The old grey mare...

So, for no particular reason I've decided to take up my keyboard and post on my dusty blog. Because of this complete lack of any kind of reason I'm also focusing this blog entry on things my mother would be most interested in.

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Chief among these right now is, of course, her grandson, Lucas (or, as I like to call him, the Grand Overlord of All He Surveys at Least in His Own Mind – GOAHSLHOM for short). We're closing in on his second birthday and he is in full-tilt "Terrible Twos" mode. Now to be fair he's better-behaved than other two year olds I've encountered. He is, however, incredibly active and hard to manage for a variety of reasons:

• he is hypercurious about everything (the more dangerous or annoying the better);
• he is much larger than other children his age;
• he is commensurately strong.

When he wants something it takes the concerted effort of Joan and her mother together to rein him in (or just me since I'm still the giant in the family).

He is, in a word, annoying.

The annoyance is mitigated, however by the sheer joy of watching him develop (and, in my case, the sheer joy of warping his mind for my own amusement). The initial health scare is gone. Lucas is a big, healthy, active, normal child in every sense. He's developing manual skills (some of them annoying – my desk drawers are no longer sacrosanct). He's developing very good listening comprehension skills in both English and Chinese. (We often underestimate how much he understands now!) His spoken skills are pretty good; he can communicate most things quite clearly now (and boy does he like to communicate them constantly!). He can recognize about 75% of the alphabet without error and about half of the remainder with about 50% accuracy. (He still confuses "N", "M" and "W" mind.) He's memorized a couple of Tang Dynasty poems (remember those from your childhood, Mom?) and is even at the point of beginning to recognize some Chinese characters in context (but not independently yet).

Some of the interesting character traits he's developing:

• he's absolutely obsessed with cars and has been from an amazingly young age;
• he loves Dora the Explorer (the TV show and the books);
• he's recently developed a love of the ridiculous rhymes of Dr. Seuss (There's a Wocket in my Pocket! being his current favourite book edging out by a hair the illustrated version of The Itsy Bitsy Spider);
• he likes to play hide and seek and is both remorseless and tireless while playing it;
• when he's tired he doesn't get whiny and cry, he gets crazy and runs around like a manic idiot;
• he's an extremely picky eater (obviously acquired from Joan, not me!);
• he likes music and will dance to it all the time, sometimes even managing to look cute instead of spastic;
• his first favourite song was, of all things, "Iron Man" which has given me one of my favourite images of all times: an elderly Chinese lady humming "Iron Man" to a young baby to soothe him;
• a current favourite song is the theme song to the old television show Night Court although I recently introduced him (by accident) to "Squeeze Box" which he also enjoys.
  

I do have a lot of new pictures of him and will post them as soon as possible, but some technical problems are interfering with this at the moment. When those are cleared, I'll make a new blog entry that consists almost entirely of Lucas photos.

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The next person that Mom's going to be interested about is, of course, Joan. Joan is doing well, but this term bit off (quite a) bit more than she could chew work-wise and is worn to a frazzle. I, of course, told her this was a mistake long before she started into teaching 30 periods per week—over and above the whole parenting thing, mind—but nobody ever listens to me until it's too late. Still, this term is ending soon and next term she won't be making this same mistake. He won't come out and admit that I was right, but we both know that I was.

Joan is still the chief driving force behind us wanting to buy an apartment in Wuhan. This is proving more difficult than we had anticipated because the Chinese mortgage industry, like most large-scale operations in China, is run by untrained chimpanzees with bladder control problems. (They don't know what they're doing, are unsuited to their positions and like to piss on everything around them.) The size of the down payment we need to make is just too large to be realistic so I'm going to have to go hunting for a better-paid job or start a successful business or something. (Alternatively I could win the lottery or something. It's hard to do when you don't buy tickets, however.) We're still working at it though, even through the added expense of a personified force of destruction (a.k.a. 王森锐 or Lucas) in the household. Indeed it is for Lucas (giving him a stable home in his childhood) that we're going through this. It'd just be nice to get it done earlier.

Other things Joan-related: she's on her way to getting her Master's degree in teaching, get this, Chinese as a Foreign Language. This is our entry plan for Canada. Given the giant China has become on the world stage there's a lot of places itching to have their staff trained in Chinese. Further a lot of overseas Chinese are interested in having their children learn their "mother" tongue. This is beside the obvious possibility of government interest in native Chinese speakers. There's lots of opportunity for the future in this and Joan's working hard at it.

(Anybody want to learn Chinese from Joan so she can get some praxis?)

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This leads to me, the last person my mother is interested in hearing about in our little family over here in China. My family life is going fine, although two sudden adjustments (bachelor-to-husband, husband-to-father) in rapid succession after 40 years of solitude was a bit of a shock (to put it mildly). As you may have gathered from the above, I'm insanely fond (and proud!) of my son despite the annoyances and worse of parenthood. (Oh, Mom? I apologize unreservedly.) Pretty much anything I do these days is for him, short- or long-term.

My work life is far improved at my new school, the Hubei Communication Technical College. This is not what one would call a high-rung college (more third-string) and as such they lack the arrogance of my previous school which (fraudulently) banks in on the good name of one of the more respected universities in China (Wuhan University). They, as a result, pay me (slightly) better, give me a much nicer (albeit about 10% smaller) apartment and pay all my bills except long distance telephone. That's not the best part, however. The best part is that I'm not just a 白猴子 ("white monkey") to them. I'm a teacher. I'm treated as a teacher and an asset. My opinion is sought out on matters that affect me (and sometimes even on matters that don't affect me). I'm invited to planning meetings. I'm actually encouraged to interact with the Chinese staff! (Three dinners so far and still counting, and this after I had to demure from two because of scheduling conflicts.)

The down side, of course, is my students. Just like the East Lake Campus students of my last school, these students are the dregs of China's educational system. They're entirely unsuited to being in university-level (or even college-level!) education. Unlike my former East Lake students, however, I actually feel for these kids. They're not arrogant, spoiled rich brats on the whole. (There's one exception out of about 100 students.) They're decent human beings who are being forced into something they have no interest in nor aptitude for. (The same is true of my former East Lake students, but I loathed them as human beings so didn't care about their suffering.)

On the other hand, my main campus students at my old school were decent people and, in many cases, people I actively thought had a real future (with several of them proving my predictions correct now!). I have no such students here. Still I'm overall much happier with my work here than I was at the old place so the move was a net plus.

My mother was kind enough to send me a big batch of books for my technical use (she's already sent Lucas about 20...). Because of her I'm now learning how to use ANTLR, Groovy, Scala, Erlang and Haskell (with Clojure on the way in another package) so that I can get my technical skills back up to snuff and ready for a move to high tech. Further, I have prospects, high tech-wise, here in China. One of my former students has talked to his manager about me and that manager is interested. Should things go well, I may be out of teaching next year this time and back into software, this time working for a Chinese company with ... well, I won't give away what it is that they were interested in me for so that I don't jinx the process of being hired. If this happens, though, it will be big. Very big.

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That's it for this blog for now. Hopefully I can get back into the swing of things again (I have a strategy I like to call "mini-blogging" that may help) and not have a three-month gap again. And Mom, for no particular reason I promise that the pictures of Lucas will be up in a blog posting just for you before the week is out.

Busy week

Well, anybody afraid that this is going to be another Lucas blog entry can rest assured that I will only be mentioning him once. Since that mention was in the previous sentence, you know the rest of the blog won't be quite as tedious as it usually is.

In September of 2006 Joan decided to do something she's wanted to do since she was a teenage girl: straighten her teeth. Her two front teeth were crooked, you see, twisted in place by quite a large amount. Nobody really noticed this, of course, but she knew about it and was very, very insecure about her smile as a result. Those of you who've seen my earlier (sadly non-digital) photos of her will know that it's rare to actually see her smiling in a photo (or, rather, when she did smile, it was always a closed-mouth Mona Lisa-style one). Which was actually quite a shame because when she's smiling (naturally, that is) her face lights up like a pinball game that's just hit the "free game" jackpot.

September of 2006 marked her decision to move away from this. She went to the dentist, got evaluated, got four teeth pulled and thus began a two-year (maximum!) process of adjusting her teeth. This week, on Wednesday, June 10, 2009, the work was finally completed. Yes, the two-year maximum process took just under three years. Three years of discomfort and three years of metal in the mouth. Sometimes sharp metal. Even with metal in her mouth, however, Joan already started to smile properly and naturally, wearing the braces almost as a badge of honour.

Finally, however, it's over. Above and to the left you can see what Joan's smile looked like on Tuesday and to the right you can see what it looked like Wednesday. Pretty big change over a day, isn't it?

Of course it's still not completely over. She has retainers she has to wear 24x7 (except when eating) for a year, then nights-only for another year. She's had to relearn how to talk because the retainers occupy quite a bit of space in the mouth, but they're visibly much less intrusive than were the braces before.

In other news, and the reason for my delay in posting any news at all, I have officially signed my new contract at my new workplace. I'm moving over to the Hubei Provincial Communication Technical College (or something approximately like that which I'll translate better when I get the energy) in under a month and will be starting teaching there September of this year.

The general run-down on the new place:

• The staff are friendlier and more communicative than my current school, not to mention better organized and better capable of communicating in English.
  
• The salary is a bit higher, but so are the teaching hours (the hourly remuneration is about the same).
• The students are going to be of much, much lower quality than the main campus (and possibly even slightly lower quality than the Sweathogs campus).
• The new apartment is a bit smaller, but much more nicely outfitted (it has an air conditioner/heater in each room, for example).

Also, again unlike my current school, they're willing to let me move in over the summer. One thing that I really didn't like about ISSWHU the first year I was there (albeit about the only thing at the time since I hadn't been introduced to the Sweathogs yet) was that they positively refused to allow us to move in over the summer. Instead I had to stow my possessions at a friend's apartment and live in Joan's apartment in Hanyang over the summer and then hastily move everything in while I was also planning lessons and getting oriented in the new location just before I started teaching. Why? They didn't want to be responsible for me or my behaviour over the summer before I started working for them.

So the move is a mixed bag that, in my opinion, slightly tilts toward the "plus" side of the scales when I measure them.

No other particularly interesting news to report otherwise. I mean it's damned hot, but I think I've been complaining about that loudly to anybody who'd listen since I first got to China. (How hot? Try 35C at 84% humidity.) I am going to really enjoy living in an apartment where I don't have a single room-sized air conditioner trying to cool down a sizable two-bedroom apartment.

Mounting income.

So, the first request from the string of "I'll talk about that in the future" things in my last entry was for details about money. This came from Melissa Barna, the wife of the son of one of my mother's best friends. ("Confused? You will be on the next episode of Soap!") So, Melissa, this one is for you!

The school I currently work for is not especially generous (nor communicative, nor competent, nor...). Actually none of the government-run schools in Wuhan is especially generous unless they're off in the "suburbs" (the locals' term for the farmland surrounding the city) and desperate for people willing to live away from anything resembling civilization. The practical upshot of this is that at 4700元 per month, I'm not exactly rolling in cash. A single person can live very comfortably off of this, but with three more people (one a toddler with all the expenses this entails) it becomes, well, not a strain but more bland a lifestyle. And it's definitely not conducive to building up a good savings account. This is why, of course, I ignore my contract and do extra work outside of the school. (Everybody does it and contracts are basically wallpaper here anyway, so it's not as if I'm doing anything risky.)

One job I've had lined up since October of last year is a three-hour weekly stint at a local middle school. My weekly salary at 12-16 hours (currently 12) with my main school is 1085元. Adding an extra three hours of teaching boosts that by 450元 because I'm being paid 150元／hour in the sideline job. (By way of comparison my main job's hourly rate ranges from 68 to 90元/hour depending on how many hours I've been assigned.) So basically it's a nice almost 50% boost to my pay (from 1085 to 1535元/week) that does the family good and it's not a whole lot of extra work.

There is, however, another job I do. It's an infrequent one, but it's incredibly lucrative. A local engineering firm does a lot of international business. They take the ability of their employees to communicate with foreign business partners and customers very seriously and, as a result, have embarked upon a very ambitious project of upgrading all of their employees' English language skills.

A former colleague of mine worked contract for them for a couple of years. Last summer he was told that the company wanted to run two courses and asked him to recommend another English-speaking language instructor. Now for a variety of reasons (this is China, after all) the original plan fell through, but I guess they were impressed by me in the interview, so when the usual fall course opened they had me split hours with Peter. (I originally felt a little uncomfortable with this because it felt like I was being used to replace Peter, but Peter had by then gotten an even more lucrative, full-time position so he didn't mind.)

The courses they run are 100 hours in length, 10 hours per week. And they pay a whopping 280元/hour. That's more than three times my hourly rate even this term where I'm teaching only 12 hours a week in my main school. And it's almost double the rate I'm paid by the middle school. This means that my weekly income is now 4335元. So by taking two extra jobs I'm almost quadrupling my base weekly income for the next ten weeks and I'm almost tripling my previous total income with just that one job!

I worked it out. Last year I only got 7 hours out of the 10 per week (with Peter getting the remaining 3) so I earned from that company 19,600元 for that one session. That's 4 months of my base salary, by way of comparison. This time around my total income from that company is going to be 28,000元; about six months of my salary at my main school. Thus for a lot fewer total hours of teaching (albeit more preparation work being required since each 10-week course is about 3 terms of English teaching hours!) I'm getting about the same amount of money. (The school only pays me ten months out of the year, you see.)

On top of that, the school still has the added problem that I hate half the students! I'm still teaching the Sweathogs, though at least now it's fewer hours than teaching my real students. By comparison even the worst of the engineering company's students are well-motivated and hard-working. So I'm getting less money, more work and students I hate. What's keeping me teaching here?

Well, this is where China's systems work against me. To stay in China I need a job with an employer sanctioned by the state to hire foreigners. And to be fair to my school I get a few benefits from them to go along with the headaches of incompetent administration, poor facilities and, in many cases, terrible students. One of those benefits is a rent-free apartment; another, subsidized utilities.

Still, for two 10-week sessions I make as much money as my main "real" job. If I could get a third one guaranteed that would more than cover my costs of having a business visa, renting my own apartment (or paying for a mortgage on one) and would leave me with a whole lotta hours to fill with other possible ventures (or a whole lot more hours to spend with my boy watching him grow while driving his mother and grandmother insane).

Yeah, I'm still working the angles.

This comes as absolutely no surprise to me

Study: 38 Percent Of People Not Actually Entitled To Their Opinion

CHICAGO—In a surprising refutation of the conventional wisdom on opinion entitlement, a study conducted by the University of Chicago's...

If I never hear the expressions "to each their own" or "it takes all kinds" or "everybody has a right to their own opinion" ever again in my life, well it's 41 years too damned late. Not everybody's opinion is equal. Not everybody's opinion is informed. Not everybody's opinion is interesting. Not everybody's opinion is valid.

As far as I can tell, it is the people who live mediocre lives, think mediocre thoughts and otherwise excel at mediocrity who hold this view. Since they can't actually argue a position that's coherent, believable (or even plausible, at times), they recite mantras to make all disagreement go away.

I really think that The Onion is a better news source than the major news sources, despite being essentially devoid of what would ordinarily be termed "facts". I'm not sure if this depresses me or delights me.

Of course a lot of this comes as a reaction to teaching now. Before I joined the profession, I really didn't "get" Mr./Mrs. Garrison, one of the characters from Comedy Central's South Park television series. The various teaching jokes like "there's no such thing as a stupid question, children, just stupid people" and "OK, would someone like to try that who's not a complete retard?" just fell flat for me. It wasn't until I started doing the job that I realized the pain of being a teacher. There are students I've had in the past who I just inwardly winced at when I saw them eagerly waving their hands to ask (or worse, answer) a question. Why? Well, the two quotes from Mr./Mrs. Garrison say it all, really.

I think that this is the kind of thing that you can really only understand when you live it. I'm sure that many of my rants on software and software development in the past caused blank incomprehension in the non-technical.

Don't Step in the Leadership

I never had any insight into what, precisely, was wrong with corporations and corporate management until I came to China. When you live in a country that gives the illusion of freedom and choice, it's all too easy to miss the more unpleasant cases within it.

One of the things that drives me most crazy in China is the so-called "leadership". These people aren't leaders. They're bureaucrats. Vicious, petty bureaucrats from the lowest levels on up to the Chairman of the Party. And, as such, they have all the leadership qualities of bureaucrats: none whatsoever.

A case in point is what's happening with my extracurricular activities. Smart people would see self-motivated employees doing extra work for the benefit of their employer and/or employer's customers and say "wow, that's great!" But that's not how corporate nor communist leadership thinks. They think instead, at a deep level, "if people are doing things without my oversight, that means they'll think I'm useless". So they meddle.

Way, way, way long ago, back when I worked at Pronexus, I saw this behaviour first-hand when Ian, the owner, walked into a skunkworks design session that Jeff Cooper and I were having with an eye toward updating the technology of Pronexus' product line so that it could thrive and expand in a rapidly-changing world. He demanded to see everything we were working on and then, basically, canned the project. (He later claimed he didn't tell us to stop, but I interpret "I'd rather see you working on things that will actually see the light of day" as a statement that he's never going to allow our project to see the light of day. I wasn't the only one who interpreted it that way either.)

This was my first taste of "leadership" screwing things up to their own detriment just so they could stay in control. I saw similar things happen at Entrust (Jeff and I, in fact, were just talking about one such incident two nights ago) all the time. New ideas are suppressed not because they're bad ideas, not because they won't make money or do good things but because any such new ideas are a threat to the position of the leader that allowed it to happen without oversight.

So imagine a country of 1.3 billion run exactly like that.

Today, after running my English Club and my Linux User's Group meetings for almost a month now, I was told that if I want to use a classroom over lunch hour I'd have to write a document explaining what I was using the classroom for and that I'd have to register my "lessons". Here I am, building something that will add value to the school's image and they decide that since it's not being done with proper oversight that I have to be told to do extra, unpaid work -- on top of the extra unpaid work I'm already doing voluntarily.

Guess who's not doing extra, unpaid work for the school anymore?

First Week Ruminations

The first week back is always fun (in the ironic sense of that last word). Lots of things have to come together all at once:

• I have to get used to waking up at 6AM every day again.
• I have to figure out where my classes actually are (as opposed to where I've been told they are).
• I have to re-introduce myself to my students because, as with students anywhere in the world, they've forgotten everything they learned prior to their long vacation.
• I have to get back into the whole "delivering information" mode that's atrophied over a month of disuse.

After five years of this, though, this all becomes increasingly easy. (Except for that first item.)

So, this week I just did a mostly teacher-talk lesson. I had to go over the previous exam and identify the strong points (many!) and the weak points (only two) the students had. I also started off the extracurricular activities I have planned for this term -- in effect replacing the school's anemic "English Corner" with one that the students actually want to attend. And, finally, I went over a brief look at what was happening this term. (The secret words are "public speaking".)

One thing I've found I really like with this batch of students is their eagerness overall. In five of my seven classes, for example, we actually had to elect people into the positions for running the new English Corner. Enough people were interested in the position that I didn't have to appoint anybody in the remaining two. I put my contact information -- notably my instant messenger accounts -- up on the screen and now have at least a dozen students who've gone to get GoogleTalk accounts to speak with me online. From this I stumbled over a couple who are avid Linux users and a couple more who, because I'm using Linux, want to give it a try. So now I think I'll also be arranging a WUISS Ubuntu User's Group as an outside activity to help these newcomers learn more about Linux. I've also ordered 300 CDs from Canonical's free "shipit" service to give as gifts to the students.

So, now the week is over and the weekend upon me (and also almost over) I find I'm a little bit lonely. Joan went off on a junket with her female colleagues arranged as part of International Women's Day (little-known trivia: the Mandarin pronunciation of the date -- 三八 or "sanba" -- is a homonym for a Cantonese epithet for women). She left very early Saturday morning and her mother subsequently took off for a while to the apartment in Hanyang (like she does most weekends). As a result I've been here mostly by myself which is now sufficiently unusual that it's actually uncomfortable. I guess that means I'm well and truly used to married life.

Something I'm still not used to is back pain. (You'd think that by now I would be, wouldn't you?) While under control, it sometimes flares up and this last month of inactivity made it flare up more. Following this with the week of lugging a laptop to and from class has left my back in pretty bad shape. The medication is controlling it -- I'm only taking it when it flares really badly -- but I'm running out of it to the tune of eight remaining doses. After that I'm going to have to either get some more shipped to me at tremendous expense or go on another likely-fruitless search for methocarbamol here in China.

Printer Shafting

So, I'm getting a lot of good use out of my new HP printer (despite a few problems with the Linux driver that have yet to be fully worked out -- luckily I'm not printing photos!). Joan, when buying the printer, was already eyeing the price of ink nervously (the printer cost us 300RMB; one spare set of ink cartridges cost us 290) and got even more nervous when she noticed that I blew through the demo cartridge that came with the printer (3ml of black ink instead of 10ml, for example) with my first print job.

She was right to be nervous.

Printing at any kind of readable resolution sucks through ink at a prodigious rate. The printer manufacturers don't make their money from printers, you see. They make their money selling the ink cartridges. I have, since getting the printer, printed off five books on various things needed for my work (reference manuals in the main). Two books (of about a hundred pages each) is all I get per cartridge.

Luckily I live in China. In my neighbourhood you can hardly fling a brick without hitting at least three shops selling printer ink. And not just official cartridges, but, too, third-party cartridges (at half to a third of the price) and cartridge refill kits. These latter are the real life-savers.

Today I bought some ink refills. These are 30ml syringes (the black cartridges are 10ml, recall; colour cartridges are 8ml each colour) with the ink you need in the colours you need. Using them is simple: you peel back a sticker, insert the syringe, push the plunger and when the ink seeps a bit out of the hole you're using you're done. And they cost, literally, a tenth the price of the cartridge.

Going with the black cartridge (the ink I'll be using most often), that means that for one tenth the price of an official cartridge I get three times the ink. And refilling a cartridge is hardly difficult work! Fumbling with the packaging and tape of a proper cartridge means replacing a cartridge takes two to three minutes. Injecting the ink takes five. Hardly an onerous task when you consider that my print batches take hours.

Now sure, the ink quality isn't quite as good as the HP official inks. The black isn't quite so deep. The cyan/magenta/yellow isn't quite so vibrant. But it's still better than the official inks I used in my old Epson before it gave up its ghost and certainly more than good enough for the kind of printing I do (text).

So why would I want to be given the shaft by HP for its cartridges?

Well, I do blow my warranty away if they catch that I used an unofficial ink. On the other hand, if I refill my black ink cartridge three times, I've saved more than the price of a whole new printer....

Aren't They Just The Cutest Thing?!

So, on Monday I begin the daily grind again. It's about time. I really don't enjoy holidays like this very much, you see. Travel is basically impossible unless you want to travel out of country or by plane. (Every expat needs to experience travelling over Spring Festival once while they're here. But only once.) Most places that would be of interest to me are one of:

• closed;
• overcrowded;
• overpriced;
• both overcrowded and overpriced.

So Spring Festival is, instead, a time of high stress family visits interspersed among long periods of intense boredom. You can't even do any decent shopping for geek toys or the like over much of that period.

So, needless to say, I'm looking forward to going back to work.

In traditional Chinese fashion I got sent my teaching schedule just shortly before the break began, too late for me to point out to them that the document they sent me couldn't be read. (It's a) in Chinese and b) garbled.) So I didn't even know which classes/subjects I'd be teaching until just this Thursday, not to mention small, unimportant details like where I'd be teaching them or when. I did finally get that information (with only one small question outstanding, but not requiring resolution until next week Wednesday -- so I expect to have an answer Tuesday night) just in time to plan lessons and arrange notes.

And today the monitor of one of my classes sends me an SMS message asking "will you be teaching us this term?". My answer is the typically Chinese one: "Maybe". Of course in context that means "yes". The monitor's response was a single word that makes me glad for my time spent in China. "Great!"

I didn't stay in China because of my employers. I didn't stay in China because of my coworkers (although I always found one or two at each place I liked -- Hello Nick, Wendy & Xiaoling!). I did stay in China to pursue the girl who later became my wife, but there was two years before that to account for.

No, the reason I stayed in China long enough to find the girl who'd later be my wife is simply the students. With the exception of the students attending the ratbag RMIT English Worldwide program at the Wuhan University of Science and Technology's International School (the non-REW students, too, were great!) my experience with students in China has been universally positive. My current school is no exception.