www.lewiz.org

Earlier this week I sold my gorgeous Sony Vaio X505/CP laptop on eBay.  The X505 is truly a work of art, both in terms of appearance and engineering

At a mere 0.8KG the X505 packed an impressive 1.1GHz Pentium M processor, 512MB of RAM and 20GB hard disk drive… lightyears ahead of the new MacBook Air!

Sad as I am to see the X505 go, I’m also looking forward to buying myself a new laptop, which will replace the X505 and my current desktop PC

This will be a Dell M4300… so, not quite as luggable as the X505, but it should strike a good balance between portability and function.  I’m specifically after an M4300 with a minimum 2.4GHz C2D CPU and the gorgeous 15.4” 1920×1200 display (the same as my Dell 24”)

Let’s hope the new owner treats this brilliant piece of kit as well as I did

A couple of weeks Xiaoxiao was back in the UK for a very short trip.  Her visit coincided with Quentin sailing into Liverpool after 12 months at sea; I think he was more than a little surprised to see her standing in Albert Dock

Apart from seeing Quentin in, we spent another day in Liverpool, enjoyed stunning Metropolitan Cathedral as well as Liverpool Cathedral, not to mention trips to Williamson’s tunnels and those funny iron blokes stood in the sea

On the way back we enjoyed a film at Manchester AMC and our Indian restaurant of choice, Punjab along the curry mile.  Amazingly at least one of the waiters still remembers me from my regular visit almost three years ago.  Not bad going, if you ask me

Xiaoxiao is back at work in China now and after a week back at work I’m also slipping into the usual routine.  Last week my boss conducted my annual review, which I’m happy to say was very positive.  In the (hopefully not too distant) future I’m going to be getting a little more involved with the kernel “community”, with the possibility of being able to tag two to four weeks onto the end of my next trip to China working in one of the Chinese Sun offices

This afternoon I decided that my monitor was too low.  Over the past couple of weeks I’ve increasingly noticed how I hunch up while using my computer, both at work and at home

After hunting around for something to use to boost the height of the monitor I realised that just last month I’d bought some new stands for my Yamaha ‘speakers… I decided to try the old wooden stands on my desk

After being initially laughed at by Vlad, both of us now have ex-Yamaha stands on our desks… the difference is absolutely amazing!  Next up is an upgrade to my desk at work

First thing tomorow morning I’m heading off to Krakow in Poland to meet the current members of photoSoc at Manchester.  I had plenty of fun on the last trip, which was to Riga in Latvia so I pretty much jumped at the chance to go on another one.

As it is a photography trip I’ve been thinking about which cameras to take… in the end I think it will be my F3+MD4 and an F3P+MD4 that I bought from eBay recently.

In terms of film, I recently stocked up on Fuji Provia 100F (colour slide) after getting some good results on a recent walk along the Thames Path in London with Kangan.  As well as this I’ll be taking some Superia Reala (colour neg) and a handful of rolls of B&W (Neopan 1600, Delta 400… no TX400 though!)

As I’ve been experimenting with my Grandad’s Hasselblad 500C/500EL bodies recently, there’s also the temptation to take these along too (again, with Provia 100F and a couple of rolls of Kodak E100G).  As of right now, I’m undecided.  They add a lot of extra bulk and without a tripod, I’m not sure how much use they’d get.

Photos to come in a couple of weeks… depending on how much I shoot, scanning could take some time!

Great site over at 1dak.com/art/reflection-of-life-with-legos-32-pics/ that has LEGO recreations of a number of famous photos, including a couple by Capa, Cartier-Bresson and I believe one by Robert Doisneau

Well worth checking out!

I’ve just found out that earlier this year (March 18) Philip Jones Griffiths died of cancer aged 72

Vietnam Inc. was his most famous collection and upon publication in the US it almost overnight shifted public opinion on the war in Vietnam

Regarded as being the only photographer to portray Vietnam as a country and not a war, he will be missed

Following the recent pro-Tibet demonstrations during the Olympic torch’s visit to France, it seems that China are now having their own rally.

I am absolutely amazed that the Chinese government is letting this happen.

Can you say double-standard?

The BBC News website has more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7356107.stm

Software vendors: please stop shipping stripped binaries.  How do you expect to support your customers without this valuable information when something goes wrong?

I’ve written a new page (not a blog entry) that I’ll update when necessary.

It’s a list of useful sites and applications to help learn Chinese.

In addition I’ve got almost complete spreadsheets with the ‘New words’ from the Hanyu Jiaocheng book 1 part 1 and Chinese Express Talk Chinese textbooks.

See the page at www.lewiz.org/chinese_learning_tools.

It’s been a couple of days since Quentin sailed into Qingdao and for the last few legs he and Rachel (another crew member) have been doing the shopping for the leg ahead.

Each boat has a 15-strong crew and the next leg will be around 24/25 days.  On top of this they need emergency rations for another five days.  Scale this up to ten boats, add the food you’ll find (or rather not find) in Chinese supermarkets and you’ll quickly have problems.

We’ve spent the last two days in two of the big supermarkets in Qingdao… the Jusco and the Carrefour.  We have more or less cleaned both of these places out of tinned meat, tinned fruit, pasta, tinned tomatoes, Frosties, etc.  The only thing they did have enough of was, surprise surprise, pot noodles!

While checking out our six trollies of foodstuffs we had to pay twice… the till wasn’t up to either the number of items we’d had, or the sum total!  In the end we’d still only spent about 300 pounds at the one shop… not a great deal more than two large families might spend for their big shop!

Our big advantage over the other teams was having Xiaoxiao on hand to help with translation… both of packets and to help ask the shop workers if they had more Frosties, pasta, etc.  In the end a lot of the things we ended up putting in our trolly had come straight from the back warehouse.

We had a tough time convincing the store staff to let us drive the shopping carts across the road to our hotel.  In the end they agreed but only on the condition that one of their workers came with us to ensure they got them back.

It’s not every day you get to drive into a five-star hotel lobby with supermarket trollies.  We got some great looks going past the check-in desks and heading into the lifts.

This evening we booked our flights to Seoul at 5.30PM, returning Friday evening.  It’s a very short trip, but we knew this in advance.  I’m looking forward to seeing some of the sights, but it’s a shame that some bloke torched the oldest structure in the city just a week ago.