Matts blog

So I finally have a date fcor my trip to visit Yahoo! in Taipei, so the second week of October, after the national day holidays i’m booked on a plane to hong long and on to taiwan. I’ve not taken the opportunity to stop off in Hong Kong, which is a bit of a shame, but I think its best to wait a while and get my up coming holiday to Guillin out of the way first. Now on to corriander… I just wanted to say its the best ingrediant in the world. My usual Chicken Curry this lunch was somehow even better today by simply adding some, and it was beautiful!! Lastly, at long last we have hot water at home, and I’m looking forward to taking a hot shower! I guess its the little things that make you happy I’m writing this on a very turbulent plane to beijing, with a pilot that seems intent on diving rather than descending, so excuse the bad typing!!

This a picture from a restaurant in Shenzhen. Crazy place!

I’m writing this ag the airport after a long taxi ride from the airport, it long because the airport is a long way from my house, but long because the traffic in Beijing ridiculous. My journey is only 30Km all on 2 or 3 lane roads, door to door, but this morning it took over 50 minutes, not a good average speed. So why? I really don’t know, maybe due to the ring road layout, maybe because Beijing drivers seem to enjoy being rude and slowing all the traffic by pushing in, maybe there are too many cars for the size of the roads. Coming from london, where there are very few multilane roads in the centre, I really think it has to be road layout, and driver attitude. As well as the churrent manic road building projects, Beijing really needs to make some improvements to its public transport and get car sharing schemes working or by the time the Olympics arrives no one will be able to get to the stadiums!!

Along with my new pocket PC I picked up a Dell 700m which a have to say is a beautiful laptop, best thing I’ve bought for a long time.

One of the nicest things is waking up to sunlight streaming through the windows. Only here it happens at about 6am which is not so nice

So i’ve had my new pocket PC for a couple of days and my first impressions are that it is a lot more useful and functional than my old palm T3. The main difference uis the screen, the dell having VGA screen giving more room when using the built in wifi to web browse. The network was very easy to setup as was bluetooth synchronization and connection to my headset. I’ve even got a SIP based softphone installed and working which is very cool. Activesync is much better than the palm equivalent and find the messaging software very easy to configure and use for both IMAP and Lotus Notes based email. but the best feature has to be that windows media player will play the XFM streams very well!!

I got my new Dell X50v today !!

So yesterday I picked up 2 new suits, and 2 new shirts all tailor made, and a total cost of around 75% the cost of the last off-the-peg suit I purchased, and I’m very very happy with them all. The suits are perfect copies of the western style suit I took in, and fits much better as its tailormade, perfect sleeve length, perfect body length, the trousers hang just right. The quality is very good too, maybe not as good as a western tailormade suit, but as good as a western off-the-peg suit. The construction seems very good, I’m not sure this is normal, or just because of the style of the original. The shirts are fanstastic, its the first time I’ve had shirts with long enough arms and body and fit at the neck, its a pleasure to wear, and again very good quality, and for 100RMB (6-7 quid) a shirt, its fantastic! I’ve spend a bit of 100 GBP on the lot, and its money well spent, and I’ll be going back for more shirts soon, and proberbly another suit before I leave

Or rather I wish I was Thanks to the pre winter goverment inspection of the hot water plumbing systems around where we live, there will be no hot water supply until the end of the month 10 days with out a hot shower, 10 days boiling water for a hot shave. Its not ideal, but another small reminder that I’m not in london! On the plus side, it is making me go down to the Gym for a swim and shower every day!!! We’ve just had our electricity meter installed, and it looks like we’ll get the last 1.5 months of heavy airconditioning use for free!!! I pick up my suit tonight…..

So today, I headed to a local tailor with my old Pierre Cardin suit under my arm to see about getting a new one made. After a lot of looking at fabric and even more measuring I paid some money and wondered off to look for some cheap jeans. I’m due to have a fitting on Sunday morning, and should have the suit early next week, I also ordered a couple of shirts, fully made to measure, so at long last I should have shirts with long arms and that stay tucked in. I cant wait!!!!!

I managed to grab some Diesel jeans as well, less than 50% of the price they should be according to the Diesel website, so all in all a good shopping trip.

We then had lunch and a couple of beers at Mexican Wave which, suprisingly, is a mexican restaurant, and bloody good it is too!