Scripting News

David Recordon

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 20:01:31 GMT

Just had a 1/2 hour phone conversation with David Recordon who's involved with OpenID and OAuth and works at SixApart. There were no deals made, we talked in generalities, I wanted him to understand where I was at with these two technologies. In the spirit of being open and transparent, here's where I'm at:

1. I'm a user of OpenID. If you look at the HTML source for the scripting.com home page you'll see all the OpenID information. Pretty sure I understand how it works at a technical level, and that I could if needed do a server implementation.

2. I'm confused by OAuth, but I know I have to implement it, at the lowest level, because there's no community to do it for the OPML Editor, and that's where I do my development. I've done the Flickr pre-cursor to OAuth, and hated it, but I have it working, and it works without flaw or problem, so that's behind me. The docs that exist for OAuth are daunting. But it's high on my to-do list.

3. Because of the inevitability of OAuth, I'm concerned that the big companies are going to start monkeying with it, and that at some point there will be many flavors of OAuth and I'll have to implement them all. This is just a fear, only based on experience with other formats and protocols.

4. In the struggle to achieve simplicity for OpenID, I came to the conclusion that it has to be built into each web browser. Interestingly David came to the same conclusion and wrote an article about it in December last year. Imho, the browsers that need to do this are: Firefox, MSIE, Safari and Chrome. If they do it the rest will follow. I think if even one does it, all the rest will follow because it is such a compelling idea, and users will like it and insist on it from their browser vendor.

5. He agrees that we need the ability to attach arbitrary metadata to a user ID.

6. He and I see eye to eye on many of the same things. He's younger, but seems to be going down a similar path as I did. He's in for a lot of pain, but he's doing good work, and I told him so, and I wanted to get that out here.

7. I still think it's trouble to support Facebook having an invite-only meeting for design around open technologies. However he says they have removed the "invite-only" phrase from the meeting description, and they may webcast it. My main concern is that the OpenID that enters the room is the same one that exits when the meeting is over.

Kettle Chips

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 23:51:46 GMT

Yummmm!

Facebook and Twitter, OpenID

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 23:43:55 GMT

There was some really interesting news yesterday about Facebook opening up their model so that status updates can flow in and out of their sandbox through their API. A lot of people who are familiar with programming Facebook (I'm not) say this will open Facebook to the same kinds of apps that have been developed around Twitter, which has always had this kind of API.

Immediately I felt drawn to know more about how Facebook works, for the first time. I've been happy writting Twitter apps and FriendFeed apps. But a lot more people use Facebook, and as we know and have said many times, the important thing is where the people are.

The best post I've read so far on the politics between Twitter and Facebook was written by Marc Canter. I laughed out loud a few times while reading it, it's that good. I don't think they're laughing about it at Twitter headquarters. But I also don't think it's in any way over, as some do. Techno-political chess matches are rarely finished after the first few moves, it usually takes a number of rounds, backs and forths, before you can develop a theory about the outcome, and even then it's hard to knock momentum. One of my investors once said, when Apple was just a $1 billion company in 1983, that "Billion dollar companies don't just disappear."

Okay, Twitter is a $0 billion company, but that's not the point, they've got a lot of momentum, a lot -- and it's not going to disipate because of a technical innovation at Facebook. It's going to take more than that. And in the meantime, it certainly means that Twitter will be more attentive to its partners and developers, and perhaps be a bit more aggressive with feature rollouts (It's been sitting on a lot of new features for a long time, imho).

I called Marc to congratulate him on his piece, and asked about the meeting at Facebook next week about OpenID, and he said something I was afraid of -- it's invite-only. Which means they're screwing around, both Facebook and especially the OpenID people. You can't have invite-only meetings about open standards. It's not at all a small thing. I strongly recommend that the meeting be held outside of Facebook, that they be made totally welcome to participate, and that everyone else who's interested be welcome as well.

OpenID has come a long way and as far as I know has always been a level playing field. I've seen people trying to have private meetings about SOAP and RSS, and I always put my foot down and said no, and blew the whistle publicly if I needed to. It's time for the leaders of OpenID to defend the open-ness of their work. You can't have invite-only meetings about open protocols. And there can't be any exceptions to that.

Update: "Because we want to keep it small and focused, the event is invite-only."

Don't boycott Kellogg

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 20:12:54 GMT

First, a disclaimer -- I used to smoke pot, but I haven't in many years. I don't smoke anything, or actually take any drugs that get me high. However, I strongly believe that marijuana should be decriminalized, even made legal. I think it's the ultimate in hypocrisy to argue that former members of the excecutive branch of the US govt should not be prosecuted for war crimes because it would be looking backward, while our jails are full of people whose only "crime" is that they smoke pot. It's like we have two legal systems, one for the powerful and one for the rest of us. It's so un-American, I don't know why people can't see that.

Anyway, I remember what it was like to smoke pot, and I definitely remember what it was like after smoking pot. It gives you the munchies, an appetite for anything that's rich and sweet. I think sometimes American industry worked at creating products just for people with munchies, like Krispy Kreme donuts. Kellogg's makes many such products.

Now Kellogg's has dropped Michael Phelps as a spokesmodel because, shudder, he got caught smoking pot. Geez Louise, that's like getting caught having a beer. Yeah it's illegal, so is torture, what are you going to do? Fact is, after winning all those gold medals in Beijing and bringing glory to our country, he's entitled to kick back, smoke some dope, eat some poptarts and rice krispies, and hang out for a bit while he basks in the glow of our admiration. He should get laid too. A lot. (But use protection, you don't want to get a STD.) What's the point of being young and successful if you can't enjoy it!

What a bunch of stinkers they are at Kellogg's. They could score so many points by saying something like this: "We don't encourage pot smoking, but we understand that some people do it. We have so many bigger problems to tackle in this country, and Michael Phelps is such an incredible young man and hero, we decided to be heroic ourselves, and cut him some slack, and keep him on the corn flakes box."

So I don't think we should boycott Kellogg's, let's buy them. And put up ads on our websites explaining why we're buying them. Because we want them to do the right thing, and get the big fat stick out of their butt, and lighten up a bit. Maybe even step out back of the office in Battle Creek and smoke a doobie.

Instant Outiner bootstrap

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 19:47:20 GMT

I've been quietly working with a small number of users on the next interation on the OPML Editor's instantOutline tool. I wrote about it in January, after Hutch Carpenter discovered its previous incarnations. I was getting a new version ready for a project I was working on in December, so it was pretty easy for me to get it ready for wider use, which I have now done.

The new tool has several prerequesites: 1. You must have the OPML Editor installed on your desktop computer, it's available either for Windows or the Macintosh. 2. You must be a member of FriendFeed and 3. You must be a member of the instant-outline-beta group on FriendFeed. I've built most of the back-end on the excellent realtime updating API in FriendFeed, that's why you have to be a member to use the I/O tool.

Documentation is here: instantOutline.html.

I'm monitoring the workgroup. Hopefully this is a next step in something fun and excellent. Look forward to seeing you there.

One more time -- open the news industry!

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 16:55:51 GMT

As I said in a podcast a few days ago, since the beginning of my career in the early 80s, I've been meeting with people in the news industry to try to play a role in its transition to an electronic medium. But that's only half of it, the easy half. The hard half: I want to be a reporter, but a new kind of reporter. Instead of one of the few, I want to be one of the millions. And I want technology to find a way to do what reporters of the 20th century used to do, to organize all the information from what they used to call "sources" into reports that people like you and me can read and think about and discuss.

Reporting is a connecting art, like a real estate broker, travel agent, stock trader. The writing part of reporting is mundane, you want the reporter to stay out of your way as much as possible, and the good ones do. It's like the other arts -- who wants a real estate broker who sells you on how great it would be to live in a house while you're looking at it. They don't know how you live, their chatter interferes with your dreaming, and it's the dream that buys the house. I once had a travel agent who loved to golf, so I ended up staying at hotels near golf courses. I don't golf. So now I do my own travel agenting. It takes more time, but I stay in places that are a better fit.

The news people talk about paying for news, but the suppliers of news, the sources, are never paid. So if we can find a way to do what reporters do, without paying reporters, then voila, we can have our news for free. Before you rattle off some tired rationale, think about it. What are reporters doing that amateurs and/or software can't do?

Jay Rosen explained this to me once -- the word for what reporters do that machines don't is "authority." Humans convey authority. But -- only until humans teach us how to do it for them.

Here's the idea I would program into the heads of people who run the news corporations if I could turn them upside down and hang them by the feet until all the old wrong ideas ran out of their heads, forming a fetid puddle on the ground beneath them. News people are all around you, anxious to get in there and work, for free, on the news. At first thousands of them, and then once the glitches are worked out, tens of thousands. There's no shortage of people who want to inform others. The challenge is to figure out which ones want to do it for love. And that might not be such a challenge. I can show you a few dozen, and I bet they could show you a few more and so on. In the end you might not be able to make money at news, but you're not making money now, so what else is new?

The manufacturing process for news has radically shifted. The question is, as with the economy, whether we can transition the existing process to become the new one (imho preferable) or does the old system have to collapse before the new one can rise to take its place.

The key is to look at all those empty newsrooms, and to envision, before they completely shut down, filling them with volunteers -- who we can teach to write the news.

One more thought -- as with all post-apolcalyptic thinking, post-Katrina New Orleans provided the testbed, the dry run. Look at what the Times-Picayune did in the days after the hurricane. In my humble opinion a great newspaper rose overnight where a mediocre one had been the day before. The printing presses weren't running, and the normal management structure was heavily disrupted. But they had a story, a great one -- and if you go back to the roots of news, that's when it really happens, not when someone pays you well, but when you have a great story. (Same thing happens in software, when you're shipping a winner, somehow everyone on the team knows, and they put it in an even better performance.)

That's what we all want to be part of -- something great. I think that expresses the best of the human spirit. As young people we want to be the greatness, but as we grow we want to be part of greatness. That's much more exciting.

Update: Here's an example of the kind of reporting I find riveting, Pulitzer-worthy, written by an amateur, with passion.

Katrina, USA

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 01:25:32 GMT

I had lunch with an old friend from college, Sandy Wilbourn. We both went to Tulane in the 70s and majored in math. Then a funny thing happened, shortly after I started grad school in computer science at UW-Madison, I ran into Sandy on campus. He was getting a degree in math there. Then a lot of years later I was shopping at Roberts Market in Woodside and saw Sandy. He lived in the Valley too. Earlier this year his uncle left him a house in Berkeley, a few blocks from where I live. Hey it's a good thing we like each other, we seem to be in the same karass.

Anyway, Sandy is the first person I know from New Orleans who I've talked with about my visit after Katrina in 2005. It stirred some memories cause we both know all the same landmarks, where the river bends and where the levees are. But Sands hadn't been back to New Orleans so I told him about places that had been wrecked that, last time he saw them, were fine.

I remembered a lesson from Katrina, the human side of something Krugman keeps saying: once deflation starts it's very hard to pull out.

New Orleans went out of business. One day every business in the city shut down. Some were destroyed, could never return (for example those in neighborhoods that were under water for weeks). But every other business had to restart from a dead stop. It's as if from an economic standpoint the city didn't exist.

The city's recovery will be slow, if it ever fully recovers. Some parts seem likely to come back. The richest parts, the oldest parts, the business parts. But it was all damaged and virtually all the people had gone, and many haven't come back.

Now, huge parts of the world economy have shut down. Some have been shut down for months. Economies don't just start back up once they shut down. They can start back up from a slowdown much more easily. But once a business is gone, it's gone.

Time for heads to roll at Meet The Press

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:51:25 GMT

First some disclaimers, disclosures, etc...

1. I stopped watching the Sunday morning news shows after the election. Now I listen to the podcasts, when I have a chance. I'm fed up with the gotcha crap. Gotcha, gotcha gotcha, that's all they know.

2. I don't like "gotcha" interviewing. I want to hear what the people have to say. I'm very circumspect. I'll form my own opinion on what they say. I know they're all lying and spinning. No one ever gets anyone with a gotcha.

3. Gotchas only interest the reporter and his or her competitors. It's their way of keeping score. No one else cares. And because they all do it all the time, it breeds politicians who are good at saying nothing because the prime gotcha is "I caught you saying something. Gotcha!"

4. Like every other element of the political system this needs reforming. If you believe in the primacy of the network filter (for me it's fading realllly fast) then nothing can get done until they evolve beyond gotcha.

5. Make a list of the reporters who can interview someone and just let them tell their story, help them along as needed, represent the audience, and stop playing the insiders' game. Bill Moyers. Some of the PBS people like Gwen Ifil. Terry Gross except when she's interviewing the terrorist who Obama palled around with. And the guy I like best: Aaron Brown.

Which brings me to the point.

Tom Brokaw was pretty good. He's old enough and senior enough not to really care what the other reporters think of him. Even so, he did play gotcha while he was filling in. But he was the best of the three. Now that he's gone, Stephanopoulos is the best, Gregory is a toad. He's a tiny mind. In way over his head. He says the stupidest gotcha stuff. Here's my favorite -- he pressed Rahm Emanuel to explain how hiring more teachers was going to create jobs. Yeah he actually said that. Several times. Give Rahm some points for not calling him a fucking idiot to his face.

Given a few years maybe Gregory will grow into the job. But we don't have a few years.

If you have to go for another interim host, get Moyers if he'll do it. But if you really want to make news on Sunday morning work, and raise the bar for everyone else, get Aaron Brown to do Meet The Press. Pay him $20 million.

I beg you.

A metadata race?

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 17:35:10 GMT

Steve Gillmor perceives a race between Twitter and FriendFeed, which I find interesting, even if I don't think it's as much a race as he does. At this point there is so much distance between the services they provide, it's hard to see them as competitors.

However, there is one area where all the current providers of social networks are in competition, and I'm not sure they're all aware of it, and so far no one has entered the arena, but I get a sense that at least a couple are poised to -- Twitter and FriendFeed.

There's an interesting story that came up that's very much in line with the Where's Your Data? and What Happened To NakedJen? threads here on scripting.com. Last week, a bookmarking service, ma.gnolia, lost all its data. All of it. It was bound to happen sooner or later. Everyone who operates a public service back-end knows how fragile these things are, I sure do. At UserLand we came close to melting down a few times, and every one of those times we urged our users, as best we could, to keep local copies of their data.

Anyway, ma.gnolia crashes, and someone there realizes that FriendFeed has been archiving their data for users that established the connection between the two services. And FriendFeed has an API. So voila -- write a web app to pull the data out of FF and re-populate their database, at least for some of their users.

This suggest a buddy system for web service providers. Not every service can rely on the same back-end for safety, what happens when that service goes down? And who knows all the dependencies we're creating -- what if FF is using Amazon's back-end and Amazon gets attacked by an asteroid or a crazy terrorist, or whatever.

All of this leads me to a wish that one of these companies would allow, through their API, for us to store arbitrary data on a per-user basis. I'm working with a small group of users on a new build of the Instant Outliner, and am using FriendFeed's "room" structure to great advantage. It's almost at the point where I don't have to write a back-end at all, I could almost completely depend on theirs. If only. If only they allowed me to store a relatively small amount of XML-based data with each user. Less than a megabyte per user. Probably way less.

Something like Amazon's SimpleDB only even simpler, would do the job. The equivalent of a Perl hash or a Python dictionary. The same data we pass around in XML-RPC would be very good.

I know all this sounds super-technical, but the architects at Twitter and FriendFeed know exactly what I'm asking for, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if one or both had this facility almost ready to go.

Archiving Twitter in OPML

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 16:23:21 GMT

In mid-January I started a project to archive the Twitter posts of the people I follow. At first I experimented with rendering the archives in an XML-compatible form of HTML, but decided the point would largely be lost, so I decided to go with OPML.

You can find the folder of archives here:

http://twitter.opml.org/calendar/

At the top level of each sub-directory is calendar.opml and today.opml. The former links to every OPML file for that user, and the latter contains all the twits from today, or the last day that person posted something to Twitter.

There's also a folder called 2009, and under that two sub-folders: 01 and 02 for January and February. And under each of those is a file for each day. In March there will be a folder called 03, and so on.

I do not archive posts for people whose Twitter accounts are private.

The archive follows the whims of my follows and unfollows. If I started following someone on January 29, their archive would start on that day. If I unfollowed and then followed, there will be a gap in their archive.

The archive is updated once a minute.

The server is in Amazon's EC2 cloud.

No guarantees are made that this service will remain up, I'm doing it entirely as an experiment, to learn what the issues and perhaps what the opportunities are.

What happened to NakedJen on Facebook?

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 03:19:09 GMT

NakedJen was a very early Facebook user because she worked for a "sister company" -- one that was funded by the same venture capital firm as Facebook, Inc.

Her account, which was recently deleted by the company for unknown reasons, was non-commercial, it represented simply a person, wasn't excessively large, didn't contain any nudity or other objectionable material. When she asked for an explanation, they told her to read the terms and conditions. When Scoble asked Zuckerberg about it he gave an annoying explanation about how the company would rather have some "false positives" instead of have their system abused.

As a friend of NakedJen's (whose birth name is Jennifer Neal, a name I have never used for her) I don't think of her as anything like a "false positive" -- she's much more of a "true positive" -- and a really cool human being. I named her my Blogger of the Year for 2007. That says it all as far as I'm concerned.

Now I'd like Zuckerberg to get in touch with his true positive -- and get a clue that his users are people who use his system in the most personal way imaginable. If you're going to kill someone's presence on Facebook, please -- give them some idea why you're doing it. And if you screw up, as you certainly did this time, please have the guts to say so and give the user the satisfaction of knowing that you care, just a little, what they think of you.

Twitter API for the social graph

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 01:06:43 GMT

Twitter just announced two new APIs that should make a host of new applications possible. The two APIs allow applications to navigate the "social graph" defined by Twitter under program control. I'm going to write a few little apps to test it out and report back here.

Kevin Marks: "the api returns numeric IDs, not twitter handles? that seems lame."

I won't go as far as Kevin, but I do wonder how we're supposed to use this data. For example, I follow 828 people. How am I supposed to get the handles for each of those people? Should I make 828 calls? I guess they're assuming I'm storing them in a database using the numeric id as a key. I don't. My databases always use the mnemonic as the key, for example, in my calendar application, I access Kevin's data through this address: config.twitterCalendar.users.kevinmarks which corresponds to a folder on a server.

Where's your data?

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 18:26:45 GMT

Craig Burton knows what that question means.

He was the CTO at Novell, the leading network company of the PC world in the 80s and 80s. Follow the link from his name and read what you should be thinking about your data and whether and how much you should trust companies to keep it safe.

However, pause when you get to this part: "I am still reeling from the transition to Wordpress. I lost years of data, links, discussions. No thanks to Dave Winer. Dave, I love you, but I think you left a ton of us locked into your silo with no way out."

First, I love you too Craig, but you're totally wrong about that. At UserLand it was our religion not to lock users in. You could download your entire website from our servers, even the ones we hosted for free. We pleaded with people to do it, but most users either didn't understand, or didn't care enough to do it. We also provided a tool to convert those websites to folders of XML files, to make it easy to port it to other blogging tools. The only way we could have made it easier was to write the import routines for our competitors.

Since we were one of the earliest vendors of blogging tools, we hoped to set a high bar for all to come. Unfortunately this didn't turn out, except in RSS aggregators where portable subscription lists are now the norm because Radio 8 taught users the value of being able to switch.

Pay attention to what Craig says, and don't store anything on anyone else's server unless you know how you're going to get it off when you need to. Even better, don't store the original on someone else's server, keep that in your space and share a pointer to the data.

We're headed into tough economic times and a lot of the for-free companies are going to go under. I think that's a virtual certainty. Further, a lot of them are cutting back, so their technical staffs are going to be thinner and more likely to make a mistake that costs you your data. Read the Terms of Service, they're usually not obligated to do anything to help you in times of trouble.

Hugs to Forbes

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 03:32:14 GMT

Big hugs to Forbes for saying I'm one of the 25 nicest people on the web. You guys are the greatest. Love ya all, Dave

Love on the sidewalk

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 01:46:15 GMT

Big hugs to all the she-geeks gathering in Mtn View!

New policy on interviews

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 18:50:24 GMT

I've gotten so fed up with reporters that I decline all interviews. I've occasionally made an exception when I was sure I'd be treated fairly, but even those have gone sour.

A new policy: 1. No interviews. 2. No exceptions.

But that doesn't mean I'm giving up because I'm not.

I think many reporters just don't know how awful they are with their sources.

I have a positive suggestion for reporters: Interview each other the way you interview your subjects. Your eyes will open.

Today's fortune cookie

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 19:43:59 GMT

Observation: If you can not or will not laugh at yourself, everyone else will.

Wait a minute there's more to it.

If everyone is laughing at you, hard as it may seem you could join in the fun. You'll probably get a really nice hug if you do.

"cheesecake"

Radioshift from Rogue Amoeba

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 04:02:26 GMT

I've been wanting to record some NPR shows that don't have podcasts, and I'd like to record FreshAir as soon as its available, so I've been looking for software that runs on the Mac that will do this, and this evening I stumbled across Radioshift, and installed it.

I decided to go with this app because I use Audio Hijack Pro and really like it, and figured this would have the same fit and finish, and so far it's even nicer that Audio Hijack Pro

I'm curious if anyone else is using this app and if so what do you think of it?

Do you use some other software on the Mac to record Internet radio?

I was able to set up a subscription to FreshAir in a couple of mouse clicks in less than 30 seconds. It's hard to believe it's that easy, but if you think about it, why shouldn't it be that easy? Here's a screen shot of what the subscription looks like. If you choose to edit the subscription this is what you get. Choose Preferences from the File menu.

In other words, if you use AHP, it's exactly what you would expect. Nice work! Now let's see if it does its job tomorrow morning. Maybe I can find something to record in the middle of the night. Yup. I've got it programmed to record three shows, with the first starting at 3AM.

I now understand the financial crisis much better

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 19:24:03 GMT

Back in September when the credit freeze was first becoming a matter of public discourse, I listened to a fantastic episode of This American Life that explained in layman's terms, what the crisis was about. This was followed up by a great FreshAir interview with NY Times financial reporter Gretchen Morgenson. Both highly recommended.

After those two shows I thought I understood, but the other day I had a flash of insight that brought it home in a much more personal way.

I'm lucky in many ways, one of those is that I have a good savings account that basically allowed me to retire at a very young age. Managing this nest egg is super important for me, it's what I live off. So in January I got the willies about the stock market and sold everything, moved it into cash. I did eventually start buying stocks again, slowly, but let's keep it simple and assume everything I own now is either in government bonds or the most conservative money market fund possible.

Turns out I was early, I saved a lot of value by selling in January, because later in 2008 a lot of other people did the same, causing the market to crash. At that point I never once entertained the thought of buying bonds or stocks of any kind. Never mind the explanation of not knowing which banks had a dishonest balance sheet or toxic assets, I was basically keeping my assets in a shoebox under the bed. I was and still am totally risk averse. I won't lend my money to anyone, I'm keeping it all for myself. I don't care if I earn zero interest, or even negative interest. I want to hold, hold, hold. As close as possible. I'm scared, freaked out even by what I see in the financial world.

There you have it. I'm not lending money to anyone. Same with everyone else. That's exactly why the economy is stuck.

You want to go first? I don't.

That smiley is there just so you know that there's still something worth laughing at in this crazy mess we call an economy.

BTW, what made me think of writing this up was an email I got from Citibank this morning offering unprecedented rates on a CD to which I said out loud "Fat chance buddy."

A special BMUG meeting on Thurs

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 18:59:15 GMT

In the earliest days of the Mac, there were two big stops on every rollout tour, Boston and Berkeley. The two biggest international Mac users groups were in Boston and Berkeley. It made a lot of sense cause the two yearly Mac shows were in Boston and San Francisco and of course Berkeley is just across the bay from SF, and honestly it's even more Mac than SF is.

It's been a long time since the Berkeley group met (the Boston group still appears to be meeting), as far as I know, but on Thursday in Berkeley Raines Cohen, one of the BMUG founders, is hosting a revival of BMUG at the Hillside Club of course, to celebrate 25 years of the Macintosh.

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1516528/

We'll take "A look back, a peek at some Mac history movies, conversation and insights," says Raines. $20 suggested donation, net proceeds benefit Alameda County Computer Resource Center. 6-9PM with a Chinese dinner after.