Today in China

Since beginning of June, people in China cannot access Flickr, or more preceisely, can access Flick but cannot see the pictures.

I’m sure it has nothing to do with censorship. Who could imagine this? No, I’m sure it’s just some misconfiguration of some servers betweem Flickr Servers Farm and China. I even heard other countries such as Iran, UAE and Saudi Arabia have/had the same configuration issues.

Whatsoever, it’s getting annoying and so I decided to find a way to see the pictures on Flickr…

It took me on Google Query and less than two minutes…

1. Open Firefox (well yes, Firefox… We will use a Firefox Add-on for this.)
2. Go to the Access Flickr! Add-on page
3. Install the Add-on and restart Firefox
4. Refresh any Flickr page already open
5. Enjoy!

Well, this solution still is not perfect…

First, if you use Flickr on your blog, most of the people from China (who don’t have this Firefox Add-on) will not see your pictures.

Also, it obliges you to use Firefox to browse Flickr pictures.

And then, if you use Firefox, you’ll never know when the misconfiguration of the Chinese routers will be fixed!

Source:
Sinosplice, June 12th 2007

Fourth week of the tournament!

no comment… :-S

(more…)

Recently, I noticed that both Wikipedia and Blogger (the Google Blog Platform) are available from China Mainland. No need anymore to browse Wikipedia with the Gollum Browser. It’s getting better!

But only better, the access to Google Video is still forbidden… by Google themselves. Why does Google prevent Chinese people to access the Videos? Is it for a legal reason? With the recent purchase of YouTube by Google for a mere 1.6 billions USD, I was getting worried about loosing YouTube too.

I had a look on the Internet and of course, there is a solution! And the solution is partially provided by Google!

1. Download and install Tor, an anonymous Internet communication system.

2. Download and install Google Video Player.

3. Set the Google Video Player proxy to localhost:8118

4. Start Tor.

5. Search for a video on Google Video.

6. Change the url from http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2458967493428649738 to http://video.google.com/videogvp/CompetingandCollabor.gvp?docid=2458967493428649738

That’s it! It took me less than 5 minutes to setup the whole system, download time included.

By the way, I currently have no access to YouTube from my appartment… I hope it is just temporary… :-S

Links
Tor, an anonymous Internet communication system
Google Video Player
Google Video
YouTube
Source
Isaac Mao

Lu Di, just turned 6 years old and impressed his teachers by accomplishing 10,000 push-ups in 3 hours 20 minutes!!!???!!! That’s 50 push-ups every minute or almost one evry single second? I don’t know if this is real, but it seems that his kung-fu school, in Central China’s Henan Province, will pay him his tuition for ten years.

Source
China Daily, 2006-07-27

The fifth day of the fifth month of the Lunar Calendar is the day of the Dragon Boat Festival.
This festival commemorates the suicide by drowning of the Chinese poet Qu Yuan. The Poet committed suicide after getting disgusted about the corruption of the Chu (楚) (722-481 BCE) government. Qu Yuan was known to be a good man and the local people decided to prevent the fishes from eating his body. Therefore, they provided food to the fishes and tried to scared them using boats with a Dragon Head and noisy drums.
That’s why every year, Chinese people organize Dragon Boats races and eat Zongzi (粽子, zòngzi), glutinous rice packed in bamboo leaves.

June 1st is the International Children’s Day in numerous countries.
The origin of the ICD is quite unclear but one of the possible origins is interesting…
The first ever celebrated ICD was during the the World Conference for the Wellbeing of Children in Geneva, Switzerland in 1925. In 1925, the Chinese consul-general in San Francisco gathered a number of Chinese orphans to celebrate the Dragon Boat Festiva (端午节, Duan Wu Jie). That year, the Festival happened to be on June 1st, and also coincided with the conference in Geneva.

Links
Wikipedia - Dragon Boat Festival

With the new IKEA Store in Beijing, you might wonder why people keep making their own furnitures. Well, in just two words: cheap! funny!

Last time, I drawed a television shelf, two tables for my living room and a master bed with a beautiful Dragon’s Head. All in the same color pattern: brown and red… A dark brown and an even darker red.
You should check my Reddish Dragon’s Head!!!

This time, I’m ready to design… my Computer Desk!
After squatting the table in the living room for more than half a year, I finally decided to arrange my home office decently. I decided to keep the same color theme as the other furnitures and here is where I am so far for the design. As you may notice, it’s in fact two pieces of furniture. The left one is for my computer and the right one is just a table…

And here is another design, less red and the shape of the keyboard-mouse part slightly different!

I’d like to hear from you… Any comments? Any suggestions?

Iwata Miyuki from Japan won the Asian Eating Competition in Shanghai this Sunday. Miyuki ate 5.748 kilograms of curry-sauced food within 20 minutes, beating her runner-up Chang Wing Man from Hong Kong by 1.952 kilograms.

And this was just the final…

Out of the 66 contestants, 28 made it to the second round by eating 10 puff pastries in 93 seconds for the fastest and four minutes and 22 seconds for the slowest. In the semi-final last Saturday, they had to eat as many hot dogs as possible in 15 minutes.

And no wonder that Iwata Miyuki - Japan’s Queen of Eating - and Chang Wing Man - also known as Glutton Lady - won that contest… When you know that Miyuki once ate 100 dumplings in 27 minutes and Chang Wing Man ate a a plate of Singaporean noodles in 43 seconds!

Update
This event becomes even more interesting when you know that SIAL China is gathering right now - from the 29th thill the 31st of May - in Shanghai. SIAL is the leading trade show for professionals of the food and beverage industry. It started in Europe but nowadays, you have also SIAL China, SIAL Montreal and SIAL Mercosur.

Sources
China Daily - 2006 05 29
China.org.cn - 2006 05 22

The management of the building where I live in Beijing is taking care of me… Look at the SMS I received last night:

Park Apartments kindly reminding: Dear owers/tenants, the tempreture of tomorrow is from 17C to 23C with drizzle. Please take warm clothes and umbrella with you.

Well, of course, I didn’t take this too seriously… I didn’t take my umbrella with me and left my pull-over at home. I hope it will not rain tonight after work…

As Beijing is currently phasing out the few thousands remaining 1.20 RMB taxis, the 1.60 ones are upgrading to 2.00!

In Beijing, the base fee for the first three kilometers is 10 RMB for all taxis. Then, the fare for the remaining kilometers will now be 2.00 RMB (20 cents of EUR) which is a major increase from the previous 1.60 RMB. The migration started last Saturday and should be finished before June the 30th.

While the Taxi Companies will not raise the rental price they charge drivers for their cars, those drivers are not welcoming the change. Indeed, drivers are afraid of the following two consequences. Lots of people, especially young people, will think twice before they take a cab. They also fear the increased number of hei che (黑车), literally ‘black cars‘, unofficial cheaper cabs.

But anyway, please remember that You Know You’ve Been in China Too Long When you think that taxis in China are expensive…

While Naomi Simmons outsold ‘Da Vinci Code’ in China with her English books for children, Dan Brown is still expected to make a triumph this week-end as the movie is released in China today. The movie is expected to reap more than 60 million of RMB (6 million EUR) in China with tickets selling from 45RMB to 120RMB (4.5 EUR to 12 EUR).
However, everybody in China does not welcome this movie… The Patriotic Church of China called the believers for a boycott. They see the movie and the book as insulting.
“The movie has many details that go against Catholic teachings or are even insulting,” said Liu Baining, vice-president of the China Patriotic Catholic Association to Xinhua. The movie indeed enraged a lot of believers worldwide with its suggestion that Jesus married and fathered children.
I decided to go to Wang Fu Jing (王府井) to watch the movie on Sunday and couldn’t buy a ticket except for the last show times, late in the evening. Was it because all the tickets where sold out? No!!! In fact, you had a few people who bought all the tickets and were selling them just in front of the cinema for 100RMB instead of the official price of 70RMB! So, we left Wang Fu Jing and went to the smaller cinema near the Poly Theater where we had no problem to buy tickets to watch the Da Vinci Code, a good movie but far from amazing…