Categories
General

No longer a Canadian (speller)!

I went to look up the Chinese word for “metre” in my electronic dictionary the other day. To my horror, I had sought out and entered the American spelling, “meter”. Being the Oxford dictionary, there was no such entry, only a pointer to its entry for “metre”.

This sad state of personal affairs is a consequence of my job. I work for an English-language science journal here in China, Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, and the editorial standard of the journal is to use American spellings. So after two years of editing for this journal, I guess I’ve developed the nasty habit. I hope it’s reversible!

Categories
General

Flattery is the best medicine

I’ve been duplicated. Well, at least sort of. My good friend Chris, whom everyone knows as Edmonton’s biggest sports fan, has begun his own blog, The Mad Sports Man, partially inspired by my blog here. Way to go Chris! It’s great to read about your adventures. I’ve even learned something: you follow basketball. I didn’t know that, or at least I wasn’t paying attention before. I guess basketball is a sport, so it must fall under your radar, right? Personally, I hate basketball, but hey, if it’s cool for you then that’s cool. Good luck to you with your new web log. You know what they say… web log today, funny papers tomorrow.

Categories
General

More than the creeps

I seem to be in a weird psychic space today. Aside from not feeling too hot, and being really sensitive to the darkness of the sky, the sickly light shining in my office, and the sundry noises and voices coming from my office mates, I think I became a bit psychically sensitive today too. At about 17h00, a strange man came into the editorial office today, and I immediately felt sick and had the desire to flee. I didn’t recognize him because he was wearing very large, very dark sunglasses. He may have been my friend’s father. I don’t know. But he said “hi” to me and “ni hao” to the others, and then roamed around the office talking to different people. I decided that I needed to leave—immediately. While I didn’t feel anything physically, intuitively it felt like a great evil had entered the room. Whether or not this was the case, I do not know. But I didn’t like the feeling, so I left the office as fast as I could and headed for home. Then I needed to spend the next hour listening to some quiet, healing music at home. Very strange. I’ve never experienced feeling this way about a person before. I’ll have to pay more attention to such feelings the next time it happens and see if I can learn something. I hope he doesn’t come back again.

Categories
Music

SomaFM: Like a Koala Bear Crapped a Rainbow in my Brain

This is great! I discovered a new radio station yesterday, and I love it. It’s called SomaFM, and they are internet-only, commercial free, and listener supported. They seem to be playing the same kind of music that I get on CJSR Edmonton, which really pleases me. Their main website says that there are currently 3043 people listening to SomaFM now. That’s cool.

While it’s one “station”, they actually offer 7 different channels of music at various audio quality levels, the best being 128 kbps stereo MP3. This is impressive. The channels are:

  1. Groove Salad
  2. Secret Agent
  3. Drone Zone
  4. indie pop rocks
  5. cliqhop idm
  6. Beat Blender
  7. Boot Liquor

You’ll have to visit the SomaFM website to read the channel descriptions. So far, I’ve been listening mostly to “Boot Liquor”, which is described as American Roots music, looking for (and getting) some bluegrass and Johnny Cash. I’ve also listened to “Groove Salad” for a while. I have yet to check out the other channels, but you can be sure that I will.

This sure makes up for the terrible broadcast radio that’s available here in Beijing. I’ll soon be listening enough to SomaFM that I’ll want to contribute (which is voluntary). It’s a good deal.

By the way, the title for today’s post comes from one of their station IDs, in answer to the question, “What does SomaFM feel like to you?.” Cute. Not exactly the answer I would have come up with, though.

Categories
China

I can see clearly now…

Something must be seriously wrong with the world, or at least with my understanding of the global economics of the eyewear industry. I went and got new lenses for my glasses yesterday, and what I discovered prompted this story. First of all, I wanted to replace my 2.5-year-old lenses since they were very badly scratched. Not from mistreatment, but because the anti-reflective coating went FUBAR, possibly because of the water here in China. This is the second time I’ve had this problem. In 2000, I travelled to the Maldives and Sri Lanka, and the coating on my previous pair of lenses also became a mess of microlines that made it difficult to see. The last two pairs of lenses were purchased at Shopper’s Optical in Edmonton, and maybe that’s the common factor and not the international travel. I don’t really know.

I put off the quest for new lenses because I thought it would be a difficult undertaking for me here in China. I didn’t know the procedure for getting my eyes checked or if the old prescription would be understandable to the technicians here. Plus I wasn’t looking forward to having to choose new frames because of the difficulty of getting used to a new pair of glasses. (Whine, whine, whine….) But, the experience turned out to be quite easy, in fact. My girlfriend took me to a centre which is a collection of many eyeglass wholesalers, and she helped translate for me. Well, the one shop we settled on had a computer which “read” the prescription off of my old lenses. I didn’t know they could do that. It was a Topcon CL-100 Lensmeter, in case you are interested. And then they double checked it with the prescription that I brought with me. Cutting the lens blanks and fitting them into my glasses was the identical procedure that I would find in Canada, but it didn’t take an hour. More like 20 minutes.

Now here’s what surprised me about the whole thing. The new lenses cost me $18 CDN for the pair! That’s less than the cost of a dinner for two at any restaurant in Canada. They were high-index, single-vision lenses, with anti-reflective coating, and they were thinner than the old lenses, which were also high-index. I think I had a choice between lenses that came from Japan and those from Korea, and I probably ended up with the Japan lenses. I’m still incredulous about the low cost. In Canada, at least 2.5 years ago, I would have paid $100-150 CDN for the same lenses. I’m going to guess that the same is true today. Why the difference? Is it the large population here in China? Or the cheapness of the labour at the eyeglass store/lab? I don’t know, but it makes me wonder what people in Canada are paying for when they buy lenses.

Categories
Swing

Flipped Out!

Adam flipped me at Swing class last night. Twice. It was a lot of fun. After the official class was over, Adam started to teach the group some air moves, presumably because someone asked. River gets to be subjected to most of the moves he knows, but sometimes she wants to see what it looks like. So that’s when I volunteered to be flipped. I stood in front of him, bent over, as if I were about to pass a football between my legs to Adam standing behind me. But instead of a football, I passed my two hands. All he did was just pull my hands upward and my body unrolled, my feet left the floor, I flipped over, and my feet hit the floor in front of me. Swoosh.

I think I’ll have to volunteer for more in the future.

Categories
China General

Mmmmmm

Today I discovered I had all the ingredients necessary for a peanut butter and banana sandwhich: crunchy peanut butter, bananas, half-decent bread, and a glass of cold milk. In my (almost) two years of living in Beijing, this has never happened before, mostly because of the lack of real bread in my neighbourhood.

It was tasty. Time to go buy more bananas and peanut butter…….

Categories
China Tech

For want of a good book

I went to the Haidian Book City in Beijing today, looking for books on database theory. I’ve been going crazy all week with ideas inside my head about different databases that I need to create for work, and a few for fun. But I don’t know anything about databases—not their theory, implementation, what software solutions are out there, or even how to create and access a database.

Well, I found two textbooks on databases that I could read. 99% of the books here are in Chinese, but there are a few computer science series that are available in the original English. Fortunately, the topics match my interests quite well: software development, hardware, theoretical computer science, operating systems theory, and network programming.

So I ended up purchasing one database book: Database Principles, Programming, and Performance, 2nd Ed., by Patrick and Elizabeth O’Neil.

On other subjects, I picked up two O’Reilly titles: Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, by Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman, and Mark Stone; and Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies, edited by Andy Oram. The first contains essays on the Open Source movement by the original and the continuing innovators of the movement. The second describes the phenomenon of peer-to-peer networks (file sharing networks like Napster and KaZaa) and specific applications and implementations.

I got one famous book in software development theory and practice: The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, by Frederick P. Brooks Jr. I’ve needed to read this one for a long time, so now was a good time to buy it.

And finally, I bought one Chinese title. Can I read it? Not exactly, but I bought it for the pictures. It’s called Web Color Design, and as you can guess, it has many examples of colour schemes for website design, including colour charts and RGB values of the actual example web pages and photographs. So I can use it to get some ideas for sprucing up this website.

How much did this whole book shopping spree cost me? 156 RMB. That’s $24.88 CDN approximately. Not bad for two O’Reilly books, a text book, and a book that’s entirely done in full-colour glossy pages. I figure there’s got to be some benefit to living in China and suffering from the lack of a good bookstore.

Well, enough typing. Time to curl up by the fire (I wish!) and enjoy a good book. Or five of them!

Categories
General Tech

Senseless Voting Technology

I’ve read some interesting articles lately. The first two are a series on the key problem in the use of voting technology in the U.S. The author brings it all home for me—literally—by using Canada’s electoral system as an example. So now, the U.S. system finally makes sense to me; I now understand that it is totally senseless.

The third article is great. Really, these guys are nuts, but that’s why I read The Onion every week. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Categories
China

A unique picture

I took this picture two weeks ago while visiting Ba Da Chu, a site of 8 temples ascending the mountains west of Beijing. It is worth sharing.