cdrum

Renting a Car in China

Originally uploaded by chrisdrum.

As my parents are coming this weekend (clean the house! dispose of the
“evidence”! disconnect the phone!), I decided it would be a nice gesture
for me to pick them up at the airport on Sunday morning. But, I needed
a car, as my motorbike certainly wouldn’t be able to fit three people
plus tons of luggage. Lucky for me, our office manager, Charles, has a
VIP card at an auto rental company new Guo Mao that happens to
specialize in SUVs. See the picture to the right, I have one of these
babies.

On another note, on the way to the rental lot, we stopped at the
Chaoyang District traffic police station to handle unpaid traffic
violations of someone else at the company (with great power). I must
say, I am BIG TIME impressed with Beijing’s traffic system - in terms of
fining those when people break the regulations. Beijing has a crap load
of camera around the city. I guess they have people looking at these
cameras 24 hours a day, because of the three unpaid violations, they had
video to prove it!!! Turning on a red turn light. Yep, we saw that in
color. Speeding? Yep, that one too! So, I am going to need to be
careful with the rental as it has blue (local peoples) plates - I am
fare game! [Note, with my motorcycle, I have black (foreigner) plates.
Never had an issue, except for that 5 RMB parking ticket I got two years
ago. And lets just say, I am no angle when it comes to following
traffic rules.]

Shots anyone?

Originally uploaded by chrisdrum.

How about a “Big Dick”?

Tomorrow morning, I have a 6am conference call with the states. So I am going to have a relatively early night tonight - as opposed to last night when I got home around 1/1:30. Two old friends of mine are in town, one who left China last year to go to school, the other, I went to uni with. They are a couple now - a very small world.

My headphone jack on my powerbook is on the frits. Only one side works - the left to be exact. I have tried several headphones, same issue. (they work fine with my iPod). Grrr. I wonder what is next…

You may have noticed the “Recently Watched” / “Currently Watching” sections on the left (scroll down…). The formatting is still crap. I’ll get to fixing it one of these days, sorry. I have spent some time modifying the css, but, alas, I am hardly a css wizard. Any special ideas?

And remember I posted how Flickr was [broken](http://www.cdrum.com/?p=253) when the servers moved to the US? And how I had to modify the links in the plugin to www-us.flickr…….? Well, I think they got their act together, which means, I had to revert to the unchanged plugin file. No idea how long my gallery was broken…. grr

Um, Yeah!

I want one!

Check out the rest of the site. Seems like their enjoy their work, judging from the company photo.

Um, here’s a hint. Click on the dang picture!

Morning Traffic

Originally uploaded by chrisdrum.

This is what I go through every morning on my way to work. Intersections like this, there there is no left-turn lane. We get green, the guys waiting to turn left bolt, sometimes getting through before the oncoming traffic gets there; sometimes not. Sometimes it is quite comical. Other times (when you are involved), it gets on your nerves!

Note: These guys aren’t moving in the picture… They don’t know what to do!!

Flickr, while moving their servers to the US, managed to break the plug-in I am running for my photo gallery. I managed to fix it, sort-of. Turns out that you can’t use the Flickr API with the www.flickr.com URL anymore. I had to modify the code to connect to www-us.flickr.com. I wonder if this is just temporary.

Just ignore the strange errors you see, the general gallery function works.

Ever been to a restaurant that didn’t serve free water? There is a restaurant here in Beijing that has some pretty damn good pizza - #2 in Beijing in my book. They don’t however, serve free water. (In fairness, many restaurants here don’t.) They used to. We asked one of the guys running the place, not an owner, but a “consultant”, and he said:

“Well, we used to offer free water, but it didn’t work out for us.”

What the hell does that mean?! I understand if he were to say “Well, we used to, but we found many people came here and only ordered water - taking up table space from other customers”. Ok, that makes sense. (Of course, I wasn’t the one pushing him on this subject, my friend was. I wanted to ask about the lack of excess tomatoe sauce that would make the pizza only much better, but I decided to wait…)

Note: I changed the wording of this post because Ben is a baby.

I arrived home last night and while in the elevator, the attendant and her friend, two young girls, told me that tomorrow (today) was my country’s birthday. Yikes! Would Americans know about the significance of [October 1, 1949](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People’s_Republic_of_China)?

Clutch Disc Screw - The Culprit

Originally uploaded by chrisdrum.

I posted [last week](http://www.cdrum.com/?p=241) about the issues I had with my motorbike. Gerald came to my home on Saturday to fix it. It turns out it was this Clutch Disc screw - it was loose and was hitting the gearbox housing. Ouch. All fixed now and running real well!

Go [here](http://www.cdrum.com/gallery.php?album=538482) to see pictures of the repair.

Last week, I [posted](http://www.cdrum.com/?p=233) about how a web hosting ISP I am using is made up of a bunch of idiots who, in my opinion, don’t know what the hell they are doing. Here is proof.

They replied to my email saying:

It does work:

server:/opt>ssh domain.com -l username
itunited’s password:
Last login: Wed Dec 31 19:00:00 1969
Sun Microsystems Inc. SunOS 5.7 Generic October 1998
No mail.
saturn:/opt4/home3/domain>
saturn:/opt4/home3/domain>
saturn:/opt4/home3/domain>exit
logout
server:/opt>

I can only suggest that there is some sort of incompatibility with the versions of SSH. Can you try using a command line option for the username, as I did above? Or try a SSH client?

Alana

First of all, Alana, I AM using an SSH client. OpenSSH, ever heard of it?! Second, it appears they are using ONLY SSH Protocol version 1. My client, which is constantly being updated according to the Debian Testing tree updates, defaults to using the newer SSH Protocol version 2. I won’t go into details, but, come on, why do they only allow protocol 1 connections?! Seems like they are using a REALLY old version - considering the OS is way old, SunOS 5.7. Jeez…

So, conclusion is, they are idiots. I am going to switch. I sent them an email informing them they are dumb (in nicer words, of course), but I have yet to receive a response.