馬庭正's Journal

8:26pm: Free market in action...free market in identity theft, that is.
From http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2008/05/09/12928/stolen-financial-data-doesnt-cost-much-these-days/:

(Stolen) financial data doesn’t cost much these days

Psst. Are you in the market for a social security number or three, by any chance? How about access to a compromised bank account? It will cost you - about 6 to 11 cents on the dollar.

At least, that is what the creators of this recently-discovered price list were demanding, according to researchers at McAfee Avert Labs. Access to a Washington Mutual bank account with a $14,000 balance would set you back a mere €500 - or around $771. Or, if you preferred an European account, you could score a BNP Paribas joint worth €30,792 for €2,200.

Prices vary depending on the available balance, bank organization and country, according to McAfee’s Francois Paget. And some sellers even offer guarantees - if, for example, you are unable to log in to your chosen account within 24 hours, you will be given a replacement. Some sites also offer free data to establish that they are - er - legit.

In some cases, batches of 500 credit card numbers were selling for $200 a pop, or just 40 cents each, in the second half of last year. Six months earlier, such data would have cost around 50 per cent more, and would only have been available in batches of 100, according to the report.

12:50pm: Plans which depend on narrativium really belong in fiction. Don't depend on them coming true in real life.

5:05pm: Thanks to applejack_12 and bluenoteboogy!
I stopped over in LA for the night, and applejack_12 made a wonderful salmon dinner! They invited over the neighbors, so we had a real party of it all. At one point bluenoteboogy noted that it really was a company town, as we had people from many different parts of the business sitting right around the dinner table.

bluenoteboogy invited me to come by the CBS studio lot and have a look around with him. A personally guided tour of a studio lot? I didn't need to be asked twice.

The things which struck me immediately were the number of crew involved in shooting, and the size of the sets, which need to be large enough to accomodate a moving camera crew. Beyond that, what really struck me was the careful attention to detail--including the masking-out of logos which aren't licensed--and the degree to which there's an abrupt change between on- and off-screen. The detail really makes that more striking, because on-screen looks so real and the backstage side is so, well, backstage.

bluenoteboogy says he sometimes gets that "half-step to the right" feeling because of that sudden transition, and I can really see why.

Anyway, it was totally cool of you both for feeding me, putting me up, and showing me around! Thanks again!

6:17pm: I understand about making the number big for the vision-impaired.
But the big purple "5" on the back of the new $5 bill is taking things a bit far, don't you think?

http://www.moneyfactory.gov/newmoney/main.cfm/currency/new5

12:32am: This isn't actually a review of GTA IV, but it's still worth reading.
From http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/nyregion/thecity/04gran.html:

The game makes no attempt to disguise the fact that it is designed to look, sound and feel like the city I have lived in for nearly all 32 years of my life.

This game is hardly the first to try to replicate some portion of the New York experience — programmers have been trying to do this for decades. But Grand Theft Auto IV is the most contemporary attempt at this experiment, and may be the most realistic made available to a mass audience.

For a native New Yorker, the game is both comfortingly routine and eerily disorienting; you find yourself playing because it is a limitless escape and a consequence-free confinement. Liberty City is like nowhere I’ve ever visited, even as it tries with all its heart and soul to remind me of a place with which I’m already intimately acquainted.

It’s not the game’s fault that it can’t perfectly replicate the infinite variety of New York. But it sometimes comes so close to pulling off the illusion that it invites you to look for the imperfections.

When my two hours of game time were over, I left the Rockstar Games offices and stepped out into SoHo at midafternoon on one of warmest spring days of the year. The sun worshipers were out in full force, each of them as distinct as snowflakes: guys wearing oversized earphones and baseball caps tilted at every angle, women wearing minimalist skirts and shorts that gave them only the illusion of being clothed. An amorous couple making their way north hardly noticed me as they nearly crosschecked me into a streetside table of $6 sunglasses.

There was so much uniqueness and so much variety that there was no room to move, and I knew I was home.

2:14pm: I'm sad about coinless slot machines.
Really, the appealing thing about slot machines for me was that they disgorged piles of change. Now, that's gone. There really is no point if they're just going to spit a ticket out. I understand it's cheaper for the casinos not to have to do all that coin handling, but I'm still sad about it.

Guess I'll actually have to go to the bank to get quarters now.

11:25pm: This may be a statement of the obvious...
...but I'm finding Las Vegas to be ground zero for the glorification of money and the objectification of women.

9:33pm: Lotus of Siam
I was surfing around looking for a place to have lunch. It seemed like everyone though Lotus of Siam was a must. And it was nearby, and off the strip. Sure.

Lotus of Siam
953 E. Sahara Ave.
Las Vegas, NV 89104
tel: +1.702.735.3033
http://www.saipinchutima.com/
M-Th: 1130-1430 lunch; 1730-2130 dinner
F: 1130-1430 lunch; 1730-2200 dinner
Sa-Su: 1730-2200 dinner only
Reservations recommended one day in advance for dinner.

Lotus of Siam is one of those Asian strip mall restaurants that looks very unassuming from the outside. In fact, the strip mail is set up with its back to the road, so until you actually drive in, you can't even see it. It's there. Look for the mall sign saying 953, pull in, turn right and drive along the strip mall. It'll be about halfway down.

I went for lunch, when their $8.99 buffet is featured, so I can't say whether it's "the single best Thai restaurant in North America", as Jonathan Gold of Gourmet magazine claimed. The steam-table isn't kind to food, so I'm sure I didn't sample Lotus of Siam's dishes at their best. Despite this handicap, they managed serve rather good food.

Highlights included the Spicy Chili Mint Chicken, with basil, green peppers, broccoli, onion, cucumber, and ground chicken. It did have quite a bit of heat, but it wasn't an overwhelmingly spicy dish. The spice was one constituent of a very complex and delicious taste. The Pad Thai was also notable, sweet with a noticeable but not overwhelming bite.

I also enjoyed the Tom Kah (sic) Vegetable soup, with cabbage and baby corn. It had the kind of spiciness that creates a warm glow, which went well with the creaminess of the soup.

The overall impression I had of these dishes was of tastes in balance: not too much pepper, not too much basil, even not too much cilantro for me as a soap taster.

Lotus of Siam managed to deliver a good meal via steam table. I can only imagine what they're like when you actually order dishes from the menu.

12:00pm: Aloha Kitchen
I got in late last night, but palmwiz had a suggestion for a late dinner. He said it was a drbitch and frotz recommendation, which in my book means it's something to check out. Also, one of the branches is open very late.

Aloha Kitchen
2605 South Decatur Blvd., Suite 110
Las Vegas, NV 89102
tel: +1.702.364.0064
fax: +1.702.364.9282
http://www.alohakitchenlv.com/
7 days: 0700-0500
Cards: MC/Visa/AmEx/Discover

Two other locations in Las Vegas, at 4745 South Maryland Pkwy. and 4466 East Charleston Blvd.

My last Hawaiian Barbeque experience had been a bit disappointing, but I was certainly willing to give it another try, particularly on a recommendation. I'm glad I did.

We started with the Lumpia Shanghai ($2.99), thin, crispy egg rolls filled with ground pork, which came with a sweet chili sauce. They were fine but nothing particularly special.

palmwiz got the Kalua Pig and Katsu Combo ($7.49) and I got the Mix Plate (also $7.49). He made the better choice. The Kalua Pig--shredded pork with cabbage--was excellent. Flavorful and moist, it was the highlight of the meal. The chicken katsu wasn't bad, either, pleasantly breaded and a bit less oily than usual. My mix plate came with teriyaki chicken, beef, and mahi-mahi. The mahi-mahi was a thin slice, fried. At first it looked like a fried egg. Alas, it was rather bland and limp. The teriyaki chicken wasn't bad, but it was pretty much generic teriyaki chicken, although reasonably well executed. The beef was better, tasty but a bit chewier than I like.

Both meals were accompanied by the standard white rice and macaroni salad. Both competently done, but we both reached our limit of macaroni salad pretty early.

Aloha Kitchen serves good Hawaiian at a reasonable price. I'm thinking I'll be going back for the kalua pig.

(Thanks for the pointer!)

1:41pm: Shuttle to Manchester Airport from Sullivan Sq. T and Anderson RTC.
it's actually pretty convenient, aside from the fact that it only runs every two hours. The service is particularly useful for those on the north side of the Charles, as it makes getting to Manchester Airport as easy as getting to Logan. It takes an hour and fifteen minutes to get there, assuming traffic is flowing freely.

http://www.flymanchester.com/transportation/shuttle_service.php

Oh, yeah, and it's free for ticketed passengers, although I've now ridden it twice in the last few weeks, and no one's asked for any evidence of that. I guess the suitcase kind of gives it away.

2:21pm: From Friday night's goodbye party for twoscoopsofruit.
"Love the Grotto..." --RJS
"...but don't let the Grotto love you." --me

3:02am: You can sleep forever, but still you will be tired
You can stay as cold as stone, but still you won't find peace

You can walk too far but still you won't be found
You can look down on the world but still you won't find love
(2001)

2:05am: You can’t get what you want
Till you know what you want
(1984)

2:46am: Thought for the night.
Community is when they give a shit whether you show up or not.

9:24pm: The world generally looks better after a good meal.

3:04pm: Laptop once again charged.
Mobile email and web back on line. :)

10:51am: Off to Fry's for a replacement power adapter.
Back with a non-Apple adapter soon.

3:38am: Electronics tour of Asia?
Many have heard of Tokyo's Akihabara Electrical Town. I suspect, though, that fewer people have heard of either Yongsan Electronics Market in Seoul or SEG Electronics Market in Shenzhen.

Here's a description of that last one (from http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=147):

As I first step foot into the building, I am assaulted by a whirlwind of electronic components. Tapes and reels of resistors and capacitors, ICs of every type, inductors, relays, pogo pin test points, voltmeters, trays of memories, all crammed into tiny six-by-three foot booths with a storekeeper poking away at a laptop, sometimes playing Go, sometimes counting parts. Some booths are true mom-and-pop shops, with mothers tending to babies and kids playing in the aisles.

And it’s not like, oh, you can get ten of these LEDs or a couple of these relays like you do in Akihabara. No, no. These booths specialize and if you see something you like, you can usually buy several tubes, trays or reels of it–you can go into production the next day.

Stacks of power supplies, varistors, batteries; ROM programmers. Atmel, Intel, Broadcom, Samsung, Yamaha, Sony, AMD, Fujitsu, every variety of chip. Some of them clearly ripped out of used equipment and remarked, some of them in brand new laser-marked OEM packaging.

Chips that I couldn’t dream of buying in the US, reels of rare ceramic capacitors that I only dream about at night. My senses tingle, my head spins. I can’t supress a smirk of anticipation as I walk around the next corner, to see shops stacked floor to ceiling with probably a hundred million resistors and capacitors.

All of this available for a little haggling, a bit of cash, and a hasty goodbye. This is Digikey gone mad. It’s as if they let the monkeys into the warehouse at Thief River Falls, Minnesota and spilled it into a flea market in China, and then some.

And that’s just the first two floors. Six more floors of computer components, systems, laptops, motherboards, digital cameras, security cameras, thumb drives, mice, video cameras, high end graphics cards, flat panel displays, shredders, lamps, projectors, you name it.

One of the commenters says:

It is a whole district with a few buildings full of these stores. Yes, “Buildings”. To name a few, there are SEG Square electronics market building. Hua Qiang electronics world building and also other small building the specialized in cell phone parts. It may not make you rich but can definitely help you to kill a lot of time there. The more experience and knowledgeable in electronics/computing/telecom parts, the more surprises you will get. If you are a real nerd, just like me, you can kill a few weeks there, just like when your first time visiting the NY or British Museum. It is definitely the mecca for any electronics hobbyist. You can easily start any business, build any electronics products in no time. If you know what you are doing. In the cell phone parts building, you have the selections of different parts and also semi-finished (SKD) parts. Just tell them what you needed and they build one for you. Maybe one quarter of the price of an off the shelf similar products but it will not pass any safety test and will not come with any warranty, as usual. Not to mentioned that there are wholesale shops that sell finished products.

Another adds an important warning, which anyone who buys anything in China should remember:

One thing to note. Those Kingston memory modules that were being put into “retail packages” were almost certainly not real Kingston modules. In Shenzhen, like all over China, copies and fakes are everywhere. Sometimes the copy is just as good as the original and it is almost impossible to tell the difference. Other times the parts sold are “overstock”, meaning they are made in the same factory as the original parts and are the same in every way. We call this “fourth shift” production. The original brand never sees a dime from the sale of his branded product. But beware of fakes that are completly mislabeled. For example, you will see flash memory drives labelled 4 GB and when you put them in the seller’s notebook, they show up as 4 GB, but when you get them back to your hotel you will find a nice virus as a gift and when you format the drive, it tuens out to be 256 K. I am not kidding. Also, you will see Products labelled as Sony, Apple, and the like that Sony and Apple never developed. These folks will blindly put anyone’s logo on anything. In fact, in one both we bought some music players and the seller offered to put various different logos on them for us. We could have Apple, Sony and about six other brands.

File under: Another idea for a tour I could do, to go along with the fabric tour of the world.

5:59pm: RFID cards?
A quick question for my flist:

Besides the new passport, the RealID compliant driver's license, and a transit card like a Charlie, Oyster or Octopus Card, what other cards one is likely to be carrying might contain an RFID chip?

(Later edits may include links to all of these if I get around to it.)

6:31am: From yesterday's On Point.
'Sonnet'

All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now,
and after this one, just a dozen
to launch a little ship on love's storm-tossed seas,
then only ten more left like rows of beans.
How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan
and insist the iambic bongos must be played
and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines,
one for every station of the cross.
But hang on here while we make the turn
into the final six where all will be resolved,
where longing and heartache will find an end,
where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen,
take off those crazy medieval tights,
blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.

-- Billy Collins

http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2008/04/20080401_b_main.asp

1:30am: "A mob of crazed monkeys in expensive suits chasing after green slips of paper."

8:20pm: Today's Financial Times Alphaville blog had a post today which included the following sentence:

"In this occasional series we will bring you a summary of the discussion for busy Alphaville readers who might find it a bit tldr."

I'm amused that they used it, and even more amused that they linked to the urban dictionary to define it.

(Alas, no semicolon. That would have been perfect.)

3:27pm: Heathrow Terminal 5's opening day hasn't gone so well.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/travel/franciscakellett/march2008/terminal5.htm:

We all expected a certain degree of teething trouble when the new terminal opened. But stories flooding out of T5 read like something from a Benny Hill sketch.

Let’s just remember that it cost £4.4 billion to get this show on the road. Which would, you’d think, cover things like functioning escalators and an effective baggage handling system.

But, no. Instead of a super-efficient, high-gloss travel experience like you might expect in, say, Beijing’s new airport terminal, our home-grown version has seen T5’s first frustrated passengers scurrying between out of order carpark paying machines and broken escalators – only to be told that their flights have been cancelled.

Those that have arrived at T5 have been stranded in planes as gates have had to be found for their flights. They’ve then had to hang around for 90 minutes waiting for their baggage.

In fact, seven of the terminal’s first flights today left without any luggage at all. T5’s new sophisticated baggage handling system is obviously a little too sophisticated, and has done little to help British Airways’ label of losing more suitcases than any other major airline.

And, to add to the fabulous confusion, amidst the travel chaos there have been hundreds of airport expansion protestors milling around in red t-shirts.

You can almost hear the Benny Hill theme music warbling in the background as harassed BAA workers chase red-clad protestors, who trip over frazzled passengers who are chasing luggage.

It just couldn’t happen anywhere else.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/542bc5ae-fc27-11dc-9229-000077b07658.html:

Day One at Heathrow’s shiny new Terminal 5, and it suddenly all started to seem horribly familiar.

A growing mountain of misplaced bags. Angry, frustrated passengers in the arrivals hall. No announcements. No explanations of what was going wrong, that made any sense. British Airways ground staff present, but themselves bewildered with little useful information.

Long queues at the lost baggage desks filing sorry reports. Growing crowds at the baggage carousels. Passengers lying around on the cold floors because of the shortage of seats. And out front at the sales desks a growing queue of travellers trying to rebook cancelled flights.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

It is mayhem at carousel nine. Two flights were in hours ago from Los Angeles. One three-and-a half-hours ago, and still no bags. Next door passengers from Athens are still waiting for bags after two-and-a-half hours. Many have given up, filed their claims and left.

A BA ground services employee admits, “there is a shortage of staff, we are still spread across all the terminals, and there is a shortage of equipment”. Another says, “it was the volume of departing bags. It crashed the system and stopped arriving bags too”.

Not a good start to the bright new world of £4.3bn T5. They have only been planning it for 19 years.

Finally, they gave up on the whole checked-bag idea.

From http://ukpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5jctHo5GEA-k7o5ZPJcNimRqf1UCg:

A disastrous opening day for Heathrow's flagship £4.3 billion Terminal 5 ended with British Airways having to suspend all baggage check-in at the new facility.

The decision, taken after a series of problems had wrecked what should have been a landmark day at the west London airport, meant travellers could only fly with carry-on hand luggage.

5:04pm: From http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/2008/03/bear-stearns-building-today.html:

Bear Stearns Building Today

2:53am: Bear Stearns goes to J. P. Morgan Chase for $2 a share.
For reference, it closed on Friday at $30.

Bloomberg reports:

"[T]he price JPMorgan is paying is about one quarter the value of the securities firm's headquarters building in midtown Manhattan. The 1.2 million-square-foot, 45-story structure built in 2001 is worth about $1.2 billion".

Marketoracle.co.uk says:

"Said another way, Bear's headquarters building, which was included in the sale, is worth four times what JP Morgan paid for the entire firm. That means Bear, as an ongoing entity, was a liability as of Sunday. This is not surprising considering the rush for the exits by customers in the last few weeks and the loss-ridden portfolio of securities on Bear's books. Add the possibility of lawsuits against Bear's actions, and JP Morgan in effect said Bear is a liability in its present form, we will not buy it, but we will take it for $2 per share to help shore up confidence since the Fed has asked us nicely."

"Unfortunately, Bear Stearns is not the only firm to hold large quantities of leveraged securities backed by mortgages."

"If Bear Sterns [sic] went from having a $169 stock in January of 2007 to being virtually worthless today, it makes you wonder what other firms may follow a similar path to insolvency."