Blog Archives 060417 to 060218

Old pointless chatter instead of new pointless chatter.

 

060417 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
Reason No. 7,034 for getting married: Many things become more efficient and less expensive. Example: Taking a taxi only costs half as much per person when you share the ride. Example: Many of the restaurants here serve various set meals. This means that when I go out and order a single dish, I get enough to feed three hungry people. If I were eating out with a total of four people, we could get the one dish and then maybe ask for extra rice and we would have the right amount. Eating out solo, I tend to end up with the choice between wasting an enormous amount of good food, or gorging myself so heavily I don't feel like eating anything else for the next day and a half (and only wasting a little food). The couple of times I have attempted to specify getting just a side dish (i.e. an amount small enough for one person to finish), I end up with the vast meal and the side dish. The "doggie bag" does not exist here. Taking food home with you is for poor people who are just above beggars. I suppose I could resort to going to a western food restaurant where the dishes are normally single-person dishes, but instead I'm just tending to go to the noodle places (where you get one bowl for one person, the right serving size) and I'm sampling new restaurants on weekends when it is easier to do the one-meal-for-the-whole-weekend thing.

The other pieces of news are:
1) I got my first mail from the US, a card from my Oma (German for grandma). It was post-marked April 3, and received today, exactly 14 days later.
2) I have now uploaded the pictures from my visit to the Summer Palace this past Friday. They are now in my picture gallery.
And 3) We had another dust-storm overnight, so everything is coated in a fine layer of orange-umber dust. Breathing the air is not recommended today.

060416 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
I just got back (Saturday evening) from a fantastic hike along a distant portion of the Great Wall, the section that winds, dips, and leaps like a dragon's back, the section called Simatai. Too bad for you that I haven't posted the pictures yet and I'm writing about something else today.

Instead, I'll mention an interesting little stroll I took today, without meaning to. A friend has asked for music as a memento from China and I saw an article about a very cool art-house project: a recording artist has put together an eight CD set of field recordings of folk music from the various indigenous peoples of China. The CDs are wrapped in home-made sleeves, the sleeves are printed with wood-block carvings, and the whole set is wrapped in twine. I figured out where to go to find the store and took the twenty minute cab ride to the outskirts on the north-east side of Beijing. The shop is essentially a cramped, tiny little loading bay just big enough to back the end of a truck into. It has been lofted and you can see the store-owner's bed guitar and stash of bottled water and food above the back half of the store. He was out of the CD set I wanted, but he did have some other Chinese folk music which I bought. Oh, and I bought two Buddhamachines (one for me and one for a gift). These things are the anti-iPod, in a way. You can read about these devices either at popmatters or at boomkat. When I set out this morning, I didn't expect to be stumbling upon the cutting edge of Chinese contemporary art, but there I was.

The music store was in a tiny back alley of a hutong that was an old industrial section and is now a high-end modern art hotspot, with performance artists suspended from ceilings, galleries showing modern Chinese and Russian paintings, a few old industrial plants still in operation (stripping car seats for recycling), and some great coffee houses and places to eat. As you might expect, the art ranged from the moving to the incomprehensible, from the banal to the intriguing, from the disgusting to the thoughtful. If I were settled and had a place to put paintings, there were one or two pieces on which I would have been willing to spend a lot of money; they spoke to me and there seems to be a decent chance of the artist moving up in the art world (thereby making the paintings both art and a possibly good investment).

So, my failing to find CDs turned into a neat little outing of several hours duration. I had not expected to find anything like that in China.

Update: On second thought, I may just keep both Buddhamachines and have to get another for a gift. Layering together two separate ambient loops by playing the two Buddhamachines at the same time creates a much more interesting set of possibilities and sound configurations, especially since none of the loops are the same length... Hm. I wonder how three together would sound?

060413 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
Today, I'll mention the big exiting world of 关系 (guan1 xi). This word is variously translated as "nepotism" or "relationship". It means both. Here is an example: Since my parents are coming for a visit, I asked my hotel for the room rates. They quoted me a nice low price. Later, a friend was visiting and wanted to know the room rates. He was quoted a rather high price. When next I asked the front desk for the room rates, they wanted a description of the relationship between me and the person who was staying. Apparently, there is one price for business people who can send more business their way, another price for random people off the street, another price for relatives of valued customers, etc.

At cocktail hour, I had met 'Tony', the top dog of the hotel's management group, as well as meeting some of the other foreigners staying at the hotel. I asked one of the other foreigners and found that there is yet another price for people who know Tony. So, I called up Tony. We are going to meet for drinks Friday evening and talk about rooms and how much I love my parents (in terms of willingness to book them the primo suite) etc. There will likely be several different numbers tossed around depending on how well I play my cards and how valuable Tony estimates my 关系 (guan1 xi) to be. Eventually, there will be a room selected and a rate established, but it is all very, very flexible.

060411 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
Since it looks like my parents will be visiting, I banged together a rough traveler's phrase listing and moved it to the top of my Chinese language page. Hopefully, it will be of some use.

060410 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
I finally went and played tourist a little this past weekend. I went to Tiannamen square, the Forbidden City, and a shopping district. I took lots of pictures and put them up in my picture gallery.

Oh, word to the wise: prices here can sometimes be very flexible. Prices in some stores are fixed but other stores have the listed price as an opening bid in negotiations. Many times people willing to bargain will get items at one third to one fifth of the listed price.
Hotel prices can also vary wildly. I asked the hotel I'm at about a room for my parents for a week at the end of May, if they visit, and the front desk quoted a rate equivalent to about 50-60 US Dollars per night. A coworker from Franklinton came for a visit and was interested in staying in the same hotel for about a week starting tonight and the front desk quoted him a price equivalent to about 110-120 US Dollars per night. Huh.

060406 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
I heard from a coworker here that the central government authority, which gives the weather reports, will sometimes "adjust" the numbers... You see, during the summer, it gets pretty hot. If the temperature goes above 37°C, there is the worry that people will not want to work. Therefore, the weather reports always give the temperature as 37°C if the temperature is higher, although the weather reporters will sometimes call it "a hot 37°C" or "a remarkably hot 37°C" if it goes too far past 37°C. We will not have to worry about that in the near future, though; it is quite cool here right now. I'm glad I brought some light sweaters and such.

Beijing has been very interesting so far, but I am spending a lot of time on attempting to teach myself Chinese: I have not found a tutor yet. Unlike many of the foreigners living here, I have chosen to avoid the taxis in favor of taking the bus to work along with many of the other regular employees. It is during the long (traffic time, not distance) bus rides that I'm working on my Chinese. So far I can not say very much since I have focused on being able to recognize characters and read a little (for lab equipment, reagents, street signs, etc.).

The food here is fantastic. I have eaten some very strange things: pickled duck feet, fish stomachs, quail tongues, pig intestine, etc., and most of it has tasted pretty good.

In just a couple of weeks I will be going to Denmark for a week for a series of research seminars. Its a big gathering, so will be nice to visit with the people I have met from the other sites.

060403 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
The Beijing site has most people's desks in a single large room. Well, Research has one big room (second floor) and Customer Solutions has another big room (first floor). Only the absolute top bosses have actual offices. Everyone else has large, wide desks. There are four desks shoved together, and then another set of four, and then another, on each side of a central aisle. The only exception to this is the first row, which has only two desks and across the isle is space for the copier. There are no dividing walls and no place to tack up a calendar or procedure notes; it's just a smooth open field of desks, with flat-screen monitors sticking up like large digital bookends.

My desk is next to the aisle, with my back to the main doorway (and stairwell) and my back is faced by the first desk. The theories of Feng Shui would describe good chi draining away out the door and point out that the aisle seats are exposed to bad chi from the energies coursing along the long straight aisle... This is, of course, just primitive energy theory to explain the fact that the position is prone to distraction, with noise from the doorway/stairwell and both noise and motion from the aisle. Fortunately, the office area is pretty quiet, so it is not a problem. Mostly, I just wish I had a tack-board so I could tack up note, equipment information, reagent information, and the like.

Er, sorry this is not the insightful post about Beijing or Chinese culture for which you might have been hoping... I've been far too busy just getting set up and running to sit and reflect. You wouldn't believe the amount of time you can burn attempting to get a mobile phone when you don't speak Chinese and the sales people (two groups: phone and phone line) don't speak English.

060330 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
News I haven't posted yet: I received my last box of stuff from the USA this past Monday. I'd sent six book boxes of stuff (clothes, books, computer stuff, decorations, etc) from Franklinton by FedEx. This was all supposed to have arrived before my plane touched down. Instead, a bunch of it was held up in customs. The worst of it was that customs reported having received only 5 boxes, so box no. 6 had apparently vaporized in transit. Eventually, customs released my boxes to me (one at a time, each one opened and searched) but the missing no. 6 had still not arrived. The missing one contained my external harddrive, all my computer-related peripherals and CDs, my camera and about half the decorations I had brought with me to help my room look more like a home and less like a hotel room. I was really not liking the idea of one-sixth of my current worldly possessions simply vaporizing. But Monday, appearing as if by magic, the box showed up. The box was pristine (unlike the smashed sides and mashed-in corners displayed by the other boxes) and it was unopened. My current theory is that kind pixies spirited it away before customs could seize it and hand-carried it with their delicate pixie digits all the way to my work place. This theory also explains the delay; the box was heavy and I'm certain that the little pixie wings grew quite tired attempting to transport such a big heavy box. Perhaps there is a more prosaic explanation for things, but I like my explanation. Anyway, box in hand, I'm now finally "all here". Try as I might to avoid being materialistic, I still like having my stuff. Now I do. And, since the camera was one of those things in box no. 6, I can get around to taking a few pictures of the place and eventually post 'em. Yea!

In other news, I finally have a cell phone, thereby making me a bit easier to contact. The number is (011-86) 13 601149985. Whereas the US has the uncivilized practice of making mobile phone users pay for both the calls initiated and the calls received, China is like the rest of the world and only makes mobile phone users pay for the calls they initiate. I.e. I can receive calls for free at either land line or mobile phone.

060328 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
I wrote a very long piece last night, but I'm not going to bother posting it. It was overly long and belabored the point. Basically it was about the interview I saw last night between the director of the British Museum and the CCTV (China Communications TV) reporter. The British Museum has sent a massive collection of ancient world artifacts to the Beijing Capitol Museum for display. Represented in the collection are important pieces from every old culture except ancient China. The official reason for this is because the Beijing Capitol Museum already has an impressive collection of ancient Chinese artifacts. The real reason is because the Beijing Capitol Museum refuses to *borrow* ancient Chinese artifacts; the Chinese government is not willing to return to foreign museums any Chinese artifacts it considers both old and valuable.

Anyway, the interview quickly went from nice ("a major step forward in international museum partnerships") to combative ("Why will you not let Chinese people see their own paintings?") and it included cut-aways to man-on-the-street interviews to reinforce the point ("The British are immoral thieves. They should return the things they stole.").

Sigh. I really think the Museum return movement is stupid. Even if you ignore the stewardship issues (returned artifacts often go from climate controlled rooms to unmaintained warehouses), it is still a terrible idea. Let us pretend for a moment that the various collected artifacts are returned to their respective originating countries. What are museums then? Each museum would be primarily a showcase for national history, with almost no perspective on world cultures and little opportunity for cross-cultural anthropology. I don't think that this would be a good thing for the world.

060324 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
I have now been here a week and one day (I don't count Wednesday; it was a travel day) and I have been over my jetlag for a couple of days. Beijing is in the middle of a massive building phase, expanding and growing by leaps and bounds. The map I have shows only really major roads... I had assumed that this was because Beijing is too big. However, using an on-line, electronic, zoom-able map of Beijing is only a modest improvement; many roads are still not shown or labeled. Near my building (just built) is a mall (just built) and several new skyscrapers (being built). Some of the roads in the area are so new that the curbs are still being finished and the roads themselves have not been named yet. The city is filled with a lot of energy; the people can see their city daily growing and moving into a high-tech, commercial future. However, all this industrial expansion comes at a price; the skies of Beijing are heavy with pollution and/or dust. Breathing is not recommended on some days.

Now for an aside about fonts and alternate characters:
Because of where I am, the blog entries for the next few months are likely to be littered with Chinese characters. I have entered all the characters in Unicode encoding, so your computer will display the characters if they are available, i.e. if you have the right fonts on your machine. If you don't have the right fonts, then you will probably see the characters replaced by little boxes or question marks, while the rest of the page will be readable.

Windows XP or later ships with the font Arial Unicode MS, which can display the characters. Windows 98 / 2000 is capable of displaying the characters once you download the Arial Unicode MS font from the Microsoft website. If you want to see the characters but you have an operating system other than WinXP, then you can download one of the two fonts I have put here for your convenience.

bitstreamcyberbit.zip (6.16 MB)
"bitstreamcyberbit.zip" contains the Unicode font "Bitstream Cyberbit". It is a shareware font that contains lots of special characters including the asian characters, cyrillic, etc.

firefly.zip (6.83 MB)
"firefly.zip" contains the font "AR PL New Sung", an Asian character font which has been carefully smoothed and reworked to ensure good computer screen readability over a range of type sizes. It also contains the basic latin letters of the alphabet.

On a Windows machine, to add a new font to Windows machine, just open Fonts in Control Panel then either open the Files, Add New menues or simply drag and drop the TrueType font file into the folder. That's it. Pretty easy, eh?

060321 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
I think I'm finally done with jet lag, mostly. I have to work to stay up past nine PM or sleep past six AM, but that's OK. The skies of Beijing are permanently milky with pollution and/or dust. Some days it is almost a thin fog or a light haze, but the quality of it is not like mist's whiteness; it is a grey-brownish tint that says "particulate", not "humid".

060317 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
I'm here in lovely China and the weather is great. I arrived Wednesday afternoon (after leaving my Franklinton apartment about 19 hours earlier) and was in at work bright and early Thursday morning. The place they rented for me is a residential hotel room. Very fancy, very new. The place has all the latest fixtures and the hotel public areas are sporting lots of marble and uniformed bellhops. This is the lap of luxury and I'm not sure how long it will take me to get used to someone else coming in while I'm gone to straighten up and make my bed. It is awfully close to having servants (a concept I find disturbing).

Anyway, between the jet lag, the attempting to learn my way around a new lab, the attempting to learn my way around a new city (Beijing is gigantic), and the sudden need to communicate (at least a little) in Chinese, well, I'm pretty exhausted. I'm looking forward to the weekend. While I don't plan on sleeping in (I'm forcing my body to obey the new time zone's ideas of morning and evening), I do plan on going to a bookstore and buying a large detailed map along with a pocket phrase book. The FedEx box containing my Chinese phrase books apparently is held up by customs. I guess it wasn't so clever to shift my heavy books to the FedEx box instead of my suitcase (to reduce it from over-weight to barely under-weight). Still, my old phrase book was in traditional Chinese and Bopomofo, while the one I need now should be simplified Chinese and Pinyin, so needing to get a new phrase book is no biggie.

060315 Beijing, CN 北京, 中国
The flight went N/NE along the north American east coast, then over Greenland, over the north pole, then down over Siberia, coming in heading S/SE over China. Since I rarely sleep on planes, I finished two books on this flight and I'm starting the third with about two hours to go before landing.

060307 Raleigh, NC, USA
Well, the Patriot Act was passed again. Sigh. Here's some links I was sent: One is the statement by Senator Russ Feingold (D Wisc.) on the first passage of the original "Patriot" Act and the other is his comments on the recent re-passage of the "Patriot" Act.

Sen. Feingold has been involved several pieces of legislation I like and has firmly opposed things I have disliked. Along with McCain, he was the one who pushed through the Balanced Budget amendment (yet another federal law that The Empe-, um, President Bush is ignoring and violating). Looking at Feingold's voting record, and McCain's stances, I really wish I could vote for a Feingold/McCain or McCain/Feingold party-independent presidential ticket in the next election. That would be far more inspiring than the same old schlock from the standard two parties.

060306 Raleigh, NC, USA
Well, it is now confirmed. The plan to ship my things to China has fallen through. I will not be able to use a moving company and I will have to box everything in small parcels and mail it to myself, care of the Beijing office. On the plus side, I just received directions to where I should go once I arrive at the Beijing office. On the minus side, the instructions look like this:
上地信息路 14 号
上地环岛向北 100 米
路东诺维信 公司
I guess I'll just wave the note at a taxi driver and hope. This is going to be an adventure. Despite the potential for chaos, I think this is going to be fun.

060304 Raleigh, NC, USA
The PHP version of this web site has now been loaded. If I did everything correctly, then you all will not notice any real difference at this point. Well, I did add a current time stamp code hunk under the "Time Off-set" heading in the right-hand column on this page and on the Travel Details page. If anyone has trouble with something or discovers that I broke a link or page, please let me know.

060301 Raleigh, NC, USA
Well, it is under two weeks until my transfer to China. I finally have the plane tickets (Continental Airlines Flight Number: 2216 from Raleigh/Durham, NC, USA, departing at 08:15AM March 14, 2006 to Newark, NJ, USA, arriving at 09:45AM March 14, 2006. Then Continental Airlines Flight Number: 89 from Newark, NJ, USA, departing at 12:15PM March 14, 2006 to Beijing, China, arriving at 03:00PM March 15, 2006).

Right now I'm busier than, well, something that is really busy. I'm still working out details of the Import of Household goods restrictions for shipping things to China, so it is unclear how much of the few things I have with me I will be able to ship over. As it is, I have to prepare for either shipping things to storage with my parents in NY, or for having things shipped piecemeal from Novozymes Franklinton to Novozymes Beijing. That means everything (other than my airline luggage) has to be neatly boxed up in relatively small parcels, with a detailed listing of contents and ready to go by March 7th at the latest.

At work I'm attempting to wrap up work on one project while being *still* sent on business trips for the other project (I have meetings in Philadelphia, PA, and Monmouth Junction, NJ, both on Thursday). Also, due before I leave for China is the final form of a hobby (gaming) writing project I promised to a friend in Finland. Yeah, it is a hobby and I enjoy it, but right now it is one more deadline riding my butt.

My current form of "relaxation" has been to teach myself a little about ssi (Server Side Includes) and PHP (a server-side HTML embedded scripting language). You see, I want to stay in contact with folks even when I'm in China and I was looking for a way of having my web page display the current times for my various locations. That way, people will have an easier time figuring out if it is a good time to call or if it is 4 AM wherever I am. SSIs will let me do that and also let me maintain and update the pages a little more easily (e.g. modifying a single included menu list instead of having to individually update the left-hand menu bar on every page). Using SSI and PHP will also let me eliminate the javascript from the pages while still having random quotes appear. Odd, but messing with this sort of stuff is the most relaxing thing in my life currently.

Now for random stuff of interest:
A friend at work, Malcolm, forwarded me a link to a piece by K. Deffeyes, the author of Beyond Oil. See K. Deffeyes' Current Events page for the article. Dated February 11, 2006, it is an interesting and short read. Check out his prediction for the year 2025.

The other note of interest is something Ken forwarded to me: China is setting up its own internet domains and internet domain servers with which to provide them. There are four Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLD) including the English language domain ".cn" (which may conflict with the current ".cn" domain) and three Chinese-character top-level domains ".中国" (Chinese for ".China"), ".公司" (Chinese for ".com"), and ".网络"(Chinese for ".net"). This may not mean a lot for most internet users currently, but this is the first time any group other than the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN, the US-backed domain name administrator) has been designated for the resolution of Internet domain name queries. It may soon be true that you can potentially be surfing only one of two internets; ChinaInternet or everything else. People already talk about the "Great Firewall of China". This may just be the next step. See Slashdot's "China Prepares to Launch Alternate Internet" or "The Credible Threat" by Michael Geist for more info.

060221 Davis, CA, USA
Today, let's take a quick peek at Bush's proposed budget for 2007. We already know that he is proposing a budget that contains a ~$400 billion budget deficit to be made up by borrowing money from the world bank, an unsurprising fiscal irresponsibility. We know that it contains cuts targeting the poorest in America, with cuts in Welfare, Foodstamps, and Medicare (Medicare alone is facing a 35.9 billion reduction in spending over five years). We know that federal monies aimed at aiding rural schools and roads have been eliminated. This is more or less the sort of thing expected out of the current Bush administration. So what are the unexpected things?

Well, the budget proposes selling off more than $1 billion in public lands over the next decade to pay for the otherwise unfunded rural schools. Another part of the budget proposal is set to sell off another $350 million worth of public land, with the money going to the general treasury. So, here we have a situation where a non-renewable public resource is being sacrificed for minimal short term gain. Hm. I guess this is a new mode of attacking the environment, but not unexpected from this administration. Oh well. Visit the public land now, while it is still public.

One thing that has surprised me is that Bush trumpeting his new-found dedication to aiding the US in becoming less dependent on foreign oil. This seems like a shocking turn-around in his normal position. So what does his budget propose for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory? NREL's budget dropped $22.5 million this year and is set to fall another $11 million next year. That's right. Overall funding has been cut and will continue to be cut. Bush's "dedication" amounts to nothing more than interfering in the budgetary allotments of specific programs within NREL. Funding for biofuels is set to double next year and funding for hybrid car research is set to be slashed 40% next year. Never mind which is more feasible in the short term, or which one has the better return in terms of overall fuel economy; political interference is overriding scientific realities. But I guess that is not unexpected either.

In conclusion, there is nothing unexpected in the budget. The voters can now return to their television coma, watching "reality" TV show re-runs and infotainment masquerading as news. Sigh. Why aren't more people pissed off by this stuff?

Page Last Modified: 2006 05 10, 00:49:00

 

 

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