Category: General

Google honored John Lennon’s 70th birthday today with a ‘doodle’ video .. the picture is from the video.   I love the words from ‘Imagine’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one

I got my flu shot today.   The flu shots here in the USA this year protects against 3 strains of flu virus :

• A/California/7/2009 (H1N1)-like virus (the same strain as was used for 2009 H1N1 monovalent vaccines);
• A/Perth/16/2009 (H3N2)-like virus;
• B/Brisbane 60/2008-like antigens.

I will also try to stay away from people that try to cough and sneeze on me! : )  – remember that the latest cough and sneeze ‘etiquette’ says to crook your arm and sneeze into your arm and shoulder, NOT into your hands !

Here’s my current weapon to fight the jet lag : melatonin*.  On a previous trip I tried 3 mg which seemed to help very little, but the 5mg capsule seems to help a lot.  It’s a ‘natural’ drug – supposedly much the same as the hormone by the same name, secreted by the pineal gland in the brain, into the blood.   Some of my colleagues at work say the prescription drug Ambien is their knock-out drug of choice; it belongs to a class of medications called sedative-hypnotics and works by slowing activity in the brain to allow sleep.  Hmm.   Think I’ll stick to my melatonin for two more days and then I’ll be good to go.

*also known as N-acetyl-5-methoxytryptamine.  Got that? : )

My gym took a minute today to take three scans of each of my thumbs so that I can check in with a fingerprint instead of my gym card in future.  They store the print as some mathematical formula and not the print itself, they assured me.  (Hmm).   In the same vein in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, there is an article about India launching a massive project to record fingerprints and retina scans of all its citizens.   The project aims to assign a unique 12-digit number to each of its 1.2 billion people and store them in a massive central database.   The identities will help the government to reduce corruption and waste in the distribution of food stamps and other payments.

The PRC’s National Day People’s Republic of China (simplified Chinese: 国庆节; traditional Chinese: 國慶節; pronounced guóqìng jié) was declared at three o’clock on October 1, 1949, in front of 300,000 people during a ceremony in Tian’anmen Square.  Chairman Mao declared the founding of the People’s Republic and waved the first five-star PRC flag.

In past times, the day was marked by large political gatherings and speeches, military parades, state banquets and the like.  But since 2000, as China’s economy developed, the national holiday lasts seven days and most workers are given time off to visit relatives and take time for traveling.    Indeed, all the China team members on our project have taken the 7 days off. And in the big cities there are 4th-of-July type fireworks displays as well !

(This is a late post).   Boy.  Working Saturday and Sunday makes the real Monday feel like it’s the third one in a row.  I posted a similar ATM screen shot a few months ago, and this one is too cute to pass up.  PLEASE DO NOT USE THE ATM IF SOMEONE PEEP OR DISTURB, SUCH AS INQUIRY, PAT ON YOUR SHOULDER, COLLIDE, ETC.    In the vein of ATM bank cards : one of us here had his card swallowed by an ATM.   So the bank sent a replacement card to the address here which goes something like this :  Building 01 North of Nuclear Avenue, Room 201, Daya Bay, Guangdong Province, China.    As one can do these days my co-worker could track the card’s journey across the continents on Fedex’s website.  Finally it arrives in Shenzhen, and Fedex was scheduled to show up.  Turns out the delivery guy did, was in the building, could not find room 210 (the wrong room number was recorded), and left.   The next day the recipient went out with a car and MET him to make sure he got his hands on the card.  You will not believe what happened next.   When he tried to activate the card, he found that the bank issued one with a number identical to the cancelled number of the one swallowed by the ATM.  There was nothing they could do from across the water to remedy the situation.   They are now sending a second card.    Incompetence which maak jou slange vang (Afrikaans for ‘makes you so angry you feel like catching snakes’).

 

We are working today and next weekend to make up for the Chinese holiday Wed-Fri.   Here is another one .. typhoon Fanapi actually has made landfall in Taiwan.   ‘TV stations aired footage of branches being ripped from trees in Hualien and a lorry overturned while driving along an exposed stretch of road’ reports the BBC on its website. (I smile at the word lorry – perfect British English – but we call all of those trucks in the USA).

I posted a Google map that shows Daya Bay’s location (the red balloon)  .. for all intent and purposes* we are right next to Hong Kong.  *Such as – is the typhoon headed OUR WAY?

p.s.  The name of the new building in yesterday’s post is  Ocean Crown.

Severe Typhoon FANAPI
at 11:00 HKT 19 September 2010

( 23.3 N, 121.2 E,
about 730 km east of Hong Kong )

I cleaned the apartment this morning and this afternoon went for a swim in the King Key hotel’s’ swimming pool.  Some of our team members stay there and could get us in.  Then I went for a walk around Dameisha.  The elephant is from the lobby of the Pattaya Hotel, a Thai-themed hotel.  (A harbinger of my plans to visit Bangkok next week during the upcoming Chinese holidays!).  The next picture shows my apartment building in the center.  Then I walked up to the OCT theme park close by to check in at the Starbucks (Pike Place roast with some Chinese, see?).  The industrial artwork of a flying horse (Pegasus?) is also from OCT, and charming enough to be worth a picture, I thought.

Finally, a cryptic name on yet another new apartment building under construction here.   The lettering running top to bottom on the right is English, believe it or not.  What does it say?  Need a clue? – Neptune.  I’ll give the answer tomorrow : ).

One would think a Canon EOS-7D monster camera with a full frame sensor is enough, but for me it isn’t!  Or rather – it is too much camera sometimes, at 1.6 lbs to lug.  And my Blackberry cell phone takes terrible pictures, especially in low light situations.  Hence the new acquisition, a Nikon Coolpix S8000 and a steal at $250.   The 10x optical zoom wide-angle lens, the 14 Mp pictures and the snappy shutter made me buy it instead of a Canon model.

My washing machine is on the fritz – it fills up, washes but then the drum doesn’t empty for the rinse cycle.   Time to get the Maytag man! (That would be to go to the local Sears store and schedule a repair appointment).   In 2007 Maytag held a national search for the advertising icon who fronts the brand.   The picture is of Clay Jackson, of Richmond, Virginia, who was selected out of 1,500 applicants.   While portrayed on television for the past 40 years as having nothing to do (since the appliances are so reliable!), the new Maytag Repairman role is a full-time position that includes multiple national television, radio, print and public appearances.    I have to confess I haven’t seen the new Maytag repairman on TV or in print, though.   I must be watching too little television, or the wrong channels.

I picked up my mail at the post office yesterday as usual.  Sorting through it is mostly an exercise in frustration.  For example, the 100 or so pieces include 8 credit card offers.  Stop it!  Offer loans to small businesses instead – not personal credit cards.  And since I’m not Michael Eisner I won’t have Mickey Mouse on my credit card.   But one has to open the letters up and shred the credit card application form which has one’s name and address filled out already – to thwart potential dumpster-diving identity thieves.    The rest of the junk mail are offers for car insurance, for unlimited nation-wide calling from my home phone (yes, I am home all the time and I blab on the phone all day with my aunt in Peoria, Illinois), and charities that want m-o-n-e-y.   I actually do give the World Wildlife Fund some.  Their latest effort is a drive to increase awareness of illegal trade in tiger products – a big problem in China as well.

P.S.  And the typhoon? It made landfall quite a bit north and east of where the Daya Bay power station is (in Zhangpu county), passed north of Hong Kong and is now dissipating.  It brought widespread rain but no casualties were reported.

The attractive young people with their bubble tea say ‘Come to Taiwan!’ , on a Hong Kong subway billboard on the way back today.   I just might !

Then tonight I finally walked around Dameisha with my camera to capture some of the apartment buildings that had recently been fitted with lighting strips (my apartment has none).   The Yanba Expressway runs by Dameisha.  And close by is a real estate office called the Australian Villa Demonstration Centre,  kangaroo and all.   Hmm.   Australian-style villas in China?   Or villas in Australia?  I am not sure.   And just as a side note – a villa was originally an ancient Roman upper-class country house.

The city of Shenzhen is turning 30 tomorrow, and has declared Friday a holiday.   So there will be no one here and we are not coming in to work – we will work from our apartments.      In my case I will work from the hotel in Hong Kong since I am going there tonight already.     It will be good to be able to work uninterrupted for a whole day.

These pictures from this link http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/shenzhen30years/sz.html .   The city has certainly come a long way from being a fishing village in 1980.    The central government has also announced that two new districts are added to the Special Economic Zone for Shenzhen.  In an article from the Wall Street Journal, it is reported that China’s broader economy seems to have bounced back just fine from the great recession of 2008 and 2009 .. but that in its two most vibrant southern cities, Shenzhen and Hong Kong, one casualty is still struggling to recover: entrepreneurialism.

Yahoo USA ran this report today on its home page :

Thousands of vehicles were bogged down Monday in a more than 100-kilometre (62-mile) traffic jam leading to Beijing that has lasted nine days and highlights China’s growing road congestion woes.

The Beijing-Tibet expressway slowed to a crawl on August 14 due to a spike in traffic by cargo-bearing heavy trucks heading to the capital, and compounded by road maintenance work that began five days later, the Global Times said.

The photo below shows early morning traffic crosses the Huanhuayuan bridge across the Jialing in southwest China’s Chongqing municipality on July 28, 2010.   China’s car production and sales will both exceed 15 million units this year, state media quoted an industry association as saying on August 4.   In the USA, 2009 sales of light vehicles (cars and light trucks) in the United States came in at only 10.4m units, the lowest level in 27 years.

Here are a few pictures from the Hong Kong Computer and Communication Festival 2010 at the Hong Kong Exhibition Center this weekend.    The exhibition center is in Wan Chai district on Hong Kong Island.    It was quite crowded, even though it’s not too apparent from the pictures I posted here.

Most of the major hardware and software vendors seemed to be there – Lenovo,  Dell, Toshiba, HP, Samsung, Microsoft, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Brother, Epson – as well as lots of resellers that had little stalls selling cameras, keyboards, mice,  flash cards, portable hard drives, gadgets and gear.   Apple Computer was notably absent.   Some of the vendors that we don’t really know about in the USA were BenQ (notebook computers),  ASK Computer Technology (Google andriod smart pads and cell phones) and Hanvon Corp. (e-book readers, tablet PCs).

I was very intrigued by the ASK 711 SP Smart Pad that runs on Google’s Android system (picture below, website http://www.uthk.com), but the screen was not nearly as nice and as clear as Apple’s iPad’s and I wasn’t sure what processor they used.   It only cost US $200.   The green ice cream picture is just for fun – it’s from Google’s Android website at android.com.

I’m going to Hong Kong for the weekend.    So is Friday the 13th unlucky in China as well?   I don’t really care since I’m not a triskaidekaphobe, but according to Chinese and Cantonese  superstition I would do well to steer clear of the numbers FOUR and FOURTEEN.  Bad news.

Some of the information here is from Wikipedia :

Number 4 (四 sì) is considered an unlucky number in Chinese,  Korean, and Japanese cultures because it is nearly homophonous to the word death (死 sǐ).    Due to that,  many numbered product lines skip the 4  such as Nokia’s cell phones (there is no series beginning with a 4),  and the Canon PowerShot camera G series (after G3 comes G5).  The Marriott Hotel where I stay in Hong Kong does not have a 4th floor.   Some high-rise residential buildings there literally miss all floor numbers with 4,   such as 4, 14, 24, 34 and all 40–49 floors !   As a result,  a building whose highest floor is number 50 may actually have only 36 physical floors.

Then there is number 14 – considered to be one of the unluckiest numbers.   Although 14 is usually said in Mandarin as 十四 shí sì,  which sounds like 十死 ten die, it can also be said as 一四 yī sì or 么四 yāo sì,  literally one four which sounds like want to die (要死).      In Cantonese, 14 sounds like certainly die (實死).    Not all Chinese people consider it to be an unlucky number as the pronunciation differs among the various dialects.

I came back yesterday to find the hydrangea on my front lawn in full bloom.  We call them krismisrose (Eng. Christmas roses) in South Africa – I’m not sure why.  I slept OK last night; took a 3mg melatonin tablet before going to bed.  Sometimes jet lag really sets in only on the 2nd and 3rd day after arriving, though – so I will only then know if it helped.

It’s a long day if after 11 hrs at work, you still have to go to a 2 hr dinner.    The dinner was OK and we had some good conversation that was not about work, though.    NO SHOP TALK! as we say.   And hey,  I’m going home on Thursday,  so one of the t-shirts from a Hong Kong street market is what I will wear in Seattle.    Shorts and t-shirt, just right for Seattle’s summer.

What a day at work .. but it’s over and hey! Friday is coming up.  Guess where I’m going this weekend?   Right : to the Fragrant Harbor (that is of course Hong Kong, the English name derived from two Chinese characters Heung and Gong ).

These snacks are the ones I grabbed at the grocery store tonight :  Italian Meat flavored chips, a Sam Miguel beer, dried pineapple, peanut brittle with black sesame seeds and Miso soup.   And of course peanut m&ms.  (No, I didn’t eat all of the snacks, only some).