Ok, we made it. I’m going to drop just a brief update.

The trip was disturbingly smooth. We made it to the airport with plenty of time. We didn’t have any issue with baggage weight. The Hong Kong airport was pretty sweet. And Cathay Pacific is the best airline in the world!

That’s possibly not true, but the flight from Hong Kong to New York was the most luxurious flight I’ve ever taken. When people told me there was a screen in the back of the seat behind me, I supposed it would just be a better shot of the animated flight map thing. But it was like a personal entertainment console. 800 CDs to listen to. Like 100 movies to watch. TV shows, video games, I think I could have made a phone call. It was awesome.

Does the awesomeness stop there? Not even. (Tony and Craig, listen closely) Free drinks. I assumed we’d get coffee, cola and water. But I drank two glasses of wine and a Campari and never got charged for it. That means according to the menu, they were serving 12 year Scotch, coniac, rum, and who knows what else for free….For Free. My two meals were Penne and a meat pie. I could go on. Let’s leave it at, the flight was AWESOME.

I suppose the only down side is that I wasn’t able to get much sleep on the plane. I couldn’t decide when to try and sleep. When I got on the plane it was 5am in New York. I don’t know, I slept a few hours. We got in about 9pm New York time, and I went to sleep last night about 2am.

Well, it’s 9am and I’ve been awake for 2 and a half hours. So…I’m kind of out of it. But I’m not sleepy. At this point I don’t remember what I’ve written in this post, so I’m going to quit while I’m ahead.

I’m in America!

I went to bed at 4am this morning.  There has been much to celebrate this week. Thursday night was our largest graduation party yet with six graduating classes,  which we celebrated with our traditional Beijing Duck dinner and then a little KTV afterward. Friday was my last day at work with started with a quiet drink among my most intimate friends, and then quickly turned into the majority of the college staff decending on our local pub to celebrate the end of another year and the leaving of many good teachers. Last night was the last time I’ll see some people that I love very dearly. Namely Brock Carpenter, James Zhan Ye, Chris Clanton and Anne Gresham who are leaving today to go home or go travelling. And today I have to find some way to say goodbye to my closest friends who are leaving for holidays tomorrow.

In the back of my mind I remain hopeful that I will see these people again. Some are moving back to the US (to home sweet home Arkansas) and so seeing them doesn’t seem impossible. I’m holding out for the long shot that I will one day come back to China to visit friends that I’m leaving behind, because I can’t seem to deal with the possibility of never seeing some of these people again.

There are many reasons we are coming home, and I don’t regret my decision to come home, but the people and relationships I am leaving behind are the only thing that makes leaving Nanjing difficult. I have enjoyed living in China as you enjoy living in any place, but what makes a place a home is the friendships you form. As many of you know, I have never lived in a single residence longer than I have lived in the apartment I am in right now. I have constantly moved from place to place (or at least house to house) since the day I was born. I have no home. And I have many homes. Nanjing is the latest to join the ranks of my many homes. And the friends that I have had here have practically become family.

So it’s been an emotional week with the highs and excitement or returning home and moving to New York City, and the heart crushing lows or leaving behind friends I love as brothers. But the clock never stops, and I have barely 3 days until I board a plane for Hong Kong (and then New York).

The Bashers are coming!

I am the wicket keeper for a champion cricket team. There’s something I never thought I would say. The Nanjing Nong Min (Chinese for “Farmer”) won the Rural Sixes tournament, beating two Shanghai teams and two Nanjing teams.

Now, I understand that most of you don’t know Cricket. My friends have been trying to teach me about this game for the last two years, but it didn’t really click until we started playing. I lament the fact we waited this long to start playing.  But let me take a step back and see if I can’t portray the significance of a rag tag group who trained for less than a month beating teams who play weekly matches in a league.

Sometime around the end of May, we heard that Hamish (a New Zealander that plays Cricket in Shanghai) wanted to put together a tournament here in Nanjing. My good friend Craig Haines heard about this, and being an avid Cricket fan, leaped at the opportunity and immediately started building a Cricket team. Craig immediately had the basis of the team in mind made up of close friends who also had an interest in Cricket, and the remaining spots were quickly filled by anyone who got wind of a cricket comp and said “Yeah, I’ll play Cricket”. I include myself in the latter group. When the roster was finished it consisted of two Australians (both named Craig), two Englishmen (both from Manchester), two Pakistanis (both incredibly good), two Americans (both who had never played Cricket), and a mild mannered ringer from India. So 9 men for a 6 man team with a vast range of talent.

We had formed the team for a bit of fun and so at our first Saturday practice we weren’t so concerned about taking stock of our skills so much as making sure everyone knew how to play the game. The major problem there was the Americans. Now as Elizabeth said, some parts can be related to baseball. So every skill Matt (the other American) and I had to offer was salvaged from past baseball experience. This was generally OK, since a lot of Cricket is catching, throwing, and fielding a similarly sized ball. Batting presented a bit of an issue since you are playing an offensive and defensive position by batting, but Matt and I were able to make the adjustment reasonably well. The major issue (for me especially) was bowling. I’ve always thrown with a bit of a chicken wing even in baseball, but when bowling in Cricket your arm must not bend more than 15 degrees (that’s pretty much straight). And so despite my Dennis Lillee moustache, I could only either throw with a straight arm or throw with a medium amount of accuracy, but not both. Our first practice was on a field where we had played Football, and lasted about 2 or 3 hours.

After we got a team organized and began training, our manager (Business Team Leader, Tony “the Business” Herbert) decided to ramp this thing up and get some sponsorship and press involved. So our senior team members started shaking down our favorite haunts for sponsorship, Tony contacted the local Chinese press, and I called a friend of mine at Map magazine (a local English/Chinese publication). We had the posters printed that the Bashers (the Shanghai team) made up. And our Captain (Capt. Haines) got to work organizing Artwork for the printing of our club shirts. (Shout outs need to go to Allison Cummins for designing our club logo, and Chris Clanton for digitizing it with his photochoppin’ skillz).  By the second practice, the press had come out to take pictures and we had our official club shirts.

The Bashers descended from Shanghai convinced that they would pulverize our Nanjing teams.  They even went so far as to dub it “the enormously rural Nanjing tour” and to drink heavily over the first day as they did not expect any real competition.  The games were held over two days.  Saturday started with the bigger matches between the all-star teams the Bashers Presidents XI and the Nanjing Salty Ducks.  I was not supposed to play for this team but, due to a shortage of players, I was deployed as a backup.  I played a brief four overs (the equivalent of 20 or so pitches in baseball) in the field position “square leg.”  The Salty Ducks lost the thirty over match.  None of the Nong Min cared much about this defeat as our focus was on the sixes competition later in the day.  The Nong Min’s first game was the last game on Saturday and ended in a spectacular victory of 79-49 against the Golden Bails.

Sunday began hot and early with the Nanjing Nong Min playing the Bashers Purple Haze.  It was my second day as a wicket keeper and I was so focused on my duties as such that I don’t remember much of the game except for being told that we won at the end.  We were excited by our second victory as our original goal was to just not lose every game.  Imagine our surprise at winning against an organized and experienced team.  Our third game was against another Nanjing team, Jimmy’s Bogans Heroes.  Our batting line-up started with Jason as striker and me as non-striker. I’m going to assume that everyone at least knows that in cricket you have two batsman in at a time. If not, read this first.  Knowing full well that we had much better batsman in our line-up, I went in with the strategy of letting wides go and smashing everything else. Surprisingly it worked rather well, as Jason and I both carried our bats for the full five overs to win the game. This put us at the top of the standings with a 3-0 record and people started to take notice. Our last game was against the other Shanghai team, the Basher’s Inside Leg. Inside Leg seemed to be a more dominant team than the Purple Haze with more experienced players that made for stiff competition. We lost by six runs.

I’m glad we didn’t win every game in the standings, because then we might have gone into the finals with big heads. But after a loss to a Shanghai team, we considered how to approach our title shot with caution.  The first game of the finals was the NIS Golden Bails v Jimmy’s Bogan’s Heroes (our two fellow Nanjing teams). During the game, our captain was told that the two Shanghai teams would combine to create a final Basher’s six to play us for the 1rst place spot. I’m not sure if this was because some of the Inside Leg players had disappeared, or if it was to give members of every team a chance to play in the final. Either way, the battle for Champions of the Nanjing Rural Sixes came down to the underdog Nanjing Nong Min vs. the best Shanghai had to offer.

The final was a riveting game! We lost the toss and had to bat first, and so sent in our two best all-rounders (Azam and Hameed). Hameed went out early for LBW and replacing him was a far too modest Aussie who we lovingly call Lynchie. Now most of the games of the weekend had had significant runs erned by wides (if you didn’t read the link about, this is when the bowler throws it either too far in front of you, or behind you and you get automatic runs for it). But Shanghai must have saved their best for last, because for the entire 5 overs they didn’t bowl a single wide. But Azam and Lynchie were on fire! Smacking almost everything that was bowled, both batsman had to retire (Azam with 31 and Lynchie with 35). Captain Craig and Jason came in virtually at the same time and picked up runs for the last few overs. I don’t remember how many, but our total score was 73 when we took the field.

The Bashers put in some serious batsman as well. After the first two overs, pits were forming in Nong Min stomachs and the Bashers runs were going up rapidly. As I said before, I had one focus for this game and that was not to let any ball get pass me (thus giving runs away) because we certainly could not afford it. The fielding players played heroically. Anything on the ground was immediately pounced on and contained to one run. By the last over, the Bashers needed 17. This feat had been accomplished several times throughout the match. Our Captain Craig had only bowled once during the entire competition, but valiantly stepped up to take the last over. With 3 balls left the Bashers needed 10. I’m going to stop for a second and explain how you get runs in Cricket. If you hit the ball over the boundary in the air, you get six runs. If the balls rolls over the boundary on the ground you get 4 runs. Short of that you have to actually run to the opposite wicket without being thrown out. So at this point these two batsman had both been hitting sixes and fours all day. So they could have easily hit 10 off of 3. Craig bowled and the batsman hit a single. 9 runs off of 2 balls. We all took a deep breath as Craig bowled straight and true and the batsman hit it straight to Jason who contained it like a wild animal. They scored one run as Jason threw the ball back to the bowler. And then it was all over. The Bashers needed 8 runs off of the last ball of the game (which is impossible) and sighs of releif circled the field. We bowled the last ball, I think the Bashers hit it and scored a few runs, but not 8. And thus, we were victorious.

My recollection probably isn’t 100% accurate, but I’m sure it’s pretty close. We proceded to congratulate our opponents for a game well played and celebrate a very unlikely victory.  It was a victory for the Nong Min, a victory for Nanjing, and a victory for the game of Cricket in actually pulling off the competition. I believe there were good feelings all around. The Nong Min found their way back to our local pub (or as close as we can get to one) to relate the stories of the weekend and toast everything we could think of. I’m sure this will be one of my fondest memories of Nanjing for years to come.

So that’s how I discovered Cricket. I have lots of pictures that were taken by other people. But you can see the one’s Elizabeth took on her page, or the one’s my friends took on facebook.

Oh, and 7 days left.

Well, I made the mac headless today. For those of you not down with server terminology, that means I removed the input and output devices. Some might say that a real headless server doesn’t have a video card, but whatever. Close enough.

I’ve been running the MacMini as a Domain Controller, DHCP server, DNS server, and File server for about a week now and everything has been fine. I installed Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) a few days ago, but it the little mac started to strain under the lack of memory (I only have 1 gig of DDR3). It was a good excercise, but completely meaningless if you only have one client (my laptop).

So enough about computers I guess. I’m sure I’ll have more time to do experiments while I look for jobs in NYC. And while I’m on the subject, a reply to Bryan; yes, we are moving to New York City.

New York City

I’m afraid I’m going to run the risk of sounding really snobbish in this post, but it’s a risk I must take. When we decided it was time to come home to the US, there weren’t many places on our list of possible places to live. We had this problem back in 2005, when we were shopping for places to move when we lived in Florida. We had many options, and visited many places, but there weren’t many that we agreed on. We ended up deciding to move to New Orleans (as you all know), because that was a place we both thought we would enjoy. And we did, until it was destroyed. But as we considered where to move back to this time, our list was down to only two places: New York City and Chicago.

Since living in China we’ve become used to being urban dwellers. I like public transportation. I don’t want to own a car, possibly ever again. I like being surrounded by the choices an urban area offers for shopping, entertainment, food, night life, etc. Being a foreigner in Nanjing, makes us a part of a very diverse community. My friends come from England, Scotland, Australia, Pakistan, Canada, France, Germany, South Africa and of course China. I’ve met people from Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Japan, Botswana, Burundi, Switzerland, Sweden, and Russia. I’ve gotten used to different perspectives being offered about any number of things. I strangely feel more American than I ever have since it becomes obvious in such company that I am different in certain ways. Being presented with other points of view makes me more sure of my our perspectives. I’m going to play Cricket this weekend! A game I’ve discussed often over the last few years, but have only practiced for the past few weeks. There are always opportunities to try new things here.

But our time in China has come to an end, and we want to come home to the United States, and this time we want to stay in the United States. I’ve become tired of running (or you could call it moving). I’ve been doing it my whole life. As many of you know, I’ve never lived in a single residence more than 2 and a half years. I’ve actually matched my personal best at staying in one place here in Nanjing. We’ve lived in the same apartment since February of 2007. I’ve lived in this apartment I’m sitting in right now longer than any other house, apartment or dorm room. But when we do come home to settle, I need to make sure it’s a place where I won’t get bored.

(This is where I start to sound like a snob) I can’t move back to Arkansas. I can’t imagine living in the suburbs or a town with less than 2 million people. There is nothing wrong with those places, and I will love to come and visit my friends and family in those places (when I get the time and money), but I need a city. I need a city that is constantly changing and has tons of diversity. I need a city where I won’t get bored. How many cities fit this description in the United States? Maybe six. How many cities fit this description and you won’t need to own a car to live there? Two. Chicago and New York. I hate the bus. We don’t have family in Chicago. That only leaves one place.

New York City

I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, or convenient, or inexpensive, but I have no choice. It’s either New York, or I have to find some other foreign country to live in. Don’t think we haven’t though about it. I’ve heard very good things about Europe.

I have to go now. I’ll post as often as possible, but things are getting more hectic by the day. I am very very very excited about being in the same country as many of you.

Thank you for all the kind comments on my last post. To answer a few questions from :

Mom:

I’m afraid I won’t be able to come and see you in Michigan for the foreseeable future. I do want to be in Arkansas in December for Anna’s graduation. And since the graduation is so close to Christmas, I was hoping to stay for Christmas. Or if everyone was going to Michigan, I’d go to Michigan also. I think we spoke about the possibility of you guys then making the return trip to New York with me, but it’s all a bit early so I’m sure we can discuss this further, and not in such a public forum.

Bryan:

The main attraction for a domain controller, was just the challenge and all the awesome management things you can do with a domain. We’ve been building a domain at our school for the last year, and so it’s also a good way to keep the my skills sharp. More realistically, what you are proposing is closer to what I might actually end up doing.

I’m messing around with Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, and WINS at the moment. But I think in the long run I just don’t have the hardware to pull this off. So I’m probably going test out the best combination of services + File serving capabilities. At this moment, I’m thinking DHCP+DNS+File Serving. Authentication can be on local accounts (because I don’t have that many users) and as you pointed out I can save the authentication in the mapped drive. Mostly this is only for excerise.

My main concern is the ability to manage a headless computer. When I arrive in the US, I don’t have a monitor/keyboard/mouse so I’ll have to be able to plug into a network and remote manage everything. Which brings me to a response to …

Chris:

Yes, I installed server 2008 on my Mac. Do I even need to point out that there is a vast difference between Windows Server 2008 (authentic version with a genuine key) and Windows XP (boot camped and purchased from Zhujiang lu)? Let’s assume that no matter what level of Mac fanboy you are, you can at least appreciate there is a difference. Apple must have assumed this would happen at some point, or else they wouldn’t have made it so easy to re-install drivers (actually installing a windows operating system without bootcamp took some tweaking, so I assume Apple always wants OSX on their machines, but still). I just popped in the OSX install DVD and it run a nifty little installer that took care of all most of the drivers and installed a boot camp console that allows me to easily re-install OSX with the click of a button if I should ever want to.

Rest easy Chris, as soon as I get back home, get a job, buy a huge monitor OSX 10.5.6 will make a glorious return to the Stilwell home and that nasty Windows Server 2008 will be migrated to another box.

Thunder:

I have a few imaging solutions that I am making use of at the moment (Acronis True Image Workstation, Ghost, and Drive Snapshot), but I’ve never heard of Clonezilla. I’ll check it out. You are correct imaging is the way to go as far as backup and start over. But sometimes I just like to start from scratch. By scratch, I mean no software installed (except for the basics) and not a member of any domain. That’s where the slipstreaming came in.

But I am taking regular images of all of my machines (especially with all this reconfiguration, in case I screw something up).

end of responding to comments

Well, I was going to make a regular post at the end of all this but it seems I’ve said quite enough for today. I’m off to cricket practice. That’s right, I said cricket practice. I’ve joined a 6 man cricket team for a city wide competition next weekend. I’ll post more about it later.

Hey everybody,

It’s been weeks, I know.  I’ve been very busy with work blah blah blah blah.

I’m coming back to the United States in 21 days (as you may have noticed from the title of this post). I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to wrap up my life in China and prepare for my new one in the US. Anyone else moving from one country to another would probably be doing things like packing or going through their belongings trying to decide what to carry across the ocean. But not me. No no.

I have my priorities in order. Before I start sorting through my clothes and books and junk, I start by deciding the best way to configure every computer in the house.

Problem number 1 : laptop

You may or may not remember my post about triple booting windows 7, ubuntu, and win xp. I never went through with my threat of installing a hackingt0sh version of Leopard (I didn’t have the hardware required), but the aftermath did leave my 320 gig hard drive in many many peices. Those many many peices mean wasted space across 6 different partitions.

So step one was to simplify the laptop and create a lot more space to back up movies, music, comic books, software, pictures and whatever else was kicking around on my hard drives. I chose to return to a basic XP install. But simply installing Windows XP and then going through the motions of installing drivers, software, changing settings seemed way too boring. So I decided to kill two birds with one stone. Bird number 1, speed up the install process; Bird number 2, have a procedure for future re-installs.

Enter n-lite. I may have talked about n-lite before, but obviously not enough. N-lite lets you slipstream (include into the installation CD) drivers, software, and install configurations into a Windows XP or Server 2003 installation. It also helps you produce an answer file that automates the install process. The result: insert a cd, boot, go have lunch, come back to a freshly installed and configured Windows XP machine. I obviously had test the theory a few times in a virtual machine, and I found that light configuration produces less wonky results, but in the end I ended up with a custom win xp install CD for my laptop that installs Windows, the hardware drivers, enters the windows key, creates my accounts, sets my sytem language options, kills the windows tour and OOBE (that funky thing you have to do the first time you boot XP), and set the screen resolution and icon sizes.

The coolest thing about n-lite (and the orginal reason I wanted to use it) is that it gives you the ability to put documents and settings on a partition other than C:. That way, if I need to do a re-install anything on the Desktop, in my documents, or in my app settings is ok.

Problem number 2: Mac mini

I’m sure you also remember me mentioning that I bought a mac mini. I’ve been running OSX 10.5.6 for a while (and loving it), but my real problem is that I don’t own a monitor, keyboard, or mouse (not for the Mac anyway). So when I arrive in the US I’m going to need a way to remote manage the mac mini without peripherals.

Now I had already set this up using an SSH tunnel and VNC (thanks to a video I found here), but this line of thinking quickly lead to wondering what else I could do with a headless Mac. Before long I was hooked on the concept of using the Mac as a home server.

So I installed a copy of Windows Server 2008, and am in the process of turning it into a file server. Having a central place to store files in the house is a cool thing, but I’ve been trying to brainstorm a way to solve the recurring problem of music.

Elizabeth and I have iPods (as do many people). iPods need iTunes ( I know there are other players out there, but I’m ignoring them). But if you have 3 computers with 3 iTunes libraries, it’s hard to keep track of what music goes where. So if I download an album and import it into one library, I have to remember to copy the files to the other 2 computers so they’ll show up in the other libraries. Or just have on library (which is what I’ve actually done) and all iPods have to get music from it.

Now what if we had a shared folder and all iTunes libraries pointed to it? That would work, because when you download and import music it puts it into the central share and not the local computer. But then everytime you want to open iTunes, you have to make sure you authenticate with the file server. So authentication becomes the problem. What solves authentication? A domain controller.

This is crazy talk I know. But this is where my head’s been for the last few weeks. I haven’t actually gotten to installing active directory yet, I think I’m on the right track.

I have to go, but I’m going to make an attempt (probably not going to happen) to post more to count down the days until I leave.

peace out.

It seems that someone heard my agonising pleas for a mac mini and delivered. Today during class I recieved a phone call. Since I was in class I didn’t take it. Moments later I recieved a SMS. Here is what it said.

你好。Mac Mini到德基了

You may not be able to read all of that, but I think you get the same idea that I got…in the middle of class. My students got a kick out of my stunned silence as I was reviewing for their final exam.

The EMC thing is still on the website, which makes me question everything I understood about it. I just hope that the Mac Mini sitting on my desk as I write this was aquired through legitamate means. The paperwork all looks pretty good.

So I’m sorry China. I take back all the mean things I said about you. Thank you for giving me my Mac Mini that I paid too much for.

I understand it has been a few weeks since I even really looked at this site. But there have been some things that have distracted me from anything except working at my desk. Let me briefly tell you about them.

As you probably know, this is my last year in China. When my contract ends in July, Elizabeth and I will return to the US. As my time comes to a close here, I feel the need to bring things to a close. A major part of my job is managing the curriculum that is delivered in the ICT classes at JCIE. Some of our curriculum has major issues. I can’t solve those issues. But I what I can do is cushion the blow for the next guy who comes along. So I’ve been working desperately hard to bang our exams and procedures into shape so that my replacement can have as smooth a transition as possible.

Now there are still about 12 weeks until I leave Nanjing, so why the rush you ask? Well, here’s where the plot thickens. I have been diligently perusing a centrally managed network for the past 2 years. We’ve made major strides in the past year (we being myself and teachers who have come and gone), but the major event that changed things is the purchase of server hardware in late January. For those of you who were involved in the original conversation; yes, it took 18 months to arrive at the decision to buy servers. I’ve ranted about this before and so I won’t bother to do it now.

Since January we’ve installed Windows Server 2003, got some services running (DHCP, DNS, WINS, Windows updates), installed some helpful stuff like Symantec End Point Protection and JIRA, put the servers into racks, and got them on the network (but not in that order). That’s right, it’s the end of March and this is what we’ve done since January. That’s because we’ve only been given 2 hours a week to work on this project around the classes and teaching duties that we also have. The school has refused to pay us extra money, so they’ve paid us in hours. 2 less teaching hours a week.

So, as you can see, if it takes 2 months to accomplish about 3 days worth of work 12 more weeks isn’t really going to see this too much more happen. It was this realization that brought about the decision to remove me from teaching after exam week. So starting April 13th I will still be a team leader of the ICT teaching team, but I will also be given a desk in the IT department to work on special projects. The projects aren’t really that special, we just need a working network and some resources to run a school. For me this is great news. As much as I loved the interactive element of classroom teaching, I was never very thrilled about planning lessons and marking papers.

Another thing about teaching I’ve always hated is that work follows you home. The advantage and disadvantage of only having 16 hours a week scheduled is that all this other work occurs all over the place. Sometimes in an office. Sometimes on my couch. Sometimes in a coffee shop. That sounds really good to a lot of you out there I’ll bet, but to me I want work to be at work. I want to have a room where work happens and then when I leave that room, work no longer happens.

Also, when I return to the US I am looking for something in the field of IT, and not in teaching. And so this is a chance to strengthen muscles that have only been exercised about 2 hours a week. Yay! I get to play with computers all day again!! We actually have a pretty short list of stuff we need to accomplish, and so the other time is a free license to test out all kinds of stuff. Different imaging solutions. Servers running on different platforms. Virtualization of everything.

I was also looking forward to experimenting with Mac OS and Mac OS server. Until I discovered you can’t by a Mac in China!!! I don’t think I’ve told this story to the Internet yet, so here it goes. Some of the jobs I had applied for required Mac experience. I have some Mac experience, but it’s been a few years. I need to be as employable as possible, so decided to update my Mac knowledge. I got some books (Apple certification training manuals) and started reading about OS X Server. Sounded Cool. I noticed that the test hardware they were using was a Mac Mini. Hmmmm. I need a Mac Mini.

So I looked at the cost and at my budget and I decide the education is worth it, so I trot on down to the local Apple re-seller to buy myself a new Mac Mini. Here’a little perspective, a Mac Mini costs $599 in the US. A Mac Mini costs ¥4998 in China. That $130 more. I get free 24 hour shipping in the US. I get “you can’t buy this until we say so” in China. Have you got a minute? If you’ve read this far, obviously you do. Follow these two links.

In the first one, you probably noticed things like “free shipping” in red text. In the second one you will also see some red text. I’m guessing you can’t read it unless you are Chinese or freakishly smart. Here’s what it says coutesy of google.com/translate:

The product is currently testing the electromagnetic compatibility (EMC), prior to the receipt of EMC is not approved for sale.

I know what you’re (I’m) thinking. “We kill people with our milk, eggs, and toothepaste; better make sure those Apple computers are safe”. I got off topic here. The point is I ordered and paid a deposit on a Mac Mini, two weeks later (the day they were supposed to release in China) I’m told I can’t buy one because the electromagneticness might be unsafe for humans. Here’s a question? What’s not unsafe for humans in China? I live in a smog covered city where everybody smokes everywhere and children and animals deficate in the street (I see fresh poo daily). I live in a place with barely any enforced traffic laws, hardly any stardards for construction or maintenance in buildings and public facilities, where anybody could do virtually anything at anytime! I am being very melodramatic, but the fact is I could be killed by any number of things on a daily basis (don’t worry mom), and yet I can’t by a Mac Mini because it’s undergoing some kind of EMC testing.

I dare anyone to find another apple store that is not selling Mac Minis right now. I’ve tried every one I can find. Hong Kong? Free shipping. Taiwan? Free shipping. Australia? Free Shipping. Malaysia? Free Shipping. Thailand? Free Shipping. China as the next super power? 该产品目前正在进行电磁相容性测试(EMC)，在收到 EMC 核准之前还不能发售。

Ok, now I’m way off topic. Sorry, had to get that out there. Anyway, I started this post to say I don’t have time to post. But obviously I do. But in the mean time I’m going to try and start just taking pictures of what I do all day and posting those instead of trying to think of clever things to say.

Here’s a start: http://picasaweb.google.com/nathanstilwell/Daily

Hello everybody,

I know I haven’t posted in a while, but I guess that’s what you’ve come to expect. As some of you know, Elizabeth and I have fully commited to come back to the US in January. Our target for coming home is New York. So for the last few weeks we’ve been hunting for job listings, cleaning up resumes, writing cover letters, and waiting for responses. The whole practice of resume writing is lost on me. Normal people don’t communicate on a daily basis like they do in a resumes. Resumes must be written in a code that says “I am an infalable candidate for any possible task you could assign.” And so you are forced to sell and spin whatever experience you have to make it sound as near to perfection as you can make it without lying. 

Cover letters are worse. They have to be the perfect mixture of brevity and guile. They have to say, “Let me tell you about the wealth of experience I have in as few words as possible as to not waste your time.” I am still convinced the perfect cover letter would simply be the word awesome centered on a page in forteen point Cambria. Once you finish writing one you feel a little dirty from the almost lies you’ve just written. Because who says, “I’m going to just be perfectly honest in this cover letter. Surely they’ll contact based on how stark and honest my letter was.” No, we all think to ourselves that cover letters need to represent us in glowing and shiny language that becomes decorative almost to the point of gibberish, becoming random, beautiful sounding syllables that lose have no actual meaning.

Anyway, as much as I dislike practicing the art of job hunting, it is very necessary and I am remaining positive about the possibility of finding something before we leave Nanjing.

Anyway, in preparation for returning to the real world I have undertaken several technical projects to brush up on my technical prowess. On of the more bizzare projects that got slightly out of hand for a while was installing Windows 7 beta on my laptop. Over the holiday in an effort to learn more about web frameworks, I installed Intrepid Ibex along side Windows XP SP3 on my BenQ. Now I’m no stranger to dual booting Linux installations, and I am constantly pleased with how much easier it gets with each new version of Ubuntu and OpenSuSE. But once I started hearing noise about the Windows 7 beta and the fact that the hardware requirements were much much lower than Vista my interest began to peak. I have held off learning the ways of Vista for several reasons, not least of which was that it didn’t seem to be a definitive replacement for XP and the hardware I owned did not meet the requirements. But after hearing aboutaa seemingly better version of Vista that will run on 512 Mb or memory, I thought this was my chance to join the rest of the world in unlocking the secrets of the latest Microsoft creation.

I came across lifehacker’s post on dual booting Windows 7 and Linux which hinted at the possibility of booting Windows 7 and XP also. Now I had planned on replacing my XP install with 7 and then repairing GRUB to get back to my Ubuntu install, but guess what? You can’t upgrade from XP to 7. You can upgrade from Vista to 7, but if you’re on XP you’ll need to start all over again. So I reshuffled my hard drive to make some more room and create a new partition, and after some testing in VMware, I am now triple booting Windows 7, Windows XP, and Ubuntu. The interesting thing is I have to go through two bootloaders to get to XP now. On boot I first go to GRUB and choose a custom entry I created to boot Windows 7, which takes me to what looks like LILO which displays two choices. Windows 7 (of course) and an entry for “previous versions of Windows”. Anyway, it wasn’t difficult at all. The only tricky part was how to re-install GRUB after Windows writes over it. But using the teminal from an Ubuntu Live CD made that easy enough. For my next trick, I may attempt a quad-boot and try to add a hackint0sh version of Leopard to the mix.

It’s a bit late, so I may have to finish this update a little later. But just to let you all know, four months from right now the Stilwells are coming back stateside.

Happy Year of the Cow! I think they like to call it the year of the Ox, because it sounds better. There is a hilarious pun going around these day, that since this is the year of the cow/ox/bull we call it the 牛 year. And since you pronounce “níu” almost like you pronounce “new”, people have taken to saying Happy 牛 year. Now Elizabeth, being extremely clever, is the first place I heard this. But it wasn’t long after that I started seeing it popping up in newspapers and signs around town.

Anyway, here’s a photographic recap of the last week or so. You should check out Elizabeth last two posts before clicking through this gallery.