John August

News

Who are you? Where do you come from?

News

[survey](http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=290091028219)On Sunday, I had lunch with Mary Edrington, my former marketing professor from [Drake](http://www.drake.edu). She was one of the best teachers I ever had, because she did the near-impossible: she made me care about boring numbers. Even though I was much more attuned to the creative side of marketing, I always appreciated her zeal for research. It wasn’t enough to come up with a clever slogan for some product; you had to prove that there was actually a customer out there to buy it.

At lunch, she asked me who the average reader of johnaugust.com was. I confessed that I didn’t really know. I can speculate about education level of some readers based on the comments. Checking the logs, I can tell you [what browser](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2005/why-does-anyone-still-use-internet-explorer) he or she uses. But my actual demographic data is an empty set.

So if you don’t mind, would you be willing to answer 10 really simple questions? I’ve timed it — it only takes 35 seconds, unless you write a big essay in the (optional) final comment box.

You can take the survey here. (**Update March 2011:** Link removed, outdated.)

After a week or two, I’ll put up the results.

Back to the Word Factory

News, Rant

This is my soliloquy, spoken directly to the audience, somehow unheard by the other characters onstage: I love to travel, but mostly, I love to get home.

Vacation trips always seem to last one day too long — except when they’re entirely too short. No matter how long the voyage, it’s usually at about the three-quarters mark that I realize I’m not, in reality, a traveling man of leisure. Phone calls, emails, and blinking cursors will always be waiting for me when I get back. Fortunately, so will my bed, my TiVo, and my dogs.

I’m writing this from the lounge at Incheon airport, waiting for my flight back to Los Angeles. Beijing, Shanghai and Seoul were all amazing, not just for their antiquities but also their dynamism. For example, Shanghai’s [Oriental Pearl Tower](http://www.molon.de/galleries/China/Shanghai/OPearl/) is ridiculous, but worth a visit just for the view from the observation deck. In most cities, you’d see the horizon. In Shanghai, you just count the number of five-story buildings being ripped down to make room for new skyscrapers.

Shanghai feels like New York, Paris and Tokyo crammed together. Seoul, on the other hand, is the metropolis Los Angeles would probably be if there were more than one industry in town. It’s very spread out, but with ample freeways and a competent subway system.

The most fascinating part of Korea was a trip into the [DMZ](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Demilitarized_Zone). For about ninety seconds, I was technically inside the North Korean border, with a few thousand armed soldiers ready to shoot if I were to do something stupid, such as pointing with my finger, or trying to defect. (I did neither.)

One weird observation: I loved China, but their national firewall is a pain. It prevents access to giant swaths of the blogosphere, whether or not the sites have anything to do with nationally sensitive issues. Although I could pull up [johnaugust.com](http://johnaugust.com) just fine, many of my friends’ sites were completely inaccessible. (Of course, simply mentioning the firewall may block johnaugust.com. The irony is appreciated.)

Happy Easter from Beijing

News, Writing Process

I’m in China for a week of sight-seeing, research for one those Someday Scripts I hope to eventually write. The project is very much Old World, so most of my time has been spent tromping around the [Great Wall](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_wall), the [Summer Palace](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_Palace) and the [Forbidden City](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_City), getting a feel for the architecture and details that you don’t really find in a book.

While the historical landmarks have been everything I hoped for, the real surprise has been modern China. It doesn’t feel anything like the Orwellian state I read about in high school. All the Business Week articles about China’s rush into a market economy understate the degree to which it already feels First World. People have cooler cell phones. They own their own apartments. Beijing feels like it could host the Olympics next year — although they have until 2008 to finish the new subways and all the other improvements underway.

I’ve been to St. Petersburg, which has a similar beautiful-buildings-to-ugly-cinderblocks ratio, but the mood couldn’t be more different. Beijing feels like it’s on a massive sugar rush, and the people in the park seem genuinely happy. It’s like Los Angeles, with more smog and darker hair. That doesn’t sound like a rave, but it’s actually pretty cool.

My advice is to come before the Olympics, when everyone will see how world-ready it is. Mandarin is notoriously difficult to master, but it’s pretty easy to pick up basic traveller pidgin: hello, excuse me, where is.., is it here?. As I overheard one expat Texan say over cocktails: “It’s easier to speak than to understand.” A great double-entendre, which in this case is true.

Archives section working, sort of

Geek Alert, News

The Archives link, which has been [broken](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2005/archives-section-temporarily-broken) ever since switching hosts, is now un-broken — which is not to say fixed.

In its previous incarnation, the Archives section could be sorted by category and date, in a variation on the familiar Sortable Nicer Archives kludge for WP. However, the database gods must have been angered, for all supplication cannot coax them to offer up their insight. Translation: something got broken, and damned if I can fix it.

So in the spirit of Something is better than Nothing, a click on the Archives section will show you every article in the system, from most recent to oldest. It’s not very user-friendly, but the Googlebots will love it.

The Show by Category buttons, incidentally, still work great. So that’s a better choice if you’re interested in reading just the [Q and A’s](http://johnaugust.com/archives/category/qanda), for example.