cdrum

So, for the first time in 6 years of living in Beijing, a friend from back home has visited!  (Yes, Derek did visit Shanghai on a business trip 2 years ago and I went down to see him, but that doesn’t count!   Jason braved the H1N1 Swine Flu control measures, his temperature was checked some 3 times before getting out of the airport, to visit me (well, he came to see Beijing, but I’m here, so I take that as he’s here to see me!

Another first for me yesterday was we went to see an Acrobatics show.  In 6+ years of living here, I never went to see an Acrobatics show!  Here are some pics!

Well, today is my last exam at school.  It’s 口语, or speaking exam.  It’s only about ten minutes of speaking to my teacher.  I did well on the mid term, and aren’t too worried for this final.  I should still be in the running to get about 50% or 75% of my tuition back on Friday through my school’s scholarship program.  Weird, they just give you cash on the spot at the commencement “ceremony”.  I think other schools give you scholarships towards the following term.

Things are winding down here.  Jason leaves on the 30th of June, the movers come on the 1st of July to pack up the apartment.  Then I’m off on the 7th!  That’s only 13 days from here.  Yikes!

Singapore Panorama - Borrowed from Wikipedia

Well folks, my long stay, just over 6 years, in Beijing is coming to an end.  It is time to finish this chapter in my life (and boy, has it been an interesting one), and begin a new one.

Melanie has accepted a position in Singapore, and like a dutiful “almost-spouse”, I will be tagging a long.

Timing?  Most likely in July. I have classes to finish up here (ending end of June). I plan on traveling around China for around a month or so (at least a couple of weeks), and then I’m off.

Friends from the states who thought about visiting?  You missed your chance! (except for Jason who’s coming at the end of June). You had 6 years…

I went out today and drove past the TVCC building (the one that just short of burned down) and snapped a few shots.

CCTV, the owner, and major state broadcasting company, apologized for their mistake.  Some of my favorite quotes of the article:

CCTV said it was deeply grieved “for the severe damage the fire caused to the country’s property.”

CCTV did cover the fire outside its own new headquarters, but it was not the top story.

“According to the Beijing fire department, this fire occurred because the person in charge of the construction of the new building project of CCTV, without permission, hired staff to set off fireworks that violated regulations,” the broadcaster said in a statement on its Web site.

Lucky Mandarin Oriental doesn’t actually own the building, but “[they have] signed a long term contract to manage the hotel and has no ownership interest in the building.”

This guy is going to jail:

Xu Wei - Construction Director for CCTV

Caijing’s article. Good information.

Photo from Reuters

What do you get when you have illegally large fireworks set off at a construction sight in a downtown area of a large city?

Starts nice like this:

Fireworks in Beijing – Chinese New Year Eve 2009 II HD Version from Tom van Dillen on Vimeo.

And could end like this, as it did last night in Beijing:

TVCC Fire Beijing from Tom van Dillen on Vimeo.

So, I suppose fireworks in the city isn’t such a good idea, eh? Fireworks used to be banned in the city, but a couple of years ago the city government allowed ordinary citizens to purchase their own fireworks and let them off any where and any time they pleased (yes, with some, but arguably not enough restrictions).

Here are some fireworks I bought 2 years ago:

The Fireworks I bought for CNY 2007 (Actually, half are mine, half are a friend's)

They turned out pretty nice, but as you see, were pretty close to our apartment building:

My fireworks CNY2007, close to my apartment building. Too close!

So, imagine hundreds of thousands, or even a couple of a million(?) people setting off fireworks like these, or bigger.  And many not thinking about safety while setting them off.  I didn’t buy any this year, mostly to save some money…

Media coverage of the fire last night:

I’m not sure how international media covered the fire last night at the TVCC building within the new CCTV headquarters complex, but local media here in China barely mentioned it (last night). Maybe they didn’t know what to say yet?  I think China has yet to understand how to deliver “breaking news”, especially if it involves China. (I am no expert on media, though, so I could be wrong)

Twitter broke the story

As has happened in many other news breaking events in the past, news of this event was broken(?) through Twitter.  In fact, my eyes were glued to Tweetgrid #cctvfire, because local television had nothing, nor did the popular Chinese news sites such as Sohu and Sina.  International media was slow to pick up on it, yet faster than local media (from what I saw).  Here are some international media stories:  WSJ, CNN, NY Times, BBC, Reuters.

Finally, today, official state media, Xinhua, has some stories.  My favorite one is where they say the fire was caused by fireworks set off by a CCTV-contracted company.  Nice work guys.  Genius – let’s burn down our own building, shall we? Lucky (?) for them, it was the hotel next door and not the “big pants” HQ.

Can’t argue with this evidence: (Watch the whole thing)

What I want to know is, how can the roof catch on fire so quickly?  Could anyone comment?

I am sure someone (or a group) will “pay” for this idiotic mistake.  As they should.  It caused at least one life (fire fighter) and many injuries.  Not to mention some insurance company a lot of dough.  What if they caused a fire in an apartment complex?

Incompetence runs rampant (everywhere) and sadly this unfortunate event probably won’t teach many lessons going forward… (how many times have we seen Melamine?

Is it bad taste to say it was an ugly building any way?

Am going to Guangzhou to the semiannual China Toastmasters conference where we’ll learn all kinds of great new techniques of making bread.  In May, it was held in Shanghai.

Will be going by train – 22 hours. Nice!

Follow my twitter for updates along the way. Should arrive Friday 11AM or so.

Last night (November 19) was the 6th Anniversary party for the BLUG – Beijing Linux User Group.  Exoweb was nice enough to host the party, yet again, for the 2nd year in a row!  Excellent office / environment for a party.

The creme penguins were a nice touch!  Here’s last year’s cake.

Can’t have a BLUG party without Chuanr and Beer.

As I am dangerously running low on hard disk space (I have 2 disks in my PC, a 320 GB and a 500 GB disk).  I decided I wanted to invest in a 1TB disk – my first ever.

I decided on the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11.  (model number ST31000333AS)  Pricewatch is telling me it’s around US$125 for an OEM disk. That’s around 850 RMB.

I went to Bainauhui near Chaoyangmen Qiao, one of the big computer markets in the area.  Did some shopping around and they were essentially offering one for 790, and another for 890.  The difference I could tell was they offered a proper 5 year warranty for the 890, the other, 1 year.  She was speaking fast, so I probably missed more.  Any way, I bought the 5-year warranty.  Ripped off? Maybe.

I’m going to encrypt it with Truecrypt.  Can’t be too careful these days, eh?

Since I was there, I wound up buying a few more stuff, like a new mouse, more DVD-Rs, and a 4GB Micro-SD card for my OpenMoko.

All put together, I got a small discount, not crazy though.

Well, it’s Monday – the day after the Closing Ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.

Things around the city seem to be pretty much the same – the car ban is still in effect and they still x-ray bags in the subway… I imagine these measures, and many more, will remain until at least the end of the Paralympic Games in September.

The question I have now, is whether our restaurant on the Siemens campus here has green beans (bian dou) and tofu (doufu).  During the Olympics, these two items (and maybe more, I don’t know) were not available “due  to the Olympics”.   Don’t ask me where the logic is here…

I’ll check during lunch today if I can get some toufu.  Let’s see if they try giving me the excuse “because of the Olympics” again – I’ll shoot back last night it ended.  So where’s the toufu?

BTW, I am a bit late, we saw some more events since the baseball photos I uploaded last week.  On Friday, we went to an Athletics event in the “birds nest” and Sunday, we went to the Men’s Volleyball final!  That was an exciting match!  Will upload photos in due time.

On Saturday, we were lucky enough to be offered Baseball tickets (at face value) to the USA-Canada game.

At first, it looked as if Canada would beat the U.S., with a score of 0-4.  But, they must have forgotten they were playing a game because they let the U.S. score 5 runs to win the game 5-4.

For more photos, check out my flickr set.

Melanie and I went with some friends (C, H, B, and J) to Friday’s evening session of Women’s Beach Volleyball.  It was fantastic!

The picture above is from the China v Cuba match.  China was quite good (and they beat Cuba, too!).

We were lucky to all get tickets to this same event as both H and I applied using our own accounts for the tickets during round 1 of ticket sales way back in August of last year. (or whenever it was)  Sure, we weren’t sitting next to each other, but we were close enough – for the later matches, we were able to consolidate.

We missed most of the first match (Germany v Austria) because H “couldn’t find a taxi”, but we made it in time for China v Cuba, so it was fine.

For more pictures, go to my flickr site.