Matts blog

No, I’m not going on another trip round this fantastic Continent, but I have finally finished the write up of the trip I finished 18 months ago. I’ve not been through and grammar or spell checked it yet, and as most of it was written on my Pocket PC on planes flying around China, I suspect its not got the best level of English, but at least its up and available. To start at the beginning click here

The Met police said it would take 40 days when I sent it off, and guess what? It did!  The good side is that I finally have the UK police report I need to complete my documentation supporting my skilled migrant visa.

Wosh have carried out an upgrade to the service resulting in download speeds jumping from around 100Kb/s to 180Kb/s which means I now reach the 10Gb data cap even more quickly now

This is a little video clip of a lunchtime meal in Guangzhou (Canton).

I thought I’d start a podcast, just for the fun of it, and as my Video camera doesn’t arrive in the China shipping ’till monday, I thought I’d start with an audio track from Shanghai

After a lot of investigation in to the various services for broadband in New Zealand I went out and picked up a Woosh wireless modem from Newmarket DSE on a 10Gb/month contract.  It gives us the ability to be able to move around within the coverage area and means we don’t need to sign up for a POTS line or ADSL service untill we work out where we will live.

So far I’ve found it great, pretty fast (~100Kbytes/sec from USA sites) the latency is a little high (around 150ms within NZ, and 350-400ms to US) but this was expected with a wireless service, it is consistant so have been able to sucessfully use VOIP with www.0064.co.nz.

So I got a call from the NZIS today, in fact I got 2, but the second one is the more important one - My Work Visa has been approved!!!!! It may only be a little piece of paper in my passport but its SO COOL!

What is even more interesting is that the EOI that I lodged in December to be a Skilled Migrant has been selected to be taken further - so I guess they are checking over my form and checking everything, so hopefully I can start the process to residency soon too. All I need now is a job

Theres been an awful lot of discussion in the media about Google and exactly what it is up to in China and having been in Googles offices in China I was in a position to comment. So I started punching various things in to google.com and google.cn, obviously I was doing this from outside the ‘great firewall of China’ as I’m in Australia at present, and would you believe what I found - HUGE differeneces in search results.
You can see from the screenshots below what I mean, this is from searching for ‘tiananmen’ on google images.

http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen


http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen

Obviously after having ADSL in China for so long I knew a lot was censored - I couldn’t access news.bbc.co.uk for example, but I kind of got used to firing up a VPN client and accessing websites via the US. I had no idea the differences were quite so big its really quite disturbing.

I’ve spent the day rewriting my CV, I had updated it during the last couple of weeks in Beijing and it seems my english had fallen to an all time low and it contained fantasticly big mistakes. I guess spending so much time speaking broken english had effected my more than I’d thought. The good news is that I must be getting better again

From a Cyclades press release on the website it seems Avocent have acquired them for $90m. I’d heard a rumour that something like this was to happen, but wasn’t expecting it to happen so soon. I wonder what the plan is now? Will Avocent integrate Cyclades technology in to their current platform?? Will Avocent take the customers and drop the technology? What will John and Daniel do? So many questions…. Maybe I should have stuck around a little longer to find the answers.