{
  "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1",
  "title": "George Mandis",
  "description": "This is my travel feed.",
  "home_page_url": "https://george.mand.is",
  "feed_url": "https://george.mand.is/feed.json",
  "favicon": "https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/george.mand.is/me-sketch-avatar.jpg",  
  "author": {
    "name": "George Mandis"
  },  
  "items": [
    {
      "id": "https://george.mand.is/2019/11/kathmandu-and-timezone-oddities/",
      "url": "https://george.mand.is/2019/11/kathmandu-and-timezone-oddities/",
      "title": "Kathmandu &amp; Timezone Oddities",
      "content_html": "&lt;p&gt;Daylight savings just recently went into effect here in the United States. Normally &amp;quot;gaining&amp;quot; an extra hour as we shift into &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.timeanddate.com/time/standard-time.html&quot;&gt;standard time&lt;/a&gt; is a reason to rejoice this time of year. We all pretend we get an extra hour of sleep that night, as though we&#39;re not just making this time thing up as we go along. The timing for me was a bit humorous though as I&#39;d only just started to get over my jet lag from a month and a half of traveling for conferences and things. Pushing everything back an hour really makes all the difference!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;But that&#39;s less interesting than what I learned while I was presenting at &lt;a href=&quot;https://2019.wwktm.co/&quot;&gt;Web Weekend Kathmandu&lt;/a&gt; in late September. It turns out that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepal_Standard_Time&quot;&gt;Nepal Time&lt;/a&gt; uses UTC+05:45.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you look at the list of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UTC_time_offsets&quot;&gt;UTC time offsets&lt;/a&gt; you&#39;ll find that most countries have rounded to a full hour. From the perspective of someone who thinks a lot about coordinating with others halfway around the globe, this seems most pragmatic. A smaller list of places use an offset that falls along the half-hour, though the largest of these seems to be India at UTC+05:30. It seems wrong to describe anything in India as &amp;quot;small&amp;quot; since over a billion people live in and use that timezone offset.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Nepal however, as far as I can tell, seems to be the only country in the &lt;em&gt;world&lt;/em&gt; currently aligned to an offset that doesn&#39;t fall evenly on the hour or half-hour. There are a couple tiny places in Australia and New Zealand that seem to also align to a 45 minute offset, though I think they&#39;re quite small—the population for one town was 53.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;It might sound silly but trying to coordinate and think about the time back home while I was there was surprisingly disorienting! If you go through the history of timezones a lot of areas have changed their timezone to round to an even hour, I have to think just because it&#39;s easier to coordinate with the rest of the world that way.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;So... there you go! Timezones. Someday, maybe, we&#39;ll abolish timezones all together. I&#39;m not sure when that day will come though—so much of our culture and language, at least in the Western world, revolves around time in a relativistic way it would be hard to unravel. I have higher hopes of getting the U.S. to adopt the metric system before that happens.&lt;/p&gt;",
      "date_published": "2019-11-04T00:00:00.000Z"
    },
    {
      "id": "https://george.mand.is/2019/07/dinner-reservations-at-the-great-wall-of-china/",
      "url": "https://george.mand.is/2019/07/dinner-reservations-at-the-great-wall-of-china/",
      "title": "Dinner Reservations at the Great Wall of China",
      "content_html": "&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://georgemandis.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/travel/great-wall-china-table-2560.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Great Wall of China, Table for Eight&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I didn’t find anything approaching profundity or enlightenment at the top of the Great Wall just a couple hours outside Bejing, but I did find an old man selling Snickers bars for three dollars.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I walked along the wall for a good long time, leaving the older tourists and the little babies climbing steps much taller than they were. Even the little boy in a hat who kept waving and couldn’t seem to stop staring—maybe not sure what to make of my western features.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Part of me expected something profound waiting for me at the top of one of the ramparts. When I arrived, seemingly away from people, there was an old man sitting there with a blanket full of candy and snacks. I pointed at the snickers bar. About $3. I laughed and kept walking…. “$2!” He said as I kept walking. It’s a tactic you have to reserve for the end, but the walking away is an important and necessary step in any bargaining.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Editors Note: I wrote this many years ago, before Donald Trump was president. Reading those words now I hear his voice, talking about how you have to be willing to &amp;quot;walk away&amp;quot; and it makes me angry.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;But I wasn’t really hungry so I kept exploring. I wouldn’t have time to make it all the way around the loop.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;It’s not a magical place like Machu Picchu or other ruins. It’s preserved. It’s design is tactical and purposeful; not divine. You can tell. It’s beautiful but didn’t quite inspire the same wonder and mystery as other places. It&#39;s made by people to protect some people, and keep others out. It is not holy. There is wonder here, but not a long-forgotten question as to &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the place was built.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I stepped through a doorway into an open air courtyard and saw a wooden table with 8 chairs around it. I looked around. Nobody in sight. Utterly surreal — like a secret room or mystery to solve in Myst. A honeybee buzzed by my head. I flicked it away, wondering how it got up here with all the wind. Other than that we were alone. Me, the honeybee and eight chairs at the table.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I descended the wall and made my way back. The first bus back to Beijing left without me, without much of an explanation. But I made it onto the second one, and made it to my debriefing in time before making my way to &lt;a href=&quot;/north-korea/&quot;&gt;North Korea&lt;/a&gt; the next day.&lt;/p&gt;",
      "date_published": "2019-07-19T00:00:00.000Z"
    },
    {
      "id": "https://george.mand.is/2019/04/texans-in-hong-kong/",
      "url": "https://george.mand.is/2019/04/texans-in-hong-kong/",
      "title": "Texans in Hong Kong",
      "content_html": "&lt;p&gt;When you travel, sometimes you meet people. Really, you&#39;re practically guaranteed to meet and interact with &lt;em&gt;someone&lt;/em&gt; when you traverse the globe 6,500 miles. What&#39;s less predictable is how, who and where these meetings occur.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In 2013 I met a Texan names James in the a hotel basement restaurant. It was not a place I was staying or an intentional destination. Par the course that year, I&#39;d taken off for the day with my laptop in-tow, intending to stop and catch-up on my work when the time and opportunity presented itself. On this day that happened to be in a nondescript, hotel basement restaurant in New Kowloon.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I probably ordered a coffee—I can&#39;t remember— and sat to work a bit. I&#39;d noticed James when he came in, his being the only other Western face in the vicinity. When he sat down initially I didn&#39;t say anything. I was preoccupied with something on my computer, probably catching up on emails from other timezones. After a little bit he motioned to catch my attention. I&#39;d tried to ignore him at first, when we made eye contact, but eventually I acquiesced and looked up.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;English?&amp;quot; He asked.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Yes,&amp;quot; I said.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Where from?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The U.S.,&amp;quot; I told him.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;He laughed. &amp;quot;Damn, you&#39;re so quiet! I thought you were Russian. English. Yes!&amp;quot; His Texas drawl was now unmistakable as he turned his chair to face me.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;He proceeded to tell stories of disbelief about his ability to get children&#39;s books published in China. Somehow his various patents were involved in this as well? I was still trying to process what he might do for a living when he told the story about a man who tried to charge him to visit a golf course he&#39;d previously visited many times before. He responded with a practiced rant about how he would pay when every bootlegged movie and Nike out of China was retroactively paid for. It was a little like listening to Yosemite Sam make his case for instigating a trade war.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;My contributions to the conversation were mostly polite nods and affirmations. Eventually he asked what I do. &amp;quot;I make websites,&amp;quot; I told him, as I tell most people. I cringed a little—saying you make websites is like catnip to certain kinds of serial entrepreneurs. I quickly followed up with letting him know I had to be somewhere soon.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;His interest was piqued and he said we should exchange information.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Here, I&#39;ll write it down for you,&amp;quot; he said. I offered him a pen and paper as he carefully wrote on the slip I&#39;d torn from my notebook, folded it a couple times and handed it back to me. We exchanged some final pleasantries and I left.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The rest of my day went about as they tended to that year—adrift in an almost dreamlike state, wandering, looking and wondering endlessly at the world around me, stopping when I was hungry, thirsty or needing to catch up on something.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Eventually I made it home for the night and put my things away. I emptied the coins and treasures from my pocket and felt James&#39; piece of paper. &amp;quot;Oh right,&amp;quot; I remembered. It had slipped out of my mind the moment I&#39;d slipped it in my pocket.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I wondered, maybe something will come of that? Maybe I&#39;ll reach out to him or connect on LinkedIn or something, and somewhere down the line it&#39;ll be a connection I&#39;m glad I made. Curious, I opened the paper to  see what his contact information was and look him up.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;All it said was: James Pickett... Texas.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;You won&#39;t believe this, but there are a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of James Picketts in... Texas.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://georgemandis.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/james-pickett-hong-kong.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;James Pickett — Texas&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;",
      "date_published": "2019-04-29T00:00:00.000Z"
    },
    {
      "id": "https://george.mand.is/2018/11/how-to-get-tickets-to-the-anne-frank-house/",
      "url": "https://george.mand.is/2018/11/how-to-get-tickets-to-the-anne-frank-house/",
      "title": "How to Get Tickets to the Anne Frank House",
      "content_html": "&lt;p&gt;Recently I was in Amsterdam giving a talk at &lt;a href=&quot;https://frontmania.com&quot;&gt;FrontMania&lt;/a&gt;. The title of my presentation was &lt;a href=&quot;https://javascriptforartists.com&quot;&gt;JavaScript for Artists&lt;/a&gt;. You can visit the webiste and find out more about that project.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;While I was in Amsterdam I took the opportunity to soak-in what the city and country had to offer—  a bicycle infrastructure that puts my city to shame, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliebol&quot;&gt;bollen&lt;/a&gt; around ever corner, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinterklaas&quot;&gt;Sinterklaas&lt;/a&gt; and his &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwarte_Piet&quot;&gt;culturally problematic sidekick&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en&quot;&gt;Rijkmuseum&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en&quot;&gt;Van Gogh museum&lt;/a&gt; and, finally, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.annefrank.org&quot;&gt;Anne Frank House&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Getting tickets to the latter turned out to be a bit of an ordeal. In typical fashion, I did not do a tremendous amount of reserach on any of these things before arriving. I spent most of my time fretting, pracitcing and reworking my talk!  When I finally looked into buying tickets to the Anne Frank House however I was bummed to learn they seemed to be sold out for more or less the next couple months!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Anne Frank House has a peculiar ticketing system. Ticket can &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; be purchased online. That means you can&#39;t just walk up to the gate and buy a ticket to enter, no matter how nicely you ask them. I tried. My next assumption was that other tour groups buy up the tickets and resell them as part of their tour packages, but this is heavily frowned upon and supposedly does not happen.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;What you can do though is use their wonky online ticketing system.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://georgemandis.s3.amazonaws.com/media/anne-frank-screenshot.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Online queue for Anne Frank Museum tickets&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The sell 80% of the tickets for any particular day two months ahead of time. The other 20% of the tickets are released on the day-of. They say this very clearly on the ticketing page, but I learned something I did not expect when talking to the ticket person outside the museum about this: They don&#39;t release that 20% all at once!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The first day I logged on to try it I saw the screenshot above with the queue and was too late to get any. I&#39;d assumed they released that 20% all at once at the beginning of the day, but they don&#39;t!  They release a few of them &lt;strong&gt;every hour&lt;/strong&gt; or so throughout the day. You just have to constantly refresh the page throughout the day. I did it every 15-30 minutes and eventually found a ticket around 11am for later in the afternoon.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;When you do find a ticket this way you&#39;ll have to act fast! They disappear very quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, if you&#39;ve planned your trip far enough ahead of time and know you want to visit, it&#39;s probably easiest to buy your tickets out a couple months. If you have a group that&#39;s larger than two people I&#39;d highly suggest this — I never saw more than 2 tickets available at once every time I reloaded the ticket page.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;But, if you&#39;re like me, you can &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; get lucky and nab a ticket this way.  My suggestion would be to stay flexible and simply plan on being in the city most of the day so that you&#39;re close enough to run over and visit if a time slot opens up. There&#39;s plenty of other stuff to see in Amsterdam to bide your time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&#39;d just about given up on visiting the museum until I discovered how the ticketing works. Having seen it now, I&#39;m very glad I didn&#39;t miss it. It&#39;s a very powerful museum and worth hassle.&lt;/p&gt;",
      "date_published": "2018-11-22T00:00:00.000Z"
    },
    {
      "id": "https://george.mand.is/2018/01/passive-protesting-through-ukranian-peanuts/",
      "url": "https://george.mand.is/2018/01/passive-protesting-through-ukranian-peanuts/",
      "title": "Passive protesting through Ukranian peanuts",
      "content_html": "&lt;p&gt;Last July I visited Odessa, Ukraine to speak at &lt;a href=&quot;http://odessajs.org&quot;&gt;OdessaJS&lt;/a&gt;. As I’m wont to do, I like to buy local snacks and candies from the places I’ve visited because I feel like they make for more fun souvenirs and gifts than most things.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I was recently reminded I’d purchased these peanut snacks in Ukraine:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/george.mand.is/images/kozatska-slava.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Kozatska Slava - Ukranian Peanuts&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In an effort to practice reading Cyrllic I tried doing a Google search for the product — Kozatska Slava. I was pleased with myself when I Found results and a little intrigued when I stumbled across this blog post providing a little history and backstory for these peanuts:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://thisismold.com/visual/branding/the-ukrainian-peanut-brand-leveraging-national-political-sentiment&quot;&gt;WHY THIS UKRAINIAN SNACK COMPANY IS THROWING PEANUTS AT RUSSIA&lt;/a&gt; — &lt;a href=&quot;https://thisismold.com&quot;&gt;Mold&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The company changed their name and mascot to something with national significance as a response to its recent conflicts with Russia and to counteract the increasing westernization of items found on shelves in the grocery stores — particularly snacks, which are kind of a western thing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;To quote the article:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;It ensures Kozatska Slava’s peanuts stand out as the Ukrainian choice on shelves filled with international options.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;I’m note sure what the rest of the text says on the packaging, but judging from the look on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cossacks&quot;&gt;Cossack’s&lt;/a&gt; face suggests something along the lines of “We’ll grind the greedy capitalist Mr. Peanut’s bones to butter and choke him on his own monocle.”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;/power-rankings/ass-kicking-snack-mascots&quot;&gt;power rankings for ass-kicking snack mascots&lt;/a&gt;, I Kozatska Slava has a solid lead in first right now.&lt;/p&gt;",
      "date_published": "2018-01-06T00:00:00.000Z"
    },
    {
      "id": "https://george.mand.is/2017/10/my-interview-at-before-after-in-serbian/",
      "url": "https://george.mand.is/2017/10/my-interview-at-before-after-in-serbian/",
      "title": "My interview at Before After (in Serbian)",
      "content_html": "&lt;p&gt;There’s an interview posted over at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.beforeafter.rs/tehnologija/dzordz-mandis-prica-digitalnog-nomada/&quot;&gt;Before After&lt;/a&gt; about my upcoming talk at &lt;a href=&quot;https://belgrade.voxxeddays.com/&quot;&gt;Voxxed Days Belgrade&lt;/a&gt;, digital nomadic-things and other odds and ends. I answered the questions in English originally and someone took the time to translate them to Serbian.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I also remember sending them pictures, but i can tell scrolling through the article that some of those they must’ve found through Googling me, because i don’t recall sending them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Anyhow — excited to speak there soon! Hope people found the interview interesting.&lt;/p&gt;",
      "date_published": "2017-10-13T00:00:00.000Z"
    },
    {
      "id": "https://george.mand.is/2017/07/free-inflight-internet-on-your-laptop-via-gogo-alaska-airlines-and-t-mobile/",
      "url": "https://george.mand.is/2017/07/free-inflight-internet-on-your-laptop-via-gogo-alaska-airlines-and-t-mobile/",
      "title": "Free inflight internet on your laptop via GoGo, Alaska Airlines and T-Mobile",
      "content_html": "&lt;p&gt;Enroute from &lt;a href=&quot;https://skillsmatter.com/conferences/8264-fullstack-2017-the-conference-on-javascript-node-and-internet-of-things&quot;&gt;FullStack&lt;/a&gt; in London to &lt;a href=&quot;https://2017.nejsconf.com/&quot;&gt;NEJS Conf&lt;/a&gt; in Omaha, Nebraska I was taking Alaska Airlines and decided to pay for internet access to catchup on some work. The novelty of surfing the web from 30,000 feet in the air has not worn off yet :)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I noticed they offered a free 1-hour option for T-Mobile customers when I viewed the connection screen on my phone. However, this option was not visible on my laptop where I do most my work.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://georgemandis.s3.amazonaws.com/free-gogo-alaska-airlines/alaska-1.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;GoGo connect screen on my laptop&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Being the sort of person who likes a challenge and wonders how things are made I tried to see if I could get the free hour working on my laptop.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m happy to report I did!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://georgemandis.s3.amazonaws.com/free-gogo-alaska-airlines/alaska-2.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://georgemandis.s3.amazonaws.com/free-gogo-alaska-airlines/alaska-3.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Here&#39;s how I did it:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;ul&gt;&lt;li&gt;Open up a new incognito browser in Chrome.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;Open up the developer tools and toggle the device toolbar. It will probably default to a mobile phone, but double-check and make sure you have some kind of mobile phone selected.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;Go to the GoGo connection site: &lt;a href=&quot;http://airborne.gogoinflight.com/app/asa/ifc&quot;&gt;http://airborne.gogoinflight.com/app/asa/ifc&lt;/a&gt;. You should see the mobile version that (at the time of this writing) offers 1 free hour for T-Mobile customers.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;Click on it and connect. It will prompt you for a phone number.&lt;/li&gt;&lt;li&gt;Eureka!&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;p&gt;The incognito step is not strictly required, but I tried to visit the GoGo connection site prior to enabling the developer tools. It must have set a cookie or something that indicated I was not on a mobile device because, even though I was able to get to the T-Mobile sign-in screen, it gave me an error saying the free hour was only available for mobile devices.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&#39;d be curious to hear if other people have tips for circumnavigating airline wifi.&lt;/p&gt;",
      "date_published": "2017-07-19T00:00:00.000Z"
    },
    {
      "id": "https://george.mand.is/2017/07/talking-about-midi-and-iot-at-fullstack-2017/",
      "url": "https://george.mand.is/2017/07/talking-about-midi-and-iot-at-fullstack-2017/",
      "title": "Talking About MIDI and IoT at FullStack 2017",
      "content_html": "&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m excited to be speaking a &lt;a href=&quot;https://skillsmatter.com/conferences/8264-fullstack-2017-the-conference-on-javascript-node-and-internet-of-things#program&quot;&gt;FullStack 2017&lt;/a&gt; this coming Friday! There are a lot of speakers scheduled to speak over the three-day event. I was fortunate enough to see and meet several of them already between &lt;a href=&quot;https://george.mand.is/2017/06/reflecting-on-my-time-speaking-at-holyjs-in-st-petersburg/&quot;&gt;HolyJS&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://george.mand.is/2017/07/how-ngrok-saved-my-talk-at-odessajs/&quot;&gt;OdessaJS&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://skillsmatter.com/legacy_profile/douglas-crockford&quot;&gt;Douglas Crockford&lt;/a&gt; wrote one of the seminal books on JavaScript — &lt;a href=&quot;http://amzn.to/2u6IdP6&quot;&gt;JavaScript: The Good Parts&lt;/a&gt;. He&#39;ll be giving the opening keynote at the conference. I&#39;m not exactly sure what the topic is but I did enjoy his talk on &lt;a href=&quot;http://dec64.com/&quot;&gt;DEC64&lt;/a&gt; at HolyJS.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://skillsmatter.com/legacy_profile/martin-splitt&quot;&gt;Martin Splitt&lt;/a&gt;, as far as I can tell, is on perpetual tour speaking at every conference I&#39;ve ever heard of! He was an absolute delight at HolyJS and is a fantastic developer advocate. I&#39;m hoping to catch his workshop on practical WebGL.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Gerard Sans is an Angular guru I most recently met at OdessaJS. He did a wonderful job of explaining heady concepts in digestable English and has a friendly way about him. Angular state management seems like a big subject to try and tackle in a 45-minute slot so I&#39;m intrigued so see how it goes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is so much good IoT talk happening at this event! It interests me a lot right now and I look forward to hearing other experts weigh-in. I&#39;m also intrigued by the other music-related talk by &lt;a href=&quot;https://skillsmatter.com/legacy_profile/tero-parviainen&quot;&gt;Tero Parviainen&lt;/a&gt;, even though the point of my talk is there are &amp;quot;non-musical&amp;quot; applications for MIDI. In genearl, any &amp;quot;creative&amp;quot; application of coding intrigues me, so his talk on generative music with JavaScript and Web Audio should be right up my alley.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;My talk On Web MIDI (and more!) should be enjoyable to most anyone, I hope. The feedback so far has been that  it&#39;s &amp;quot;fun&amp;quot; and nice to be reminded about something that&#39;s not strictly related to work and professional development. It&#39;s a chance to explore something more purely creative and think outside the box a little. It toucehs on that desire to create on a computer that got most of us into the industry in the first place, and it&#39;s that type of thinking that keeps things fresh, makes us use the rest of our brain and helps us continue to do good work.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m excited to unveil some new MIDI experiments and demos. That&#39;s the beauty of this talk — I can probably continue to give it for some time as long as I keep the experiments fresh and interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The event is already sold out so  if you&#39;re among the lucky group that already purchased a ticket, please come say hello!&lt;/p&gt;",
      "date_published": "2017-07-09T00:00:00.000Z"
    },
    {
      "id": "https://george.mand.is/2017/07/how-ngrok-saved-my-talk-at-odessajs/",
      "url": "https://george.mand.is/2017/07/how-ngrok-saved-my-talk-at-odessajs/",
      "title": "How ngrok saved my talk at OdessaJS",
      "content_html": "&lt;p&gt;I recently spoke at &lt;a href=&quot;http://odessajs.org/&quot;&gt;OdessaJS&lt;/a&gt; in Ukraine and gave two different talks — one on making non-musical projects with &lt;a href=&quot;https://midi.mand.is&quot;&gt;MIDI and JavaScript&lt;/a&gt; and another on my semi-infamous open-source project &lt;a href=&quot;/2017/03/that-time-i-broke-marvel-com/&quot;&gt;Konami-JS&lt;/a&gt;. It was a fun conference and being near the Black Sea in the midst of a heatwave was good timing on their part!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The setup for my first talk is &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/georgeMandis/status/870976166819180544&quot;&gt;asking for trouble&lt;/a&gt; — six MIDI controllers, three Node servers tunneled through &lt;a href=&quot;https://ngrok.com/&quot;&gt;ngrok&lt;/a&gt; to circumnavigate local network restrictions, an interactive WebRTC demo, an interactive WebSockets demo, audio, video, all running off my 2015 MacBook with only one USB-C port! I&#39;m using a cheap &lt;a href=&quot;http://amzn.to/2tXwdPM&quot;&gt;Amazon Basics USB hub&lt;/a&gt; off a &lt;a href=&quot;http://amzn.to/2sSlD7G&quot;&gt;Satechi USB-C HDMI + USB hub dongle&lt;/a&gt; to keep everything connected.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The whole thing looks absurd:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://georgemandis.s3.amazonaws.com/holyjs-midi-setup.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;My More Than MIDI Setup at HolyJS&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Satechi dongle is an especially necessary component as it&#39;s what gives me my HDMI out. With that I&#39;d have a hard time connecting to the projector at &lt;a href=&quot;/talks&quot;&gt;these conferences&lt;/a&gt;. At my most recent talk in Odessa however, they only supported VGA, which I (Perhaps foolishly) had not anticipated.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the end I was saved by someone that happened to have a USB-C to VGA adapter, but I couldn&#39;t track that person down for my &lt;em&gt;second&lt;/em&gt; talk about the history of Konami-JS. Fortunately &lt;a href=&quot;https://ngrok.com/&quot;&gt;ngrok&lt;/a&gt; saved the day. It was about 10 minutes until I was scheduled to talk and I thought I was going to have to upload it to a server to access there. Had I thought ahead that would&#39;ve probably been a good idea... But doing it right before I was about to talk seemed like a bad idea. I hadn&#39;t optimized or compressed a lot of my images thinking, since I&#39;d be serving them locally, it wouldn&#39;t really matter.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Because of ngrok I was able to run the &lt;a href=&quot;http://lab.hakim.se/reveal-js/&quot;&gt;reveal.js presentation&lt;/a&gt; on my laptop as normal and tunnel port 4000 to a temporary URL. On a separate laptop with better support for VGA adapter — which I guess is a nicer way of saying an &lt;em&gt;older&lt;/em&gt; laptop — was able to run pull up the URL and run through my presentation as normal.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Would I have been able to do this with my MIDI presentation, given that it had many more interactive components and the MIDI controllers interacted with the presentation itself? With a bit more planning, I think yes. I also could have theoretically plugged the MIDI controllers into the backup laptop and everything should have worked, save the Bluetooth MIDI setup for my &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/georgemandis/puck-js-midi-clicker&quot;&gt;Puck.js BLE MIDI clicker&lt;/a&gt; which would&#39;ve required pairing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;All in all, if you&#39;re a speaker who feels compelled to run their presentation on their own laptop sort of like my setup, I&#39;d highly encourage you to create an ngrok account. It&#39;s great for any sort of interactive demo where you want to run components locally on your machine, but it can also save the day in a situation like this!&lt;/p&gt;",
      "date_published": "2017-07-06T00:00:00.000Z"
    },
    {
      "id": "https://george.mand.is/2017/06/midi-javascript-and-more-at-odessajs-2017/",
      "url": "https://george.mand.is/2017/06/midi-javascript-and-more-at-odessajs-2017/",
      "title": "MIDI, JavaScript and more at OdessaJS 2017",
      "content_html": "&lt;p&gt;I&#39;ll flattered and excited to be speaking at the beginning of next month in Odessa, Ukraine at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://odessajs.org/&quot;&gt;OdessaJS&lt;/a&gt; conference. I&#39;m looking forward to seeing some familiar faces from my previous speaking engagement at &lt;a href=&quot;https://george.mand.is/2017/06/reflecting-on-my-time-speaking-at-holyjs-in-st-petersburg/&quot;&gt;HolyJS&lt;/a&gt; in St. Petersburg, Russia.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m also looking forward to having an opportunity to give not just one but &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; talks! In addition to my presentation on &lt;strong&gt;JavaScript, MIDI and Tiny Computers&lt;/strong&gt; I&#39;ll be giving an 8-year retrospective on my open-source easter-egg project: &lt;a href=&quot;https://snaptortoise.github.io/konami-js&quot;&gt;Konami-JS&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The first talk concerning JavaScript and MIDI will be chocked-full of demos and code samples, but the latter is more of a high-level overview of what I&#39;ve learned in overseeing a silly-but-popular open-source project — a project that&#39;s overlapped with most of my 11-year career as a freelance developer and consultant.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you saw me at HolyJS please come say hello again! And if you didn&#39;t see me but were in attendance... come see one of my talks at OdessaJS! I&#39;d love to meet you.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&#39;ll be giving my presentation on JavaScrit and MIDI a number of times in the coming months. Please check out my &lt;a href=&quot;/talks&quot;&gt;speaking page&lt;/a&gt; for more information. If you&#39;re organizing a conference and are interested in having me come and present please &lt;a href=&quot;/contact&quot;&gt;get in touch&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;",
      "date_published": "2017-06-13T00:00:00.000Z"
    },
    {
      "id": "https://george.mand.is/2017/06/my-interview-at-habrahabrru/",
      "url": "https://george.mand.is/2017/06/my-interview-at-habrahabrru/",
      "title": "My interview at habrahabr.ru",
      "content_html": "&lt;p&gt;In my review of what it was like speaking at Holy JS yesterday I forgot to post a link to an interview I did as part of that conference. Part of the reason I might&#39;ve forgotten is that most of my audience speaks English and the interview is in Russian:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://habrahabr.ru/company/jugru/blog/329940/&quot;&gt;Стартапы и ненормальное программирование. TBD&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Per Google Translate, that translates to English something like:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://habrahabr.ru/company/jugru/blog/329940/&quot;&gt;Startups and abnormal programming. TBD&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Also courtesy of some automated translation, the lead-in paragraph reads:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;In anticipation HolyJS we discussed the problem of start-ups, development of geographical differences and the impact of open source on the industry with George Mandisa (George Mandis). At the time, he had already proved in practice that the developer is not really important political boundaries and geographic coordinates for a number of years working around the world. Today I decided to share with us their observations.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are numerous translation curiosities that made me smile, but I think the content of the interview overall is pretty good. I try my best to relay my opinions on startup culture and developer work after 11 years in the industry and having worked and traveled through various countries the past several years.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you want to read the original English response to the questions as I wrote them  — which, I will warn you, are a little less amusing when untranslated — you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://georgemandis.s3.amazonaws.com/holyjs-piter-2017/HolyJS%20Interview%20Questions.pdf&quot;&gt;read those here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;",
      "date_published": "2017-06-11T00:00:00.000Z"
    },
    {
      "id": "https://george.mand.is/2017/05/speaking-on-javascript-midi-and-more-at-holy-js-2017/",
      "url": "https://george.mand.is/2017/05/speaking-on-javascript-midi-and-more-at-holy-js-2017/",
      "title": "Speaking on JavaScript, MIDI and more at Holy JS 2017",
      "content_html": "&lt;p&gt;After close to 30 hours of transit time I&#39;m finally in St. Petersburg, Russia for &lt;a href=&quot;https://holyjs-piter.ru/en&quot;&gt;Holy JS 2017&lt;/a&gt;. This weekend I&#39;m going to give &lt;a href=&quot;https://holyjs-piter.ru/talks/make-more-than-music-with-tiny-computers-javascript-and-midi/&quot;&gt;a talk about JavaScript, MIDI, tiny computers&lt;/a&gt; and some of the fun, outside-the-box things you can do with them. I&#39;m very excited about it and think it&#39;s going to be fun.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you&#39;re attending this conference please come say hello! Don&#39;t be shy.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Tomorrow I look forward to getting a little better acquainted with the city and purchasing some voltage adapters so that I can actually charge all the gadgets I brought. Somehow I foolishly left mine at home in the rush to leave.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;If this talk sounds like something you&#39;d be interested in but you&#39;re not in Russia right now, you should look at my &lt;a href=&quot;/talks&quot;&gt;upcoming speaking engagements&lt;/a&gt;. I&#39;d love to see you there!&lt;/p&gt;",
      "date_published": "2017-05-31T00:00:00.000Z"
    },
    {
      "id": "https://george.mand.is/2017/02/decide-where-to-be-a-nomad-with-earth-awaits/",
      "url": "https://george.mand.is/2017/02/decide-where-to-be-a-nomad-with-earth-awaits/",
      "title": "Decide Where to Be a Nomad with Earth Awaits",
      "content_html": "&lt;p&gt;Recently I was introduced to an interesting travel website geared towards people interested looking to do some long-term traveling: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theearthawaits.com/&quot;&gt;Earth Awaits&lt;/a&gt;. What it attempt to do is suggest places in the world you could live based on a budget.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In addition to filtering by the cost of living you can screen out places based on crime, pollution and miscellaneous other factors that might be important to you. They&#39;ve pulled all of their data from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/&quot;&gt;Numbeo&lt;/a&gt; which is basically a crowd-sourced cost-of-living website. I remember referencing it a few times when planning extended travels.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m pretty sure the site makes most of its money through affiliate credit-card marketing via their &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theearthawaits.com/award-search/&quot;&gt;travel page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&#39;s an interesting tool. I&#39;d like to do another extended travel adventure at some point, and when that time comes I&#39;ll be sure to keep this site in mind.&lt;/p&gt;",
      "date_published": "2017-02-22T00:00:00.000Z"
    },
    {
      "id": "https://george.mand.is/2017/01/giving-talks-as-a-means-to-travel/",
      "url": "https://george.mand.is/2017/01/giving-talks-as-a-means-to-travel/",
      "title": "Giving Talks as a Means to Travel",
      "content_html": "&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m experimenting with giving talks at tech conferences right now as means to travel. After last Fall&#39;s experience giving an Ignite presentation in Portland about my year as a digital nomad, I&#39;ve been intrigued by the idea of giving more technical presentations at conferences.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;It turns out these conferences exist all over the world and many of them have open calls for speaking! I&#39;ve compiled  Twitter list that follows a number of web-development-centric conferences here:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/snaptortoise/lists/conferences&quot;&gt;twitter.com/snaptortoise/lists/conferences&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can also peruse conferences open to speakers over on &lt;a href=&quot;https://lanyrd.com/profile/georgemandis-1451/edit/&quot;&gt;Laynrd&lt;/a&gt; on their Calls page, which is a bit hidden from the main navigaton:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://lanyrd.com/calls/&quot;&gt;lanyrd.com/calls/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Another good resource to look for events soliciting calls for proposals is PaperCall.io:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://papercall.io&quot;&gt;papercall.io&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do you have resources to suggest for CFPs? &lt;a href=&quot;/contact&quot;&gt;Get in touch&lt;/a&gt; and I&#39;ll add it to this list!&lt;/p&gt;",
      "date_published": "2017-01-29T00:00:00.000Z"
    },
    {
      "id": "https://george.mand.is/2017/01/practicing-foreign-pronunciation-with-speech-to-text/",
      "url": "https://george.mand.is/2017/01/practicing-foreign-pronunciation-with-speech-to-text/",
      "title": "Practicing Foreign Pronunciation with Speech-to-Text",
      "content_html": "&lt;p&gt;About a year ago I went to Serbia to visit my relatives. Every visit is a crash-course in Serbo-Croatian, whether it&#39;s learning to pronounce the sounds that don&#39;t quite exist in English, phonetically sounding-out the Cyrillic or learning new, creative ways to swear.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are not very many opportunities to practice Serbo-Croatian in Portland, Oregon, so I relied a lot on watching YouTube videos and, frankly, guessing. It&#39;s a surprisingly tricky language to learn and even seemingly simple idioms in English have a tendency to translate strangely — like asking for a &amp;quot;glass of water&amp;quot; can sound like you&#39;re asking for a glass made out of water if you use the wrong article.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I discovered a simple practice trick though with &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com&quot;&gt;Google Translate&lt;/a&gt; that helped quite a bit. One of the coolest features is the ability to speak into your microphone instead of type. You can access this on the website by clicking on the microphone icon in the bottom-left-hand corner.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/george.mand.is/images/google-translate.png&quot; alt=&quot;Google Translate&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Although speech-to-text services are getting better all the time, they&#39;re still prone to misunderstanding. I find I have to make a conscious effort to enunciate and speak a little slower than I normally might.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In this case however, that&#39;s actually a good thing! I reasoned that, if Google could understand me as I tried to wrap my mouth around some of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/#sr/en/Zdravo%20m%D0%BE%D1%98%20prijatelj!%20Gde%20je%20crna%20ma%C4%8Dka%3F%20%D0%88%D0%B0%20sam%20dosadno.%20%D0%88%D0%B5bite%20sve.&quot;&gt;trickier sounds in Serbo-Croatian&lt;/a&gt;, my relative and other people might be able to understand me as well.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Srećno!&lt;/p&gt;",
      "date_published": "2017-01-26T00:00:00.000Z"
    },
    {
      "id": "https://george.mand.is/2017/01/video-from-the-2016-pyongyang-marathon/",
      "url": "https://george.mand.is/2017/01/video-from-the-2016-pyongyang-marathon/",
      "title": "Video From the 2016 Pyongyang Marathon",
      "content_html": "&lt;p&gt;This isn&#39;t my video — this one comes courtesy of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.koryogroup.com/&quot;&gt;Koryo Tours&lt;/a&gt; — but it&#39;s a much longer and more accurate idea of what my trip to North Korea last spring was like than &lt;a href=&quot;http://george.mand.is/2016/08/north-korea-documentary/&quot;&gt;the other video&lt;/a&gt; I posted about previously. It really captures what it was like running around the streets of Pyongyang.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I haven&#39;t watched all 35 minutes to see if I make an appearance, possibly because I&#39;m not a &lt;a href=&quot;http://george.mand.is/2017/01/the-guide-to-dismantling-a-dictator/&quot;&gt;complete and utter narcissist&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;iframe width=&quot;100%&quot; height=&quot;315&quot; src=&quot;https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/g9y56HiofYY?showinfo=0&quot; frameborder=&quot;0&quot; allowfullscreen&gt;&lt;/iframe&gt;",
      "date_published": "2017-01-17T00:00:00.000Z"
    },
    {
      "id": "https://george.mand.is/2017/01/uncommon-souvenirs-my-red-ostrich-cigarettes-from-north-korea/",
      "url": "https://george.mand.is/2017/01/uncommon-souvenirs-my-red-ostrich-cigarettes-from-north-korea/",
      "title": "Uncommon Souvenirs: My Red Ostrich Cigarettes from North Korea",
      "content_html": "&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/george.mand.is/featured/north-korean-cigarettes.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;North Korean Cigarettes&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of unusual things about visiting Korea, but one of the more amusing ones is the curious souvenir situation. The DMZ, on the North Korean side, feels surprisingly like a tourist trap full of t-shirts, candies, artwork, dear leader pins and more.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&#39;s a crime to actually purchase things there, at least as an American in the U.S. But there&#39;s a roundabout way where they will accept Euros and RMB for goods in tourist stops stocked full of their various dear leaders&#39; translated thoughts on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juche&quot;&gt;Juche&lt;/a&gt;, musical notation for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjV2EErPHdg&quot;&gt;the country&#39;s anthem&lt;/a&gt; translated to Russian, recipe books and colorful postcards, the latter of which I acquired many.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;They were all much more interesting than your standard touristic souvenir shop, partly because you knew this was quite literally the only place in the world you&#39;re likely to find these things, but also because you never knew quite what to expect, when you&#39;d see a particular item again or what the price would be (In case you&#39;re curious, my one half-hearted attempt at bargaining was not well received. Not recommended).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;There was one &amp;quot;tourist moment&amp;quot; that stood out above the others though. Throughout the entire trip we were never entirely sure of our itinerary from one moment to the next, and my impression was neither were our wonderful North Korean tour guides. On one of the days its was announced we would have approximately 15 minutes to visit a real department store, exchange RMB or Euros for North Korean won and buy something.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;We must ask that you change the money back, as you are not supposed to leave the country with our money. We will not check, but please exchange it,&amp;quot; he told us.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The funniest part wasn&#39;t the wink-nudge encouragement to acquire a more interesting travel memento — it was trying to take-in the interestingness of a North Korean department store, buy something, stand in-line for checkout and then pretend we were exchanging all of our money again in 15 minutes!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I walked up and down the aisles, trying to figure out what to get. The 18,700 won frying pan? The smartphone running the DPRK-flavored version of Android sitting under the case next to chintzy jewelry? Would they even &lt;em&gt;let&lt;/em&gt; me buy that?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In a panic I settled on candy, a strange bottle of booze that I thought might look good next to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.binnys.com/spirits/Zuta_Osa_Slivovitz_Plum_20281.html&quot;&gt;Žuta Osa&lt;/a&gt; my Serbian relatives gave me the previous winter and a carton of cigarettes. For context, I do not smoke or drink (I&#39;m a bad Serb).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Many months later my red ostrich North Korean cigarettes sit on top of the microwave in my kitchen, relegated to the occasional gag gift and conversation pieces.&lt;/p&gt;",
      "date_published": "2017-01-12T00:00:00.000Z"
    },
    {
      "id": "https://george.mand.is/2017/01/just-jik-it/",
      "url": "https://george.mand.is/2017/01/just-jik-it/",
      "title": "Just Jik It!",
      "content_html": "&lt;p&gt;When I was in Nairobi in 2013 I spent in inordinate amount of time watching television with my hosts. That might sound like a terrible way to spend your time in a another country, particularly one as interesting as Kenya.. and, well, it kind of is if that&#39;s all you do. But watching TV in other countries is surprisingly interesting! You get a taste of the culture and local happenings through the local news and talk shows, and the commercials can be hilarious and entertaining from an outside perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Speaking of the latter, this was hands-down my favorite commercial:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;iframe width=&quot;100%&quot; height=&quot;315&quot; src=&quot;https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2BLOdIm6vWQ?showinfo=0&quot; frameborder=&quot;0&quot; allowfullscreen&gt;&lt;/iframe&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&#39;s actually from South Africa, as I understand it, but it doesn&#39;t matter. Some people will remember Kenya for safaris and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matatu&quot;&gt;matatus&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maasai_people&quot;&gt;Maasai&lt;/a&gt;. Me? I&#39;ll remember it for catchy detergent commercials.&lt;/p&gt;",
      "date_published": "2017-01-09T00:00:00.000Z"
    },
    {
      "id": "https://george.mand.is/2017/01/obligation-chocolate-the-saddest-of-chocolates/",
      "url": "https://george.mand.is/2017/01/obligation-chocolate-the-saddest-of-chocolates/",
      "title": "Obligation Chocolate, the Saddest of Chocolates",
      "content_html": "&lt;p&gt;Leave it to Japan to make chocolate sad.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I say that lovingly, recalling my month in Japan several years ago wandering Tokyo and &lt;a href=&quot;http://george.mand.is/2014/04/sento-silence-vending-machines-retro-future-promises-tokyo/&quot;&gt;spending late nights in the sentō&lt;/a&gt;. There&#39;s a subtle sadness that touches everything, a quality seeming inherent to Japanese culture that I can&#39;t quite point at but see its outline when I squint. I see it when I watch things like &lt;a href=&quot;http://amzn.to/2j0ZX5A&quot;&gt;The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness&lt;/a&gt; — a documentary about &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XWpMQFYczI&quot;&gt;Studio Ghibli&lt;/a&gt; — and when I read &lt;a href=&quot;http://amzn.to/2iOiaUA&quot;&gt;Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;http://amzn.to/2iSkkF2&quot;&gt;Haruki Murakami&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I saw it when I walked past this to-the-point sign near Shinjuku:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/georgemandis/media/2013-11-24-18.24.18-768x1024.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Coffee and Whiskey&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;So it was not surprising to me when I learned about a new aspect  of Japanese culture recently that also found a way to be a little bit... sad.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I present to you &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giri_choco&quot;&gt;giri choco&lt;/a&gt; — otherwise known as &amp;quot;Obligation Chocolate.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;During my time in Japan I&#39;d learned about how they have a followup holiday to Valentine&#39;s Day called White Day exactly one month later. The idea is that each person in the partnership — traditionally male/female — has a special day to purchase gifts for the other person.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;On Valentine&#39;s Day women give chocolates to men. Depending on the seriousness of the relationship you give a different kind of chocolate, ranging from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honmei_choco&quot;&gt;honmei-choco&lt;/a&gt; (&amp;quot;True Feelings&amp;quot; chocolate) to the bottom of the totem pole, our good friend giri choco.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is a bluntness to its titling I appreciate.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Please, don&#39;t read too much into this chocolate I am giving you. I am obligated.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I learned about this from a participant in an ESL conversation group I&#39;ve been facilitating the past few months. I&#39;d already known about Valentine&#39;s Day and White Day in Japan, but had never heard about the chocolates!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;So, how do you know if you&#39;re receiving an obligation chocolate or a true feelings chocolate?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think the rule of thumb is, if you have to ask... it&#39;s almost certainly obligation chocolate.&lt;/p&gt;",
      "date_published": "2017-01-06T00:00:00.000Z"
    },
    {
      "id": "https://george.mand.is/2017/01/learning-to-count-by-hand-in-beijing/",
      "url": "https://george.mand.is/2017/01/learning-to-count-by-hand-in-beijing/",
      "title": "Learning to Count by Hand in Beijing",
      "content_html": "&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/george.mand.is/featured/Finger_counting.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Counting by Hand&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;This story is about the time I accidentally discovered &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_number_gestures&quot;&gt;Chinese number gestures&lt;/a&gt; in a back alley in Beijing, haggling over shoes I&#39;d later wear as I bowed before the bodies of North Korea&#39;s two previous leaders at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumsusan_Palace_of_the_Sun&quot;&gt;Kumsusan Palace of the Sun&lt;/a&gt;, where they lay embalmed under glass, skin taut, still as plastic toy soldiers, during that time we botched the bowing ritual and unintentionally disrespected the Kim Il-Sung, before correctly paying respect to Kim Jong-Il.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Every word in that sentence is real, surprisingly, and probably a story worth writing. But it&#39;s not this story. Today, we&#39;re going to talk about counting on your fingers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Last spring I visited Beijing before making my way to North Korea for the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.koryogroup.com/&quot;&gt;Pyongyang International Marathon&lt;/a&gt;. It was my first foray into mainland China. The thought was I&#39;d stay the first week in Beijing to get acclimated to the timezone change and continue running around the city to stay in shape.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The latter half of that plan didn&#39;t happen on account of the pollution, which was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollution_in_China#Air_pollution&quot;&gt;remarkably awful&lt;/a&gt;. I hear stories of China&#39;s booming economy, but walking around in Beijing I couldn&#39;t help but think &amp;quot;At what cost?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;But this isn&#39;t a story about pollution in China either. Or economies or marathons in countries under dictatorships. This is about counting on your hands.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;One of my favorite things about travel is how much variety there is in the world, and also how much underlying similarity there can be. Preconceived notions and world views are constantly challenged, and it&#39;s glorious. It lubricates and utilizes the pathways in your brain you&#39;d either forgotten about or never fully explored. The problems in the U.S. can almost be drowned out to whispers when you&#39;re thousands of miles away — though this observation comes from the innocence of a pre-Trump world. Going forward, I&#39;m less certain that will be the case...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some things you assume to be fairly universal. A smile is usually friendly. It never hurts to laugh. Always learn &lt;em&gt;please&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;thank you&lt;/em&gt;, because every language has them and everyone, everywhere will appreciate it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and when in doubt or confused about numbers, you can always count with your fingers. Right?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I learned something walking through the markets in the alleys of one of the working-class neighborhoods in Beijing. I was looking for shoes, a shirt and a tie to purchase for the one formal day we&#39;d have in North Korea. I&#39;m not one for packing heavily and it seemed easier and cheaper to purchase these things when I arrived.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The day before my departure to Pyongyang I&#39;d found the shirt and the tie, but still hadn&#39;t settled on shoes. Finally, sitting on a table outside on a glorious spring day, I found them. The chintziest-looking, black, faux-leather shoes perfectly suitable for formal occasions in rogue nations.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;For some reason, I asked the man manning the table how much. That&#39;s pretty much an invitation to pay 100x the price.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;He flashed a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-ODoWickco&quot;&gt;hang loose&lt;/a&gt; sign at me. I was bewildered. Was that... Two? Eleven? Something... else?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m not a great bargainer, but one thing I&#39;ve learned is if you know what you want to pay for a thing it&#39;s always better to lead with about half that amount, and never ever ask, like I had.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I decided to pretend I&#39;d understood and simply write down the number I wanted to pay, assuming whatever he&#39;d intended was almost certainly more.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;On a little &lt;a href=&quot;http://store.analog.is/&quot;&gt;notebook&lt;/a&gt; I like to carry in my back pocket when I travel, I made my opening offer: &lt;em&gt;$7.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;He glanced at my chicken-scratch on the grid paper, smiled, shook my hand and handed me the box with the shoes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Well, shit,&lt;/em&gt; I thought. I probably could&#39;ve had those for something like $2.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Later that night I was still thinking about the &amp;quot;hang-loose&amp;quot; gesture he had initially signed. For the rest of the day I&#39;d paid special attention to other people bargaining over items and noticed a slew of recurring hand gestures I wasn&#39;t familiar with. An &amp;quot;L&amp;quot; shape between the index and thumb, a single index finger to the air, a &amp;quot;hooked&amp;quot; index finger and a fist. This was not how I&#39;d been taught to count in kindergarten.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;After a bit of Googling — which I was able to do via my phone because, as I discovered, although Google is blocked in China, if you have an American SIM card in your phone Google is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; blocked, and neither is Facebook — I stumbled across the Wikipedia page on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_number_gestures&quot;&gt;Chinese number gestures&lt;/a&gt;. It seemed to describe what I&#39;d seen perfectly!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Counting on your hands from one to five is the same as it is in Western culture, and I&#39;d be willing to guess just about &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; human culture on earth, though I&#39;d love to find the exception to that rule. Six through ten however is where the additional gestures come into play, which you can see in this video:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;iframe width=&quot;100%&quot; height=&quot;315&quot; src=&quot;https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/A2U-tkS-PEw?showinfo=0&quot; frameborder=&quot;0&quot; allowfullscreen&gt;&lt;/iframe&gt;&lt;p&gt;You know what 6 looked like? It looked like a hang-loose sign. Of course. No wonder the man had smiled when I wrote down 7. Little did he know, I wasn&#39;t overpaying him — I was tipping him for teaching me how to count on my hands!&lt;/p&gt;",
      "date_published": "2017-01-05T00:00:00.000Z"
    }
  ]
}