Chris Drumgoole

Wow, that was a lame-ass title.

A special “Thank You” goes out to Ms. Foo for handling the tickets for our trip to Qingdao. The true master herself in planning for budget travel has succeeded once again! What, did you really think our sorry butts would actually handle the logistics ourselves? I didn’t think so…

Train ticket and plane ticket together, including tax, comes to CNY 808. That’s a little over US$100.

The hostel we’re thinking of staying at is also quite cheap - a double room is CNY 160. Nice.

Hopefully, that is!

4 years in China, I am finally going to the Qingdao International Beer Festival in August.

The above photo is provided by the (I think) official Website about the festival, located here: http://www.qdbeer.cn/2007/into.php3

I have 2 observations:

1. These guys are still using PHP 3.   Let’s get with it people - PHP 4 already has a End of Life date.
2. The more entertaining observation: The site is all in Chinese.  Yet they have two photos on that page (including the one above) only with foreigners. This is a pretty common sight in China - ads or other media targeted to Chinese but depicting foreigners.  Must be something like: “Hey People!  Look!  The crazy foreigners are doing it!  You can too!!”

Any way, the details: We depart Beijing by train Saturday, August 11, at like 6am.  We then grab a plane in Qingdao bound for Beijing just past midnight on Sunday (technically Monday the 13th).  So, there is an optimal amount of time to drink and still not have to take any time off work. (Hopefully)  My boss already told me “You better make sure your in the office 9am on Monday!”

In response to my post from yesterday, after asking for a refund, I received an email from someone else at noteburner:

Hi  Chris,

We are sorry that our support staff make a mistake.  The ID3 tag could
be resevered with iTunes, please  click iTunes’ main menu
“Edit->Preferences…” , select the “Advanced” Tab. In the “Burning”
page, please also check the option “include CD Text”. then burn the
playlist to noteburner and the ID3 tag could be resevered.

However, there is no problem If you would like to refund anyway,
please reply this email and we will refund your order.

Sincerely,

Thomas Yuan

Thank you, Thomas.  Very professional.  (No, I’m not being sarcastic).  I replied, asking for the refund.  An hour later, I receive an email from PayPal saying my payment has been refunded.

I am glad this turned out the way it did.  The product works almost - just not the ID3 side of it.  So it’s unfortunately not for me.  Any other similar products?

Note: as I was writing this post, Thomas replied to my thank you email suggesting I have a look at the website www.anvsoft.com to see if any other product interests me.  A real salesman.  We’ll see.

These guys are a bunch of scammers.

Noteburner is a clever piece of software supposed to easily convert your DRM’d tracks (from any service, not just iTunes) into nice MP3’s. “Great”, I thought, as I’ll want to be able to play the music I legally purchased in Linux when I make the move this week.

Noteburner does this by cleverly creating a virtual CD-RW in the middle, so in iTunes, you go to create a audio CD from the selected tracks, and Noteburner takes over by reencoding them to MP3.

So, I plunked down the US $40, thinking it would work like a charm - I did a little research, I didn’t see any complaints. One concern that I had was whether the ID3 tags would be preserved (Album, artist, track name, etc.). The features list of the product claims that it does.

Click on the above thumbnail to see a screen capture of the features page for Noteburner. I outlined the feature in question.

After I made the purchase, I got an email with the registration code. That worked fine. I then proceeded to convert my DRM’d tracks.

Something I found that was odd is it only grabbed the track name and artist. Not the album name, genera, or other tags. Hmm, that sucks. No album art either, I presume - although that wasn’t promised.

I then double checked to see if I had it configured correctly according to the (albeit limited) instructions online. I did.

So, I emailed tech support over the weekend.

Today, during my day, I get an email back from tech support, a person by the name of “Cui Jenny”. Hmm, I see what’s going on here - these guys are Chinese. Interesting side note - there is zero information about the company on their site at all. Only an email address. Shame on me for not doing enough due diligence.

Any way, the tech support person wrote:

Dear Chris Drumgoole,

Thank you for your support.

We are sorry there are problems in iTunes and it cannot burn music with
complete tag information. Sorry for any inconveniences.

Any other problems, please contact us.

Regards,
Cui Jenny

Excuse me?! I’m sorry, that is unacceptable. The website clearly states that the product “Preserves ID3 tags for artist, album, title names etc.” It clearly doesn’t, now does it… No where (that I could find) does the site have any fine print disclaimers stating “Sorry, iTunes doesn’t work”.

I am demanding my money back…. I’ll keep you up to date of any developments. I doubt I’ll get a response…

Don’t buy this product.

You may or may not know about the 2 guys who somehow obtained an iPhone, videoed the smashing of it, then posted to YouTube a couple of days ago.  Here’s the video.

At the time of this posting, this video had more than 2000 comments, many saying how stupid these guys are.  Fine.

But what I don’t get, is why people would waist their time to make videos of themselves saying how stupid these guys are… Here’s a few:

1. Guy drinking Canadian beer claiming he knows why these guys did it - money.  Maybe…
2. Drunk or Retard being stupid.
3. Ditsy girl asking why.
4. Idiot who doesn’t read asking a stupid question.
5. Darth Vador.  Seriously

Only in China-

There’s a story in the Wall Street Journal (full article here [$]) about the pollution problem in Beijing.  Here’s an excerpt:

“Amid concern about Beijing’s ability to clean up its pollution in time for next year’s Olympics, the city has plans to ban one million cars for a two-week test of its smog-control measures next month.

A ban on one-third of the city’s cars is among the measures being considered in preparation for the Games, and could be given a trial run next month, a spokesman from Beijing’s Environmental Protection Agency said.”

Folks who live in Beijing, mark your calendars for the two week period of August 7 through the 20th.

It will be a beautiful time - both for blue sky’s and driving

1. Speaking of X vs. Y, Opera has a Opera Mini vs. iPhone video spoof.
2. Will be going back to Tim’s 2nd tonight to try some real-menu food.
3. Apple sold 500,000+ iPhones in a 72 hour period.  Wow. Impressive.  Really…  The accessory industry is already coming out with cool accessories like this one from Belkin.  Nice work!  Can someone provide some guidance as to why one would need to buy this thing?  (i.e. why did Apple make the decision to recess the jack)
4. Found this on reddit (actually, a friend suggested I take a look).  Comments here.  I know what I want to do now…
5. Scoble has a good comparison on N95 vs. iPhone.  Relax, Ben.

07012007077

Originally uploaded by chrisdrum

Tim’s second franchise has opened. This time, it’s more Tex-Mex. Hmm. I was there for the opening, and with my trusty N95, took several photos. They are up on Flickr (note, see post below how to view Flickr in China).

The photo to the right? Got to love a xinjiang band in a tex mex joint! (A friend told me he overheard some other people talking - they thought these guys were mexican!)

All photos are here: Photos