What is it about Chinese goods?

I was going to say “Chinese manufacturing”, but in my experience there are plenty of products conceived in the US (or Canada, or Europe), produced in China that are perfectly fine from a quality standpoint. Clearly, there’s nothing wrong with Chinese manufacturing as such.

But when it comes to products and goods “designed” in China, things really fall apart—often quite literally. It doesn’t seem to make a difference if it’s tools, electronics, household goods, toys, food, even cars: what superficially looks like a decent product often turns out to be shoddy, even downright unsafe. I use “design” in quotes because as often as not, the Chinese product is a knockoff of a well-designed, well-made genuine article produced by another company.

You’d think that if they’re copying an existing product they could at least manage to replicate that product’s quality, but perplexingly that’s also rarely the case. Sure, it may cost more than the $20 or so my friend paid for the “Lolex” (as we jokingly call it) watch he brought me back from his China trip, to produce a real Rolex watch, but it doesn’t cost the thousands that the real thing is priced at, either. You’d expect to find quality knockoffs filling that middle ground, but you simply don’t. It’s as if they had one or two tries at duplicating the real thing, stopped trying, and started producing the result en masse.

To say nothing of the various fake/tainted food scandals that have plagued the country in recent years. What kind of mindset does it take to put inedible or sometimes toxic ingredients into food products and assume that no-one will be able to tell the difference? The mind boggles.

Is it a cultural thing?

Are inadequate laws and regulations and/or inadequate oversight to blame, or is there something else at play here? Here in the US, the FDA vigilantly monitors food and drug production… but food inadvertently tainted by pathogens still manage to make it to the consumer on a fairly frequent basis, proving the FDA and other regulators aren’t all-seeing and all-knowing, either. Accidental, even occasionally negligent tainting of products still happen, but what you don’t see is deliberate introduction of non-food ingredients into food products as is apparently often the case in China.

It really makes me wonder, what motivates the perpetrators? What mentality does it take to make a product that they know may be harmful to others? As far as I know, farmers and food producers in China are not desperately poor. Sure, no doubt many face dire financial straits, but the same could be said of farmers here and elsewhere. Greed? That’s an easy accusation to make, but again, there are greedy people everywhere.

I think it’s more to do with the population and the sociopolitical regime. In a country with over a billion people, a government without any accountability to its citizens who are given no voice, everybody becomes depersonalized, disconnected. The loss of accountability isn’t just between the government and the average citizen, it also occurs between people: if other people are reduced to nothing but a faceless set of numbers, the individual producer doesn’t feel personally accountable to whomever his product may ultimately reach.

Culture is a two-way road, of course: part of the reason the Chinese (and others) make cheap, shoddy goods is that people seem to be content to buy them. Almost everything we buy is regarded as “disposable”; infusing technology into many products somehow infuses with them with built-in obsolescence.

My parents bought many household appliances that served them for twenty, thirty or more years. I’m not that optimistic about my $10 toaster, nor any of the other appliances in my home. Sure, they’re cheap and easily replaced, but I have a feeling what they lack in longevity will ultimately result in a higher amortized price.

On one hand, I wouldn’t want a computer built to last longer than, say, five years; on the other, I wouldn’t mind paying more for a toaster that works well and lasts decades. The balance to be struck, I think, lies in doing one thing, and doing it well. Adding on techy features on to a product to “add value” will in the long run do the opposite. I don’t want my toaster to play music; I don’t need my fridge to surf the Web or play DVDs.

… or how much money I stand to lose.

A few years ago I switched my banking services over to those provided by my financial investment services company, because I hated the “service” provided by my local bank.

My financial services company? Merrill-Lynch.

My local bank? Bank of America.

Dammit.

Okay, not really long, nor sordid, but I did notice however that it’s been two years since I started hosting with Dreamhost and, according to the archives, two years next month since I moved vtluu.net over to DreamHost. Funny how I couldn’t even remember who I was using to host vtluu.net prior to that; I had to search my archived E-mail to figure out it was Your-Site.

Was Your-Site that bad that I’ve apparently repressed all memories of it? Probably not; nevertheless, that Your-Site seems still the sleepy little company it was two years ago and that DreamHost has grown and developed even in the same period of time says a lot of about the two.

Without sounding overly gushy, I couldn’t be happier with DreamHost. I think it’s their ability to anticipate everything that I want out of a hosting service. When I wanted to set up websites using Joomla and Wordpress, they made that easy. When more recently I decided to move my E-mail hosting over to Google, they made that a breeze as well. Looking at their company info, I get the impression that their philosophy is to stay small, do one thing and do it well. I admire that kind of ambition—no fame-seeking, no Superbowl Ads… not what you’d expect from a company based in the heart of L.A.

Of course, business is business, and when it comes to the bottom line DreamHost has very competitively-priced service and a great referral bonus program, but here are a few other noteworthy items that make DreamHost stand out:

• Their corporate blog, a genuinely interesting read.
• Their environmentally-friendly approach (waste reduction, renewable energy, carbon-neutrality, etc.).
• Their charitable efforts (e.g. matching donations); I’m a bit cynical about charitable contributions by corporations (i.e. why take my money and give some of it away when I could just give it away myself) but I nevertheless appreciate the effort.

Anyway, if you’re looking for a new/replacement web/domain hosting service, check out DreamHost (and kick a referral bonus my way) at this link: http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?225447.

Janice and I took a little road trip down the central coast last weekend, ending up at Cambria/San Simeon, or more notably Hearst Castle. (If you happen to find yourself in Cambria, by the way, be sure to check out The Black Cat restaurant; we had dinner there and Janice had what was possibly the best foie gras I’ve sampled since French Laundry.)

We did the first of the five tours offered, called the “experience” tour, which consisted of the bus ride a few miles up the hill from the visitor center to the castle grounds, a quick walk-through of some of the outdoor facilities and abridged visits to a couple of the buildings, and of course the bus ride back down to the visitor center. What was silly was that there was no single tour you could take to see everything (or almost everything), and moreover if you elected to spend the whole day there and do all five tours, you’d spend a large portion of the time in the areas where the tours overlap (e.g. the outdoors Neptune Pool), and an even larger portion of the time riding the bus up and down the hill.

Overall the experience felt a bit cheap and canned, not to mention rushed. The State Park people seemed to do everything they could to push as many busloads of tourists through the place as possible and milk as many dollars out of us as they could. What would William Randolph Hearst think; would the builder and collector frown at visitors hurried through his creation too fast to take a moment and truly appreciate what he’d built, or would the businessman approve of healthy revenue stream generated?

Granted, Hearst Castle is itself a product of the 20th century, much like, say, Disneyland, so maybe it’s not really fair to compare its tours to some I’ve taken of the ruins of ancient Rome or the Vatican, for example.

Still, I can’t help but be a bit cynical. Take the photo below, for example, of Janice and I in front of the beautiful Neptune Pool on the Hearst Castle grounds. Those with a keen eye will notice something seems not quite right about the lighting, and they’re right: the photo is a composite of a stock photo of the pool and a photo taken of Janice and I against a green screen just before we boarded the bus. It seems rather absurd, since minutes later we were at the Neptune Pool proper, and had we not been rushed along and crowded in with a few dozen other tourists, could have used our cameras to create the genuine article.

Of course, we bought the photo because we were rushed along and it was too crowded to get a clear photo. At least we can say that the photo was taken on the same day, and relatively close to, our actual visit to Hearst Castle… We joked about how they could take the same greenscreened photo of us, whip up Adobe Photoshop and drop us in front of the Eiffel tower, the pyramids at Giza, the ruins of Machu Picchu, etc. for a few extra dollars. At what point is the experience, or at least the artifacts thereof (souvenirs, photos, etc.) so synthetic that they become meaningless, if not worthless?

Saw a news story over at the BBC about how laptops sent up to the International Space Station were infected with a computer virus, partly because the computers “reportedly do not have any anti-virus software on them to prevent infection”. The mind boggles; how could so many smart people be so stupid?

That got me to thinking about how I don’t have any antivirus software on my Macbook laptop. (Not quite true: I have ClamXav, a free virus scanner for the Mac, but it’s not a “real-time” scanner and I rarely perform scans manually.) I did a bit of Googling on the topic and found a Slashdot piece (followed by the usual pro- and anti-Apple bashing; get a life, people!) that linked to a pertinent and interesting, if not entirely convincing article by computer security expert Rich Mogull, “Should Mac Users Run Antivirus Software?” Mogull claims that most Mac users do not benefit from running antivirus software, given how very few viruses target the Apple OS X platform. The latter statistic owes partly to Apple’s relatively small market share, and Mogull notes that there may come a point when that market share grows high enough for viruses to start becoming a real threat.

On the Windows side I’ve found that most antivirus software offerings suffer from creeping featuritis: antivirus programs turn into “security suites” and eventually install all kinds of extremely obtrusive programs that make them as much of a hassle as many of the viruses they’re supposed to block. Over time I’ve bought and given up on Symantec and McAfee when both programs started popping ads selling upgrades or worse, unrelated products from the same company. Evidently it is too much to ask for a program that does just one thing and does it well.

Fortunately, using a Mac largely spares me the aggravation of dealing with bloated antivirus software. As long as Macs remain largely unpopular, of course. So please, don’t buy a Mac… unless if you’re a national or international space agency.

Orchard Supply Hardware stocks just about every cleaning product known to man: sprays, foams, aerosols, wipes, sponges… But no paper towels. What gives?

Had the pleasure of meeting up with my friend Anthony from high school yesterday. It’d been almost 16 years since we’d last met… in other words we’re almost (and in fact he is) twice as old now as when we last saw each other. Understandably we had had a fair bit of catching up to do.

Neither of us reminisced much about the past; though I think it’s fair to say that although those years of our lives were mostly positive, we’d separately spent enough time reflecting upon them that we were content to not spend much more time rehashing our high school experience.

It’s tremendously comforting to see how our friends have grown, changed, and for the most part done reasonably well for themselves. It’s a somewhat stark reminder of the passage of time, the march of the years, but at least for me it’s a also a reminder of how far I’ve come over those years.

After high school Anthony and I were the ones in our class who set out furthest from the Saguenay Region where we’d grown up, and consequently the ones who had littlest contact with our former classmates. Since many of the latter have since moved to the Montreal area, and since I’ve returned there numerous times over the years, I suppose my own isolation is less excusable… Nevertheless, until Facebook came along I had only rare tidbits of news of my old friends’ lives, so now that I’m once again in touch with details of their daily lives it’s almost as if they’d long ago disappeared into obscurity and reemerged years later, wholly changed.

It was good to have a chance to fill in a bit of those intervening years, good to finally see how we got from there and then to here and now.

I got Janice a new solar-powered quartz watch for her birthday.

I am a bit meticulous, if not downright obsessive-compulsive, when it comes to timekeeping. I keep my computers’ clocks synchronized precisely using NTP, two of the watches I use and my bedside alarm clock automatically synchronize themselves to the atomic clock in Fort Collins, Colorado via radio signals… I frequently adjust my Zenith mechanical watch to match these other “trusted” clocks although the fact that I usually wear such an inaccurate timepiece at all proves that my timekeeping obsession is short of pathological.

Janice’s new watch, being quartz-driven, is supposed to be accurate a few seconds a month or something like that. In keeping with my aforementioned obsession I would periodically check her watch, and much to my consternation find it running a few minutes fast. I couldn’t understand how a quartz watch could be running so inaccurately…

Until today. Janice saw me adjusting her watch and promptly told me not to. “I match it to the clock in my lab. It’s supposed to be synchronized to some satellites or something.”

She said she couldn’t figure why she would find her watch off by a few minutes every day, and have to readjust it. And of course, I noted wondering the exact same thing.

Still, it seems that Rigel’s timekeepers have a lot to answer for, because Janice’s lab clock, if her watch is any indication, is ahead by about five minutes.

The replacement Milwaukee chop saw from Amazon arrived today. I had a strong doubt that this one would survive the shipping process intact as well, so I told Noe (Extreme Performance’s store manager) to check it as soon as it arrived.

Sure enough, this one was broken in exactly the same way, and Noe refused delivery on the item—much to the consternation of the FedEx guy, who didn’t relish having to carry the 50-pound box back to his truck. That confirms my suspicion that the packaging was insufficient to protect the tool during shipping. Not what anybody would expect from Milwaukee Tools.

I finally got around to dropping off my MacBook for repairs (a couple of hardware glitches, annoying but not fatal, had cropped up over a year ago) at the Stanford Apple store. (I chose the store because they were the only store without any 8GB iPhones in stock, hence I reasoned would be less crowded.)

I went to the “Genius Bar” and showed them the problem with laptop, and they said they’d take it in for diagnostic testing to be followed by any necessary repairs. They told me the initial diagnostics would take about 48 hours and they would follow-up by phone.

Five days passed without any word from Apple, nor any update on the repair status on the tech support website. I finally called Apple’s tech support line; they contacted the Stanford store who claimed that they had tried to contact me a few days earlier for authorization to send out the computer for repair. Funny, that; I’d given them my mobile phone number (verifiably correct on the receipt I received from them) and at no point did I miss a call or get a voicemail from the store.

Anyway with my authorization they sent the MacBook out to Memphis (if the FedEx tracking information is to be believed) for repairs, which were completed last weekend. The computer was shipped back to Stanford which received it on Monday. I phoned them and was told the computer was being “processed” and they would call me when it was ready.

Two days later and no phone call. I called up the Stanford store, inquired, and sure enough, the computer is ready to be picked up.

For a company that now makes phones, you’d think they would understand how to make phone calls.