Well the world hasn’t come to an end, and there haven’t even been that many fireworks. I must say I’m underwhelmed. Well I was at one of our local bars for the opening ceremonies and I was certainly not underwhelmed by them. I was actually very impressed.

China wisely stuck to its guns and delivered on what they do best. Massive crowds performing in perfect laser accurate synchronization. Acrobats in mind blowing costumes attached to strings and flying through the air. Larger than life calligraphy. And plenty of fireworks. I must say I was very proud of the opening ceremonies, I thought they were the perfect Chinese story. Like I said thousands in perfect harmony is what we’re about over here, and the synchronized lighted drumming made for a very impressive show. And then the hundreds of men and women in boxes rising and falling to form the the character for “peace” (和), in ancient forms and then in simplified told of the transfer from new to old that China has been experiencing in the last 30 years. But what did it for me was the crowd of children dressed as the 55 other ethnic groups of china carrying the national colors of China toward the massive flag posts at the other end of the field, only to have the flag taken at the very end by representatives from the PLA take it in the end, hoist it high, and it perfect two step carry it the remaining 20 feet or so to run it up the pole. A sad beautiful poetry in that, but very very fitting.

I have been keeping up with the medal race, and it seems to be a battle between the ol’ USA and the great motherland. I love and respect China, but for my own sanity I hope everyday that ‘Merica will pull ahead and spank the crap out of China. Humility is something the China could always use more of. The only problem is that America could always use more humility also. But I guess I have to go with the lesser of two evils here. I’m not saying America or China are evil. Lets be clear on that. I don’t need this site blocked.

The very first day I started out by watching women’s 10 meter air rifle shooting and 48K women’s clean and jerk where (if you haven’t heard by now, I know I sure have) Chen Xiexia dominated the competition by putting up 117K. Think about that for a second. That girl wieghs 104 lbs and she lifted 257 lbs above her head. That’s like me lifting 435 lbs above my head. Much like Chen Yun, I’ll bet she likes weight lifting.

I’m watching right now as Zhang XiangXiang has just won China’s 4 gold medal in a weightlifting competition and I’m thinking to myself that the stem cells and gene therapy has really paid off for China this year.

We got mad amounts of rain this weekend. I was told it was due to the typhoon that tore through Taiwan and into the mainland. But in the wee hours of Saturday morning the manhole covers were blown off by the amount of water in the drains (I don’t have pictures of that). But we did get to play in it for a while.

So back a while ago my friend Leif had his phone stolen and was telling me about it in Castle bar after he noticed my Motorola L6. He said that he really like my L6 and wanted to know where he could get one. I told him I had bought it two years prior when I first arrived in Hangzhou but I had seen them around for about 500 or 600 yuan. Wanting to upgrade my phone I offered to sell him my phone for 300 yuan and he accepted.

The reason I sold it was because ever since I had seen the L7 I wanted to upgrade. With the mini-SD card for storage moving pictures, ring tones and other kinds of files was much easier. And my friend Jason had recently purchased an L7 for around 700 yuan. So I went to the phone market and found a used L7 in decent condition for 500 yuan, thus purchasing a phone for 200 yuan. As I suspected I was very happy with the L7, it worked just as well as my L6 but creating ring tones, wallpaper pictures and other stuff was much easier.

So when I lost the phone about a month ago I wasn’t very happy. I was on my way to a friends house in the back of a taxi and pulled my phone out to call him when we arrived and I thought I put the phone back into my pocket. About an hour later when I reached into my pocket to check the time I found out it was missing, and when we tried to call my number we got the “phone is powered off” signal. That could only mean one thing, and this is I would never the your phone again.

So over the break I had an important decision to make, do I sink some money and get a good phone or do I buy a crappy phone for $10 and wait until I get back to the US to buy a fancy phone? Well after 2 days without a phone my imagination began to get the best of me and I decided to have no limit and no budget and buy whatever phone I wanted.

I looked at a lot of phones. I won’t take you through the whole thing, but it was terrible. There are a lot of phones out there.

Anyway, I landed on a fantastic phone. The Nokia N82.

Let me just say this, 5 megapixel Carl Zeiss optics and Xenon flash, 802.11b/g wireless card, 3.5 mm audio jack, stereo speakers, Symbian OS v9. Now I suppose you can find that stuff on lots of phones, but what surprises me every day the software. With my L7 I was using Motorola Phone tools and it kind of sucked. And wasn’t free for download. But Nokia PC Suite, Nokia Photos, and Nokia Maps are free from the Nokia site and so far work nearly flawless.

I’m probably going to talk about this later, but I’ve got to prepare for classes in the morning. Guess what? 5 days ’til the Olympics!!

My desk, ready for another year

Well, I haven’t posted in a while. And that mostly has to do with me being lazy and trying to first finish up the last term. Then after it was over I wanted to make sure that I enjoyed my very short vacation as much as possible. And now I’m two weeks into the new year and I still haven’t posted. Or Tweeted. Or … Facebooked. But a lot has happened and I will tell you all about it. Just not right now because I have to go to class in about 20 minutes and I have not idea what I am going to teach. Something in English I think. I hate teaching English.

Today I downloaded Firefox 3 four times. I have been waiting and watching throughout the beta and the release candidates because there were certain extensions I didn’t want to lose. But, today being download day I decided to take the plunge. I was very happy with the download speed and the smooth install over the top of FF2, but I was a bit grief stricken when on the maiden launch of FF3 I came up with 4 addons that were not compatible.

I went throughout the day thinking that surely now that the full release is out there will be an update soon that will bring my extensions back into the fold, but when I got home I started to think to myself “surely someone else is feeling my pain.” So a short search found that firebug is indeed compatible with FF3, just not from getfirebug.com. Nor will it automatically update. But if you pop on over to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843 you can aquire it with no problems.

Will having my life instantly improved, I got greedy and went after the one addon that I absolutely must have living in the people’s republic, gladder. Well, the short version of the story is I found a Chinese thread that when translated said something about opening the XPI and editing the install.rdf to change the maxVersion attribute to fit the version of Firefox you are running. Well, I found this article, downloaded this software, uploaded it to dev.whereisnathan.com, and it worked!! Now I have FireFox 3 and gladder! Yeah! Best download day ever!

Happy Firefox Download Day everybody. If you are not aware of what Download Day is check out spreadfirefox.com. But the short version is that Firefox wants to set a world record for the most downloads in a single day. I have no idea what the previous record is, but I like Firefox so I want to do my part. So today (Tuesday) I excitedly get to work and go to http://www.spreadfirefox.com ready to get my fresh copy of Firefox 3 (hopefully with working plugins) and I come to find out that the downloading madness doesn’t start until 10am…PST! Do you know what time that is in China? That’s 1am! On Wednesday! So I don’t even get to download it on Tuesday, I have to wait until tomorrow. Ahh! Living on the other side of the world bites me again. Sometimes it’s hard living in the future (12 - 15 hours in the future depending on where you live).

My week was screwed up by a round of ARP poisoning that came in through one of the Chinese computers that we haven’t gotten around to securing with a standard version of Windows, or proven anti-virus. I was just informed that it was a ’sploit for Chinese media player called BaoFeng (storm? maybe?). If you do a search for “baofeng storm”, you can see why we think this is our problem.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you can read about it over at the place where they keep all human knowlege. Basically what’s happening is a computer on our network is pretending to be our gateway router. So the computer sends an ARP request to an innocent computer that says, “Hey little buddy don’t go to the gateway router, I’m the gateway router. Send your traffic to me, I promise it will get to the Internet ok?” Then your compute says, “Sure, what could happen?” Well, it’s like having a noisy neighbor who promises to deliver your mail, but reads everything first before he gives letters to you or the mailman. What a jerk. Oh, even better, it’s like having a noisy neighbor who dresses up as a mailman and comes to your house to get your mail. He’ll eventually give it to the real mailman (maybe), but not before he reads through it and steals anything of value. Seriously … jerk.

It caused us quite a little panic, because if only a few people have it everyone else can use the Internet just fine. But if several people have it the network becomes so flooded that all traffic stops and then we’re screwed. So we got screwed. Back to the mailman analogy, if only one jerk dresses up as the mailman the mail still flows, but if 25 jerks come to your door to get your mail, you get confused and a fistfight ensues.

Our band-aid fix was to clear the ARP cache and use a static entry to point out our “real” router. Like this …

Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.

C:\Documents and Settings\Nathan>arp -a

Interface: 192.168.1.10 --- 0x10004
Internet Address Physical Address Type
192.168.1.1 AA-BB-CC-DD-EE-FF dynamic

C:\Documents and Settings\Nathan>arp -d

C:\Documents and Settings\Nathan>arp -s 192.168.1.1 FF-EE-DD-CC-BB-AA

arp -a shows us who we think our mailman is. If the type is dynamic, that means anybody can walk up to our door wearing a blue jacket and tacky shorts and we’re just going to hand the mail over without a care. So we run a arp -d to lock our front door and forget that we even know what a mailman is. Then we use arp -s 192.168.1.1 the name of my mailman to tattoo the forehead of our real mailman and not give our mail to anybody else.

The reason this is a “band-aid” fix is because if our computer has the virus, we’ll continue to poison ARP caches but at least we’ll still keep an Internet connection going. Anyway, anybody whose a technical professional and understood what I’m talking about without the mailman thing, please feel free to propose a more permanent solution. I’m hoping it doesn’t involve some sort of specialized piece of software.

I’m sure you’ve all heard about this. Maybe not. But it’s basically saying that Cisco is looking a little shady for a presentation they made in 2002 about “opportunities” that looked a lot like “helping the man keep the people down”.

Now being a computer whoever in China, I know the great fire thingy all too well. But I don’t know why I’m surprised to find out that Cisco was behind it. First of all, there is no way that the Chinese could configure and run their own firewall. Ok, wait, that’s not fair. Just because they got some poor kid who was a media major in college to run our network, that doesn’t mean there aren’t very smart people in Beijing who could pull off their own evil repression machine.

On other blogs and sites, they make the point that the 90 page presentation was mostly about giving communication systems for the police and not about Internet censorship. But my point is who else would be responsible for Internet censorship? The police are made up of military personel. The military is the government, the police are the government. So anything that’s labeled 公安 may as we be labeled “long arm of Beijing”.

Anyway, One World, One Dream. Peace out.

Hey wait, if you bob on over to wired you can download the presentation. The slide that caught my eye wasn’t the one about the F_L_G_, it was this one. It’s sums up my whole life in China.

I heard late yesterday there was another earthquake in Sìchuān province yesterday. Last night my mother in law asked if we were ok. I hadn’t felt a thing. This morning I received a handful of emails asking the same thing. The strangest this is that I didn’t hear anything about this at work today. I spread the news at the office and every single co-worker responded with shocked surprise.

Today the talk wasn’t about the horrible tragedy that befell Sìchuān province, today the talk was about the hope of China; the Olympic torch. Tomorrow the Olympic torch will come to Nánjīng tomorrow and pass within 200 meters of the school I teach at. The education department has said that we will have classes as normal. The reason for this (we believe) is that they don’t want to be responsible for any students in case of something happening. What could possibly happen I have no idea. But I’d put money on the fact that there will be hardly any students in class tomorrow morning as the torch makes its way past our school.

The torch is making its way toward Gǚlóu square, which is a block from my house. I feel like I should be excited about this. I feel like I should want to go and see the torch. Check it out, this is how close I’m talking about.

Today walking home I must have passed 13 guys selling Olympic flags, t-shirts, stickers and other random Olympic paraphernalia. As we get closer to the Olympics, I can’t help but get this feeling of impeding doom. I’m sure it’ll be fine.

I’m not quite finished with updating the site, but the truth is that I won’t be for a while. So I’m just going to put up the changes I’ve made and just change stuff on the run. I’ve tried to integrate my “theme” with Wordpress as much as possible. So things like widgitizing my sidebar and writing custom functions are taking me the most time. Anyway, I hope you like the changes. More to come.