Matts blog

I’ve been in Beijing for the last couple of days, last night I went out to Lotus Lane, an area of bars by a lake. My Boss and the customer decided they wearn’t really up for drinking that much, shortly after 12 bottles of Corona were ordered, so I ended up ensuring they did’nt go to waste, of course this has had the side effect of making me a little drunk, and infact this morning I’d have really liked a paracetamol to ease the pain

Beijing is very hot, and much clearer skies that Shanghai, and luckily there is no sand storms at the moment, though lots of evidence that there had been recently.

So I’ve finally heard my Radio advert debut, if you are in Shanghai, you can hear it around 7.45am on 91.4, its a Toyota advert. I’ll try and get a recording… Anyway ‘Nice To Meet You!’.

UPDATE: I managed to record the advert today: My Radio Debut

I’ve had ADSL installed at my apartment at last, and it was amzingly smooth sailing, I’ve opted for a 512K up and downstream service from CTC - China Telecom.

The engineer came to install, and after a short wait while the building handyman kroned my wires to the DSLAM I had working ADSL.

The service comes with a wireless router from abovecable conected to a no brand ADSL modem with PPPoE.

My laptop wasn’t happy talking to the router, even the admin page was talking a long time to load. After some broken english and chinese I managed to tell the engineer that there was already a CTC wireless network in the building, and the laptop was picking up the other network as they had the set the same SSID on the router.

So after a short fiddle with the SSID I had a working net connection. After setting up the forwarding rules, I can now ssh in to my apartment no problems, and I’m getting around 55Kbytes/sec over the link to most places.

Directed by
Jonathan Glazer

Genres
Drama, Mystery, Romance

Review
I’ve got to say Nicole Kidman was quiet impressive in this film, but was is a odd storyline and strangely edited. On the whole it didn’t really hold my attention so well, and I wouldn’t watch it again.

We have decided to kick off a design company, as we are getting some interest in our existing sites and graphics, such as Sanei Hokins Architects. I’ve still not seen a website that works quite like the that!

Anway, the URL for ecleago design is here or email here.

We are trying to build our portfolio, so if you have a worthy cause email us

Even though I’ve only just come back from the UK, I’m going to be in Europe from July 4th for about 2 weeks, based in Erding, Germany and Budapest, Hungry.

The company I work for - Cyclades - would like to become more involved with local linux user groups around the world, and support the good work they do.

There is a couple of user groups in Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou, but no SAGE. If anyone is interested in helping getting a SAGE chapter off the ground contact me!

I’m currently based in Shanghai working for a US company thats been operating here for around 18 months, I’ve been based here since January 2005.

I live in the Pudong on the east side of the Huangpu river which runs through the middle of shanghai. Pudong is a very new area of Shanghai, development of the area started around 10 years ago, and now hosts the new financial centre of Shanghai.

Pudong also houses the tallest buildings in Shanghai, the Oriental Pearl TV tower which is 468m but this is dwarfed by the Jin Mao Building the tallest building in China, and third tallest in the world. By 2007 Jin Mao will in turn be dwarfed by the Shanghai World Finance Centre which is aiming to be the tallest in the world. Further from the river you get to the more industrialised areas of Pu dong, and seem familiar names like Siemens, Alcatel, and such like, and further out still you get to Pud dong (PVG) airport.

The west of the huangpu river, Puxi, is the older area of Shanghai, holding the main centre of the city, the shopping areas and a large majority of the businesses seem to operate in this area. Further from the river the city turns in to a more residential areas, with districts such as Gubei by very popular with expats.

Directed by
Michel Gondry

Genres
Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi, Comedy

Review

Directed by
Bo Welch

Genres
Adventure, Comedy, Fantasy, Family

Review
It was fun and passed the time, though I’m sure if I’d thought about it I’d have found something more fun to do.