China Musings

This is a video taken during our trip to HK for our 3 year anniversary. The Avenue of the Stars is HK’s answer to the famous Mann Theater in Los Angeles. It was recently completed and I guess they have been holding live shows there on a weekly basis. We happened to catch one of the acts while we strolled the lane. The Avenue itself is placed at the tip of the Kowloon peninsula, right across from the famous HK skyline. The view was really nice and we had a great walk.

CM#7 Hong Kong Skyline

Just uploaded a wikified version of my Mom’s site for the Lau Reunion 2006. If takes the pages my Mom made in Freeway, but puts in the simpleCMS software we use.

It was pretty simple, the only holdup was the awful HTML output by Freeway. Plea for all HTML editing programs: “HELLO, its 2005!” Let’s leave behind the slice/table method for good, OK. If we want to continue to develop the web platform, we have to MOVE. All of us. That means YOU Mr. I love tables!

We have a date. Interview Dec 12, 2005. That is when Alison will have to convince the US that she really wants to be with me. We should get a visa within a few days after that.

This video was taken on a grocery run around the ‘hood. We live on a small alley that runs parallel to a larger road. Our community is made up of small, old, old, dwellings and newer block style apartment buildings. Although I appreciate the historic feel of the flagstone lane and the ageing architecture of days long past, I have come to realize that a lot of the people living in these old houses are also still mired in a standard of living that many of us thought we had left behind. Many of these small places have no or very little indoor plumbing. Cooking is done outside, as are clothes washing and sometimes hair washing.

We live in a very peculiar part of Guangzhou, and it is in no way indicitive of the rest of the city. There are several different situations which I hope to bring to you over time, so you can get a chance to see the dynamic nature of life in China.

Chinese Lesson:
路 Lu - Road [street, lane, way]
街 Jie - Street [road, lane, way]

The main street you see is Duobao Lu 多宝路, while we live on Duobao Jie 多宝街. In this case I would say the taxi takes us to Duobao Road, but we live on Duobao Way.

Geekspeak follows:
After spending hours over the weekend and last night trying to find some way to reduce the size of my movies, I finally broke down and upgraded to Quicktime Pro. So, now, instead of 10MB for 30sec we are down to 2MB for 30 sec, which is much more reasonable. The picture is not quite as large or as sharp, but you’ll deal.

Just a quick case in point for anyone who thinks Macs are too expensive: I spent countless hours downloading no less than 8 different video editors and converters in Windows and Linux and not one of them could both load my camera’s mpeg4 files and manage to not crash. When Tori brought over her iBook a few months ago when she was still here, I was able to spend 6 hours putting together a 5 minute movie from15 different clips, with music, titles, and trasitions, with iMovie. Comes right with the computer.

Anyway, Quicktime Pro doesn’t give me all the mutli-track goodness, but it does allow me to serve up my movies in slick H.264 iPod optimized format, and that’s good enough for me.

CM#6 Duo Bao lu

I realized that I could include a lot of content in this feed that I have collected but not really let anybody listen to. This was recorded for the magazine Crazy English. They have a magazine for english learners. It is printed bilingually and comes with a CD so you can listen and follow along. This was my first recording with them, about 5 months ago. Since then I have had about 6 sessions for various things. Most recenly it was a entry level English book for 3-4 year olds. A lot or Mr. Dog and Hungry Wolf voices. That was actually kind of fun.

CM #5.5 The Little Prince Chap. 21

I am working right now on bringing my ERP system into the Java1.5 fold. My original impressions are not terribly positive. I like the new for each syntax, that is very handy, but for generics, I feel it is just more typing…

Sorry, bad puns aside, in comparison to C++ templates which I like a lot and find are necessary, there isn’t anything in my java code where I have found that I needed to use generics. Maybe this will change with time.

I guess I have to learn more about it before I start really talking about it. I just refreshed the system today though, with all the underlying structural code converted to java1.5 This doesn’t necessarily mean it uses it in the right way, but I went through and parameretized my SQL code, which was fun. It helped to get rid of a lot of extra code I had in there to catch exceptions and the like.

After striking out on cheap street, we took the Metro to Teem Plaza (天河城广场) This place was the biggest mall in Guangzhou until the Vanguard Mall opened up next door about 6 months ago. In any case, Teem Plaza is big enough. We took a look at some Sony Laptops and Alison browsed the leather bags. This is a quick look just to get a sense for the size of the place. We also shared some tasty mango gelato.

CM #5 Teem Plaza

This weekend I went shopping with Alison. We stopped by one of her favorite stores, the 5 kuai shop on Zhongshan 6 Rd 中山六路. Zhongshan Road, named for revolutionary leader Sun Yat-Sen (Sun Zhongshan in standard mandarin), is split into 8 parts and runs right through the heart of old Guangzhou. This particular section is a fairly good representation of WWII era architecture. The buildings here are not in especially good repair, and in other places, these style buildings are being torn down by the block. But in some areas they are being lovingly restored. I’ll have to take some video of one of those places.

CM #4 Zhong Shan 6 Lu

This is a video I took the last time I was in Baokang, Alison’s hometown. It shows her eldest sister making one of my favorites, fried poatoes.

While we were there, the whole family ate together pretty often, and da jie (literally big sister) did most of the cooking. You will see here how she expertly takes care of this dish, very straightforwardly.

CM #3 Cooking with Da Jie

Alison decided to come out from behind the door and say hi!

CM#2 Welcome from Alison