ajft

I think Jo and I were the only two in our room who slept well last night; Damian and Amy were both feeling sick, Dan snored a bit and claims that he never sleeps well when he stays here, Julie says she spent the night rolling back and forth between Damian and Dan — not used to sleeping between two others!

After the tremendous thunderstorm last night it was clear and sunny again this morning, I ducked out for a short walk around the place, then Jo and I took off for a longer walk before breakfast, happy to get out and see some of the place without the local children hanging off our arms.

Out the western gate and around the outside of the “city walls” around to the east. Dozens of little frogs were out and about on the paths and the walls themselves, so dense in places that you couldn't avoid stepping on them. There were more smiles and curious looks from the local inhabitants starting their day, fetching water from the bore and putting the animals out into the fields, and watching tourists wander about.

...

Afternoon bus trip off into the Tibetan grasslands, up from Xiahe at 2900m altitude to around 3300m crossing the rolling green hills, then back down onto the plains to visit Tsewey Monastery and on to Karnang — also Kharnang or the Chinese Ganjia Baijiao City — to spend the night, Karnang hardly classifies as a city, a population of maybe 500, unpaved roads, no shops and a mass of single storey mud houses inside 1000 year-old city walls. There is a primary school here that Intrepid used to support, but we've learnt that the teachers were stealing the donations and none were getting to the school, so the school visit is off the agenda!

The road out from Xiahe to Kharnang is in fairly good condition, except every single bridge is simultaneously being replaced! This has resulted in detours down off the roadway at every culvert and bridge off to one side or the other, across the hopefully dry watercourse, then back up onto the road.

    I met a hairy black yak,
    In appearance, a shaggy old sack.
    I approached the wrong end,
    In an attempt to befriend...
    and ended up flat on my back.

City walls, drum and bell towers and the Little Goose Pagoda.

I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it was not what I was expecting!

A long time in the bus....

Grey, grey skies....

As it says on the ticket:

As the famous touristy attraction in the world and 4A level scenic spot firstly announced by State Tourism Board, Shaolin scenic spot enjoys rich humanities sight, antique natural sight, massive Shaolin Buddhist and Wushu Culture and elegant & rare geological wonder. Centralizing within 2.1Kmof coral area of coral area of scenic spot, the humanities sight mainly includes Shaolin Temple, tower forest, Damo Hole, First Ancestor Hut, Second Ancestor Hut, etc. Centralizing in Sanhuangzhai of Shaosi mountain, the natural sight integrates three biggest orogenies of Songyang, Zhongyue and Shaolin and land making activeties, which were famous during the precambrian period and are the optimum sight spot of Songshan World Geology Park. The natural sight mainly contains over 40 spots such as monkey watching sky cloud apices and howling tiger setting sun in Yusai, autumn scenery of Shaoshi, Waterfall, Atalagamite Hole, Daxian Gorge, Lingxiao Gorge, Nappe Hole, Camel Stone, Elephant Stone, Dragon Head and Tail, etc.

A day to ourselves today, just be back in time to get to the train! At 08:30 or so we'd packed our things and checked the bags into storage at the hotel, then walked off towards the old town. A long way to walk, but neither of us had much of an idea how to go about finding the right bus, or how to flag them down and pay. Breakfast again of mysterious tasty bread-things from a stall, then roughly south and east zig-zagging along the streets and trying to stay in the shade — it was already hot in the direct sun.

Past the “Bund Centre” and a mandatory photograph for the folks at bund.com.au — its a tall building with what appears to be a concrete crown, I may have taken a photograph of it yesterday.

Around the corner and suddenly we found ourselves in blocks of traditional-style buildings, some still under construction. In fact everything in China appears to be still under construction. One huge marketplace of little shops selling to tourists, endless streams of touts on the footpaths wanting me to buy “Watch, Prada bag, lady watch, shoe,” all rattled off as one long meaningless sentence. Crowds of people around the — bright green — ornamental lake, including a TV crew filming an interview with someone, I've no idea what its about but I'm in the background!

Then RMB30 to enter the Yu Yuan gardens where it was far more peaceful, although we still had to dodge 50-person Spanish and American bus-tour groups as we walked around in the maze of rooms and gardens and pavilions. A real shame there was no map as it seemed a lot larger inside than expected, all the small spaces making it easy to miss parts of the whole.

Finally we made our way back to the entrance, then back up to the Bund to start on the day's chores — money and food for the train. A green-bean icecream as we crossed another new park and back in the direction of the river, confusion set in and we headed the wrong way along Ren Min Lu and found ourselves walking three-quarters of the way around an enormous building site then along a main road in blistering sun and finally to a corner of the park where we were within sight of where we'd sat to eat the ice-creams! Took the correct turn this time, then alongside the river on the Bund walk, again really hot as there's hardly any shade up on the embankment.

The first bank we stepped into while hunting about to change money was enormous, one of the traditional old-fashioned style banks, all timber panelling and 19th century attitude. Completely overwhelming and no signs anywhere in either English or Chinese of where to do anything. The second was much easier, the guard took one look as we walked in the door and guided us upstairs to the foreign currency office.

Financial transactions completed, back across (under) the river via the “Pedestrian tunnel,” a bizarrely misnamed piece of tourist tat which is a very expensive little train that holds eight or so people, costs RMB30 one way (as against RMB1 for a return ticket on the ferry) and has a very tacky and very loud laser and light show its entire length. We had been warned by Julie, but we just had to see it for ourselves!

One good point is that the tunnel exit is right next to the Pearl tower and across the road from the enormous gold coloured supermarket-mall-department store that Dan had suggested was a good spot for provisions. Once inside it was a bit tricky finding the supermarket, luckily Jo remembered that it was in the basement!

It felt strange to be walking around in an enormous supermarket, everything marked in Chinese, but little different to any supermarket anywhere else in the world. All the same bright fluorescent lights, bright colours, endless brands and packaging. A reminder of how different the culture is came in the form of a company rep. standing behind a display rack of cartoons and a tray with tiny sample cups full of a mysterious drink... “Sir, madam, try this, its milk” Indeed it was, simple, ordinary, plain cold milk, but a product that necessitates a special advertising campaign in a country that doesn't consume much in the way of dairy products.

We made our way back towards our hotel by the metro, then sheltered for half an hour or so in an air-conditioned foreign-language (ie English) bookshop. The thermometer outside happily telling us it was currently 35°C.

Regrouped at the hotel then all piled into taxis for the trip to the station. An amazingly noisy and slow trip, I'm sure we could have walked it quicker, then down into the largest underground taxi rank I have ever seen.

Show our tickets at the turn-styles with guards outside the building — with so many people in China you can't even get into the train station without a ticket, but even so it was packed once we got in. The waiting halls are amazing, enormous cavernous rooms just full of people.

A deafening and distorted PA system blasting out announcements, then down onto the platform for the long walk to carriage 17 of 20 or more — sorry Marko, no chance of taking any pictures of the engine for you!

We made ourselves at home in our compartment, six beds in two stacks of three, then spent the rest of the afternoon and evening sitting around chatting and eating our way through assorted snacks, watching as the world went by. Noodles for dinner, the same as most of the other passengers, RMB5 from the lady with the food cart then fill them up with hot water from the urn at the end of the carriage.

Lights out and into bed at 10; I slept fitfully through the night, waking up occasionally as the train lurched and banged or stopped in odd locations.

After a day of travelling, last night I slept like a log, but surprisingly still managed to wake up around 7:30 this morning. Off to find something for breakfast out on a street stall before our first group event — subway and walk to the Shanghai museum. Temperature already up around 30°C as Jo and I headed off at semi-random around a few corners and bought a pastry-thing and a bun-thing from a street vendor.

The group met up around 9:30 for the walk over to the museum, I think I was still confused about west and east and thought we were heading in the opposite direction — towards the river rather than away from it! The museum was far more interesting than most of us expected — we didn't think we'd be there long but found we spent almost an hour on the fourth floor just looking around at the exhibits and costumes (we'd decided to start at the top of the building and work our way down). Some fascinating calligraphy and scrolls — but of course neither of us can read any of it. Nearly everything was labelled quite well in English.

Ming and Qing furniture, a huge room full of bronzes, we skipped the exhibit of five thousand years of pottery and finally made it out around 12:30 to find that it was still hot, but had just finished raining.

With the afternoon free we took off on foot to the French quarter and found ourselves surrounded by construction work everywhere we went. Buildings listed in our maps simply did not exist anymore. A new park with a sign proudly proclaiming “4,936 families successfully removed to create this park” — we wonder where the families are now.

The old flower market is gone, one huge building site of rubble in its place. Slight mis-reading of a map on the way back had us walk the long two sides around a triangle, then successfully made it back to Middle Hennan road on the metro — including a change of trains and puzzling out the automated ticket machine. Simple things that become suddenly complex in a new place and a foreign language. Dinner by ourselves of “three mixed meats” and eggplant and Chinese vegetables, then regroup at the hotel for a visit to the acrobats. Wow! These are absolutely amazing people. Traditional pole and rope climbing, running up poles as though they were stairs. An incredibly flexible girl performing some sort of yoga/ballet will holding five sets of lit candles, tying herself in knots and not setting anything on fire. Hoop diving, plate spinning, a tacky silk-rope show set to an over-the-top backdrop projection of music and film from Titanic. Cyclists on eight bikes in formation, then eight cyclists in formation on one bike! The climax of the show was the motor cycles in “the wheel of death”. Completely crazy to watch with one guy spinning around inside the ball, when the second bike entered it was amazing, then it was three... four... five motorbikes whirling around in a blur of two-stroke and noise.

Successful negotiation of the metro back to the hotel and then some very expensive beers outside on Funan road — the Chinese equivalent of Eiffel tower beer, RMB25 a bottle, 20 of which was for the seat and the view! Then back to the hotel, exhausted.

An hour and a half this morning in Changi airporty in Singapore, time enough to walk around and look at the pools of Koi and orchid gardens, then back on the plane for the flight to Shanghai.

Long queues at Chinese immigration, video cameras everwhere filming the arrivals in the hall, then quickly through a very prefunctory customs check and out of the aiport. Do we change money insider or outside the immigration? The rates inside didn't look so good so we waited until outside — should have known, the rates outside were exactly the same. Luggage and money, now time for transport — woohoo, the maglev train! Only one small problem, we couldn't find it!

The sign that we thought pointed outside to the Maglev train actually meant go upstairs to the second floor! Luckily a woman for one of the hotels tried to get us a taxi, then told us how to find the train station once we explained our predicament.

RMB40 and an aircraft boarding-pass stub and we were onto the train. Very ordinary looking on the inside, apart from the groovy illuminated signs that tells you how fast you're travelling; 100, 200, 300, 400 — ticking away up to 432km/hr! Only a little bit of noise and shaking, it was all quite amazing really. Eight minutes later and we were in the station in the centre of the city, this is definitely how it should be to get from an airport to the city!

Struggled across to the metro station and puzzled our way through tickets; machine or person? The machine has English text, but is slightly confusing, as every ticket machine in every city always seems to the visitor. We made it though, two RMB4 tickets and onto the train, then across Pudong, under the river and off at the correct station of Middle Hunan road — Yay!

I'll blame the northern hemisphere! Subconsciously navigating by the sun we came up blinking into daylight from the metro station, confidently turned left and strode off in precisely the opposite direction to where the hotel was! Luckily it was only half a block before the rational part kicked in and had us make an about-face, then down the side street to the Nanjing hotel and inside to checkin and get a well-earned shower!

After getting established in the Nanjing hotel we headed back out for an exploratory walk, once again I got confused about north and south, that subconscious is a dangerous thing! Nanjing Lu is one big pedestrian mall, the crowds and shops and stonework making it all look vaguely reminiscent of Bourke street mall in Melbourne — but maybe that's just because I don't spend much time in Bourke street mall! Maybe not so similar after all, the architecture and neon signs all straight from the 21st century.

Early in the evening we met the rest of the Intrepid group for the first time, handed over our wads of cash for the “local contribution” then headed out dinner. Damian and Amy from down near Geelong, Peter and Rachel from Ballarat, Steven and Kristine from Toronto in Canada, and Julie from Adelaide, to be led around the country by Dan.

Dan quickly proved his leadership abilities by taking us around a few blocks to a favourite restaurant where he ordered the first of what turned out to be many fantastic meals in China! Of course no meal and no holiday is complete without beer, so there was a highly symbolic “first beer of the trip” in the restaurant, followed by a couple of very expensive (for Shanghai and China) beers at an outdoor café on Nanjing Lu. At RMB25 per bottle, we were definitely paying for the pleasure of sitting around outdoors in the warm evening air and watching the world go by.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single zone one Met. train.

Oh well, it sounds good, sufficiently Confucian for the start of a fifteen day trip through China. The 9:30pm to Spencer Street station — errr, make that Southern Cross station. The station looks almost complete now, totally empty and desolate at ten o'clock on a Sunday night. Foolishly, Jo thought we'd be able to buy a coffee while we waited for the bus to the airport... not a chance! Just sit in the cold grey echo-ey concrete carpark that is the brand new bus station. I wonder if there is a bus station anywhere in the world that looks attractive?

A small mercy on the bus to the airport, for once we were not subjected to the appalling “Come and spend all your money at Chadstone mega-mall” video. Maybe it only shows to arrivals, maybe the driver hates it as much as the passengers do.

Checkin as much fun as it always is, this time we got to queue up behind an entire teenage German orchestra and most of their instruments. All kinds of oddly-shaped luggage requiring all kinds of different handling.

Eight hours to Singapore and I tried to sleep, dozing badly while being leant on by a man we nicknamed “Mr Stinky” — the owner of one of the worst cases of halitosis I've ever had the misfortune to experience. When his fat arms and broad shoulders weren't leaning on me, he was subjecting me to a form of chemical warfare that must surely be illegal on a civilian aircraft.

Yahoo, last day of work! Two weeks of holiday. A blur of preparation. Am I ready? Have I got everything sorted?

AAaaarrrg! Every day I ride to work. It's only five kilometres and it only takes fifteen minutes. Every day I see a couple of idiots on the roads on their phones in the morning, and another couple in the evening. Every week once or twice I have to take some evasive action from the antics of one of these idiots.

The local papers state that the police had “a massive crackdown”on motorists on the Monash freeway with “round the clock staffing” for an entire month. A whole 72 motorists were booked for using their mobile phones — illegally — while driving. Um, forgive my mathematics but 72 in a month is about 2 and a half a day, or a mighty one every ten hours!

How the hell can the police see one motorist every ten hours on an eight lane freeway using their phone when the rest of us have to put up with seeing 2 or 3 every fifteen minutes? Maybe the police should get out of their shiny protective police cars and see what its like being a pedestrian or cyclist on our roads!

Prompt for the rant? Today's dickhead du jour in his red Nissan Skyline, RGK 034, pulled out to pass me in Haughton road, then swerved back in when only half-past since he was about to ram into the traffic island and keep-left sign. I ran up the gutter to avoid being hit while he blithely roared off, the steering wheel in his right hand, the phone in his left as he SMSed away.

The latest plot uncovered in the UK and the (over?) reaction of the airlines has me thinking that maybe the terrorists are winning. Is the desired outcome death, or is just total disruption? Restrictions down to no hand luggage of any kind, no food, no drink, nothing except travel documents.... Oh yay, I'm flying internationally in a couple of weeks too.

Seems to be getting close to a point where the airlines are going to hand out a plastic bag as you step through the security checkpoint and ask you to strip and hand everything over, you'll then be led naked into the aircraft and handcuffed into your seat for the duration of the flight.

I think my favourite quote would be in Bruce Schneier's New Airline Security Rules:

Yet another opportunity for a movie-plot: Evil terrorist drinks a large bottle of liquid explosive, then detonates himself by swallowing a small pill hidden inside his watch (or chewing on a detonator hidden in a false tooth...).

Yet more magnificent reporting, courtesy of The Age this time: “plotters had begun investigating non-stop flights from the UK to the USA.” Non-stop flights over the Atlantic? Can someone tell me what other kind there are? Do some of them set down on icebergs or something?

Courtesy of The Register:

Welshman in 12 pint cider binge goat death ride

...

Myles' defence asked: "Did you know you had a goat with you and did you have any intention of driving the vehicle on the road?" Myles replied: "No."

...

Another bloody motorist who can't be bloody bothered to watch where they're bloody going and obey the bloody give-way signs. Idiot old builder in crappy old white Ford station wagon, tears up the merge lane of North road from Huntingdale and goes straight through the give-way sign, straight past the “watch for bicycles” and would have hit me square on if I hadn't swerved out of the way. Glancing blow on the knee and hand, looks round in amazement at the loud bang as the bike hits the door and slows for a moment, then roars off up the road. Registration Vic. DPC-215, oh yeah, only one working brake light too....

Assorted mucking about with inferno, getting it all working on the Windows XP laptop. Hassles since home area is in both a file path with spaces in it and not the C: drive! (D:\Documents and Settings\ajft\pkg\inferno).

Inferno just wouldn't install to a path with a space in it, so I installed to C:\infern then copied all the files to ~/pkg/inferno=, ran regedit and changed the root path. Then updated the Start menu icon to launch the correct executable with the correct parameters.

Could not get ~/namespace to handle paths with spaces in them either, so I've ended up with a convoluted path to get Inferno launched and running:

1. %HOME%\pkg\inferno\inferno.cmd that contains:

     "%HOME%\pkg\inferno\Nt\386\bin\emu.exe" -g1280x1024 \
       "-r%HOME%\pkg\inferno" sh.dis /%COMPUTERNAME%.sh



2. %HOME%\pkg\inferno\%COMPUTERNAME%.sh that contains:

     bind -bc '#UD:/Documents and Settings/ajft' /usr/ajft
     svc/net
     wm/wm wm/logon -u ajft



3. %HOME%\pkg\inferno\usr\ajft\namespace that contains:

     bind -ia #C /
     bind -a #UC:/ /n/c
     bind -c /usr/ajft/tmp /tmp
     bind -a /usr/ajft/dis /dis
     bind -a /usr/ajft/module /module

A kind of awful loop-back mounting of package within the home directory has a home directory that mounts the real home directory over the top of itself.

Mounting external resources:

The following works, showing me I've got the network configuration setup correctly and can access sources.

 mount -A tcp!sources.cs.bell-labs.com!9fs /n/remote

I can mount caerwyn's wiki, but /acme/wiki doesn't (yet) exist in this installation so I can only see the raw files.

Local mount -A tcp!canto.hopto.org!wiki /mnt/wiki
/acme/wiki/Wiki

Tried to follow some of caerwyn's Getting Started, but the first steps are to create an account, and the first step of that is an anonymous mount that won't work for me.

An interesting conversation with the local council's planning office today; I decided to call them up and query our neighbour's actions on Saturday of cutting down the tree that was expressly retained on their planning permit. Half way through explaining the permit's application, objection, granting history the women interrupted with “...and let me guess, they've cut down the tree.”. When I replied yes, it was met with “Why does that not surprise me in the least — oh, I shouldn't say things like that, um hang on, I'll put you onto the planner officer responsible for that case.”

Explained the story again, and once again was met by an unsurprised audience. It sounds a little too common to leave the trees in the plan to make it all look green and friendly and environmentally responsible, then once the permission arrives, to bulldoze the lot and concrete it for ease of development. The Senior Statutory Planner will investigate further and call me back....

The planning permit went up; bulldoze the single-storey house and build two, two-storey houses on the block. We objected. We were over-ruled and the plan accepted, the plan that included “retaining established shade tree”. The bulldozer came and the old house departed — but the tree remained! The tree was carefully protected by plastic “do not bulldoze me” tape, protected from the bulldozer driver, but not from the owner!

Ten o'clock this morning and the chain-saw started up, the owner and the developer drove in and cut the tree down. Didn't even bother to take the mess away, just left it lying there against our fence. If that's their attitude to the planning permit and conditions, what will they do with the rest of the development?

Too much talk in the newspapers over the last few weeks — yet again — about Melbourne needing an icon. Something big, we've got to have some enormous building sticking out like dog's balls or we're not a real city — or something like that....

Grow up.

Much is iconic about Melbourne; the people, the bars and cafés, the trams. Tonight was an iconic Melbourne evening; meet after work for a couple of beers in the Goat brewery — hidden away on a Richmond backstreet, walk up the road for delicious pizza and staff who remember us at E-lounge, shoe-horned into a tiny table beside the fridge, then catch a rattly old drafty W-class tram back down Church street and the train home. Human-sized iconic.

I'm tempted to try again and see if I can beat PyBlosxom into producing the kind of site I'm after.

This will be my first posting if that system works, then I have to see about back-filling with all the old posts.