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Lack of religion does not mean lack of morality

Sunday, December 10th, 2006

There’s a fairly vigorous thread going on in the discussion of the previous article, and I wanted to clarify some points that I am making about China. I appreciate that people have taken the time to read the article and give such thoughtful commentary, so hopefully I can do their comments justice, although it’s a bit like trying to talk to twelve points at once.

I think the basic objection that people have in the previous article is that they believe I am associating a lack of religion with a lack of morality. This is not the case. I myself am fairly atheist. I was born a Catholic but I haven’t really followed up with it (sorry, mom), finding that I had a lot of disagreements with the Catholic church and its history of hypocrisy. I am still a very spiritual person, however. Having been through the process of thinking about religion and considering it carefully, I was forced to think about morality, so to some extent the absence of religion in this case is as defining as the presence of religion. So no, I’m not saying that atheists are amoral. And I’m also not saying that the Chinese are atheist. An atheist states “there is no deity”; the attitude that I met in China is “what deity?”.

The point of starting with religion as a root of morality (not the root!) was to ground the discussion in a reference point that I am familiar with. However, I transitioned away from that in the article over a single sentence, a point that I did not expound greatly upon, and I will do now in this post. The sentence I refer to is this:

“I was talking to some of the locals who were familiar with both Chinese and Western cultures, and it seems that in the absence of religion, the moral code is primarily enforced by family: loyalty, family reputation (or disgrace), and social status.”

I believe that morality has its roots in many sources. Religion is a very American source for morality. However, the world is not America. Family and tradition are just as important in other cultures, a fact which I perhaps too glibly accepted in the previous article without exposition. I myself am Chinese, and I know many Chinese of no religious background who are very moral, upright individuals, so clearly one can be moral without religion. However, I was never forced to consider where the roots of such morality would come, if they were not exposed to the 10 commandments and nuns, like I was, at a young age.

Let’s take a step back. I think–perhaps wrongly–that morality is essentially the system of default assumptions that enables a large group of humans to co-exist. The power of defaults is amazing–how many people still use IE as their web browser? How many people still type QWERTY, despite it being a keyboard layout designed to slow down typing? The conflict of defaults is also very powerful; it is perhaps no small chance that the “vi versus emacs” debate is often termed a religious war (fwiw, I’m an emacs guy, and I use dvorak too. I suppose if I can reject Catholicism I can reject QWERTY, too), and there is vigorous debate over the default assumption of a marriage being a union between a man and a woman.

Now the question is, how is a default imposed upon an infant or an adult? In my opinion, moral defaults are imprinted through consistent exposure to societal rituals and judgements. Therefore, the most important source of moral imprinting is your family, because you spend the most time with them growing up. The customs and traditions of your family influence your views of the world. A first generation Chinese American myself, I was exposed to the strength of the family unit. Cultures tend to make unique names for things important to them; the Chinese have an extentsive naming system for extended family relationships. I call my parent’s friends, who have no blood relationship to me, Auntie or Uncle, as a sign of respect and trust. Confucianism adds a layer of almost “religious” cohesion on top of this basic foundation, with its emphasis on relationships, filial piety, and humaneness: “Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you”–parallel to the Christian saying “Do onto others as you would have done on yourself”. At Chinese New Years, I bow to my parents, and I also bow to the graves of ancestors, and we have shrines to our ancestors. Therefore, one could say that the Chinese have a deity-free religion of ancestry and tradition. Or you could say they have no religion, but they have their moral code enforced by a strong sense of family and family ethics. For the specific case of sleeping around, sleeping around is bad for a tight-knit family culture, since it leads to accidental pregnancies that can greatly upset the balance of power in families, especially when land titles and estates were merged and undone by family relationships. Thus, I’m going out on a limb, but it appears logical that many traditional Chinese would have a very straight moral ethic when it comes to sexual relationships.

The important point is that family exposure is constant and imprinting, thereby creating defaults. Parallel to this, religion also imprints through constant exposure and teaching. Christians go to church every weekend; Muslims pray several times a day. Regular study of the Bible, Koran, or Torah causes us to change our thought patterns. These books are filled with parables that are meant to imprint a certain pattern of thought, and our religious advisors help us interpret and understand these challenging and extensive texts. Of course, families are also important in these cultures. However, the key difference between religion versus family is that a religion is formally codified and therefore a child estranged of family can find guidance in the church, mosque or synagogue (for better or for worse…).

Coming full circle, my point in the article is that the modern China has interfered with several of the classic mechanisms used to imprint ethics and manners: religion, tradition, and scholarship were done away with in the Cultural Revolution, leaving nothing but family and the rule of law. The rule of law is indeed strict, but even in China it does not have an all-seeing eye, and the favor of law can be bought anyways. The most important pillar – family – was attacked by the one child per family policy, thinning the ranks of extended family and causing many children to become spoiled. The coup de grace is the mass emigration of young people from the country into the city, where they leave their family behind. Here, with no familial supervision, and no traditional teaching, texts, or religion to refer to, they float in a moral vacuum. Again, this doesn’t mean they are amoral, it just means they have no defaults to rely upon, and they must create a version of morality for themselves, de novo. Perhaps a friendlier term for “moral vacuum” could be “innocence”–innocence has a connotation closer to what I am getting at.

Therefore, I should restate an opinion in the article to more accurately reflect these conclusions: I said that perhaps American morality is 5% inherent, 15% fear of law, and 80% customs and traditions (not necessarily religious, but it does include religion). Perhaps I should have made the Chinese comparison as follows: 5% inherent, 40% fear of law, 10% customs and traditions, and 45% innocence. Innocence, like a vacuum, is neither good nor evil, and it tends to be filled with other things, and these young people were filling it in the philosophy of “to become rich is glorious”.

And that was the truly shocking point about the women in the Hard Rock Cafe in Beijing. They did not believe they were prostitutes, no more than the women in American bars who come up to you, chest forward, asking you to buy them a drink (and nothing more), believe they are. [Note that no where in the previous sentence did I declare anyone a prostitute; the sentence is left deliberately vague to accomodate your world view]. It is simply a matter of scale along the same vector. Consider, however, that some would be upset upon learning that their significant other uses their sexuality in bars to score drinks from strangers. Now, remember that many, if not most, people would not use their sexuality to go up to a stranger and ask them to pay for their drinks–just as most Chinese women would never offer sex for money. I am not casting broad judgement upon Chinese society from this limited experience: it is clearly a corner case. However, as every engineer knows, the corner cases are the most interesting and informative cases. Therefore, in my previous article I contemplate (perhaps incorrectly) what could have lead to this, and what the implications could be for an up and coming generation that will play a major role in defining the world we live in.

As a final point, I extend the concept of a “moral vacuum”–remember, neither good nor evil, but it needs to be filled, so perhaps a better phrasing is “moral innocence”–to the realm of MMORPGs. An MMORPG is a society like any other, yet no Biblical text tells you how to live in one (unless you consider Snowcrash to be Biblical), and certainly my parents have no notion of what an MMORPG is. There is also virtually no rule of law in an MMORPG, and the cost of doing something “bad” in an MMORPG is currently almost nothing. Therefore, the observation that overt commercial sexuality is rampant in some MMORPGs shines a new light on the adage “prostitution is the oldest profession” for me.

The contemplation of morality and MMORPGs is a new thread, however, probably best saved for another post on another day.

Posted in Made in China, Ponderings, Social | 22 Comments »

Adventures with the Venture Communist

Saturday, December 9th, 2006

It’s no small secret that China is the place to go if you want something made cheap and in mass quantities. I’m on a mission with my boss/CEO of chumby/venture capitalist–now venture communist (that’s him in the photo up there–no photoshopping, I took that photo of him standing underneath the portrait of Mao in Tiananmen square)–to figure out how to make chumbys cheap and on time. I know it’s a lame excuse, but this is why Name That Ware is late this month. I’ll get a new ware up early next week!

What is shocking is what China really is. China is all at once communist, capitalist, rude, and innocent. It’s the fearsome global economic powerhouse, yet shockingly third-world. It’s a people denied religion, yet cities festooned with Christmas decorations. Communism is essentially gone, and in its place has grown the most terrifyingly capitalistic place on Earth: I think they took Deng Xiaoping to the heart when he declared that “to become rich is glorious.” This blog post, and perhaps a couple more beyond it, are devoted to one American hacker’s view of China.

The most remarkable thing about China are its sheer numbers, and how it compares to America. Most of my numbers are based on what the factories there have told me, so maybe they aren’t correct, but it’s what I’m going by. Here are some of the most interesting ones:

Minimum wage In Shenzhen, the minimum wage is about $0.60/hour. However, there is a very competitive labor market in China–there is a shortage of workers and mobility between factories is unimpaired by employment agreements. Therefore, employers must provide a very competitive benefits package for their employees, which typically includes dormitory housing, food, medical care, schooling, and day care; there are no retirement or unemployment benefits. While technically required to pay tax, many minimum wage workers don’t pay any tax because first, they are migrant workers and the government has no way to find them, and second, their contribution to the tax base is minimal anyways, so why go after them? Also, most local officials can be easily bribed out of collecting full tax monies if you are caught. Furthermore, workers have an 8-hour day, 5 days a week, and employers are required to pay 1.5x overtime and 2x on weekends. As far as I can tell, employers honor this. So in the end, these laborers earn a discretionary income of at least $100 per month, or $1200 per year. This is surprisingly comparable to the $2,075/yr discretionary income of US households that earn under $50,000 (link), which is probably the correct reference point for comparing minimum wage workers in both countries. I haven’t even adjusted for the cost of living difference between China and the US–but let’s just say 100 RMB goes a loooong way if you are just buying food, and not to mention the whole copy-culture of China where you can get “Diesel” jeans for just US$10. Also, the finest hotel suites at the Sheraton Four points in FuTian ran us just over US$100, and includes free internet and water. I could barely get a shack of a room at a Holiday Inn in the Bay Area for US$120, and I had to pay US$12 for internet that night too, with US$5 bottles of water on the table next to me.

Also, minimum wage has increased by 30% per year for the past two years. It’s unclear how sustainable this is, but factory owners seem to see more increases down the pipe and 30% per year is a ridiculous CAGR. Compare this to the history of minimum wage in California.

The fully-burdened rate of a worker in China is around $1.80 it seems–this is the rate that the employer pays once all the benefits (free food, housing, medical care, day care, etc.) are factored in. At these wages, laborers are cheaper than pick-and-place machines. In the US, you typically pay between $0.05-$0.25 per component placed on a PCB with a pick and place machine in low volume (100’s to 1000’s). I saw several electronics lines where about ten workers are lined up on a bench, bending and stuffing resistors and transistors into a moderately complex circuit board, and hand-dipping them in a solder bath. They crank out about 100 boards per hour; each employee is stuffing about four components, so 400 components per hour at $1.80/hour is $0.0045 per component. Setup and training for the line I saw took about 2-3 hours. So even if you were to run a few hundred boards, this is a very cheap assembly method indeed, as long as you can keep good quality control over the process.

The amazing part is that the Shenzhen factories were complaining that labor rates were way too high. Apparently, minimum wage for factories in other regions is much less, so they are seeing contracts migrate away from their factories and inland where labor is cheaper. Think about it–Americans complain about work going to Hong Kong, Hong Kongers complain about work going to Shenzhen, Shenzheners complain about work going inland China, and to Vietnam (apparently Vietnam is the new hotness for cheap skilled labor).

Cost of life I don’t know if this is accurate, but I was told that in China, if you accidentally kill someone, you don’t go to jail. You are fined 50,000 RMB to the family (about USD 6,500) of the victim. Every time you kill someone, the fine goes up, until your fourth incident, where you will go to jail or be sentenced to death yourself, unless you pay off an official. It seems that if you intentionally kill someone, you have to face the Chinese criminal justice system, where essentially you are guilty until proven innocent and your default sentence is death or life in jail, and you have to argue with the judge as to why you deserve less. Not a pleasant system, but if you are consigned to this fate, it makes a little more sense why you see Chinese people nonchalantly walking across busy highways or into opposing traffic. If they get killed, at least their family gets the equivalent of about five years’ salary for their death. I know I saw at least one fatal accident while I was in China. Another interesting index is the price of sex. It seems that in a moral vacuum–remember, religion is not allowed in China–the equivalent of a girl coming up to you in the US and asking you to buy her a drink is for a girl to come up to you and asking you to buy her sex. While I was enjoying a beer at the Hard Rock cafe Beijing, several girls propositioned (of course I said no) but they were very forthright about what they wanted from you (1,000 RMB, or US$128) and what they wanted to do to you for that money (“I give you sex, normally 1,500 but for you 1,000! You very good man!…Why you no want me?”). These women seemed to be there of their own free will, as some were just sitting around doing nothing, just checking out guys, and others were aggressively pursuing men. I guess since the people are not allowed to have a religion, sleeping around has no taboo. Since even a human life has a price, I guess propositioning the relatively wealthy foreigners for sex (and the Hard Rock is sure to attract foreigners) is just par for the course. And despite the “higher morals” of the westerners, it seemed that several of the western-looking men there had no problem doing as the Chinese do when in China, and walking out with two or three women in tow.

This phenomon was a telling indicator of the way the winds are blowing on morality. In the absence of religion, what defines morality? On one side is the nuclear sense of morality that all humans are born with, and on the other side there is the fear of punishment by society/government, and in the middle there are the customs and ideals of society. For example, in America, I think morality is perhaps 5% instinctual morality, 80% customs and traditions, and 15% fear of law and loss. Of that 80% of customs and traditions, the bulk of it springs from the teachings found in the Bible and our Christian foundations. I was talking to some of the locals who were familiar with both Chinese and Western cultures, and it seems that in the absence of religion, the moral code is primarily enforced by family: loyalty, family reputation (or disgrace), and social status. In my naive view of the world, I would say it’s a rather Confucian, rather than Christian, ethic. The new China–with its one child per family policy, and massive emigration from villages to cities–has torn apart the fabric of family, thereby destroying the fabric of morality. Since there is no religion to fill the void, there seems to be a re-balancing of morality. In China’s case, I’d say morality is probably 5% instinctual, 20% customs and traditions, and 75% fear of law and loss, with an overall lower bar for morality. It is interesting to observe how this is very similar to how morality evolves in an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer On Line Role Playing Game). Religion has nothing to say about how your Avatar’s life should be conducted (hah! What Would Arthas Do?), and there is little rule of law on the servers. Thus, if one was to take a walk through SecondLife, one would commonly find copious quantities of sex-related items for sale, and presumably there are many people who will also sell you virtual sex for Linden dollars. Maybe this is a stretch, but I think the underlying moral lessons are not too different from the scene I saw in the Hard Rock Cafe Beijing.

Consumate corruption Since life and morality both have a defined market price, it’s easy to see how politicians also have their price too. That’s not such a big surprise–corruption is not an uncommon theme about China–but what was interesting is how commoners flip the script on the politicians. In one instance, I saw a road being built, and in front of it I saw sapling banana trees and rice paddies. These weren’t planted in any agrigultural area–they were just these random fields planted in the path of the road. Why? because if the farmers that own the land plant crops in them, the government has to compensate them for the crops that were destroyed. So once the farmers knew a road was going to be built through a particular area, they immediately cultivated the area, knowing that the crops would be wiped out in a matter of months. In another instance, I saw a section of town where a subway was being planned. Once the subway plans were made public, the residents that would be displaced built extensions to their houses, so they could collect more money from the government as compensation for displacement–again, these extensions would never really be used. It seems that the extensions were being made so cheaply that one of them collapsed recently, and killed a worker; this lead to a government investigation, which then lead to the government demolishing all of the sub-standard construction in the area…presumably once the demolition work is done, there won’t be enough time left to rebuild before the subway takes over the residence so the owner(s) won’t gain from his scheme–and of course, a worker lost his life as collateral to all of this.

Despite the consumate corruption, the government is scarily efficient and accomplishing its most important goals. Beijing is in the process of building an enormous Olympic park. They tear down whole neighborhoods and pave roads over them in a matter of weeks. They are building an 11 or 12-route subway system that promises to rival the subway system in Manhattan for connectivity and completeness. Watching this happen reminds me of how I play Sim City. If you’ve ever played the game, you’ve probably remorselessly bulldozed huge sections of Sim Cities that you messed up the planning on, and improved your city’s long-term productivity through doing that. The Beijing government seems to restructure the city with about the same attitude and efficiency…I can’t help but compare this to the Big Dig that I lived through in Boston, and wonder if one can really say that the US government is less corrupt than China, at least when it comes to urban renewal.

Huge population The Hong Kong area has about 7 million people, and Shenzhen has about 9 million. That’s a lot of people in an area comparable to the size of San Diego county. China has 1.3 billion people, or about 4.3 people for every person in the US. I guess that’s why life is so cheap out there, the market has an over-supply. According to the CIA world factbook, China has an excess of 44 million males in the age range of 0-64 years old; 17 million of them are in ages 0-14 alone. This is thanks to the one child per family policy, which is still in place. The ramifications of this are pretty astounding. 10 million military-aged men without spouses means 10 million men who have no obligations to a family or a loved one. Combined with the indoctrination of life being cheap, I suppose China has a pretty significant base of effective military mass to throw into a ground war. The other interesting question is what do these men resort to for entertainment. I’ve heard that drug use is fairly popular in the younger generations. It’s hard to say if homosexuality is common or not. Walking through Shenzhen, I saw at least five or six young men with their arms around each other. I’m cautious about assuming that means they are gay–some cultures endorse heterosexual male-male hugging and greeting kisses–but then again, you don’t see that much out here, and even the boy-girl couples rarely hold hands or put their arms around each other.

Interestingly, I saw factory floors with thousands of people on it, and the composition is about 95% female. I asked one of the factory owners out here, and he said that the women are the hardest working and most skilled component of China today. When I asked where all the men were, he said they were all either gambling or doing hard labor jobs, like construction and hauling. Looking around, that seemed to be about right–there is enormous amounts of construction in China and even a small construction site seemed to have 30-40 men busily working on it.

History and Direct Control In San Diego, a building is old if it’s aged 50 years. In China, bulidings that are 500 years old seem to be a dime a dozen, and they are being torn down as if the government really believed in that. For example, the Hutongs are a delightfully quaint area of the city. They are named as such because “hutong” is the Mongolian word for “water well”, and the ruling Mongols organized the city by the neighborhoods built around water wells. I learned a lot about Chinese history on my brief tour of the Hutongs–I’ll write about this perhaps in another blog post–but unfortunately much of the Hutongs are being demolished to make way for huge highways and modern buildings. It makes me feel sad to see these go away, but at the same time, next to these 500 year old shacks sits the 500 year old palaces of Emperors. It also seems that some of the Hutongs are being preserved.

The other interesting thing is that land is leased to the people–you can’t own land outright. The standard lease length is 70 years. So in general, buildings are built to be knocked down, and the rate of urban churn is fairly high. Buildings a dozen or so years old are routinely knocked down and replaced, as if they are somewhat expendible. The quality of construction also reflects this assumption.

Another thing that I heard which was fairly interesting is that because the government has so much control over its lands, cell phone service is apparently extremely good in this “third-world” country (infrastructure gets placed exactly where it needs to be, regardless of ownership, history or appearances). You can drive from northern Shenzhen to Shenzhen city (about an hour drive through some very rural and very urban areas) and have perfect voice quality on your call and it never drops. Comparatively, it’s a small miracle when I drive the stretch on I-5 from north county San Diego to central San Diego and I don’t drop a call–and this is Qualcomm’s home city, the city where CDMA was invented! (Okay, okay, I use a GSM phone, but the reason why is because Sprint PCS’ CDMA coverage in San Diego is abysmal compared to Cingular’s GSM).

Lack of civil liberties Of course, this is an issue that the international community harps on all the time. It’s hard to say if people are exaggerating things or not. I think as far as factory conditions go, all the ones I visited were decent and people were of an appropriate age to be working there (I’m sure there are sketchier ones but I also bet they don’t allow foreigners to tour them). Employment seems to be “at-will” by and large–hence the need for extensive benefits packages to lure in workers. As I mentioned earlier, it seems that the effective discretionary income of the average low-end Chinese worker is comparable to that of the US. Also, the currency is undervalued, thus making a direct comparison to the US look worse than it is. However, I did see a group of 30 to 40 policemen about to beat up a group of 3 or 4 women and drag them off to jail. It was unclear what their offense was–they looked like out-of-town travellers; they were wearing some rather fancy tribal outfits that were gilded, and their faces looked rough from sun, and they all carried things on their back. What was clear though is that they were not going to make it to their destination. As our car pulled around them, I could hear–almost feel–the electric snap of the tazer guns discharging in the air. The scene made the Rodney King video look farcical in comparison. I was tempted to take a photo but I realized that would be a bad, bad idea–several of the cops were eyeing my foreigner-filled van as we drove by.

It’s also obvious (to an outsider) that the press is government controlled and biased. The writing style and headlining of the China Daily reminds me a lot of The Onion. I think people in China are generally aware that there is propaganda everywhere, but few are willing to confess that openly. However, the people also vote with their feet: it turns out that the Chinese do not trust any media that looks over-produced. Websites that look too slick are discredited; the preferred source of information is from BBSes, websites that look home-made, and home videos shot with Handycams and shared on the web.

Minimal taxes I alluded to this earlier in this (now much longer than I had intended) post, but it’s worth explicitly pointing this out. The facts I’m quoting are based on conversations in Hong Kong, but I’m assuming they are common in China. The maximum tax rate is 17.5%; it’s less if you make less (minimum wage workers generally can dodge taxes it seems). There are no local taxes, no social security tax, no medicare tax, no sales taxes, no alternative minimum tax. There are no capital gains tax, although you pay a minimal tax (I don’t remember exactly what, but I seem to recall about 0.3%) when you buy a stock. If you know the right guy in the goverment, you can get your tax rate lowered if you bribe the official. Thus, there is almost nothing to limit the rate at which you can acquire personal wealth in China, if you are smart about managing your money. This is in stark contrast in the US where it is virtually impossible to break free of the ranks of the upper-middle class into the true upper-class; you pretty much have to win the lottery or have your company go public (also basically winning the lottery) to get past the enormous tax burdens. Remarkably, the infrastructure in China seems pretty robust, although everything is being privatized, including the schools, and if you’re cynical, the local goverment is effectively privatized thanks to the bribing system. While this low-tax system is creating a widening gap between the upper and the lower classes in China, it seems that there is a relatively high rate of people “living the American dream” in China and breaking free of the lower class and making it big–there is a preponderance of mom and pop shops starting up. I presume if you are a native in China, since land is cheap, labor is cheap, and equipment is cheap (you can buy knock-off industrial equipment at low prices), and foreign demand is high, you can start a company for very little coin. It seems that as long as the economy keeps on booming in China, everyone is happy; minimum wages go up by 30% per year and there are ample opportunities to work your way up to being rich.

In the end, I guess the trillion-dollar question is: will the Chinese economy surpass the US? I think, after being on the ground there and seeing where things are going, the answer is an unequivocal yes. While their current position is beneath the US, the first derivative is positive, the second derivative is also positive. Even if the economy were to start cooling down today (second derivative goes negative), I think they have enough inertia to soundly position themselves above the US for total GDP in about a decade or two. Now, the question is, can they accomplish this growth and remain stable? It’s possible, but I think their leadership needs to be very careful. There is definitely a risk of significant social problems for China in the future that could lead to unrest and destabilization of their economy. At least one opinion I heard has it that China is in for big problems as soon as shortly after the 2008 Olympics. If you drive around Beijing, the government is pushing the Olympics everywhere–there are signs, countdown posters, propaganda of all types. You’d think it was just rampant commercialism until you realize the government is behind it, and then all of a sudden it feels almost like war propaganda and jingoism. It’s effective though–the population seems to be rallying behind it–and I have little doubt that Beijing will produce the most fabulous Olympic villiage every created (I saw a scale model in the Beijing city planning office and it’s…huge…). However, once the Olympics are over, there will be a line of people with their hands out waiting to be compensated for their efforts and sacrifices, and the government might not be able to pay up. Also, the influx of foreign money and exposure to foreign spending habits may raise the awareness of the population about how badly China’s fixed currency policy is hurting the common person. The RMB is sorely undervalued; most people in China don’t realize that because they just haven’t been exposed to the buying power of the dollar in China. Should be interesting to see what happens, but at any rate I need to make sure Chumby has some kind of contingency plan just in case we can’t get chumbys made in China anymore due to political unrest.

[editorial note: please also read my follow-up post to address the fair objections to my framework of discussing morality in the context of religion]

Posted in chumby, Made in China, Ponderings, Social | 73 Comments »

The Contents of My Bag

Tuesday, November 7th, 2006

I thought it might be fun to write a post about the contents of my laptop bag, which I carry everywhere with me. I mentioned in a previous post that I have gone away from being a gadget freak to the kind of guy who carefully researches his gadgets and carries around a select set of well-worn gadgets. I’m not all old-fashioned, though, as you will see. Here are the contents of my bag, in no particular order, along with why I think these are the gadgets I would carry around. A picture of the bag is shown below. It weighs in at 14.5 pounds with all this stuff below in it, plus some of the extra miscellaneous papers I happen to have in it today.

Laptop: IBM T60p, configured with 1600×1200 display, Verizon EVDO, Core Duo 2 GHz, 2 GB memory, and 100 GB hard drive. The base model number is 2623-DDU. It looks like Lenovo doesn’t offer this anymore on their main website, but many of their sub-distributors still carry it in stock.

This is of course the most important thing in the bag, and I literally spend 90% of my waking life behind this laptop in one form or the other. It is sufficiently powerful that I do all my design work on it–the chumby was 100% designed on this beast–and I also play my games on it (WoW runs great on it). It has built-in EVDO, which means I get broadband (0.5-1.5 Mbit) connectivity in every major city in the US (and yes, you can do Skype video conferencing and WoW over EVDO!), so I’m never looking for a WiFi hotspot. It has a fingerprint scanner that I don’t really use for security, but more for convenience. Needless to say, all my data is stored on encrypted partitions and I am pretty good about backing this thing up to my Buffalo Terastation Pro 1TB…also, Norton Ghost is a great tool, I’ve recovered from more than one hard drive crash with it and didn’t miss a beat…and I also rotate USB hard drives with full images of my critical data to a safe deposit box in a geographically diverse location. It makes me nervous to have all my beans in one location.

When I’m at home, I drop my laptop into the Thinkpad mini-dock, and use dual 21″ flat panel monitors at 1600×1200 resolution, along with a Kinesis contoured keyboard for comfortable typing. An interesting point is that a combination of the contoured keyboard, dvorak layout, and swapping backspace, space, delete, control, and caps, means that virtually nobody can walk up to my machine and use it except for me. I’m left-handed so my backspace and space usage is swapped, and I’m an emacs user so control and caps are swapped, as well as delete and escape.

I guess one big advantage of using a laptop as your main machine (especially one with EVDO) is that you never have to rely on a UPS again…I can work straight through a blackout. The battery life when I have both the primary and the secondary batteries installed is around 4-5 hours when I’m doing light design work–good enough for a transcontinental flight.

Laptop AC Adapter: Combo AC/DC adapter

This may seem like an obvious thing to have, but this particular model is worthy of note. It has both a cigarette lighter DC plug and a two-prong AC plug–so I don’t have to lug around two adapters, and I never forget the right adapter when I leave home in a hurry. I also found, to my pleasant surprise on the way back from Taiwan one day, that the DC plug comes off and reveals a secondary plug that is compatible with the weird “EmPower” DC power plug that you find in some airplanes. Someone was using their noggin when they designed this one…

Cell Phone: Blackberry 8700c

First and foremost, a phone should be a phone. That is exactly the reason why I use the Blackberry. Unlike my Treo-weilding and PPC 6700-weilding brethren, I can brag that my phone never crashes! Imagine, never missing a call or a voice mail because your phone locked up and you didn’t know it. I have only seen the Blackberry “shudder” once–the browser crashed–but a watchdog timer in the Blackberry kicked in and booted the process. Amazing. It also has good phone book backup capabilities (I’ve had to rely on this once, unfortunately), plus the browser is finally full-featured enough to visit java-script enabled pages, such as my webmail account…which of course supplements the excellent push-based mail service from RIM that’s linked to the corporate mail account. And my battery lasts a whole day, unlike the PPC 6700. I always leave a USB host to USB-OTG cable in my bag so I can charge my phone on the go from my laptop. Sure, the phone doesn’t have ie…but wait, isn’t that a feature? And there are those who complain that it doesn’t have a camera…enter the next item in my bag…

Camera: Sony T-9

I don’t like the cameras on camera phones. Half the time the pictures don’t come out, and the other half the time when they do come out you wish you had a better version that wasn’t grainy or distorted. This is why I always carry around the T-9. It is super-slim–it’s smaller than my wallet–and it takes photo print-quality pictures. I have a 1 GB memory stick in it, which holds a long vacation’s worth of pictures, or about 45 minutes of video. The battery life is also insane. I’ve taken it on two-week vacations and never had to replace the battery once. I’ll usually tote my cell phone in my pocket and the camera in my shoulderbag, although I’ll drop the camera in a pocket as well when I want to leave the bag at home or the hotel room.

I always carry the camera USB cable with me so I can get pictures off the camera at any time. I rarely carry the battery charger, though–that usually goes in the rollaboard.

I happen to have a salient example for a time when a full-featured digital camera with 3.0x optical zoom comes in handy. I was at a business meeting the other day and Bruce Willis happened to be outside on the street getting an honor. The guys with camera phones could never have gotten this shot…I’m not really into the paparazzi thing, but this was definitely an example of preparedness meeting opportunity. My girlfriend was thrilled to get photos of Ashton Kutcher, Ben Affleck, Demi Moore, etc. etc. that I happened to grab at this opportunity.

Music Player: Ipod Nano, black.

Not much to say here. It’s a great MP3 player and the market numbers reflect that. I have the engraving on the back because it seems like everyone has a black iPod nano and it’s easy to get yours confused with your friends’. I always keep the USB charging cable in the bag as well, as well as the jogging strap. The MP3 player is an important supplement to the laptop because you just don’t want to waste precious laptop battery time just listening to music, and you definitely wouldn’t want to take your laptop for a jog!

Headphones: Etymotic ER-4 MicroPro

I have friends who tote around Bose and Sennheiser noise-cancelling headphones. The disadvantage? They need power, and they are big. The Etymotic headphones are noise-blocking from their very design, so if you can handle sticking things in your ears (I have no problem with this, but some people find it uncomfortable), they are the perfect thing to keep in your bag at all times. Crying baby on the plane next to you? pop these things in and the world just disappears. The only disadvantage is that during the plane descent your ears will feel a little uncomfortable…but then again, I’m not supposed to be listening to music when the plane is landing.

Oh, added benefit. The carry case that the earbuds come in? They fit an iPod Nano perfectly. So my Nano isn’t scratched up.

Watch: Laks Memory Date USB2.0

Okay, so this isn’t really in my bag, but it’s on me at all times, along with my class ring from MIT (which doubles as a bottle opener!…which is why I still wear it (video of it in action)…totally the most useful thing I got out of the school) and my toe ring. I have the 512 MB version. Whenever I have a big presentation coming up, I always copy the presentation onto the watch (a friend of mine once said, “never trust a presentation to any mechanical storage device”). I figure I could lose my laptop and the shirt on my back but I could still give the presentation, albeit somewhat naked and embarassed (maybe I’d fashion a toga out of a tablecloth before getting on stage). Thankfully, I haven’t been in this scenario yet but I figure the day I am I’ll be so glad I have this habit.

Travel Mouse: Targus Notebook Retractable Laser Mouse

I always use a mouse…when I don’t, I use the trackpoint, not the trackpad…the Targus laser mouse is the only mouse I’ve found that works on almost every surface imaginable, including the tray tables on an airplane, the shiny marble tables in coffeeshops, and even bare skin or the denim covering my legs when in a pinch.

Ethernet cable: No-tangle self-reeling cable scored as a free trade-show promotion

The best things are sometimes free. I was given this at a tradeshow (DAC, I think) one year by Silicon Dimensions and it never left my bag. It’s a self-reeling ethernet cable, and it’s great for when I can get a plug-in LAN connection.

Skype video camera: Logitech Quickcam for Notebooks

You can imagine that given my spread so far, I do a lot of travel. This can be hard on your loved ones. Enter the Quickcam for Notebooks. Both my girlfriend and my parents have Skype video, so no matter where I am I can say hi to them and show them around my hotel room or show them the neat stuff I picked up in some random city. It’s a great way to be close to the ones you love even when you are on the other side of the world. I remembered when video phones first came out, and I thought they were crazy–why would you want to see someone, talking is enough?–but now I’m a convert. There is so much more depth of interaction and expression with a loved one when you can see the expressions on their face. You catch subtleties that you might miss on a simple phone call or email. And keeping the people I love happy is worth the world to me, so this has been a great addition to my bag.

Not to say that it’s not without flaws–I really dislike the software package that comes with the Logitech cameras. It’s always trying to reboot your computer and it installs way too many wizards and helper programs. I want a camera to just get out of the way and let me do what I want, and not take over my machine every time I use it. Still, despite its flaws, it has clear value from a total quality of life standpoint.

The bag itself: Coach messenger bag

I got this bag many, many years ago (almost a decade now…) as a gift from a now ex-girlfriend, so I can’t find a link to it on-line. I’ve been through many laptop bags since, and every single one has broken and I’ve had to come back to this one. So, even though this bag is quite expensive, if I totalled what I spent on the other bags, it’s probably much more than what this one bag costs. I’m very rough on my bags and this one has pretty much held up to the worst possible treatment; I’m quite happy with its durability. It could use some more pouches and features, but maybe that’s a good thing–it forces me to pare down what I carry around so it’s not so hard on my back. The only drawback of my current bag that I see, and I only recently discovered this, is that it has no hand-carry handle–so when you are wearing a suit (me? in a suit?!) you end up looking lopsided because it pulls at the jacket.

Thankfully, suit-wearing isn’t a common problem for me.

Odds and ends:

Some other things I always carry around with me include a 3-way two-prong power splitter (you can buy them in Japan, but not in the US–I suspect they don’t sell them here because they wouldn’t pass safety standards since they are missing the third prong), incredibly useful while travelling. It will both adapt 3-prong to 2-prong (perfect for travel to Japan) and give you multi-way power. I also carry around a European mainland-to-two prong adapter at all times. It’s small and the few times I really needed it I was so glad I had it.

Another thing I always keep in the bag is a Sharpie permanent marker. It’s amazing how often you really need a pen that can permanently mark on almost any surface but you just can’t find one. Ballpoints and pencils are pretty easy to borrow, but Sharpies are rare. It’s great for labelling all kinds of things–boxes, media (CDs/DVDs–I always pack some blank ones on long trips to trade photos and data), luggage.

I keep a microfiber wipe cloth in my bag as well. Being a guy who wears glasses, this is the best way to keep your glasses clean and scratch-free. It also has the advantage of doubling as a good way to wipe down your laptop screen when the dust that accumulates on it makes it hard to read in the daylight.

I used to always keep a set of lockpicks and a small set of screwdrivers in my bag, but ever since 9/11 I haven’t been able to carry those items around. Bump Keys are a good stand-by as airport-friendly picks but it turns out that in practice they aren’t that useful, plus I’m not as experienced with bump keys as I am with my picks. I use the picks when I lock myself out, and depending on where I’m staying the bump keys often times don’t fit or work, and a full set of bump keys is a drag to carry around everywhere.

Something that’s noticeably missing from the list is a Bluetooth headset, like the Jabra. I used to use a Jabra, it was pretty good in terms of voice quality…but the UI was terrible. You never knew if a call was going to pick up on the Jabra or the phone itself, and Bluetooth itself has security problems that I’d rather not expose my phone to. Thankfully, my Blackberry 8700c has a very good speakerphone that lets me go hands-free in my car, with the only disadvantage being that everyone can overhear my conversation. Then again, I try very hard to be discrete when using my phone in public places…most people don’t realize that you don’t have to holler into a cell phone for it to pick up your voice. I’d love to take the yellers to Japan where it seems like everyone almost whispers into their phone…maybe cell phone companies should give a mandatory course on how to talk into a cell phone at the right volume whenever they sign a new customer up.

Hmm…business cards, of course…and a couple spare $1’s for tips and a $20 snuckered away in a secret compartment to get me by in a pinch.

An oddity that I have in my bag that I just discovered is a 512 MB compact Flash card in a PCMCIA adapter. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to use that…

I also don’t carry around a flashlight…my Blackberry’s LCD backlight doubles as a weak flashlight when I really need to squeak by.

Wish list: Some things I wish existed but as far as I know don’t…

I’d love to have a Kit-Kat candy-bar sized thermal printer that connects to my computer via USB (why not Bluetooth? because I don’t want to carry around a charger. USB means no batteries necessary). What would I use this for, you ask? To print my boarding passes from on-line check-in. With EVDO, I can access the network from anywhere, so the next step is to print my boarding pass. Man, that would be cool–I can print my boarding pass on the rental car return shuttle and just walk up to the gate. I would also use this to print short directions and maps to show to taxi cab drivers, especially in Asian countries where my written Chinese is poor and you really need a map to tell a cab where you are going. Maybe I could even print fedex shipping labels, so if I’m travelling and I have to just drop a box in a fedex drop box, I can just go on-line, print the label, drop it off and run. I suppose if nobody makes one of these, I’ll make one for myself someday…for what it’s worth, I used to carry around a portable ink jet printer, but ink jet printers really do not do well at airplane altitudes. The cartridges get messy. A thermal printer, like the ones they use in grocery store receipt printers, or even–hey–airline ticketting stations, would be fine. I’m okay with the paper roll being tiny, maybe being able to print only four or five linear feet of paper before being replaced. That’s about all I ever need on one trip.

This isn’t as important, but it would be nice someday to have a business card scanner that fits in my PCMCIA slot. I don’t use my PCMCIA slot on my laptop, yet it is there. Maybe something that I can shove a business card into, pull it out, and capture it as a JPEG would be great. OCR would be a bonus (but be sure to offer JPEG as a backup–remember, business happens in Asia too!), and the only thing I’d really care for it to integrate with is my Blackberry. I never use desktop contact software, because it’s all in my phone. Man, that’d be rad…business card to Blackberry phonebook, in a snap.

This is also pretty silly, but I’d love it if my laptop bag had a spot to hold my brush, a change of underwear and shirt, my toothbrush, and some TSA-approved liquid/gel container. Then I’d have a complete overnight kit in one spot.

Posted in Ponderings | 27 Comments »

Lik Sang is going out of business…

Thursday, October 26th, 2006

Although it is always hard to read between the lines, it seems that Sony has decided it is a priority to make sure that the world remains divided into marketting regions and has managed to sue importer Lik Sang into oblivion. I know the Lik Sang guys and they are nice, hard working people who recognize the fact that we are in a global economy and that the internet has pretty much broken down traditional market barriers. What really frustrates me are the tactics used by Sony, and as a small business owner whose business purpose is sometimes at odds with large corporations, but importantly is no less legitimate, I feel a visceral pain for Lik Sang. I know first-hand how the wrong or right of such cutting-edge issues in traditional courts of law essentially boils down to who can outspend the other: I have some first-hand experience with the despicable tactics that people can use in the court room to mask the truth in a haze of lies, half-truths, motions, demands, flawed discovery, depositions, and biased evidence that can be very expensive to refute. From what I can gather, Lik Sang was essentially shot down on safety concerns due to the safety differences in power supplies between regions as well as trademark concerns. Note that Microsoft didn’t pay nearly a proportionally painful price for its overheating Xbox360 power supplies, and those supplies are even region-certified. Might makes right, I suppose, and that does keep me on my tippy-toes when it comes to hacking consoles these days. It’s also a pretty sobering thought for a small company like Chumby.

I think it’s time for me to boycott the PS3…I’ll save my money for the much cooler Nintendo Wii (although, wouldn’t it be more financially damaging to Sony to buy the PS3 and then buy no games? Presumably they are selling the PS3 at a big loss initially…huh). The Cell processor is being deployed in other pieces of equipment, so I can wait until those are out to get my chance to hack with one. This is perhaps melodramatic, but the situation does remind me of the “First they came…” poem. Even though I am not an exporter (yet!), we are all in the same small business boat, so my little boycott is a small sign of solidarity.

Alex and Pascal–I feel for you. Best of luck with everything. Let me know if I can help somehow, and thanks for showing me around Hong Kong.

Posted in Ponderings, Social | 7 Comments »

chumby–My Inside Perspective

Monday, August 28th, 2006

So, the cat is out of the bag, and I’m finally able to talk about a project that I have had the priviledge of working on for the past several months. I have been working on the chumby, an inexpensive (sub-$150) Wi-Fi enabled content delivery device that is designed to be used around the home. From the hacker’s perspective, chumby is basically a linux client that runs a Flash player and streams content from the “Chumby network”, our content management service. In my mind, these were the goals of the chumby design:

  • simple. A non-hacker user familiar with computers–for example, a typical teenager–should be able to set up and use a chumby. In addition to a lot of thought put into the UI, the chumby network’s ability to deliver drag-and-drop content via Flash widgets is the tehnological cornerstone for chumby’s simplicity. It is this simplicity that differentiates chumby from general purpose devices such as PDAs and laptops.
  • fun. This is a device whose core consumer market is not the gadget fanatic. It needs to be accessible to everyone, so we are trying to take the industrial design in a direction that we like to call the “anti-iPod”.
  • deep. A fatal flaw in many “simple” products is that they are too shallow, and miss key features that would make them useful. Products like the Civa pictureframe, the Ambient Orb, and the Nabaztag rabbit are examples of devices that are too one-dimensional and lack depth. And this leads us up to the most important goal for me–
  • yours. The chumby is architected to be as open as possible to anybody who wants to hack it. In the design of the system, we consider not only open source software hackers, but also hardware hackers and artists and “crafters”–e.g., people who are equally skilled in their ability and passion to do non-computer things, such as metalworking, sewing, carpentry, etc.

Thus, there are two messages about the chumby, neither of which are fundamentally exclusive. One is that Chumby will appeal to the new generation of always-on, always-connected people who use myspace, blogs, and rely on IM to keep in touch (hence the picture of the teenage girl on the chumby corporate website using a chumby). The other is that Chumby will appeal to hackers, who have an insatiable desire to extend, modify, customize, and abuse consumer products to do things they weren’t intended to do. I am hoping that these two worlds will develop a synergy that enables chumby to do things we never imagined.

The real key here is enabling hackers to break out of the realm of point-solution hacks on unsupportable hardware and into the realm of something you can share with hopefully just about anyone. My boss likes to cite the example of a hack where someone adds a blood pressure cuff to chumby, and gives it to their grandmother. Now you can check on grandma’s health, and she can watch pictures of her grandchildren while she gets her bloodpressure taken. Now imagine this scenario, but with a WRT-54G router instead of a chumby. Sure, you can add a blood pressure cuff to a WRT-54G as well (they are architecturally quite similar in fact), but try to explain to grandma how to set it up and use it. In other words, hackers can leverage the effort we spent into making chumby usable to help make their hacks more usable and more palatable to others.

So, Chumby is making the source code, schematics, board layouts, bill of materials, flat patterns and 3-D CAD databases of our plastic pieces available for you to use. You can find them all at the chumby developer site (the link may be down right now due to the stress on our servers from being on digg, engadget, and other popular websites). Working on chumby is very personally exciting to me, because not only am I presented with the opportunity to build a product that helps people improve their lives in some small way, there is also a chance for me to enable you to build hacks on this platform, and you can leverage our (hopefully) success.

Here is a simple example of what I mean. I heard from someone this weekend at FOO camp (I forget who already–if you are reading, please refresh my memory!) that they are unhappy that the thermostat in their home is so far away from the place where they actually want to have thermoregulation. Thus, a weekend project for him would be to hack a chumby and add a temperature sensor. Since the chumby platform already has Wi-Fi built into it, the amount of hardware grunge work he has to do is minimal–he just needs two chumbys, one with a temperature sensor, and one with an interface to the thermostat, both enabled with the hacker sensor package that I built (more on that later). Furthermore, the device he builds will not only help keep his livingroom at the right temperature, it can also tell him the latest news and help him track his favorite TV shows. The coup de grace for all of this is that he is also free to publish his modifications and even resell modified chumbys with this capability so that others can enjoy the benefits of his work, and he can make some profit off of his initiative. And on a lighter note, since the housing itself is made out of fabric, he has the opportunity to redo the housing so that it matches the livingroom decor, keeping his spouse happy because there is not yet another odd hack with ugly cords everywhere sitting in the livingroom.

And of course, I want to make clear that I’m not the only guy behind Chumby–I am just the hardware lead designer, and I do the linux kernel stuff too (which is something new for me, but it was a lot of fun learning the insides of linux from boot to halt). There’s a team of talented, hard-working people who are also a lot of fun to work with.

Posted in Hacking, Ponderings, Social | 12 Comments »

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