January 2007 Archives

My friend matt-man helped me out with my Mac system on Monday afternoon. I had completely the wrong idea, and he had the tools, skill, and experience to get my poo back in one sock (<abbr title="Also known as...">aka</abbr> getting your shit together). Thanks Tiger!

So I'm back online, trying to catch up on some work that I missed during the last few days, and also hitting the job search-interview dance & casual tutoring gigs that bring in a few RMB.

Anyone want to hire a microbiologist/scientist/teacher?

My Powerbook pretty much crashed today.

Shit.

It only boots directly into BSD, so it should be salvagable. But even with root permissions, I can alter, copy or create files.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

Anyone got any ideas?

I'll be online everynow and then until it is back up and running. Great timing for this to happen too.

So, on my usual morning routine of checking Australian online newspapers, I was met with sever DNS errors, which generally means that these sites are blocked.

Intrigued, as I may have thought that a few more satellites may have disappeared from the sky, or Australia signed a treaty recognising an island floating in the South China Sea as a fully-fledged nation, I jumped onto an anonymous proxy to check out the salubrious details.

I couldn't find anything juicy. Only one article seemed to fit my well-trained China news eye but I wouldn't really call the below article salubrious enough to warrant blocking.

The SMH: An end to Shanghai's spitting image.

The story about Shanghai's taxi drivers receiving onboard spitoons isn't really breaking news, however for those on Antipodean shores I am familiar with, it is.

Access appears to have been restored for me, but I just wonder why it access to such sites was blocked this morning in the first place?

I'm not really up for much diarist blogging right now (such an entertaining lifestyle I'm leading right now), so I'm resorting to 'Plan B', namely rehashing the work of other blogs.

I read this highly pro-blogging article on my favourite news source (The SMH) earlier today. I just liked this little excerpt. Prof. Halliday's comment is a great one, and typical of what I'd expect from a Professor.

In Western nations, blogging has grown in popularity as public trust in the mainstream media has declined. Much of what passes for debate in the Australian press can be called "corkscrew journalism", a term that originated in the 1940 film The Philadelphia Story, directed by George Cukor. According to Fred Halliday, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, the phrase is defined as "instant comment, bereft of research or originality, leading to a cycle of equally vacuous, staged polemics between columnists who have been saying the same thing for the past decade or more".

Doesn't this sound like most of Australia's leading commentators? Endless point-scoring and ill-informed rants against "elites", the "Left" and the "Right" are constant features of mainstream punditry. It's no wonder the major newspapers are in terminal circulation decline.

The arrogance of the commentariat was on full display in August when the New York Times columnist David Brooks said on American TV: "One of the things I've found in life is that politicians are a lot more sincere than us journalists and we are more sincere than the people that read and watch us." Could there be a better argument for his early retirement? If Brooks was unaware of how the general public viewed the media - worse than the dodgiest real estate agent - he'd been spending too much time with political insiders in Washington, DC.

Yes, politicians are the most sincere people I've ever met¡

You can read the full article here.

A model-turned-PR asks me to guess the worst social crime you can commit in Shanghai. It's not a very good game, to be honest. 'Child abuse?' I hazard. She shakes her head. 'No! It is to give someone a fake!' she says, just a little too solemnly. 'This is the worst thing! Unforgivable!' And then she wags her finger at me.

I'd suggest you read more of this report into Shanghai's big money at The Guardian's Observer Magazine.

It is kind of easy to forget how much money floats around this metropolis and country, but articles like these give you that non-too subtle nudge just in case that new skyscraper just happened to fail to do so.

Nothing new here, but my hosting provider just changed it's reseller. You may have noticed a blip or two if you logged in recently - so that explains it.

Another project I've been working on recently involves a different style of website on a completely different web host. I have discovered many new things about hosting, security, and the whizz-bang world of web-hosting.

I've also learned that you truly get what you pay for. All I can say is don't EVER contemplate using dot5hosting for any website. They are cheap, but their hosting systems suck. Lots. Create a subdomain = a two day problem. Get a usable FTP account = two day problem. This stuff should just take 2 minutes altogether, and shouldn't require contacting live-chat support. I was also told today that there is no way you can connect to a server using FTP on the shell command line. Yeah. Live support at dot5 is on the ball.

Added to this is the Asia internet melt slow-down, and connecting to their servers is a painful process. It has much slower speeds than other webhost providers listed in John's hosting provider's entry & comments discussion section.

After pulling my hair out for quite a while about these small problems, today I came across this thread. It appears I'm not alone. In this thread I discovered bewaredot5hosting.com. Someone's taken their rage and made something constructive.

I really should have read these threads earlier.

Carol's custard tart birthday cake, originally uploaded by DaLish.

My sister & bro-in-law took a few photos from my Mum's (something)th birthday 点心/饮茶 breakfast extravaganza back in Brisbane last weekend.

The photos were a good way for me to catch up with the day's celebrations as I am the bad son and couldn't make it back for both my Dad & Mother's birthdays in the last few weeks. But this one took the cake so to speak.

A 蛋挞 birthday cake?

I like these, but my Mum loves them a lot more than myself.

I was thinking that a Chinese person seeing this photo would shake their head. "Candles on an egg tart? Crazy foreigners!" It goes to show that each culture takes in a part of another, and puts their own unique twist on things.

A few pertinent links from Wikipedia (via Anonymouse)...
Egg Tarts, Yum cha, and Dim Sum.

This entry was posted with flickr

The last few weeks have been quiet for me and Lin, and thus we've spent a great deal of our time leading homely but studious lives inside our cosy apartment.

Hence, there's no great stories to be written nor tid-bits to be shared through this blog. I've a number of photos to upload to Flickr, but both my internet and personal interest bandwidths right now are both suffering from post-New Year outages.

Lin & I spent both our Christmas and New Year's holidays in Shanghai this year. We had a great time hosting a Christmas luncheon at our place with a few of our friends that didn't follow the annual mass expat exodus for the Christmas/NY holidays. There's a number of lasting memories from this period, with the most tiresome (but ultimately satisfying) being numerous excursions taken to hunt down those special ingredients for our feast and also to find the niche & thoughtful gift in a land of cheap, easily purchased mass-produced items that would normally consist of a thoughtful (and moderately priced) gift back home.

One of the joyous was stepping a little further outside our social zone and mingling with new friends & faces during the Christmas and New Year party rush. Almost every expat we chat to agrees with the sentiment that the calendar New Year in Shanghai is a real anti-climax due to lack of interest in the holiday here in China. There is no buzz whatsoever about the holiday here (although a few of our Chinese neighbours have wished us well). I find this a little puzzling given the interest & buzz for Christmas that we've observed in Shanghai over the last 2 years. The level of Santa and tinsel representation & the force-fed consumer spending of Christmas here matches that of our home-towns.

One thing that I've regretted about spending this time of year in Shanghai is that I missed both of my parent's milestone birthday's. Although they understand our position & location on the northern side of the Pacific Ocean, I would have dearly loved to have been there to celebrate with them this year. At least we will be able to swap notes when both my parents, sister and new brother-in-law visit China later this year.

Lately, I've been wrangling with a few job possibilities, and also contributing a lot of my own time to a little project of Linda's. She's a hard task mistress. Both of these developments will be deserving an entry or two in the not so far future if all goes to plan. I'm glad to be doing this, and it is starting to add considerably to my technical skills and future employability. This new branch of learning is really taxing my concentration skills and I have found myself spending between 4 to 10 hours at a time plugging away at it. If only I could transfer that interest into a much longer and more important millstone I have to grind.

Apart from her little project, Lin has also been intently focused with her language studies prior to the massive 6 week break Chinese university students receive around the Chinese New Year period.
We're thinking of taking a few little trips in the next couple of weeks. Initially we were considering the Harbin Ice Festival, but Lin vetoed this due to her aversion to chilly climes. Then there was the attraction of Xiamen during the Chinese New Year Golden Week, but we decided against that. We're now contemplating a Nanjing excursion in the near future. Who knows where we could really end up!

More later as life comes to hand.