Airline security in China

Every time I fly I wonder - do these security measures they are imposing throughout the world really help to catch terrorists?

Take for instance that humiliating search we have to go through every time. They will make you take off your shoes, unbuckle your belt, will look into your wallet and count all the money there... and now they even will check your laptop! And don't even try to bring any liquid with you, even if it's sealed 50 ml bottle of allergy medicine - you'll have to open it and they won't give a damn that it must be stored in the fridge immediately after being opened or be thrown away after three hours. There are no body cavity searches yet... but looks like these will be mandatory soon. And don't get me even started on that stupid ban on lighters and matches!..

On the plane they'll make you turn off your phone (flight mode is not enough now - apparently you phone's LCD can interfere with avionics) and sometimes will tell you to turn off your MP3 player as well. The reason for this is unknown - they just make you do it...

What's hilarious in all this is the fact that exactly zero terrorists were caught thanks for these measures. For me it loks rather like psychological study: How much humiliation will people swallow before they are fed up?

Getting mad and tired

I believe every last one person working in China who has to deal with exports will tell you that the greatest problem here is not quality or production delays but the people that are behind every order, the dreaded Export Managers. Quality tou can discuss. Production delays you can overcome, adjust order volumes or do something else. But usually the only way to do this is going through export manager... and that sometimes is just unbearable.

I regret to say that I've got myself a case just like this. In my nine years in China I thought I've seen every possible variations - from lowly migrant workers to big bosses and ministry heads. Still this one particular export manager stands out like sore (and painful) thumb.

The guy's name is Richard Fang. His trademark is lagging. If there was some competition like "The most useless manager in China", this one would automatically qualify for finals. It's the only Chinese manager I've encountered so far that will tell me that his mobile has ran out of power and he had to charge it for three days - that was his excuse for doing nothing with our order. When he says that order will be ready in time you can add two weeks to the date... and still it's not guaranteed that they'll start the production.

I'm writing this entry while on the road to the factory. Finally there's something that needs QC... and only two weeks behind the schedule. Previous batch was late two months! Did I hear something like "Sorry.."? Not once! and that would be his usual way... and he still is an employee here! Now that would be highly unusual for China - usually they make a short work of such people who spoil the company image... but this situation makes me willing to resort to violence. It's a pity I'll never do it...

Standard Skinny Girl shows

This morning while browsing the Web I ran into an article. Chinese final of 4th Asian Supermodel contest just finished. Now is it just me or all these contests look disturbingly like dog shows?

You see, the dogs are bred to have a certain standartized look. It may not be healthy for a dog - indeed, short-legged long-bodied dogs suffer from back problems, bulldogs have problems with breathing, and so on, and so forth. Now take a look at these models. Don't they remind you of some common household item? For me they bear a striking similarity to the clothes rack, and in no way a clothes rack can be considered beautiful. Looks like last year's motion to ban starved-looking models was not successful, after all...

And the most stupid thing about such contests in Asia is trying to squeeze Asian girls into European standards. Not even European, but some requirements for the walking clothes rack concocted by fashion "industry". Instead of promoting the beauty of Asian women they promote cheap imitations of European perversions...

Google did it!

They finally did it! Google is going to release a desktop OS. That will teach those who were joking about it to be careful, eh?

There were numerous warnings and rants about so-called "Google OS" over the years. Usually people explaining why it will be "worse than Microsoft" were citing privacy reasons and some half-formed fears (a Big Corporation will be holding all your data in their online storage... they surely are aiming for the world domination!). Other tended to use the name "Google OS" to refer to the package of online software services provided by Google. Well, according to the BBC article, it will be just another OS, not some evil scheme for world domination. Bit of a disappointment for all the conspiracy theorists out there.

Chinese millimeters are different!

I cannot complain about my job. Well I can complain about many things related to it but still I like it. But sometimes it's just a bit too much, if you know what I mean. So I'll try to vent my frustration here.

As almost everyone who worked in China will tell you, the biggest problem in China is called "Chinese people". Or to be more precise - their way of thinking. After couple of months in China you will learn to fear the phrase "mei shi" (means: it's nothing, it will do as it is!). Usually it is used as an answer to your request to replace substandard or outright broken product. And your specifications will resemble German novels, being long, precise and very hard to read. Because if you don't include something in specification you may be asking for disaster.

Please don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to say that Chinese people are stupid or inferior or something like that. It's just different understanding, different perception of the world that makes it hard for both sides. And today I ran headlong into the perfect example of that difference.

You see, the company I work for is ordering lighting fixtures and other such stuff here in Ningbo. One of the important parameters is a cross-section of the power cord, which should be at least 0.75 square millimeters. So I will take a micrometer and check it - only to find out that in reality cross-section is more like 0.60 square mm. Turns out that there are several "variants" of 0.75 mm cross-section (all of them less than real 0.75 mm) - and the guy is genuinely shocked when you say that it must be changed. "But it's OK! There' written 0.75 square mm here!", he would say. Apparently Chinese millimeters (and other -meters) are different from European...

Mobile troubles

So it's time to take a look at mobile blogging again. After switching to Wordpress I thought that life will be easier as there are several freeware clients for Wordpress out there.

Because of time constraints I decided to check two clients. One called TBlogger looked promising so I got myself a .CAB file, installed and... it doesn't start. Well, turned out it does start but every click makes it load something big or recompile Linux kernel or search for the meaning of life or do something equally time-consuming. It took the program five minutes to start and it hung for 16 minutes out of 20. As far as I was able to get the program's actually pretty good (it connected to this blog without any problem, downloaded all the messages...). The only drawback was impossibility to actually write a post, as damned thing just hang there taking up all system resources doing nothing. Maybe it has something to do with TBloger being .NET application?

So I started moBlog again. Setup was a tiny bit harder (I had to remember login URL for this blog, that's all), but so far it looks pretty good. Startup was fast, after initial setup it found both blogs connected to this account. Post categories also were retrivied correctly. The only drawback would be additional scroll bar in the post editor while in landscape mode. You have to scroll down after writing the first 12 or so lines or you won't see what you're writing.

Test platform for this post is HTC Kaiser a.k.a. TyTN II.

Guangzhou in my eyes

Just found this on my hard drive. That's what you get when someone in Guangzhou makes "Ancient Greek" statue. Right - you get rams!

And when you have the river flowing through the city Chinese are sure to try and catch some fish there! It doesn't matter that the river sometimes smells of something unhealthy and that it isn't exactly clean... no such trifle can stop a real fisherman!

When building, they try to create a small park from the apartment block, complete with trees and flowers and ponds. Well, not always... but when you rent a flat, just make sure it's one of these apartmens! Nothing can compare with a short walk in such park, listening to the sound of frogs and occasional splash of fish in the pond.

There are much more photos on my hard drive, so this series will be continued sometime. Stay tuned!

Two birds with one stone, or Write one, publish two

Now that I've got two blogs, I decided to try and keep them in sync. The best way for this? Offline blogging! You write the post once, and then publish it multiple times. After checking several pieces of software I selected one called Zoundry Raven. It's open sourcem it supports multiple blogs and it can publish to several blogs at once. Oh, and it supports installing as a portable application so you can put it to your thumb drive and take it everywhere with you. Drawback? Well, there's one: It's Windows only...

Migrating from Blogger to Wordpress: Ain't that easy as it should be!

As I said before, I had to change my blog host. Now, the problem was that there were some entries, tags and whatnots that I wanted to carry over to the new hosting. Shall be easy, no? Au contaire, my friends!

Oh yes, there is Blogger import button in the Wordpress control panel allright. It just didn't work for me (authentication problems with Google Data API). And ATOM file exported from Blogger control panel could not be imported into Wordpress directly. Several offline blogging tools that I tried to use were of no help either.

Finally I have found the solution. Google provides some Perl code for conversion (as I have no sensible way to run Perl scripts, these were of no use to me). Now some people just took these tools and created an online service called Blogger2Wordpress. It works like magic, taking Blogger's ATOM backup file and outputting Wordpress XML which can then be used with Wordpress import feature. Just go to the Blogger control panel and export your blog (Dashboard -> Settings -> Basic -> Export blog). After that go to the Blogger2Wordpress site, browse for the file you saved your blog to and you'll get a Wordpress backup file. Now go to the Wordpress dashboard (Dashboard -> Tools - > Import) and click " Wordpress " in the list that'll appear on the right. Select the file you've just received and voila! - you get all of your Blogger blog imported to your Wordpress blog. Neat, eh?

Great Chinese Firewal, or New Blog Hosting

I had to change the hosting provider I've been using for this blog. Now the main blog hosting will be Blog.com. The change was forced on me by the fact that Blogspot.com is apparantely blocked by the Great Chinese Firewall. I know nothing of the reason for this. Maybe it's just a byproduct of YouTube being broken (and even Google will be blocked occasionally here!). Maybe it's because some people started getting too political in one of the blogs. Maybe it's something else, like quirky routing in Ningbo. Honestly, I don't care. I'm too lazy already and I don't want to use anonymizers just to write blog entries - so here we are.

From now on I hope to publish all entries to two blogs - on Blog.com and on Blogger (which will be used as backup).