is no such ban on the pro-GMA), and the ban on public officials appearing before the Senate signify. Collectively, they say that we may no longer talk about the fact that GMA stole the vote.

Bizarre similarities to the U.S. aside -- though I don't think Bush has yet banned rallies against him -- it's a fascinating, and somewhat scary, time in Philippine politics. There are rumors of martial law, a much-disbelieved promise by the president to step down if "the people" demand it and a general feeling of uneasiness about where the country is heading.

We're far enough from downtown Manila that we're generally unaffected by the rallies and protests. Today, though, a large contingent of farmers from the southern provinces marched through our neighborhood on their way to downtown Manila, snarling traffic and bringing out the police in droves. Parked at the gate was a fire truck positioned, apparently, to repel any protesters who decided to stay here rather than continue on downtown.

Driving...Outside the Gate

Today is Sunday, errand day. At home, that means hopping in the car, going to Wawa to pick up the Sunday Washington Post, then heading out to Wal-Mart, Giant, Home Depot, Target, PetSmart, or wherever else.

In Manila, it meant driving outside the gate for the first time.

We live in a very large gated community, large enough that we drove 10 minutes to church this morning (within the community) and still weren't at the back of the community. Driving inside is no big deal, as there isn't a huge amount of traffic. But to get to Ace Hardware, ShopWise and the Makati Supermarket to run my Sunday errands, I had to head outside and actually drive in the Philippines.

I've watched Bobby drive every time I've been in the car with him, trying to learn Filipino driving etiquette. Outwardly, it looks much like it does at home: traffic lights, octagonal STOP signs, lines painted down the center of the road. In reality, driving in the Philippines is more of an art form, knowing when you need to obey the red light, and when you're better off running it, when you should stay in your lane, and when you can squeeze three cars into two lanes. (We usually stop at the red lights, but not always, and we tend to ignore the lane markings, especially when they're not convenient. And when you're ready to cross oncoming traffic to make a left turn, we pretty much claim even the smallest break in traffic as our own.)

"There are only two kinds of drivers in the Philippines," Bobby told me, "offensive and defensive. And you have to be both. Sometimes at the same time."

Which is pretty much true, I discovered. I found myself following a car that had drifted to the left at a stop light, expecting him to turn left. Instead, when the light turned green, he gunned his engine and slipped in front of the jeepney in the lane to his right, leaving me totally exposed to the oncoming traffic.

So I did what any good Filipino driver would have done: I gunned my engine and made the left hand turn. It might have been against the light, and it might have been illegal, but it was also appropriate, given the circumstances.

I think I would have made Bobby proud.

Happy Birthday!

After running my errands (including a second box of cat food for the cat who has suddenly turned finicky), Shelly took me out for my birthday dinner. The plan was to celebrate on Oct. 25, one month late, but it looks like she'll be in China then, so we did it tonight, instead.

She had a great spot in mind, a place she's been on every trip to Manila, a restaurant called Italianni's. After Googling around, I now know that Italianni's also has branches in the U.S., though I've never heard of it before. However, the U.S. stores don't have the excellent Sicilian Chicken Salad they serve here: chicken breast, mangoes, ripe red grapes, pine nuts, with a lemon-dijon dressing and romaine lettuce.

And, I'll bet they don't have as much fun singing the birthday song in the U.S., either.

Shelly swears she had no plans to announce my belated birthday celebration to the staff, but if she did, she was off the hook, anyway, as our server noticed I was opening birthday cards. After a long wait for the bill, she came to the table and apologized, explaining that they were "preparing the ice cream for the birthday."

The birthday song started normally, with a happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, happy birthday, happy birthday to you, and then immediately turned into a rousing edition of Macho Man.

Body...wanna feel my body?
Body...such a thrill my body
Body...wanna touch my body?
Body...it's too much my body
Check it out my body, body.
Don't you doubt my body, body.
talkin' bout my body, body,
check it out my body

Shelly was in stitches the whole time. I think she would have fallen off her chair if it had gone on much longer.

I'm tempted to take Shell back to Italianni's next month for her birthday. First, she likes the place. More importantly, I'm really, really curious about what they sing to women.

Settling In

Tylenol P.M. does wonders for the out-of-sync body. A good night’s sleep a couple nights ago, and I’m almost good as new. I’m still getting sleepy much too early in the evening, but I’m managing to stay up an additional 30 minutes or so each night. Before long, I’ll be completely on Philippines time.

I was offered a job today – part time and temporary, but a great opportunity to jump into the local culture. I’ll be teaching English to a class of future line leaders at the “Yakitori 101” class at one of the plants Shelly works at. There’s no syllabus and no text, so not only will I be teaching, I’ll be creating the class, too. I’m going to spend some time on Monday observing “Hot Dog 101” at a different plant to give me an idea of how the classes are run.

Both the satellite TV folks and the broadband Internet folks showed up yesterday, so we’re online and watching CNN again. Getting the Internet set up was no problem, but I can’t get the wireless router we brought to reach much beyond the room where it’s set up. I suspect there’s too much steel and sandstone in the house and that the signal just can’t get through. I’m trying to come up with a good solution to this, but so far have not. I may end up doing my surfing from the living room rather than my office, as I had hoped.

I’ve taken over the cooking duties, for the most part, playing housewife to Shelly’s hard-working salaryman. With a miniature refrigerator (about half the size of an American fridge), that puts me at the grocery store every few days. For the most part, it’s a familiar trip: I don’t think there’s anything I’ve looked for that can’t be had, for a price. But it’s incredibly cheap to eat local produce: We had a fantastic fresh pineapple, a bunch of fresh beets and some tasty dalandan (oranges), all for less than a dollar. The grocery stores I’ve been to have all been at rather high-end shopping malls, crammed full of every kind of luxury good imaginable, along with a wide variety of American and Asian fast food joints. Certainly things aren’t always so rosy out in the provinces, and the disparity between the rich and the middle class, not to mention the poor, is something I may never adjust to.

We're Here!

We made it to Manila, finally. After something like 23 hours in the air and another 5 or so on the ground, Tanaka and I arrived at Ninoy Aquino International Airport at about 11:00 Monday night.

Aside from it being a long, long walk from the gate to the immigration and the baggage claim, NAIA was nothing like the chaos I had imagined after reading Lonely Planet Philippines and a variety of Web sites. It was all very smooth, and nobody even asked to see Tanaka's documents.

I wandered outside, trying to remember where Shelly had said to meet her. I ended up calling her -- and padding the pockets of a guard who loaned me his cell phone. The damage: I paid 2 bucks for something that should have cost just a few cents, but it was easy and probably worth it, at least once.

After a quick Shelly and her driver, Bobby, collected us at the parking lot and whisked us home. It took me an hour to get into sleeping mode, but at least it was a restful night. Shelly finally woke me up at 10:00 this a.m. She took part of the day off and we spent it having lunch, figuring out what to have for dinner and shopping. I went for a swim in the afternoon, and then determined around 5:00 that there was no way I was going to be able to fix dinner....jet lag had begun to set in. Shelly fixed a couple of grilled cheese sandwiches, and I was out by 7, only to awake at 11, 2, 3, 4 and 5:30, all perfectly logical times for the jet-lagged body!

Tanaka seems to be adjusting well, though there's construction on three sides of us, and the noise is making him kind of skittish, with lots of hiding under the bed and in various corners. He hasn't eaten much, but he's drinking plenty, so I suspect he'll come around.

Updated October 17. Now I know how much that $2 phone call was really worth. One dollar is worth about 54 pesos. That 108 pesos I paid for the one minute phone call could buy several packs of AA batteries, 4 kilograms (8.8 pounds!) of cucumbers, 1.25 kilograms of lettuce, 3 kilograms of imported onions or 2.5 "Snacker" meals at KFC. Suffice it to say that, in a country where the average laborer's wage is between 200 and 400 pesos a day, I overpaid.

Google Knows I'm Overseas...

Loaded up my Firefox browser and was greeted by Google....in Tagalog!

What else does Google know about me?

Almost There

Narita International Airport, Tokyo
October 10, 2005

Tanaka is, the inside-the-bed-incident aside, a great traveler. I have not heard a peep from him since leaving Washington. I'm fortunate to be flying business class on my way over, sitting in the top section of a Northwest Boeing 747 with a small shelf between my seat and the window. The shelf is just wide enough to fit Tanaka's Sherpa bag, which means he sat by my side rather than at my feet for the Los Angeles-Tokyo leg of our trip. This has allowed me to reach in to pet him from time to time and to sneak him an occasional Pounce treat.

On landing, the ground agent came aboard and made an announcement for me to "please see the ground agent upon deplaning." And, sure enough, after walking up the jetway, there was a woman holding a placard with my name in both English and Japanese. Seems she wanted to take Tanaka's travel documents to make photocopies of each of them. I found myself easily falling back into my days of trusting Japanese efficiency, saying, "sure, here you go" and turning his entry to Manila over to a total stranger. She promised she would meet me at Gate 22 in 20 minutes, and that's about what it took her to get there. Only in Japan would I trust this to work!

When transfering between international flights at Narita, you have to go through security screening again. Carrying Tanaka through security had been my biggest fear of this whole trip. He's squirmy under the best of circumstances -- definitely not a cat who likes to be held for much more than a minute. I knew that, in Washington at least, my trip through security would be a fairly complicated dance:

1. Take shoes off.
2. Take computer out of bag.
3. Put shoes, computer and computer bag through the x-ray machine.
4. Go through metal detector to make sure I don't cause it to beep.
5. Take Tanaka out of his bag.
6. Put Tanaka's bag through the x-ray machine.
7. Carry Tanaka through the metal detector.
8. Return Tanaka to his bag.
9. Hope computer hasn't disappeared through all of this.
10. Squeeze computer back into a very full bag, while putting shoes back on.

Lucky me, I was also selected for "additional security screening," but the whole thing went much more smoothly than I had assumed it would. Tanaka, for once, had no interest in going anywhere other than my arms.

Security at Narita was much easier. I didn't have to take my shoes off, didn't have to take Tanaka out of his bag and didn't have to take the computer out of its bag. I carried Tanaka through the metal detector in his bag, which a 40-year-old man then visually examined while cooing "ah, kitty-chan!" It did, at least, give Tanaka a moment to stand up and stretch.

So, we leave soon for the last 4.5 hours to Manila. I can't wait to see Shelly, and I'm sure Tanaka feels the same way.

A Third of the Way There

Sunday, October 9, 2005
Los Angeles International Airport

Finally, time to start blogging again. The last three or four weeks have been simply amazing. Amazing in terms of how much I’ve gotten accomplished, amazing in terms of what I have learned, amazing in terms of actually getting the household furnishings packed and stored away.

I had lofty goals. I was going to chronicle, down to the most boring minutae, what goes in to preparing for an international move of indeterminate length. What happened, in reality, was that life got in the way.

Instead of blogging, I completed two sizable freelance projects.

I took Part 3 of the IRS Enrolled Agent Exam. Again.

I spent a week in Iowa visiting Mom and Jerry when I should have been packing.

I visited just about every doctor in town, checking out any body part that could bad over the next year or so.

Took Tanaka to the vet for the same treatment. Then fretted over whether or not his “authenticated” health certificate – his entry to the Philippines – would make it back from the Philippine Embassy in time for us to leave.

Tried to convince Tanaka that, yes, he actually did want to spend a bunch of time in his Sherpa bag, practicing for the trip.

Sorted, packed, sorted some more, packed some more, unpacked a bunch of it, then sorted it all again.

Worked with the property manager to prepare the house for rental. Keep your fingers crossed.

Tried to get forwarding addresses to anyone we do business with. (I know I have failed at this task, but I can no longer keep track of who I updated and who I didn’t update.)

As I said, I had lofty goals.

This past week has been the most trying. I worked my last day on Tuesday, to spend at least part of the day with my successor at the hospital. The movers were due to show up Thursday to pack and Friday to take everything to storage, so everything I needed to get done had to be done by Wednesday evening. Easier said than done, when you add in a four-foot by four-foot pile of mulch that didn’t quite make it as far as the garden and, therefore, needed to be moved manually by the only laborer left at home. (Mom said last fall we should have pruned more of the low-hanging around our driveway. Having had two rather large trucks in our driveway in the span of two days, I now concede that she was probably correct.)

Vivian has been a great help, and a great neighbor, over these past few days, too. I’ve stored a few odds and ends in her attic, she has fed me when I’ve been too busy eat, and she gave me a place to sleep when I realized all the rooms in town have taken up by the Seagull Century bicycle ride. She said “that’s what good neighbors are for.” Well, she is a good neighbor, and all three of us are going to miss her while we’re gone. Thanks, Vivian!

Tanaka has been a great traveler so far, aside from making me dig him out from inside the bed at the Red Roof Inn last night. Roughly a third of the way to Manila, I’ve only heard three brief, loud meows from him, and that was as we sat on the tarmac at Washington National Airport. When the plane started moving again, he stopped meowing, perhaps thinking his complaint about our delay had been heard. At this point, he’s sitting, apparently quite contentedly, on a desk next to me, watching me type, fondly recalling the days he could roam freely, prying the keys off my computer’s keyboard.

The longest leg of our trip is starting soon. If I’m lucky, I’ll get some sleep and can begin recovering from this nasty cold I picked up somewhere over the past few days.

Hmm. *That* game didn't go well.

Ah...college football!

This afternoon found me at the Greene Turtle to watch the big Iowa-Iowa State game. It should have been a great game. Iowa was ranked in the Top 10, Iowa State predicted to win its Big XII division. And, I suppose if you're an Iowa State fan, it was a great game.

No luck for Hawkeye fans, though. It was an ugly 23-3 loss to the Cyclones. Iowa turned the ball over 5 times and could not get the offense going. At all.

Still, it was good to spend the afternoon with -- as Shelly calls them -- my "Iowa buddies." And, it was good to watch Iowa again, even in a loss.

Money Back

After posting about our unexpected road trip, I should note that we asked Northwest for a refund of half of each of our tickets, based on their Contract of Carriage (Section 240, Page 109; and Section 260, Page 123).

Today, a letter arrived, indicating that there should be a credit on our next Discover bill.

Sure, they were cheap tickets to begin with (something like $168 each, round trip), but that's still 168 bucks, back in our pockets.

Superstar Sammy

Lisa sent along some great photos of Sam a couple days ago, including this shot. She says, also, that while talking about church, Sam was saying God bless mom and dad and Uncle Greg.

No God bless Aunt Shell? Maybe he's trying to say I need it more than she does!

Updated September 7. Heard from Lisa yesterday, who had the following to say: sam did say god bless aunt shell - it was just a few minutes later - you were the one who popped in his head

We're not *entirely* from the Stone Age

It's possible we're not complete luddites after all.

Although we're still without a DVD player, we're now running a wireless computer network around the house.

Brad and I seem to be in a technologic arms race these days. He bought an iPod, I bought an iPod. I bought a new laptop, he bought a new laptop. So when he set up a wireleless network, what choice did I have?

A trip to Best Buy and 20 bucks later, a brand new router now resides in Shelly's office (she has the non-wireless computer, though her work laptop should be able to tap right in to "TanakaNet"), and I've been surfing all over the house. Including the dinner table and the back porch.

Which means I no longer have an excuse for taking so long to post updates, now that I can get online anywhere.

Eulogy for an Old Friend

It's always hard to say goodbye to an old friend.

It's that time with my Macintosh PowerBook G4, which has served me well since January 2002, making it ancient in computer terms. It's produced countless newspapers, conference programs, advertisements, flyers and press releases. It's kept me entertained with iTunes, cranking out "Hit Radio G-R-E-G" while producing the great volume of work we've created together. It's even done some gaming, though we both found its paltry 500 MHz processor and 256 MB of RAM challenged by the latest version of SimCity.

In its later years, the PowerBook has been limping towards the finish line. The finish is coming off in several places. The CD drive is wobbly, to put it mildly. And, yes, that's a binder clip keeping the screen together.

In just a few days, a shiny new PowerBook will arrive with the FedEx man, shipped straight from China to my desk. It will have a faster processor, a brighter screen, more memory and a back-lit keyboard. It will be a pleasure to use. The old PowerBook will be put on reserve status, but will always be ready to step in in a pinch. I'll miss you, Old Friend.