I’ve just come back from a wedding in Manchuria - in Liaoning province, that is, part of China’s northeastern rust belt. Getting there from Beijing was fascinating; it took only four hours on the super-modern electric train to Shenyang. From there, it was a forty-minute drive to the town where the wedding took place. Here the [...]
My old G4 12″ iBook recently started making really loud grinding noises, which seemed to come from the bottom left-hand corner. Sometimes, when I started it, it gave an error message saying that it couldn’t find a hard drive.
Oops. Not good.
A trip to the new Apple Store in Sanlitun village led to me “checking in” [...]
A haven for the South Asian migrant workers, and an interesting insight into the services needed by an insecure, low-paid service force.
The LIFT Asia conference starts today, and I can’t be there. Bummer. I had really hoped to attend; the LIFT conferences is one of the more interesting gatherings around, from my particular set of interests. Alas, the new semester starts next Monday, and today and tomorrow I have meetings that Shall Not Be Missed… Ah, [...]
I’ve just moved in to my new apartment, on the inner side of Beijing’s north-western Second Ring Road. This road was built where the city’s ancient defensive walls used to stand, so “inside the second ring road” means “inside the historic part of the city”. One of Beijing’s little mysteries, by the way, is that [...]
Coming to the end of a couple of weeks’ holiday in Singapore, it strikes me that when I fly back into Beijing on Wednesday morning it will be different…. For the first time since my first stay there in 2004, Beijing won’t be looking forward to the Olympics… I wonder whether it will make a [...]
All things change, and the globalized economy is no exception. The globalization of the early noughties was based on cheap oil - but oil isn’t cheap any more. At the same time, globalization took the internet… almost everywhere. Two stories that I found via Slashdot show future directions…
Rising fuel costs make outsourced manufacturing less desireable. [...]
Living in China is fascinating in very many ways; one of them is watching the transformation of values as prosperity spreads through Chinese society. The Chinese are, of course, just like everybody else: they want security, consumer goods, education… and that shouldn’t be any surprise; it’s odd sometimes to hear Western commentators (especially in the [...]
OK, I grant you that I could have done all this before, but really: which genius decided that the best time to take Singapore’s online tax-filing system down for two days of maintenance was the last weekend before the filing deadline? For goodness’ sake…
