for the past week I’ve been staying in Penang in Malaysia, working for a client located here on the island. I’ve never been to Penang before and have had an excellent time working here and exploring the city, which is a fascinating and very diverse place. So far I’ve learned a lot about the country and its culture and have experienced some new and interesting things.

when I arrived in Penang by way of Kuala Lumpur on Sunday morning I was exhausted. However, instead of taking a nap, I went out into the city with some contacts, both of whom turned out to be extremely nice and a lot of fun to tour around with. We went to the Penang Botanic Gardens for a walk (with monkeys!) and then to a beach to watch the sunset. Afterward we had dinner and toured the local night market – I love Asian night markets!

this evening we stopped by a street-side fruit vendor and I got to try durian, a local fruit that smells so bad that they won’t let people bring it into hotels or office towers lest they upset others in the building. It smelled pretty terrible… but I persevered and tried some, and found that it actually tastes quite good. It was very sweet, and somewhat pasty, and gooey between my fingers. I also tried some rambutan, otherwise known as “hair fruit” due to the bright red hairs that grow on its shell. It was also good; it looked and tasted rather like lychee.

here are some pictures from my stay here:

a monkey, with a baby monkey, at the Penang Botanic Gardens. The gardens were full of these monkeys scampering around and climbing all over everything.

a picture from inside the Botanic Gardens. There’s a monitor lizard in the picture, but you probably can’t find it… or can you?

sunset from the beach in Penang.

sundown. Yeah I know, I wasn’t holding my camera perfectly straight… oops.

a single flower embedded in the wall at the Botanic Gardens.

you’re darn right I bought a whole bunch of Malaysian sauces to bring back on the plane with me!

This evening I took a quick trip to the Carrefour, the local grocery store here in our (temporary) neighborhood in Versailles. While there I bought three things: a chocolate bar (with caramel), a box of Jaffa Cakes, and a small bottle of Chimay Blue. Okay, I’ll admit it… I was feeling rather snackish.

I got into a checkout line with my items and prepared to wait. In Paris, from what I’ve seen at least, long checkout lines are the norm… whenever the lines seem to dwindle down to what to my North American senses seems to be a reasonably sized queue, they start closing lanes (I’ve been at the tail end of two lanes that they’ve closed in this manner). Ahead of me was an elderly French lady, probably in her late 70s or early 80s, and ahead of her, a lady about my age or a little older, with a fussing baby. The elderly lady’s items consisted of vegetables, fruits, more fruits, more vegetables, two types of baguette, and some Omega 3 butter-like spread. I’m not usually self-conscious about what I buy at a grocery store, but compared to what this lady was buying (healthy and good for you stuff) my beer and chocolate seemed like a pretty poor showing.

At any rate, when the elderly lady saw how few items I was buying, she quickly told me to go ahead of her in line. Mind you, this is an elderly lady telling a young(-ish) man to step ahead of her in line… normally it should be the reverse! Of course I refused, but the lady insisted quite strongly I go ahead of her, and it seemed to me that it would make her very happy if I did so, and so I did.

When the lady with the fussing baby ahead of me was finished checking out, before she left, she turned around and thanked the elderly lady (who was now behind me – stay focused here) for letting her step ahead of her in line. That’s right, I was the second person this elderly lady had let in front of her. The elderly lady responded with “it’s no problem… I have kids too.” (for those interested in the French language, the French way to say “it’s no problem” is “il n’y a pas de quoi”.) And before I started checking out, the elderly lady started chatting merrily with the lady behind the cash register, and of course as soon as they both heard my accent (which happens as soon as I open my mouth to say just about anything in French), they started chatting with me too, asking me where I was from and what I was doing in France.

There’s a lesson here that I can’t quite put my finger on, but from what I could see this elderly lady was pleased to be able to let us youngsters (comparatively anyway) speed our way through life, while she herself took the time to do nice things for other people and to enjoy her time wherever she happened to be, even if that place happened to be the checkout line at a crowded grocery store. It’s a lesson that some of us (myself included) could probably stand to learn earlier in our lives, while we still have decades ahead of us to take advantage of the joys it can bring us.

a few days ago while the 2010 Olympics were in progress I posted this tally of how many Olympic medals countries were earning per million people, to help to gauge how countries were performing compared to the number of potential athletes available to choose from. Now that the Olympics are over I’ve updated the tally, and here it is:

1. Norway: 23 medals, 4,769,274 population, 4.823 mpm (medals per million)
2. Austria: 16 medals, 8,344,319 population, 1.917 mpm
3. Sweden: 11 medals, 9,220,986 population, 1.193 mpm
4. Canada: 26 medals, 33,311,389 population, 0.781 mpm
5. Germany: 30 medals, 82,140,043 population, 0.365 mpm
6. Korea: 14 medals, 48,607,000 population, 0.288 mpm
7. France: 11 medals, 62,048,473 population, 0.177 mpm
8. United States: 37 medals, 304,059,724 population, 0.122 mpm
9. Russian Federation: 15 medals, 141,800,000 population, 0.106 mpm
10. China: 11 medals, 1,325,639,982 population, 0.008 mpm

and just for fun, here’s a quick chart that gives a graphical representation of how it turned out:

I realize that the results are skewed – some countries have a lot more snow than other countries, and therefore a lot more of an interest in winter sports – but regardless, I found this an interesting exercise. At any rate I’m pretty pleased at Canada’s performance on a per capita basis during these Olympics, though you can see from the chart that Norway totally crushed it!

Edit: I’ve updated this list – see the final results for the 2010 Olympics medals per capita.

currently, the United States is leading the Olympic medals count, with 35 medals. My native Canada is in third place, with 23 medals (we also have the highest number of gold medals, with 12)! I was thinking that in comparison to the United States we’re actually doing pretty well, as we have roughly a tenth the population that the USA has… in which case, per capita, we’re earning many more medals than the United States is.

that got me thinking… of the current leaderboard, who is getting the most medals, per capita? Is it Canada, or someone else? I assumed it was someone else, and I was right… but I was pretty amazed to see by just how much that other country is getting more medals per capita than my own!

of the current top 10 medal holders (I didn’t calculate for 11+), the tally looks like this:

1. Norway – 4.403 medals per million!! (21 medals, population 4,769,274)
2. Austria – 1.914 mpm (15 medals, population 8,344,319)
3. Switzerland – 1.179 mpm (9 medals, population 7,630,605)
4. Canada – 0.690 mpm (23 medals, population 33,311,389)
5. Germany – 0.341 mpm (27 medals, population 82,140,043)
6. Korea – 0.288 mpm (14 medals, population 48,607,000)
7. France – 0.177 mpm (11 medals, population 62,048,473)
8. United States – 0.115 mpm (35 medals, population 304,059,724)
9. Russian Federation – 0.106 mpm (15 medals, population 141,800,000)
10. China – 0.008 mpm (11 medals, population 1,325,639,982)

this medals per million leaderboard is going to change as soon as I publish this, of course – perhaps I’ll make another post with the final tallies when the Olympics is over. But I have to say… way to go Norway, for cranking out four and a half Olympic medals per million people… that is simply amazing!!

this afternoon I created this page on my personal web site, with links to my various profiles online – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and so on. I made it for two reasons – the first, and most obvious, is so that people who are seeking to contact me can do so in whatever way they care to. But I also realized that I usually can’t remember which handle I’ve used for each social networking site, and in fact I often can’t remember which social networking sites I’ve signed up for at all (for example, I realized just now that I have two Orkut profiles, neither of which I use, and I can’t even remember how to log onto one of them). I assume this list will grow as I remember old profiles I’ve used, or create new ones into the future.

what amazed me the most about this exercise is how many profiles the average Internet user posesses. I wouldn’t even call myself a “power social networker” and yet I have a whole page full of ways to contact me or figure out what I’ve been up to online. Aggregators, created to make sense of and unify the many profiles people maintain online, turn out to be yet another profile that users then need to keep track of.

another thing I find interesting is how different social networks vary in popularity depending on which part of the globe they’re used in. Facebook is the most popular social networking site here in the United States; Orkut in Brasil; while QQ (I don’t even know what that is!) in huge in China.

I find it sort of interesting that when you do a Google image search for Brian Crawford, the first image that comes up related to me in any way, is a comic I drew for work. The second is also a comic I drew for work. The third is a comic I did for Office Offline.

the first image that comes back with an actual image of myself, is this one, image #91 on the list.

I need to get some more pictures of myself, out there.

at a party last night I met a pretty tough looking guy who, in conversation, mentioned that he had just returned from his final tour of duty as an infantryman in Iraq, and was now working for a pesticide company here in town. When I pressed him for details about what it was like over there, he was unable to respond, and tears started forming in his eyes. I stopped him, shook his hand, and thanked him for all he had done for the United States, and for Iraq. It wasn’t the kind of answer I’d been expecting, but it was an answer nonetheless.

I haven’t posted in a while, so here is a brief Q&A, initiated by myself, to answer those questions that haven’t been asked!

where are you living? We’re back in Charleston, SC.

where are you working? At Blackbaud, as a program manager.

how’s the family? They are great! Callum is now 5, Mia is 3, and Lachlan is 1. More information about their antics can be found on Yvonne’s blog.

are you on Facebook? Yes, you can find my profile here.

have you been using Twitter? Yes, here (and on Identi.ca here).

have you been gaming? I am still playing some World of Warcraft, though not much… in fact, my main character has still not yet reached level 80!

then what have you been doing in your spare time, if not cranking those levels? I’ve been writing, and also creating music. And some studying.

what kind of music? The stuff I’m working on ranges from some more serious minimal techno to melodic club music with a purposefully high cheese factor.

can I hear some of your music? Yes, here is an example, though as a caveat I must mention that I still have a lot of work to do on the leveling and EQ. It sounds a bit muddy, and there’s too much sound bouncing back and forth.

so what’s the big news of today My sister is having a baby, right now!

you can learn a lot about a man by what he will or won’t eat after he’s dropped it on the floor.

last night I was telling stories to Callum and Mia before bedtime. Callum wanted to hear stories about trains. Mia wanted to hear stories about princesses.

so I spun a fantastic tale of how Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty were having a tea party in their castle, when suddenly they heard a strange noise outside, so they snuck out of the castle through the secret back door and into the garden, with all its beautiful flowers, tall trees and hanging vines, and then out through the wrought iron garden gate, on the other side of which they found a worn set of train tracks, and then suddenly in the distance they could see the Santa Fe Super Chief approaching (!!!), with two A units and two B units, multiple passenger cars, a diner car, two dome cars and even an observation car. Strangely enough, cooped up in the castle all day, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty were tiring of their non-stop tea parties and spent most of their time daydreaming about what it would be like to ride on a real train…

statistics dictate that people who have two kids have about a 50% chance of having one boy and one girl. I wonder if there is a market for stories like these.