George Mandis

Kathmandu & Timezone Oddities

2019-11-04T00:00:00.000Z

Daylight savings just recently went into effect here in the United States. Normally "gaining" an extra hour as we shift into standard time is a reason to rejoice this time of year. We all pretend we get an extra hour of sleep that night, as though we're not just making this time thing up as we go along. The timing for me was a bit humorous though as I'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!

But that's less interesting than what I learned while I was presenting at Web Weekend Kathmandu in late September. It turns out that Nepal Time uses UTC+05:45.

If you look at the list of UTC time offsets you'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 "small" since over a billion people live in and use that timezone offset.

Nepal however, as far as I can tell, seems to be the only country in the world currently aligned to an offset that doesn'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're quite small—the population for one town was 53.

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's easier to coordinate with the rest of the world that way.

So... there you go! Timezones. Someday, maybe, we'll abolish timezones all together. I'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.

Dinner Reservations at the Great Wall of China

2019-07-19T00:00:00.000Z

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.

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.

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.

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 "walk away" and it makes me angry.

But I wasn’t really hungry so I kept exploring. I wouldn’t have time to make it all the way around the loop.

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'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 why the place was built.

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.

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 North Korea the next day.

Texans in Hong Kong

2019-04-29T00:00:00.000Z

When you travel, sometimes you meet people. Really, you're practically guaranteed to meet and interact with someone when you traverse the globe 6,500 miles. What's less predictable is how, who and where these meetings occur.

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'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.

I probably ordered a coffee—I can't remember— and sat to work a bit. I'd noticed James when he came in, his being the only other Western face in the vicinity. When he sat down initially I didn'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'd tried to ignore him at first, when we made eye contact, but eventually I acquiesced and looked up.

"English?" He asked.

"Yes," I said.

"Where from?"

"The U.S.," I told him.

He laughed. "Damn, you're so quiet! I thought you were Russian. English. Yes!" His Texas drawl was now unmistakable as he turned his chair to face me.

He proceeded to tell stories of disbelief about his ability to get children'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'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.

My contributions to the conversation were mostly polite nods and affirmations. Eventually he asked what I do. "I make websites," 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.

His interest was piqued and he said we should exchange information.

"Here, I'll write it down for you," he said. I offered him a pen and paper as he carefully wrote on the slip I'd torn from my notebook, folded it a couple times and handed it back to me. We exchanged some final pleasantries and I left.

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.

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' piece of paper. "Oh right," I remembered. It had slipped out of my mind the moment I'd slipped it in my pocket.

I wondered, maybe something will come of that? Maybe I'll reach out to him or connect on LinkedIn or something, and somewhere down the line it'll be a connection I'm glad I made. Curious, I opened the paper to see what his contact information was and look him up.

All it said was: James Pickett... Texas.

You won't believe this, but there are a lot of James Picketts in... Texas.

How to Get Tickets to the Anne Frank House

2018-11-22T00:00:00.000Z

Recently I was in Amsterdam giving a talk at FrontMania. The title of my presentation was JavaScript for Artists. You can visit the webiste and find out more about that project.

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, bollen around ever corner, Sinterklaas and his culturally problematic sidekick, the Rijkmuseum, the Van Gogh museum and, finally, the Anne Frank House.

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!

The Anne Frank House has a peculiar ticketing system. Ticket can only be purchased online. That means you can'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.

What you can do though is use their wonky online ticketing system.

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't release that 20% all at once!

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'd assumed they released that 20% all at once at the beginning of the day, but they don't! They release a few of them every hour 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.

When you do find a ticket this way you'll have to act fast! They disappear very quickly.

Obviously, if you've planned your trip far enough ahead of time and know you want to visit, it's probably easiest to buy your tickets out a couple months. If you have a group that's larger than two people I'd highly suggest this — I never saw more than 2 tickets available at once every time I reloaded the ticket page.

But, if you're like me, you can probably 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're close enough to run over and visit if a time slot opens up. There's plenty of other stuff to see in Amsterdam to bide your time.

I'd just about given up on visiting the museum until I discovered how the ticketing works. Having seen it now, I'm very glad I didn't miss it. It's a very powerful museum and worth hassle.

Passive protesting through Ukranian peanuts

2018-01-06T00:00:00.000Z

Last July I visited Odessa, Ukraine to speak at OdessaJS. 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.

I was recently reminded I’d purchased these peanut snacks in Ukraine:

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:

WHY THIS UKRAINIAN SNACK COMPANY IS THROWING PEANUTS AT RUSSIA — Mold

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.

To quote the article:

It ensures Kozatska Slava’s peanuts stand out as the Ukrainian choice on shelves filled with international options.

I’m note sure what the rest of the text says on the packaging, but judging from the look on the Cossack’s 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.”

In the power rankings for ass-kicking snack mascots, I Kozatska Slava has a solid lead in first right now.

My interview at Before After (in Serbian)

2017-10-13T00:00:00.000Z

There’s an interview posted over at Before After about my upcoming talk at Voxxed Days Belgrade, 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.

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.

Anyhow — excited to speak there soon! Hope people found the interview interesting.

Free inflight internet on your laptop via GoGo, Alaska Airlines and T-Mobile

2017-07-19T00:00:00.000Z

Enroute from FullStack in London to NEJS Conf 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 :)

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.

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.

I'm happy to report I did!

Here's how I did it:

Open up a new incognito browser in Chrome.
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.
Go to the GoGo connection site: http://airborne.gogoinflight.com/app/asa/ifc. You should see the mobile version that (at the time of this writing) offers 1 free hour for T-Mobile customers.
Click on it and connect. It will prompt you for a phone number.
Eureka!

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.

I'd be curious to hear if other people have tips for circumnavigating airline wifi.

Talking About MIDI and IoT at FullStack 2017

2017-07-09T00:00:00.000Z

I'm excited to be speaking a FullStack 2017 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 HolyJS and OdessaJS:

Douglas Crockford wrote one of the seminal books on JavaScript — JavaScript: The Good Parts. He'll be giving the opening keynote at the conference. I'm not exactly sure what the topic is but I did enjoy his talk on DEC64 at HolyJS.

Martin Splitt, as far as I can tell, is on perpetual tour speaking at every conference I've ever heard of! He was an absolute delight at HolyJS and is a fantastic developer advocate. I'm hoping to catch his workshop on practical WebGL.

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'm intrigued so see how it goes.

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'm also intrigued by the other music-related talk by Tero Parviainen, even though the point of my talk is there are "non-musical" applications for MIDI. In genearl, any "creative" application of coding intrigues me, so his talk on generative music with JavaScript and Web Audio should be right up my alley.

My talk On Web MIDI (and more!) should be enjoyable to most anyone, I hope. The feedback so far has been that it's "fun" and nice to be reminded about something that's not strictly related to work and professional development. It'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'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.

I'm excited to unveil some new MIDI experiments and demos. That'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.

The event is already sold out so if you're among the lucky group that already purchased a ticket, please come say hello!

How ngrok saved my talk at OdessaJS

2017-07-06T00:00:00.000Z

I recently spoke at OdessaJS in Ukraine and gave two different talks — one on making non-musical projects with MIDI and JavaScript and another on my semi-infamous open-source project Konami-JS. It was a fun conference and being near the Black Sea in the midst of a heatwave was good timing on their part!

The setup for my first talk is asking for trouble — six MIDI controllers, three Node servers tunneled through ngrok 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'm using a cheap Amazon Basics USB hub off a Satechi USB-C HDMI + USB hub dongle to keep everything connected.

The whole thing looks absurd:

The Satechi dongle is an especially necessary component as it's what gives me my HDMI out. With that I'd have a hard time connecting to the projector at these conferences. At my most recent talk in Odessa however, they only supported VGA, which I (Perhaps foolishly) had not anticipated.

In the end I was saved by someone that happened to have a USB-C to VGA adapter, but I couldn't track that person down for my second talk about the history of Konami-JS. Fortunately ngrok 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've probably been a good idea... But doing it right before I was about to talk seemed like a bad idea. I hadn't optimized or compressed a lot of my images thinking, since I'd be serving them locally, it wouldn't really matter.

Because of ngrok I was able to run the reveal.js presentation 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 older laptop — was able to run pull up the URL and run through my presentation as normal.

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 Puck.js BLE MIDI clicker which would've required pairing.

All in all, if you're a speaker who feels compelled to run their presentation on their own laptop sort of like my setup, I'd highly encourage you to create an ngrok account. It'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!

MIDI, JavaScript and more at OdessaJS 2017

2017-06-13T00:00:00.000Z

I'll flattered and excited to be speaking at the beginning of next month in Odessa, Ukraine at the OdessaJS conference. I'm looking forward to seeing some familiar faces from my previous speaking engagement at HolyJS in St. Petersburg, Russia.

I'm also looking forward to having an opportunity to give not just one but two talks! In addition to my presentation on JavaScript, MIDI and Tiny Computers I'll be giving an 8-year retrospective on my open-source easter-egg project: Konami-JS.

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've learned in overseeing a silly-but-popular open-source project — a project that's overlapped with most of my 11-year career as a freelance developer and consultant.

If you saw me at HolyJS please come say hello again! And if you didn't see me but were in attendance... come see one of my talks at OdessaJS! I'd love to meet you.

I'll be giving my presentation on JavaScrit and MIDI a number of times in the coming months. Please check out my speaking page for more information. If you're organizing a conference and are interested in having me come and present please get in touch.