Categories
Tech

Some Windows Utilities

In surfing the Internet while sick at home, I came across a few good utilities for my Windows systems. I run Windows 98 (not Second Edition) at home on my laptop and Windows 2000 at work. I found a few of these utilities on the website Pricelessware.org, billed as offering “the best of the best in Freeware”. Here’s some of what I found:

Oscar’s File Renamer

This one’s a gem. Renaming a file in Windows is easy. Just point, right-click, and hit “m”. But to rename more than 10 files this way is just a pain. So this utility provides a way to rename files in a batch, and it does it in a clever way. When you choose a directory of files to rename, the names of the files are placed in a text window. You then can edit the text with the full search/replace and macro abilities of a text editor. (The lines are fixed in place, of course, because each line represents a different file.) Once you’ve finished editing, you can commit the changes to disk. This utility is particularly handy for managing a collection of mp3 files or image files.

DirKey

DirKey provides hotkeys for your favourite directories that you can use when presented with File Open/Save dialogs. This eliminates one particular annoyance of Windows for me, that of Open/Save always being open to the wrong directory. Plus, simply in Explorer, DirKey’s hotkeys will let you jump to your favourite directories. So far, I’ve bookmarked C:\darren\, C:\download\, and C:\media\.

AutoSizer

I use the web-based email site Oddpost.com and it always opens a new Internet Explorer window that isn’t properly aligned to my desktop. And I always have to maximize it after logging in. Now with AutoSizer, the window automatically gets maximized when it appears. One less thing for me to worry about.

Cacheman

Cacheman is a disk caching / paging management tool for Windows. It allows me to tweak some of the memory settings on my system. This is particularly important for my laptop, which is a Pentium 266 MHz with only 64 MB of RAM. Since it’s a laptop, there’s no hope for more memory. I hope to see some improvements in the speed of loading and switching between programs. I’m using the Freeware version of Cacheman for Windows 98, but there is also an XP version. The program comes with a Wizard which helps you decide what settings are important for you to change, and various profiles for different kinds of systems. I’m trying the “Low Memory System” profile.

Categories
China

Sick at home

I started feeling something Monday night. It didn’t take me long to figure out that a cold was coming on. I get about four major colds / flus every year. They usually last about a week. So, I’m resting at home today, like yesterday, surfing the Internet, eating, sleeping, and keeping warm.

Keeping warm is important. Fall has come full force in Beijing, with colder temperatures outside, and waiting for the heat to be turned on inside. I think the heat got turned on yesterday in my building. For now, it’s only on for a few hours in the morning (before work) and in the evening (after work). So my apartment has gone from 13°C to 15°C. And believe me, this is a very noticeable difference. It’s very welcome, too.

While I was feeling industrious today, I cleaned the filters from my air conditioner (which acts in reverse as a heat pump, to give my bedroom sufficient heat) so it will work better. Better means warmer. And better means more efficient. I also put plastic over my bedroom window to seal off the airflow from outside. I had to open the windows in the apartment for a while to get rid of the condensation on the window frame so the tape would stick. But this dehumidification stage didn’t last too long, plus the sun was shining on the window frame at that point. I reused the plastic from last winter, so it was already cut to fit. Last year, while hunting for a plastic solution, I came upon the idea of using a clear plastic shower curtain from IKEA. It cost me $3 CDN. Easy to cut and very durable. By sealing the window, I will gain a few more degrees in the apartment’s ambient temperature. When the heat comes on full-time (will it?) later on in the winter, I’ll be in good shape.

Categories
Astro

Moon: Broke!

There was a total lunar eclipse last Wednesday night over North America, and my sister and her family were able to catch it. They saw the full moon on their way to get family pictures done. When they reemerged to the outdoors, the eclipse was well underway, and the moon was only a tiny sliver. Trinity, my youngest neice, who’s now about 20 months old, apparently loves the Moon. She was the first to see it, and so to alert the family she exclaimed, “Moon, broke!” Very cute.

Makes me proud.

Categories
Audio China Palm Swing

Salsa and Swing concoction brings local boy life-enriching epiphany

So much has happened in the last few days, or even hours. It’s 4h12 in the morning, Saturday morning, and I just finished a very cool Friday night. Since being in the taxi on the way home, I’ve wanted to sit down and write a blog entry. I haven’t done that in a while.

I started the evening in the afternoon. After researching what needs to be done to get me a new passport, I headed over to Qiao Ying’s tea house. I spent the afternoon drinking tea and speaking Chinese with her and my friend Zhang Hua. Sometimes Qiao Ying gets in these moods where she refuses to speak English. So I played along and I didn’t speak English either. It’s really good for me, actually. It really helps. I went through three kinds of teas during my stay there, met a new friend of Qiao Ying’s, and then left to join Mandi for her farewell dinner. I didn’t have far to go, and traffic wasn’t bad, but there were no empty taxis. I waited, changed locations, and then waited some more. So I eventually took a bus.

It was a direct route that I needed to follow, just 2 or 3 km up the street. And the trusty Route 120 took me there. I met my friends at Ya Show market near San Li Tun Bar Street. Most everyone was late (like I was—even I was the second person there!) cause traffic was really bad. It ended up being a party of 18 and then some, and miraculously we managed to find a restaurant to house us. Even to pick a restaurant. I was impressed. It was a Xin Jiang Muslim restaurant. Very good food, roasted lamb and such. I had my first Budweiser beer that night. The restaurant ran out of the local beers, so that was all that was left. Damn expensive and not very good. (Sorry, he says to his friend Karen who works for Anheuser Busch.)

On the way to dinner, Joanne pointed out to me that my backpack was open. Did I leave it open from the tea house, all the way on the bus ride? Or did someone open it while I was walking or talking to Paul in front of Ya Show? Yikes! I didn’t find anything missing until later. My minidisc was still there as well as my USB sound card and Palm Wireless Keyboard. (Yes, my backpack is an arsenal of geek electronics. Go Darren!) It was only after dinner that I realized that my $300 Etymotic ER-4P earphones were missing. I’ll never see them again. The disappointing thing is that the new owner will have no idea the true value of their new prize. Damn. Back to el-cheapo $10 earbuds for a while. At least the Etymotics are well coated with a couple month’s worth of my ear wax. Hope the new owner doesn’t actually use them.

I skipped out on Mandi and drinks on San Li Tun at 22h30 after dinner cause I wasn’t in the mood. It’s really not my scene. Adam and the gang were going to be at The Big Easy a few kilometres away, so I decided to join them. I wasn’t feeling so hot, actually. Mostly just tired from being sick all week with the flu. But I found myself telling the taxi driver to go there, so I just went with the idea. The Big Easy was alright, but nothing too great. The band was swinging a bit so Adam and River danced, and I got one dance in with River. I would have liked to spend time chatting with Adam and River, but an impromptu business meeting between them and the owner cut our time short. The belly dancer gave a couple of performances, but I wasn’t impressed. I just couldn’t get into it. Besides, her hair was dirty and her costume (what little costume she was wearing) had big food stains all up the front. Pretty yucky.

But, during one of the belly dances, I looked up at the balcony and, to my surprise, saw my friend Cheng Lei there. So I immediately left my friends and went and said hello. This is the second time that she and I have met “by luck” in this area. The other time happened at Latinos, next door to The Big Easy, about a month and a half ago, just before I left Beijing. (And I never go to Latinos.) So we were quite happy and surprised to meet like this again. It made the whole evening worth it. Plus she smiles so nicely at me. We chatted for a while until Adam phoned me looking to see where I was. I literally had disappeared on the group without a trace, so they wanted to know where I was. I felt loved. So we came down and said hello to Adam, River, and John for a few minutes. Cheng Lei had friends over at Latinos, a Brazilian dance performance group that was in Beijing for the week, so she invited me to join her over there. I hesitated, but finally agreed. I have never felt comfortable at Latinos, especially since Latin dancing/music isn’t my thing.

But I’m so glad I went with her. Although Cheng Lei likes dancing (she’s a salsa teacher, even) she just wanted to watch the others dance. But when I told her that I wanted to dance with her, she invited me to dance Swing to the Latin music. I was surprised that it even worked, but I guess it can be done cause we did it. And it was fun. She made me feel so comfortable there that I had no problems being there, dancing my own way, and enjoying myself. We met up with her friend Julia, and after the Brazilians left, the two of them decided the music at Salsa Caribi would be better. So, back to San Li Tun, and I got to try out a new club. Since I never dance Salsa in Beijing, they’re all new to me.

Salsa Caribi seemed not too bad. An acquaintance, Mustafa, was there outside the club, so already I had a friendly face to welcome me. The two girls, Cheng Lei and Julia, took to the dance floor immediately, so I just waited at a table. I saw my friend Irene dancing there too, and eventually discovered that all of my friends of Irene were there: Karen, Maple, and Christine. Seeing them was a treat, especially Karen since I haven’t seen her in so long. She’s been busy with work-related travel for many months now.

I had the best time with Cheng Lei and Julia at Salsa Caribi. They were dancing pretty hard, and when I joined them, I started dancing hard too. We danced and danced and danced. Some of it was Swing (but not to Swing music). Some just disco, and lots of Latin. I started to figure out the arm thing, twisting you and your partner’s arms in and out of pretzel contortions. Lots of fun. We played with it a lot, sometimes doing the pretzel thing with all three of us holding hands.

A very sweet night. I’m really feeling blessed by the whole thing, how it all turned out. I’ve been dealing with a lot of internal struggles and realizations lately, stemming from events in and related to returning from Canada. (I can only post weblog stuff when I’m being outgoing and external, which is why my posts are as infrequent as they are.) So I think tonight’s events have corrected my thinking in various ways, helping me to keep on the correct path that I need to follow. It’s what I needed.

Categories
General

Wayne’s Car Story

Sometimes things from your past can come back to haunt you. A story from my brother-in-law Wayne:

Remember our old car, the Oldsmobile that mom used to drive? I inherited it when mom was no longer driving it. When we bought our Camry, we looked for someone to give it to—since it was a gift to me, we passed it on.

Heather, a girl across the hallway in our apartment in Calgary, needed a car. She had mental illness problems, was on low income, and certainly couldn’t afford to buy a car. Originally she asked if she could buy it, and was impressed when we were willing to give it to her. Great solution!

We moved back to Edmonton 6 months later. At that point she hadn’t registered it yet, so we double-checked to see if she still wanted it, and if she needed help getting it registered, etc. She still wanted it, and she didn’t want help getting things arranged. She was capable.

So we moved, and forgot all about the car. We were clean of it.

Until . . .

A week ago Sunday (July 25) we received a phone call from the city impound lot in Calgary. They had a burgundy Oldsmobile of which we were the last registered owners. Great! Our car was returning from the dead! It had never been registered in three years. So we debated what to do: Claim it wasn’t ours and forget about it? Or go back, pay the impound fee and claim the car? We called Heather and asked her about it. Initially she said she didn’t want it, but wanted to think about it for day. The next day she claimed she sold it to a friend last November. Right. Obviously she was in over her head. So we decided to reclaim the car, sell it, and try to make about $1000. Instead of mucking with ownership questions, we didn’t tell Heather, in case she (or her idiot boyfriend) wanted to make things ugly.

I made a bunch of phone calls to figure things out, but that was Tuesday, when we were supposed to be leaving on holidays. We left it in the impound lot in the mean time ($10/day storage fee). On Tuesday (yesterday) I would go to Calgary, buy insurance and registration and pay to get the car out of the impound lot. Then drive it to Edmonton and put it in the Auto Trader. It seemed a simple solution, and we couldn’t think of any hiccups along the way, short of tires being flat or needing a boost to get going (I took tools just in case). I even pre-arranged to have a locksmith cut a new key, since Heather had the only ignition key.

I caught a ride to Calgary Tuesday, and by 9:30 had picked up my insurance. Picked up a new license plate and registered the car by 10:30. Off to the impound lot! I paid the $240 to get it out of the lot. The locksmith was just finishing my new key when the security guard escorted me to my new car.

That’s when the wheels fell off my fool-proof plan. Actually, that’s when I noticed that there were no wheels. As we drove up, the car was sitting on the ground with no wheels. From the back I could see that the windshield was smashed. The trunk was open a little bit.

The orange stickers on each window read “Biohazard.” The car was full of junk. A few old clothes, garbage, and mess. The seats were askew. The steering wheel had been removed and was on the floor. And needles. Needles everywhere, There were probably 20 or 30 needles inside. Congratulations! My new car! It had become a tireless, garbage-filled, biohazard nightmare. Lucky me. And a new set of keys to boot.

I’ve never been so shocked in my life. Never in a thousand years would we have guessed the car was stripped and full of drug paraphernalia. I poked around, tried not to touch too much for fear of being poked with needles, and stared in astonishment.

The car didn’t start (I got a $15 discount on the new key, considering it all). We popped the hood (my new locksmith friend and I), and the motor seemed in tack, though the battery cable was disconnected. At that point, who cared? We tried to get into the trunk, but couldn’t pry it open. So what.

So what do you do with a wheel-less, syringe-filled car? Auto recyclers wouldn’t take it, since it was too old. After a few phone calls and a couple of hours of disbelief/debriefing to get over the shock, I decided to make a generous donation to the Children’s Foundation, who will give you a $50 tax receipt and take care of towing. It seemed appropriate; maybe they could find a use for the needles.

Unfortunately, I didn’t think to find a camera and take pictures of it all. It was quite a sight, and now I wish I could have shared it with a few close friends. It was amazing.

The total cost of it all: Insurance (hopefully free with same-day cancellation); Registration ($28); Impound Fee ($240); New Key! ($60); Bus Tickets around Calgary ($8—and lots of frustration getting loonies from a bank machine). My ride to Calgary was free, but he didn’t go back to Edmonton until Wednesday morning (today). I got to stay with friends in Calgary, and they took pity and BBQd steak. Total cost of my priceless experience is about $350.

So my car is once again gone. And my lesson? I would do it all again. Except next time the impound lot calls, ask them if my car comes complete with Biohazard stickers.

Wayne

Categories
Astro Swing

Swing, Northern Lights, and Rainbows

I’ve had two great experiences here in Edmonton so far, to do with the sky. The first was when I was walking back to my car after being out at a Blues club with the some of the Swing dancers here. It was some time after midnight and I was heading home. I thought I saw some northern lights in the sky, very faint, like wispy white clouds in the dark sky. So I left my car and went to the nearby park which has an awesome swing set, and I swung for a couple of hours under the lights. As expected, they got brighter and more active. Very beautiful, and an excellent reminder of why I live (or used to live) in such an amazing place.

The second was last night. There’s a fair going on here called Klondike Days, and a Swing band was playing at the outdoor stage that night. So eight of us dancers went and crashed the show, dancing off to the side of the stage. It was cool, but a bit difficult to dance to everything the band was playing. There was some threat of rain, but we only got spit on at the start of the show. But as I was dancing, I noticed a very bright rainbow hiding in the clouds, in full view of the stage. The audience missed it since the rainbow was behind them, but I’m guessing that the band and I were the only ones who saw it. So I got to dance Swing under a rainbow. Now that was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Categories
China Swing

Back in Canada, eh!

After a long flight on Sunday, the I-arrived-before-I-left flight from Beijing to Vancouver, I arrived pretty tired back in Canada. I tried sleeping on the plane but it was quite futile. When I want to sleep, they serve me food, and when they want me to sleep, I’m awake and looking around. Oh well. The long flight, its cost, and the jet lag  are the reasons I don’t do this more than once a year.
 
It was fun being in Vancouver for two hours. I wasn’t looking forward to the customs and immigration experience, but it went by without any problem. I even got to see the cute little customs beagle at work.
 
It was pretty easy to tell that I had arrived back in Canada. It wasn’t very long before I noticed people were apologizing and being extra polite. One lady in the customs line stepped backward and hit my foot slightly, so she apologized. A man stopped suddenly in front of me while we were walking and he apologized too. I held a door for a third person and he thanked me. Kinda fun.
 
I guess I paid enough attention to the people on the Beijing flight that I recognized a few of them later at the gate to board the flight to Edmonton. So I sat down and introduced myself to a young girl there. She’s currently a Chemistry PhD student at the University of Alberta. She had been visiting her family in Nanchang, Jiangxi Province for her two-week summer vacation. We compared notes about our opposite overseas experiences. I told her about my plans for the coming month and invited her to check out the Edmonton Fringe Theatre Festival that will take place this August. The Fringe is one of my favourite things about summer in Edmonton.
 
But the excitement that I’m really looking forward to on this trip is the Swing Dancing in Edmonton and Calgary. Here in Edmonton, there are Lindy Hop classes every Wednesday night for the summer. They’ll have a social event—a charity dance—on August 7. Then I hope to catch a dance in Calgary on August 14.  There’s even a dance workshop taking place in Vancouver around August 27 that I heard about. Maybe I’ll have to push back my return trip to Beijing far enough to go. Why not? I’m young, and dancing is my life these days.
 

 

Categories
China

Beijing Dirt

My friend Eydie sent me this clever little short message to my phone the other day. Welcome to the strange world of old men in China.

As I walked to work just now, I saw a man open a bag of dirt and pour it in a fat stream along the sidewalk. He was adding dirt to the street. Adding it! Like the roads and walkways of Beijing aren’t dusty enough. Then I got to thinking, maybe this is the secret behind the city’s grime-enrobed thoroughfares. That in fact there are many men who stealthily coat the highways and byways for reasons unknown but no doubt nefarious. Makes me almost want to be an investigative reporter again. Though I’d probably be thrown in jail and sentenced to work on a road gang—spreading the dirt!

Categories
China Rant

Death Traps R Us

I’ve just spent two days in Hefei, doing some collaboration work with a research group at Anhui University. They’ll be building a temperature and precipitation dataset like I did for my masters degree over two years ago.

Here’s a picture of the fire exit in the hall outside of the hotel room where I stayed on campus. The double door is situated at the end of the long hallway.


[Fire Escape]

Yep, that’s right. That’s a bicycle lock threaded through the two door handles. So, when I first checked in, I thought I’d entertain myself and ask the staff to unlock the door for my safety. For one thing, the Chinese characters on the sign above the door translate into “Safety Exit”. I didn’t expect them to honour my request, but I wanted to see what would happen if I insisted. I had a good laugh when they responded by saying: “It will be less safe for you if we unlock the door.” I told my translator to tell them, “No, you’re wrong.” I should get an honourary degree in cross-cultural diplomatic relations for coming up with that one. I stood my ground for a few more minutes, but I didn’t bother getting angry. I mean, I really didn’t have to because I wasn’t taking it personally, nor did I expect them to do anything anyway. But one of the staff members involved in the conversation with the “crazy foreign devil” was smart enough to realize that a person could fit through the open doors when the lock stretched to full length. So they took me back upstairs from the front desk and we opened the two doors so that I could see that a person of my stature could fit his head, and hence his body, through the space between the two restricted doors. I told them that was good enough and that I was satisfied. Of course, I then wondered how having this more-or-less useless lock there in the first place made me “more safe”? I guess it would keep someone from sneaking a lion into my room while I was sleeping. But what about a smaller animal that was just as hungry?

Anyway, this is just a typical example of the state of fire safety in buildings in China. The lock wasn’t even a problem, really. I inspected the doors before making my request and realized that even a ten-year old could kick the doors open if necessary. All over China actually, and here in my hotel room, any windows on the first and second floors are covered by bars that are bolted to the concrete door frames. The only way to bust them open is with a moving car and a strong cable. That, or a half-stick of dynamite. (I keep a half-stick in my backpack just for this purpose!) Sometimes they even bar the windows on the third floor. Most fire exits are treated as potential entry points and are thus locked. Typically, they are used as storage closets too. In the case of the hotel, I suspect they are trying to prevent television sets and furniture from walking off. But anyway, when I hear that dozens of people die in a building fire in China, I am never surprised. Death traps are endemic despite being 100% preventable.

Yet through my little stunt in challenging the hotel staff, I didn’t actually get any closer to understanding how the Chinese think about fire safety. Well, okay, I can infer a lot from the fact that everyone who joined in the conversation burst into laughter—laughing directly at me, in fact. There was a hotel fire in my neighbourhood last month and about nine people died. So my office decided we needed to replace all the powerbars in the room (the supposed cause of the hotel fire) with brand new ones. But we still keep the doors on most floors propped open to the stairwells. (This is hazardous because smoke will spread from the floor that is on fire and prevent people on all floors from using the stairs—the only way of escape.) So I don’t have much faith in their reactionary way of doing things. It’s not going to make a lasting difference. It never does. So to the people laughing at me over the fire exit request, “See you in hell” should have been my response. It’s a literal possibility from my point of view.

Categories
Audio China Swing

Dance, Dance, Dance

Boy, I’ve been having fun dancing. Two guests from the States, Amanda and Eric, came to Beijing to join our Swing Beijing! group. Eric is leaving to go home tomorrow. Amanda will be around for another week and then move on to Shanghai. It’s been great having them. Adam, our teacher, also came back from a week-long furlough at his home in San Francisco. So all three of them brought some new styles and new moves that they were able to show us this week.

We had a Saturday night party, an emergency session of sorts, at our Thursday location at the Move! studio. It seemed like reunion night. Don came back to join us after being gone all winter / spring. I got to see and dance with Linda whom I haven’t seen for so long. She’s one of the people who joined our group for about two months way back when we started last July. Eric and Amanda were there. Adam came back that night, too, bearing gifts. It felt like Christmas! I had ordered some earphones and had them shipped to Adam’s house, so he brought them that night. He also brought me a 4-CD box set of traditional bluegrass music. A total surprise. Thanks, Adam! Other people got their new swing shoes that Adam brought back to Beijing with him. But beyond all the gift giving and excitement, there was lots of dancing. And lots of follows for me to dance with. At one point, I turned to a friend and said, “So many follows, and so few Darrens.” Sigh. I was in Swing heaven. Same thing tonight at our Monday class. I danced and danced and danced. We ended the night with real New York cheesecake in celebration of Eric’s birthday. Mmmmm. Cheesecake.

Update: You can read Amanda’s report of her trip here.