A shift in direction...

For years Jeff has been my little hole in the Great Firewall that allowed me to download pornography access the web unhindered while living in China. Basically the Great Firewall is a joke that only stops lazy people and stupid people (neither of whom you really want on the Internet anyway, so you could view it as a public service). Jeff, very kindly, kept a server in his basement hooked up that allowed me to redirect all requests for web pages that were deemed a danger to the state here through a Canadian server that allowed such things.

About a month ago this server's connection went flaky and died. Jeff, being newly married and kind of in a complex part of life, didn't have the time to check it out. I didn't mind, though, because very few sites I really cared about got blocked. That changed this week as Blogger turned out to be a threat to the Chinese government. It became imperative that the problem get solved and, for some reason, Jeff was incommunicado.

I decided that it was really unfair to have Jeff be responsible for my free (as in freedom, not beer) Internet access and embarked on a project to change this. So as of today I have my own tiny, cheap VPS in the USA that runs my little backdoor to the rest of the Internet; the stuff the Chinese government thinks is too dangerous to be seen. Like my blog here. The one I'm posting. Telling you what a bunch of utter shitheads the Chinese government is for being afraid of my little key-clickings telling you harmless, inoffensive things about China (for the most part). Apparently I am a danger to the state. Funny, I don't feel any different from last week this time....

Mr. Hu Jintao? I want the six hours I spent debugging this setup back. Please mail it to me you frightened little child.

Annoying aspects of life in China.

I went, at Joan's behest, to give a sample lesson at a language training school. I had misgivings about things even before we went and, to my intense depression, found that my misgivings were, if anything, optimistic.

First off, they wanted a 40-minute sample lesson. For a class of students ranging in age from 3 (!) to 9 (!!). This is, flatly, on the face of it, ludicrous. "Oh, they all have the same English level" is not a defence. A three-year old has the attention span of an average gnat while a nine-year old has the attention span of at least three gnats. Teaching to one will bore the other, no matter what.

Oh, and of course, I had about 15 minutes to prepare for this lesson. And nobody could tell me clearly what the students had or had not yet learned. "They've almost finished the first book." "How many units remaining?" "We've started on the second book." "So you've finished the first?" "We've almost finished." Ad nauseum.

So I assembled a lesson from nothing for an age group I have no experience with and an age range which is clearly ludicrous. Only to find out that the main teacher of the class was basically incapable of communicating in English. Joan had to do interpretation on those rare occasions where I needed instructions translated because the class teacher was utterly useless. And, of course, I had three-year olds mixed with nine-year olds.

To call the resulting lesson a travesty would be too unkind to real travesties.

Did I mention that it was incredibly hot as well? That we went an hour there and back for this? I didn't? Consider it mentioned now.

Another Busy Week

Well, it's been another busy week, but this time at least I'm used to getting up before 6AM to start my day.

On the home front I've been making very heavy use of my printer and the refill kits. I learned three things by using the refill kits:

1. Printer manufacturers have one Hell of a scam going on with their ink prices.
2. Printer ink is really, really, really messy.
3. Printer ink is also very, very, very persistent.

I'll be sure to keep you posted on the fascinating life of printer cartridges.

Other computer-related stuff isn't so happy. My network feed has been ... well, it's China Telecom. That pretty much says it all. It's low-grade service presented by a bunch of people who'll be paid the same whether the customer is happy or not, so would rather sit on their fat asses all day than actually provide a service. This is what happens when you have government-mandated monopolies (or, as Microsoft demonstrates, monopolies of any kind).

Sometimes doing business in China is intensely frustrating. I knew that China Telecom was going to be a problem the moment they set up my connection. The guy setting it up got very antsy when it turned out I wasn't going to be installing China Telecom's spyware/adware to connect -- and that, indeed, I wasn't going to be using Windows at all. He kept trying to load the software -- Windows software, note! -- on my system and was wondering why it wasn't working. While he was out talking to someone on the phone, I just took the userid and password he was using and put them into my router. Time taken? About ten seconds. When he came back, I was merrily surfing away. He still wanted to go hassle someone else to get a Windows laptop to "check my connection". (Apparently having the connection working in front of him wasn't enough to convince him that it was working. Or something.)

Sure enough, the first thing I found out about the feed after a week of use was that they had about 100 people connected to a line which could give actual broadband service to maybe a tenth of that. During the evenings in particular I'd get about 5KB/s speed tops. About the same as using a dial-up modem. That's "broadband" according to China Telecom. I decided then that I really want to get a different provider.

The building I'm in has boxes for China Netcom. China Netcom isn't very reliable as a provider in my experience -- they go down more often than a Vegas streetwalker -- but when they are working they are bloody fast! My normal speed when I was using them was 8 times the maximum speed I can get from China Telecom even in theory. (900KB/s vs. 120KB/s) That means that they were over 100 times faster normally than what I'm getting from China Telecom, say, right this minute.

Try contacting China Netcom sometime, though.

Their equipment has no telephone numbers on it for contact or servicing. Their web site is a dog's breakfast of one window after another before you get numbers that... don't work. Email? Hah! No business in the world has good email support. Not even the companies that exist, for all practical purposes, entirely on the Internet. A big telecom company? Not a chance.

So after literally months of searching, we finally figured out how to contact China Netcom. Who don't serve this building. They have the equipment here, though, because when they get enough customers they'll hook up the boxes and provide service to the building. But they won't actually sign up any customers because they haven't hooked up the boxes. The circle of stupidity that was this explanation apparently made sense to them, even as it sprained my brain before I thankfully shut it off.

So back to hammering China Telecom. They insisted up down and sideways every time they were contacted that they could do nothing to increase the speed of service. Until the last conversation where they said if we contacted the University office (which had hitherto never been God-damned mentioned!) we could actually pay more for improved service. Which is something I literally asked one week after getting connected and seeing how crappy the service was!

And we still can't upgrade because of stupid bureaucracy that Joan doesn't have time to deal with and the foreign affairs office doesn't want to deal with because it would mean actually doing a job.

And this is business in China. Big business, I mean. Small businesses aren't run by retards. They want money and if you're willing to give it to them, they're willing to bend over backwards and then twist themselves into a pretzel to help you give that money to them. I'm getting my leather jacket resized now, for instance, and while they're at it I asked for a couple of alterations to the styling. No problem there! But big businesses? They seem to think that just existing is reason enough to give them money. "Give us money," they say. "We'll figure out what we'll offer you in return. Someday."

I mean really! I was there, I was waving (metaphorically) hundred-RMB notes in their faces saying at the top of my lungs "I have money! I want to give you this money! Price is no object! Let's do business!" and getting blank incomprehension in response. With China Netcom they just had to string one cable about 25 metres. That's it. And I was willing to pay a month's salary to get it! About enough to pay for ten people in one of their existing accounts for a whole year! And China Telecom? Add "incompetent" to "criminally corrupt" to the list of charges I'm drawing up against them in my head.

OK. Now I've got that out of my system.

In other news, at just the right time I'm getting two of the books from my wish list sent to me. Someone also shipped me a book that has opened my eyes to web design. It was in electronic form, so the physical copy is now in my wish list as well -- it's a really good book about web design with hardly any HTML or CSS in it. A book that isn't just boilerplate and pages and pages and pages of code, but instead offers a deep glimpse into the world of visual design.

Tomorrow -- China Telecom willing -- I'll be making a very special celebratory blog post, so please stay tuned.

Playing With Words

I like words. I like words in particular that don't exist. One of my favourite episodes of Duckman, for example, involved a running gag surrounding the fictitious word "proxyglossoriasis" (spelling approximated) which is supposedly a disorder in which one replaces the word one intends to use with the next word in the dictionary. The effect is hysterectomy.

I also like using the word "spectabulous" -- coined by Greg Porter of BTRC, if memory serves -- which is defined as "being so good that you have to invent a new word to describe it". (It's a portmanteau of "spectacular" and "fabulous" you see.

In that vein, there is a word I use which I also coined. It is a portmanteau of "China" and "anaphylaxis": chinanaphylaxis. It means "having a psychological allergic reaction to living in China".

Today was a big chinanaphylaxis day.

I knew it was coming. It's Spring Festival time and this is when the Chinese are at their most Chinese. Today, in particular, was visiting the relatives who visited us yesterday (as previously blogged). The day was a disaster from the beginning onward. I'll gloss over the gory details of getting there and just let you imagine an unhappy rant about people who can't seem to communicate what they've got planned for you, where it will be, when it will be and how many places you're going to stop off at in between for indeterminate lengths of time. Because, apparently, actually telling people what is planned for a day is a State Secret whose revelation in advance is punishable by death. Or something.

Anyway, that set the tone for the rest of the evening. Which consisted, basically, of me sitting in the corner of an apartment and playing my Nintendo DS. (Thank GOD -- or at least Misha -- for that thing!) I would get called up to eat or to play the trained monkey for a while every so often, but mostly people around me were having a great time socialising, talking, reading, watching TV, etc. while I was bored out of my skull.

Insert here a long, unhappy rant about a culture for whom the word "no" means "he's just being polite, so let's force him".

And the worst thing about it all? Nobody was doing this to hurt me. Nobody at all was saying "what can I do today to piss Michael off the most". They were just doing what good Chinese hosts and families do. It just unfortunately was badly timed (c.f. above re: the horrific trip there) and badly executed ("culture clash" is the term bandied about most often). So not only was I aggravated most of the day, I had nobody to actually point fingers at as the malevolent source of the aggravation. This actually makes things worse.

The day wasn't a complete write-off. The food was good (although not as good as the food cooked by my mother-in-law). I lost track of all the dishes, but the best one was the tripe with mixed pepper. The stir-fried squid with mixed pepper was a damned close second. And my darling wife accidentally referred to "Andy" as "Candy" and then looked charmingly perplexed when I mentioned that I doubted Andy went to Mexico for that kind of operation....