MORE SENSELESS ACTS OF BLOGGERY

That pretty much sums up my trip to Taipei earlier this week.

Here are the toys.

 

And here are the taxis.

 

The back-seat screen on the right is a new thing – about a thousand taxis have been outfitted with these touch-screens that are linked to a wireless network called Wimax (similar to Wi-Fi, but it can cover a whole city instead of yr favorite coffee shop – if you have Clearwire service in yr area, it’s the same thing) and the onboard GPS unit. So you can watch music videos while tracking yr location. Which is handy.

The laptop rig was even more interesting since it was basically an ad hoc set-up – the driver bought a laptop with Wimax built into it and mounted it in the passenger seat. He was running GoogleMaps and a local live TV channel at the time.

It sounds dangerous, I know. But we never even came close to so much as a fender bender, so who am I to be critical of the future?

Anyway, that was pretty much Taipei for me – I spent almost all of it working or sitting through PowerPoints ... which is how I learned that one local Wimax operator tried out wearable Wimax webcams for police who can stream live POV video during crowded events.

The quality was decent. Which is why I think dashboard Web TV is the least of our problems.

And now it’s time to hit the road yet again – first to Singapore, then straight to Shenzhen in mainland China. This will take about a week. Broadcasts may be limited, but will likely be ongoing.

Keep the meter running,

This is dF

And now for something completely different: a song from the first album ever to be inspired by a Robert Charles Wilson novel.

In Chinese!


The band is Wu Bai (伍佰) and China Blue, who I’ve been listening to on and off for six years or so. Wu Bai is an interesting anomaly in the Taiwan music scene in that (1) he plays rock in a scene dominated by sugarpop idols, (2) writes his own songs and (3) plays an instrument. He and his band have a rep for great live shows, and he’s outlasted an awful lot of “proper” stars despite not following the industry playbook.

He’s also hard to pin down musically, which I like. Judging from the above song ("太空弹", or “Too Blank”, according to my online translator), which is from the new album Spacebomb, this year he’s favoring turn-of-the-century David Bowie space-rock. Which isn’t as bad as it sounds. Not to me, anyway.

And I wasn’t kidding about the Robert Charles Wilson thing. See this interview for details. Admittedly, the video suggests a VERY loose adaptation ...

Space is the place,

This is dF