Chris Drumgoole

Well folks, I think I have out done myself this time.

Really…

As some of you may know, I had to make an unexpected trip to the U.S. for a funeral. Well, I am currently on my way back to China - I am at the Minneapolis airport waiting for my flight to Narita.

Well, on the way to the lounge, I found this neet ZoomSystems vending machine selling ipods, among other things. Here’s a photo I borrowed from anoither website, click on the image to go to that Website.

Just for fun, I went to it and played around with the touch screen interface. Hmm, they have iPod Touch’s. It sure would be nice to watch my videos on that nice 3.5″ screen instead of the smaller 2.5″, or whatever it is, that I have on my 5G iPod Video… Hmm, the 8GB model is US$279.99… I figured I could transfer my videos over between the two iPods during my almost 3 hour layover. The plan was perfect!

A quick impulsive credit card swipe later, I was the new proud owner of the iPod Touch. And because it wasn’t an iPhone, it wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) have any nasty activation issues.

Ha!!

It turns out that this bloody thing REQUIRES you to “activate”, or initialize it using iTunes. And, of course, iTunes runs only on Windows and Mac.

The world is not fair for us freedom loving trouble makers…

Here’s a picture of my currently useless iPod Touch plugged into my old Appe PowerBook G4 running Ubuntu. Oh, the irony. I just had to have Linux on this thing, huh?

As you can see, it requests a connection to iTunes. Grrr…

So, I’m stuck not being able to use my new toy until AFTER my long flight - which was the main reason I bought it in the first place!

And here’s a random tidbit… For fun, I decided to scan the lounge for open bluetooth devices. Here’s a screenshot:

Steve is my phone, but it’s interesting to note the 3 computers with bluetooth and the 2 BlackBerrys. Is it normal for BlackBerry to have Bluetooth open? Maybe it’s those people with the stupid bluetooth ear pieces with the annoying “I’m Cool, But Not Really” blinking blue light…

Oh well, time to go to my plane…

Folks, I’ll be in the U.S. for most of next week: leaving early morning Saturday, January 26, and returning late evening, Thursday, January 31.

Even though this was a last minute, unexpected trip, I managed to get a relatively acceptable air ticket on Northwest Airlines - Round trip Beijing to Baltimore BWI (via Narita and Minneapolis), RMB 6,700 inclusive of tax.  Not to shabby.

And, I’ll be sharing the first leg to Narita with H.  We’re going to do a food experiment, where he gets the Kosher breakfast (there are Asian Jews, you know…) and I get the Muslim breakfast (no comment).

I suppose a good result of this trip, if there can be one, is the what was going to be a 9-day work week* (due to Chinese New Year) is now back down to a 5 day work week (Friday Feb 1 through Tuesday Feb 5) - I then fly to Hong Kong on the 6th.

Unfortunately, the Narita to Minneapolis, and return, flights are on the older 747’s, which means, us slaggers in the back (economy class) don’t get individual TV monitors.  ugh…

*Oh, to my friends who don’t know what is going on with the 9-day work week, Chinese New Year is a “Golden Wee” holiday, where we get 3 days off, plus the weekend, plus a shifted weekend, that results in a 7-day straight holiday.  The shifted weekend is made up either before of after the holiday.  In this case, we make it up on February 2 and 3.

Folks,

If you’re like me, you have a sidecar motorbike, you like to drive year round. And if you’re like me, it’s because you hate taxis for a multitude of reasons - those of which I will not go into now.

But, I have a small word of advice:

During the winter, check the damn weather report for current conditions before driving to work.

Today, I didn’t. Oh my god… Pain. Pain all over my body.

When I finally got to my office (lucky I didn’t freeze to death), I checked the weather on CNN’s website, and this is what I found:

New rule: no driving in below freezing with wind more than 5mph.

Last night I was “Toastmaster” of our Toastmasters meeting - meaning, I lead the meeting. And one of the responsibilities of the Toastmaster of the meeting is to give an intro speech and set the “theme” for the meeting - although it’s rare everyone else follows the theme.

I feel the theme I selected is important for everyone, and decided to post the speech as a blog entry. Enjoy.

Some of you may know that last week I moved into another apartment. I had been in the old apartment for about 2 yrs and figured it is time to move because our landlord was giving us a lot of trouble, first she raised the rent and started to send people to look at the apartment without even telling us. We concluded that our landlord was simply out of touch with reality. What really confirmed our deduction was when it came time for the actual move.

First, she would not allow the wuye to give us the slip to allow our moving truck to leave the complex until she had someone look at the apartment, probably to make sure we weren’t steeling anything! Of course, this refusal came on the day of the move. Apparently us telling her several days beforehand didn’t help at all. So, that delayed us a bit.

Second, when we first rented the apartment, our landlord provided some furniture in addition to the furniture that I owned. She provided a Sofa Bed, or Shafa Chuan. The Sofa and Bed, however, are mine. In the first contract we had, the two words were together, written as Shafa Chuan. When we went to sign the 2nd year contract, she rewrote it, and we didn’t realize she conveniently added a comma, so now the contract wrote that she provided both a bed and sofa. So, this was a big discussion that ultimately had me dig through our boxes to find the old contract! (This is one reason why I never ever through away any paper)

Finally, she insisted that she send us the security deposit only to an agricultural bank account, no other bank. Even after we offered to pay any transfer fee, she still refused. So, we had to spend over an hour in line one day to open the stupid bank account…

After all of this, my girlfriend and I were pretty angry and we wanted to do something to make us feel better. I thought about “conveniently forgetting” a package of extremely stinky cheese that would work like a time bomb – give it a few weeks, the apartment will stink like nothing else!

After thinking about this a lot, eventually we decided to not do anything. We both feel we did the right thing – let’s be realistic here — the landlord would probably not learn from this- she’ll always be greedy and mean. Looking back, we would probably regret this as well.

For me, knowing that I didn’t have do this ultimately makes me feel better. I know that she will eventually get what she has coming to her as life generally works in a circular motion. (Bad Karma) You get when you dish out.

So, next time you are confronted with a situation where you could react in a negative way, think about it beforehand and try just letting it go. Take the moral high ground. People in the wrong will always eventually have their day.

Sorry to my 3 loyal readers - I haven’t posted here since December 22nd! Many apologies!

So, what’s going on these days? Well, I’ve been back in Beijing since the 4th of January. Back at work since the 7th. Melanie have been here for the last almost-2 weeks, so that’s been nice.

Oh, and we moved to a new apartment! interested to know where it is? Have a look at this Google Map I made:

View Larger Map

Hopefully it shows up. I think Internet Explorer has some issues with it, so use Firefox.

We moved on the 8th on January, and we have been busy unpacking and planning our housewarming party, scheduled for tomorrow! Let me know if I forgot to invite you. Be be forewarned, it could have been for a reason! (j/k, or am I?)

Some things we’ve been preparing:

The drinks fridge. Hopefully people won’t go home thirsty…

The “bar”. I tried to get some key ingredients for the popular cocktails…

I’ll be sure to manage my alcohol intake at this party so I can be sober enough to take photos. Rest assure, I’ll post them to flickr “as it happens”.