Category — China

Finally, we get some Olympic pictures up!

The Czech Republic suffers on the course. Time for a beer

Over 4 months after the actual event, here is the first batch, from the mens’ Mountain Bike competition. [Read more →]

I know there are zillions of places out there about eating in Beijing and how great it all is. So I keep on asking myself why is it that when asked ‘where do you want to go and eat tonight?’ I have *no answer*, I just don’t feel like there is anywhere that I can say – ‘yes let’s go there’. Nothing where you can eat reasonably good food, that is not more than 75 kuai/person (and let me tell you that this is a *lot* of money for most Beijingren who will eat for about 10 kuai or preferably less, usually max 20 kuai, including beer), that is not (ab)using oil that has been thrice recycled or taken from a sump, and where MSG and salt are used sparingly.

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Quick rant about our Xmas dinner at Feichang Thai (Very Siam) here in Beijing as it justs sucks to have to eat such fake thai when the place *was* so good in the past. Nothing is permanent here, and here is further proof of Beijing’s rapid descent *down* the culinary scales as people forgo authenticity in lieu of crass and in your face ‘trendyness’. It seems it is easier to make money selling crap wrapped up in gold leaf rather than making the effort of doing the real thing.

My wife asked me soon after we ordered ‘why are there so many dongbeiren serving us here?’ and it all clicked into place. I was the only paleface in the joint, last year it was full of them. It has changed its target clientele and is now aiming for the clueless hip ‘nouveau riche’ chinese and serves up Thai dishes that taste as if designed by a Dongbei chef. From the deep fried mandarin fish in sweet and sour sauce that looks and tastes exactly like a poor man’s song shu gui yu (but it ain’t cheap) to the Tom Yum soup that is tasteless and totally lacking in anything except maybe the name of the packet that it came out of to the masaman curry that is just totally weird and bears no relationship to the real thing. Oh and the ‘vietnamese spring rolls’ even had a layer of sugar to crunch on and no mint at all. Looked and tasted just like pillows. For 360 kuai per couple (and with only 1 beer! imagine how much if you buy drinks for two!) it is just a total waste of your money. Cool for dating clueless Dongbeiren though Looks nice, but it is all so shallow.

If you want real thai in Beijing, try somewhere else! (Purple Haze?)

This site is getting very slow. This is nothing to do with the provider, but all to do with me. So far MT has proven pretty good for my current modest usage of it, in particular it allows much better customisation of the PHP/Apache interface, so you can actually use a php.ini or .htaccess file with most of the options. SSH access is great and works very well, only pity is I could not find a way to bulk FTP my old site across using the default MT tools.

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I was asked to take pictures of this event by Jan Nemec of MTBS.cz and so I took up the challenge with my Nikon D80. Here are the results, I will post the writeup here over the next few days..

Christophe Sauser has en entry in his website about the event, it looks like he enjoyed himself very much

Ook bedankt aan Rogier van Mountainbike.nl!

The official GLB 2007 MTB website is here. I can’t get the videos to work..

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This is something I did just before setting out for a MOB ride, and I don’t recommend doing that for the first time. You will find that you spill oil everywhere and getting oil on your disk brakes + pads is not recommended. Nor on your clothes, pets, baby or jibadeng (why would you want to do that anyway and who knows the correct pinyin for the beast? )

So, here are some pictures to explain the process. This is using the ‘My Little Bleeder’ kit from Hope, and a Hope Mono Mini setup but it will work chabuduo the same for other Hope hydraulic brakes. If you do not have the kit, I suggest getting one, or if you are with the MOB, asking nicely

First. Read the instructions. Don’t start to do anything. Did you understand them? Good. Ignore this post. You are obviously looking for something else. If not, read on…

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Until I can somehow find a WSP (Web Service Provider) that allows me to host large files (ie 20GB of space or more) has secure SMTP, IMAP and POP3 access, the usual LAMP type setup and can run Gallery 2.0 along with WP and everything else I want to throw at it (Ruby on Rails for example) then I am stuck with kludging on this site.

This is a pity, I have a large number of pictures that could well go out there. Flickr is useful, but is a huge dustbin as well, with just a search on Beijing coming up with thousands upon thousands of pictures, nearly all of them just holiday snaps of no use or interest.

At least Porta is really beautifully designed, although it needs some tweaking to get it to be really 100% useful. It is very fast in generating pix, but totally non-interactive, in other words, once out there, the pix are static, just paintings on the wall. Why infomaniak cannot get its act together and ramp up PHP memory and have decent libraries beyond a basic GDLib drives me crazy, as they are otherwise really good.

So, enjoy the MOB pictures from Bai He  from KHM, they are really good. And there is another one here of the ride to Machang on the 1th of May

Finally get round to putting link up to these pictures I took at the race. It was great fun, very good track, a bit short at 40K overall but quite demanding. Probably the best MTB race here in China.

As usual some of the best things out there are found when looking for something completely different.

Apparently there is a project for doing . The original was with cars, eg the famous Citroen escapade.

One of the guys is doing this as part of a round the world on a … penny farthing …

Now one his site he has this link to a guy who did one … a hundred and twenty years ago… He came to China. Go to his page to find out how to read the book. Brilliant, really fun and well written. FanKwae we are indeed!

After my friendly bike shop did something strange with one of the bolts on the XTR middle chainring of my bike, and spending the best part of the Huangshan race having my chain fall between middle and outer ring and me lose two more bolts. Return to Beijing and then on to another shop where the only competent bike mechanic in town lurks. Ask for bike cleaning. Forget to mention the missing bits but do mention problem with wheel. ‘no problem’ it is fine. We will see. [Read more →]