Posts for year 2006

We’re off!

The year’s work is done and we’re feeling quite ready for a holiday.More than ready, in fact. So it’s a darned good thing that we’re heading off to New York for Christmas and NYE.Ciaociao!




Camera update

While I was away I mostly used my 17-85mm f/4-5.6 lens. I was surprised that there were only a few occasions when I really wished I had a better zoom — mainly when I went to see the Great Wall @ Mu Tian Yu, and in the Forbidden City.One thing that Tim advised me to do was to get a 50mm prime lens (Canon make a 50mm f/1.8 and f/1.4), and actually move around so that I could find the right position to take the photo in. M also recommended this, especially since this is my first real camera and I’m a real noob with it.It wasn’t until my second last day that I actually acquired a 50mm lens. I’d negotiated prices at Top Electronics Plaza (next to Hailon and Zhongguancun E-Plaza) quite a bit, but I didn’t actually make a purchase until one of the blokes from the office came along with me. I did get a better price that way .. image:: /images/smilies/icon_smile.gif

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Anyway … I made a determined effort to minimise my zoom usage, to move around a lot and to just take lots of photos in general. And since I was walking to and from the office most days, I was able to figure out a few spots where I should position myself in order to get some nice photos. I think I managed about a 30% strike rate (non-blurry, “worth a second look” photos). I’m mostly happy with that percentage, given that I got the camera just a few days before I flew to Beijing, and I’ve never had a DSLR (or SLR) before now.Hopefully, with experience, practice, time and a bit of research into the technology and science behind the art, I’ll be able to improve that strike rate just a tad.




Gradually getting photos webified….

I managed to take about 700 photos while I was in China. A lot of them are crap, and a lot of them didn’t turn out — shakiness on my part, under- and over-exposed… all those sorts of issues.Those that I am happy with, however, I’ve started to “webify” using Gallery 2. At the moment I’ve got two ‘albums’ – from the wine dinner for Chateau Ste. Michelle which was held at the Garden Of Delights restaurant near Wangfujing, and my trip to Beihai Park with Forrest, Sophie, Vector and Robs.You can get a good view of the park with this Wikimapia link.More, of course, when I get my act together and get the photos sorted!`Technorati`_ tags: topic:{Technorati}[Beihai Park], topic:{Technorati}[Garden of Delights], topic:{Technorati}[Gallery2], topic:{Technorati}[Chateau Ste. Michelle], topic:{Technorati}[Wikimapia]




Back in Oz

QF192 from PEK (Beijing Capital International Airport) departed about 90 minutes late, we appeared to lose some time coming over The Phillipines, but eventually I got home yesterday arvo by about 2:30pm. Severely lacking in sleep thanks to Mr Inconsiderate in front of me, and Airbus’ stupid seating in cattle class. At least it was warm when I got off the plane.More later, once I’ve recovered a bit more.




How to add a locale

Since I’m now back in Sun, albeit on a contract, and part of a team based in Beijing, I thought it would be really handy to be able to render Simplified Chinese characters in JDS (and CDE). It was really easy to find the font packages, but I didn’t have a clue which ones I really needed.A quick “please point me to TFM” question on #opensolaris this morning showed me the way: localeadm(1M).It was really easy to use:

# localeadm ---l ---d /media/SOL_11_X86
# localeadm ---d /media/SOL_11_X86 ---a china

I did have some problems along the way, due to the package inventories for the Blastwave Faroese (CSWaspellfo) and Kushibian (CSWaspellcsb) aspell packages having some bizarro characters (from an en_AU perspective) just lumped into /var/sadm/install/contents. Once I had removed those, the addition of the Simplified Chinese locale was a snap.Making use of it though … I had to logout, then go back to the console login so I could correctly kill of dtlogin and then run

# svcadm restart svc:/application/font/fc-cache:default
# svcadm restart svc:/application/x11/xfs:default

If you don’t restart at least the fc-cache service, then your font cache will be out of sync and your JDS login will die leaving a corefile in $HOME from gnome_segv2.Once I got logged back in correctly, I went straight to my zh test page and on mouseover there are now none of those ugly boxes with numbers. Yay!Once you’ve got everything setup correctly, you’ll notice in your process table entries such as these:

14132 /usr/bin/iiimx ---iiimd
14133 iiimd ---nodaemon ---desktop ---udsfile /tmp/.iiim-jmcp/:0.0 ---vardir /home/jmcp/.iiim
14135 iiim-xbe

Technorati tags: topic:{Technorati}[locale], topic:{Technorati}[localeadm], topic:{Technorati}[Beijing], topic:{Technorati}[damned square boxes], topic:{Technorati}[Solaris], topic:{Technorati}[OpenSolaris], topic:{Technorati}[Blastwave], topic:{Technorati}[fc-cache]




Hang on, I mentioned the cold

In my previous entry I forgot to really mention what effect the cold weather here is having on me. I wound up, despite having a really warm coat, gloves and a woolen scarf on top of 2 t-shirts, feeling frozen to the core.This morning Robs and I walked to the office per our habit, taking photos along the way, and by the time we got to the corner of Chengfulu and Zhongguancun Donglu my chin was so frozen I had trouble talking properly. And yes, my chin was covered! I understand now why the face mask is so popular. Not only does it keep the smog out, but it keeps your chin kinda warm so you can be understood once you’ve entered a building.The forecast for today was 0C to a relatively-balmy 8C. For tomorrow it’s -1C to +7C!I’m just not coping too well with the cold. Yesterday’s tourist outing left me with a horrendous runny nose and sinuses which kicked me all night and day. (And they’re still kill me now). Fortunately for me one of my team here was kind enough to tell me where a local pharmacy was so I could get even some minimal pain relief and also translate Paracetamol and Ibuprofen for me so I wouldn’t have too many problems asking for something to help.Even though I though Sydney was too damned cold in the winter months, Sydney’s range of ~4C to ~16C would be heaven in comparison to Beijing. It’s not even the coldest part of the year here either, which I find somewhat scary.(Note to F, C and J:: just because Sydney is coming out favourably in a winter temperature comparison doesn’t mean I want to keep living there! :->)




The cold does have an effect on me

On Saturday the weather was really bleak, so I decided against going to the Forbidden City. Instead I walked around Renmin Daxue looking for a tshirt for M instead. I didn’t find one, even though I looked all over the campus. All I could find were Beijing 2008 souvenirs and merchanise. A bit of a disappointment, so I wandered back to the hotel via Zhongguancun E-Plaza and Top Electronics City where I tried negotiating prices on a few items that I’d like. I didn’t have much success, perhaps I was too aggressive. On a brighter negotiating note, one of the blokes in SCERI who I work with has offered to come with me and help .. image:: /images/smilies/icon_wink.gif

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That should be a lot of fun.So Saturday was a bit of a write-off.Sunday, however, the sun came out. I rang and spoke to J for a while (and it was soooooooooo good to hear her voice again, even when she scolded Codercat for bringing in a huge lizard), and then I caught a cab across town to Tianmen Square and the Forbidden City.It took me three attempts to get the taxi driver to realise where I wanted to go — being minutely (ok, barely) familiar with the Beijing dialect, I pronounced Tiananmen as “Tian” “an” “men”, three separate words. The taxi driver ran them together as “Tiarmn” … fortunately I had a map to show him where I wanted to go, and so 40RMB later I got to the Great Hall of the People, which forms the western boundary of the Square. I walked around the hall (took me a good few minutes because it’s really big like everything else here), and then while I was lining up some shots of the Square and the portrait of Mao Zedong on the Forbidden City, three young bloke came and asked to take photos of me with them with Mao’s Mausoleum in the background. Well, that’s what we figured out after a minute or so of gesticulation and total lack of verbal communication skills on my part. I took a photo of the three with the Mausoleum in the background too. I think I framed it ok, and I hope it turns out ok.From there it was across the road into the Square between the Monument to the People’s Heroes and the Mausoleum. There was a solitary guard there, behind the low fence. Fortunately, I guess, it wasn’t open, so there weren’t great snaking lines of people wanting to go in. It was also really windy so nobody really stood around to look at anything. Then it was off to the north end, where the massive national flag is situated, under the road via the underpass and off to the Meridian Gate (south gate) of the Forbidden City.{Incidentally, somebody mentioned to me that they thought Chang’an Avenue was wide enough to land a 747 on. I have to say that I think they were correct. It is definitely wide enough, and certainly long enough}.Tian’anmen, or the Gate of Heavenly Peace, is what I had pictured as being the main entrance to the Forbidden City. Boy was I wrong! It’s merely the southern-most gate of the complex, and it’s entirely outside the 57m-wide moat. Once you get through Tian’anmen with its 20m thick walls you find yourself in a courtyard outside the South Gate (Meridian Gate) full of stalls and people. People who try to sell you lots of trinkets and general crap, as well as beggars and people who will offer to be your guide. I avoided all of them except one fellow who I bought a multilingual souvenir guide to the Forbidden City from — 25RMB well spent I thought. You can recognise it by the almost-square format and the Cyrillic on the bottom of the front cover. He had wanted 50RMB for it originally, but I haggled by walking away. At 25RMB (=~4AUD) I couldn’t refuse, and I hadn’t really wanted to buy it anyhow. (As it turns out, it was a timely purchase, but more on that later).Then to the ticket window, 40RMB (don’t forget to ask for a map, like I did), through the ticket gate and the 10m-thick walls of Taihe and then you’re into the Forbidden City. Nowadays it’s called the Palace Museum and while a good portion of it is closed to the public, there is still a massive number of rooms, artworks and artefacts to look at. One thing that did disappoint me is that the Hall of Supreme Harmony (in the centre of the complex) is under repair, and thus off limits. It was covered in green fabric and scaffolding and there were signs up saying that it’s due for completion in (iirc) 2017 or some equally long way off date. I guess I’ll have to go back

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From there I went to the right hand side and walked through …. hell, I lost track of where I walked. I didn’t get a map of the whole palace, so I was somewhat lost, and I just kept walking and photographing …. I saw amazingly thin and translucent pieces of stoneware, sculptures from various semi-precious stones that looked like preserved flowers ….I will have to go back, next time with a friend from the office who’s willing to spend an entire day there with me and J, if I can manage it.So at about 4:20 I started heading back to Tian’anmen, because the loudspeakers started playing muzak and there were announcements requesting that everybody leave and time our visits better. I got to Tian’anmen just in time to be barricaded in behind the full platoon honour guard for the flag lowering. That’s the massive national flag in the square. The troops were all polished and shined up, had their rifles with fixed bayonets …. even though all I could see was the back of their heads it was still an impressive sight. I remember seeing the Venetian flag lowering in St Mark’s Square last year, and this was just as powerful an experience. I just wish I’d been through the gate in time to see it from the Square.Since I’d left my departure from the Palace so late in the day, I didn’t get a chance to go and purchase any souvenirs or postcards, so I’m really glad I spent the money on the guidebook earlier in the day. I also think that I might have seen 1/3 of what there was to see. It’s just staggering how much there is.Once the wait and the ceremony had concluded — took about an hour all up — I figured I’d get a taxi back to the hotel. Nobody was going to stop anywhere near the Square though, so I kept walking west along Chang’an until I got to Huayuanjie and noticed there was a shopping mall of some sort. This was about 3km away from Tian’anmen, the breeze had picked up again, and I was damned cold by then. The competition for taxis was fierce, but eventually I got one. Unfortunately the taxi driver didn’t really know where to go, and it was only when I said “Renmin Daxue” that he recognised what I was saying. (Note to self, have the hotel’s phone number on speed dial….). Even then, he asked me whether it was east or west of where we were. I got to Renmin Daxue and he refused to go any further even though Shuzhoujie was clearly indicated and I told him to take it. So another 15 minutes in the freezing cold wind and I got back to the hotel to defrost.One thing which M had mentioned just before I flew here is that Beijing is a tourist Mecca for Chinese as well as the rest of the world. This was something that was writ large for me yesterday. Apart from a tour group of Europeans gathered around a Danish flag, I saw perhaps 10 European faces all day, out of several thousand people both in the Square and in the Palace. It was a real eye-opener for me — here’s an ancient city (now with 20million or so residents) which is a tourist destination of choice for well over 1 billion people….. from the same country. Then there’s the rest of the world which is fascinated by China and her culture. On some levels it freaks me out .. image:: /images/smilies/icon_smile.gif

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But all in all it was a very good day, except for the freezing breeze, the resulting temperature and getting back the hotel afterwards.I took about 260 pictures yesterday, so once I’m back in Sydney I’ll spend a bit of time getting them into a publishable state. In the meantime I hope my words are enough to help you draw pictures in your mind’s eye.`Technorati`_ tags: topic:{Technorati}[Tian an men], topic:{Technorati}[Great Hall of the People], topic:{Technorati}[Mao's Mausoleum], topic:{Technorati}[Forbidden City], topic:{Technorati}[Chang An avenue], topic:{Technorati}[Renmin Daxue], topic:{Technorati}[Zhong guan cun]




Not quite sure what I was expecting, really

I just got back from the Crowne Plaza where I joined a few others from the office (Robs and Melanie amongst others) for a Thanksgiving celebration.That hotel is seriously 5 star — just check out the reception desk: +------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | .. image:: http://www.jmcpdotcom.com/blog/wp-content/Thanksgiving_CrownePlaza_reception1.jpg

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but even the espresso was CNY28 (=~ AUD4.70) which with the 15% service charge they add to everything works out to approx AUD5.40 …. just a tad expensive in my book.At any rate, dinner was a very nice buffet but when I sat down to eat it with knife and fork it just felt wrong. So I cut up the turkey and then ate with chopsticks. .. image:: http://www.jmcpdotcom.com/blog/wp-content/Thanksgiving_chopsticks.jpg

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Another first for this trip

This is a trip of first — first time clambering over one of the Wonders of the World, first time in China, first time travelling with a good camera and having some clue about how to use it …. but I think the ‘first’ which is really going to set this trip apart is that I’m joining a group of the local American expat community (all Sun) tonight for a Thanksgiving dinner at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Yanyuncun.It’s not something I’m used to (same goes for Halloween) except as an observer from the outside (“why hasn’t X replied to my email yet? Oh … Thanksgiving”), so this is going to be fun.




I’m glad I got a good coat

I walked back from the office this evening, leaving about 5pm. It was cold. Damned cold. So cold in fact that by the time I got to the intersection of Beisihuan Xilu and Zhongguancun Dajie, I couldn’t feel my chin.I took a few photos of the traffic. This is the intersection that we’ve been avoiding crossing in the evenings, because it’s …. uh …. somewhat scary with all the cards, trucks, buses, various types of bicycles, and the number of people. It’s easier on the head to walk 200m south and cross near the new subway constructions site. .. image:: http://www.jmcpdotcom.com/blog/wp-content/22nov_traffic1.jpg

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