Airport WiFi

• San Francisco : free
  
• Hong Kong: free
• Beijing domestic waiting lounge: 300RMB for cup of tea, then network is free, found unsecured office WiFi, I'll use it, of course
• Beijing international waiting lounge: operated by China Mobile. Only accepts payments via SMS on China Mobile cell phone. In fact not even all China Mobile cell phone numbers are accepted, only the most expensive packages allow user to pay for WiFi, otherwise even money cannot buy access. Fees are charged by the minutes.
• Shanghai domestic waiting lounge: operated by China Netcom (CNC). No online payment system, no cell phone payment system. User has to purchase prepaid card. There is NO card sale in the airport.

Another Stay in Beijing

March 11th to March 15th.

The use of Photoshop

« Report on Reuters actions after publishing altered photographs

A brief guide to Reuters values and standards »

The use of Photoshop

January 18th, 2007, filed by David Schlesinger

Photoshop is a highly sophisticated image manipulation programme. We use only a tiny part of its potential capability to format our pictures, crop and size them and balance the tone and colour.

Materially altering a picture in Photoshop or any other image editing software will lead to dismissal.

THE RULES ARE:
• No additions or deletions to the subject matter of the original image.
(thus changing the original content and journalistic integrity of an image)

• No excessive lightening, darkening or blurring of the image.
(thus misleading the viewer by disguising certain elements of an image)

• No excessive colour manipulation.
(thus dramatically changing the original lighting conditions of an image)

凯子一号: Tomson Riviera

Boardwalk ... Park Place ... Tomson Riviera

Shanghaiist thought the name of Tomson Riviera looked familiar, because we posted about it a couple of months ago, when part of its construction site caught on fire. Turns out after that, some people felt the fengshui there wasn't too great, and the government's attempts to cool the real estate industry haven't helped. We recently found some facts and figures about the place that we'd thought we'd share with you:

Spanning over an area of 20,000 sq m, the four-block Tomson Riviera condominium consists of two 40-storey and two 44-storey towers. Each unit is between 434 sq m and 1,200 sq m, priced at RMB 80,000 to RMB 150,000 per sq m – reputed to be the most expensive in Shanghai.

The next most expensive in Shanghai are those places by Xintiandi, which only cost 58,000 RMB per square meter -- but we wouldn't be caught dead in a place like that! According to this report (in Chinese), the prices of these residences range from a modest 39 million RMB to 190 million RMB. To buy one of these you also have to prove your assets total over 40 million RMB. One possibility is to make 40 million RMB, show them the proof, pay 39 million for the cheapest place, pay the monthly fees and eat instant noodles for the rest of your life with the remaining 1 million. Here's yet another way of looking at it -- Shanghaiist used to live in an apartment in Jing'an district that cost us 1,000 RMB a month. At that rate, our 40 million RMB would allow us to live, completely rent-free, for over three thousand years!

Posted by Peijin Chen

Shaolin Temple Meeting Uses Radio Communication

Rapter Software Glitch

F-22 Raptors' systems crash mid-flight over Pacific

Posted Feb 27th 2007 8:27AM by Jeannie Choe
Filed under: Transportation

Lockheed's shiny new F-22 Raptor stealth fighters may have owned a few war games, but crossing the International Date Line left them as helpless as a carrot in a rabbit trap, with multiple system crashes causing an emergency detour en route from Hawaii to Okinawa, Japan. Communication, fuel subsystems, and navigation systems were rendered useless and repeated "reboots" were of no help. Luckily, the fleet had clear skies and refueling tankers to guide them back to Hawaii. If they had separated from the tankers, "they would have turned around and probably could have found the Hawaiian Islands. But if the weather had been bad on approach, there could have been real trouble," states Retired Air Force Major General Don Shepperd. The voyage suffered a two-day delay on account of the system failures -- "a computer glitch in the millions of lines of code, somebody made an error in a couple lines of the code and everything goes." What should have been a showy parade of $125+ million super fighters quickly turned to disaster for Lockheed who would've had a lot of explaining to do, had this happened during combat.

[Via Slashdot]

Write as I Recall

• I was gazing at the ubiquitous dusty countryside from the sky when our plane suddenly landed - I asked the air hostess where we are, because I really did not believe this is Beijing International Airport. It is, however, The Beijing International Airport. Passengers walked off the plane down to the airfield, like a foreign delegation visiting a middle-east country. This is my first flight to Beijing, so far it is the most surprising of the dozen airport I have been flying in China.
• I took a taxi from Beijing to Datong. This is the fastest way to get there. As time approaches the Chinese New Year, travelling by train is nothing but a nightmare as I have experienced time and again as a college student. I have just been to Death Valley and this is just on the outskirts of Beijing and it just looks so much like it. There is not much green anywhere. There is not that many leaves anyway. And there is not much vegetation at all. It's just sand, rock and gravel, barren mountains, dried river beds. The view is quite depressing. Maybe it has something to do with the reason of this trip, but having been in northwestern China for years, this still strikes me as a very harsh reality. Remember this is only 100km outside the capital. If nothing good is done rapidly, the capital could see a desert in this century.
• It all went OK until the taxi exit off the highway. To be honest the highway is in pretty good condition except for grossly overloaded trucks going under 50kmh and everyone is passing on the shoulder. Once off the highway, we were in Datong. It's barely a city. There are only a few paved roads, all severely damaged by heavily overloaded trucks and there are half-meter wide potholes every half second. Children covered by back soot runs across the road, an image I have only seen in black-and-white documentary films. This is real, this is the coal capital of China, the main coal production site of the entire country. And it is really, really black. Even the air smells dark.
• Most Chinese woman do not smoke, over 60% of Chinese men smoke, including doctors. Doctors are smoking in the hallway of the hospital, in front of the emergency room and just outside the "intensive" care unit, not to mention visitors. In such a city with such smoky air I wonder why is it even necessary. Most of these people are paying for their lung cancer with a considerable portion of limited income on cigarettes.
• We hired a few coal mine workers to help us in the hospital - there is not nearly enough medical staff. The miners earn a wage of under $200 a month, yet when I saw one of them answering a cellphone call, he has a Motorola Razor. It is entirely beyond my understanding why a blue collar worker would spend over a month's income on a phone.
• The gate to the MRI room has signs in 3 languages: Chinese, Russian and Japanese.
• After huge efforts, we finally secured the allegedly best ambulance of northern China. We were told there are currently only 2 of such in China and this one cost 1.8million RMB. I do not know how much of that is government tax. It is a Mercedes, actually just a Mercedes microbus chassis. The interior and equipment does not seem remotely Germany engineering. I guess someone in Shenzhen perhaps got a dozen of Mercedes chassis, bought some import medical supplies and hired a paint shop - a 1.8million RMB Mercedes ambulance is born.
• Before the extremely urgent trip to Changsha, we had to go have lunch with the people who helped us. Like 2 hours of delay is beneficial to the outcome of the critical patient, a dozen people were waiting for us at a local restaurant. A restaurant is a gross understatement - it is so luxurious that I was confused. 2 minutes ago I stepped in this door from the catastrophically polluted shit-hole into this glamorous high-end VIP room where a lunch would blew away a miner's monthly wage (including the next month). I do not know any one of the people having lunch with us, yet everyone talked like we have been best friends for a century. The room was filled with smoke - they all smoke, heavily, and accept whole packs of cigarettes as gifts. Of course we did not pay for this, I would have refused to pay for it if asked to. Later people would bargain for hours over a few hundred RMB, yet no one seems to give a damn about a few thousand for a lunch.
  
• The doctor on the ambulance could not find the power switch, and after only half an hour, the battery on the monitor ran out. The nurse (and the doctor) is too short and cannot reach the hooks hanging from the roof. There is no secure storage and every time the driver brakes (because there is a 40kmh coal truck just decided to cut in front of a 140kmh ambulance with sirens on), glass bottles are flying across the cabin. The only storage place for staff is under the bench which runs the entire length of the cabin in one piece. Every time anyone need to fetch something, everyone has to stand up, holding bags, trying not to fall on the patient.
  
• There are as many toll stations as traffic signs. Any town, city, province can set up a toll station, not on highway exit, just in the middle of the highway, and claim a few hundred RMB for each vehicle, including ambulance. Maybe they do not charge police cars because they can put them in the car, maybe they do not charge military vehicles because they have guns. Other than that, this is a perfect business model.
• With incredible luck, we finally made it. 19 hours 1600 kilometers.
• [about 500 words are self-cens0red here]
• Now we are in a better hospital, except that people still smoke everywhere.
• And I do not know since when fireworks are allowed again in cities. I was really happy when it was banned a few years ago, it was so nice and quiet. Now there are loud, rapid, smoky explosions everywhere, all the time. Children throw little bombs from the buildings onto the street, small rockets reach the 8th floor window. It's like a war zone. Some people call it holiday atmosphere.
• I've been flying too much recently. I got tired of it. I have also realized something: Air China oversold tickets last time I came back; Air China lost my luggage in Hong Kong even though I flew Cathy Pacific this time; Air China oversold tickets again this time my wife flew to China; Air China flight to Guangzhou was delayed and blocked the boarding gate of my flight to Beijing, causing a 40-minute delay when our Hainan Airline plane is right there in front our eyes. Air China sucks.
• At 9pm, at Dongdan (the main commercial center in Beijing), taxi drivers refuses to take passenger on short trips. I was asking a taxi to go to Zhaojialou, only a few blocks east. The driver said, with a thick Beijing-accented Putonghua: 我他妈都不知道是哪儿 (I have no fucking idea where it is).
• Such a city will host the Olympics for the first time in 2008. But do not worry. They are good to foreigners.
• The power supply plug of the DELL does not work with most Chinese power outlets, where as IBM, Apple and HP plugs work very well.
• The GPS is better than expected. The built-in map is rubbish (almost empty), but the accuracy is quite impressive. I was getting DGPS outside North America, including Bering sea, Pacific Ocean and quite a few places in China as well.
• I needed a cell phone because my Cingular free phone does not work with the local GSM frequency in China. I went to a cell phone store and was totally disoriented. I gave up and asked for the cheapest tri-band GSM phone. It set me back 900RMB, a little over $110, it's infinitely more expensive (divide by zero) than my current phone. It reminds me of the coal mine worker in Datong.
• My wife was asked to wait for 3 weeks for her passport. After she finally found someone, it took less than one day. In some country, rules are made complicated so that lawyers can have a life; here, rules are made difficult so that some people can have power, so that they can have whatever else.
• 
  

Arrived in Shanghai

Tracks in Beijing

Trip Status

A Cup of Tea Costs 350RMB

In Beijing International Airport waiting lounge. That's almost 70 USD. I was not looking for tea, I was looking for network.

So I found an unsecured WiFi with 96% signal strength.

Rescue

The M0$%3@^!+&ing C41n323 Authorities

Leaving for China

Here at SFO, I am awaiting Cathy Pacific flight CX873 to fly to Beijing via Hong Kong. Mi is already in Datong. I will join them in the next 24 hours.

Mi almost missed her flight on the 24th because Air China refused to release the ticket after payment, only 2 hours before boarding. Thanks to United Airlines we did not have the ticket priced tripled to 2500. I am not flying Air China again.

Booking an international flight for the next day is hard. I was shocked to find out that any airlines' 800 numbers are not even 24-7. I called a few and they all say I was calling after business hours. Expedia does show some tickets for the next day, but Wednesday's experience told me never to trust them again. I jumped on the car and drive to San Francisco International, running across all airline check-in counters asking if they have ticket on the next day to Beijing. I got one from Cathy Pacific. It's a one-stop flight via Hong Kong and sets me back 1150, more than 870 of Air China. But with printed ticket in hand, I felt much more secure than hoping I won't need to purchase a 2000 dollar ticket upon check-in if I had chosen Air China.

The last time I went to the terminal to buy a ticket was back in college days, buying train tickets in China. Who would have imagined 7 years later I have to do the same thing for an international flight. Mi sort of did that as well, when she was forced to buy a new ticket at the counter 2 hours before boarding. Thanks to the UA hostess who saved us a load of money, for Air China and Expedia's inability to do their job.

How It Got Here

The Garmin GPS told me how it got here, in its own way:

An Antic Disposition: The Chernobyl Design Pattern

An Antic Disposition: The Chernobyl Design Pattern

AT&T Again

Change of Bulbs

Just changed all light bulbs in the house to compact fluorescent lamp. Save some electricity.

MINI USA’s Motorby Pilot Program

Got one invitation, haha :)

No Post for A Month

Still tired from the holidays, haven't finished sorting (Thanksgiving) pictures yet ...

Still cannot switch to new blogger. My blog is not huge, only around 200 posts. Why, why, why ...