Where is Nathan??

Internet Explorer 7 has been a long time in coming. I had been foretold about it’s coming sometime ago, but like others who have been burned by M$, I was skeptical. I heard it had dropped last week but was able to get a copy since I run Linux and Elizabeth’s computer has a Chinese version of Windows. So last Sunday I had my first taste at a friend’s house and I must I’m impressed.

They, of course, fixed the obvious lack of tabs, but they have also taken great strides to try and bring useful things into the browser like RSS and del.icio.us. But IE7 (to the Firefox user) is starting to look a lot like Firefox. They’ve got the search bar next to the address bar (notice the default search is Windows Live search instead of Google), they’ve got some “add-ons” that look like “extensions” (except there is a lot less of them) and now you’ve got some themes or skins for it too. I don’t want to sound like these are bad things. They are the things people liked about Firefox so I say “good job M$” for adding them. And I guess I don’t want to sound like the new IE doesn’t bring anything new to the table. The kind of auto detecting RSS thingy at the top is pretty cool and they handled tabs and full-screen mode very well. I just think the interface looks a little funky and I hope it gets smoother with time. I also hope it’s as easy to develop those “add-ons” for IE as it is to develop “extensions” for Firefox. If not, why did they bother? Maybe you can buy proprietary new ones in the future.

I have been of the opinion that Internet Explorer sucks, hence the button you see off to your right that says IE is bad. But I like to be fair in my opinions so I’ve been doing a lot of reading about this new player in the game. It turns out that M$ has really cleaned up their act as far as security and fixed pretty much everything that was majorly wrong with IE6, although slashdot was very quick to point out a chink in the armor. The other major problem I had with IE6 was the CSS support. I have mentioned numerous times that IE6 makes this site look like it was hit by a truck, but after viewing it in IE7 it actually looks nice. It looks slightly different than how it looks in Mozilla based browsers, but its a lot closer to what I intended, and it’s at the point that I wouldn’t be embarrassed if someone came to the site with IE7.

I guess my verdict is, IE really doesn’t suck any more.

But on Tuesday, we got Firefox 2.0. Now I immediately install it wondering what could be better than what I already had. There was little change to the actual interface. The tabs now each have their own individual X’s and if you open up too many for one window’s width you get little directional arrows to scroll through them. The RSS support got better with the ability to automatically subscribe via Bloglines, My Yahoo, or Google Reader when viewing an XML file. They also threw in a phising filter (although is doesn’t go by that name) I’m assuming because M$ put on in, but who uses a phising filter anyway? I don’t think that many people know what ‘phishing’ is anyway.

So, Firefox is still awesome.

So what does this mean for the internet? Well, I’m pretty sure that people who use Firefox aren’t going to be switching to IE7 anytime soon. IE has got some cool new features and I would say it’s a decent browser again, but I just don’t think it can compete toe to toe with Firefox or Opera. But according to the numbers it doesn’t have to. Firefox has made a pretty big stink, but it still makes up a fraction of total internet users. All Micro$oft has to do is keep people from installing Firefox out of frustration from their browser, which I think they can now do. I don’t know if we’d call this a “Browser War” or not, but it’s good to see something else keeping M$ on their toes.

_Nathan

So I got my hair cut last Tuesday. I went to the same place that I went last semester and booked the same stylist. The English-speaker had, however, changed. Last time it was one of the receptionists; this time is was a guy who is a stylist. I told him what I wanted and he repeated it back to me, sort of. Anyway, I thought we were on the same page. So he told the stylist and then went his prissy way back to his own customer. I settled in and became engrossed in the Cosmo (in English!!!) and when I looked up at last, much of the hair on the back of my head was gone. I was feeling it and thinking, “Oh man, where is my hair?!”

We called the translator back over and he said what was going on was what we had agreed on. I said, “Uh, but where is my hair?” Then he went into some lecture about how it was “concave” and much better for my hair type and “See here, see this graduation is as short as it will be.” I said, “Yeah, but it is not supposed to be that short!” Anyway, he wouldn’t accept his wrong, even though he basically said in his Chinese way that he had decided this would be better than what I had said. So I had fallen victim to the I-know-better-than-you -do-what-you-want Chinese stylist. Now, these exist in America, but for fear of litigation, they will not actually carry out their anarchist plans. That is what reality TV is for. But in China they are everywhere. If you go to try on some clothes and the item has a pin or tie or, heaven forbid, a belt, the girl helping you will do it up for you and then fuss over it for 5 minutes while you just stand there awkwardly.

Anyway, the stylist finished up the cut and it wasn’t too bad in the end. Nathan really likes it and it is growing on me. But I think it is the shortest it has ever been.

Elizabeth

So life has gone back to its normal paces I suppose. I think people were getting tired of me talking about computers and stuff so I’m going to make an effort to talk about something else.

So Chuck Harle (the guy who got me my job here in Hángzhōu) wrote me a few weeks ago wanting to know if I was staying on another year or not. I got another email from him last weekend asking again since he has teachers lined up and needs to know if my position will be open or not. I really wish I could give him an answer, but Elizabeth and I haven’t been able to decide what we are going to do next semester. We’ve made some friends here, but we pretty much came to Hángzhōu on the premise that we were using this an an entrance back into China. I suppose we didn’t rule out the possibility of staying but last semester felt so much like waiting to leave that we never really entertained the possibility until now. So it becomes very obvious that we need to get ourselves to Nánjīng in order to seriously consider or options for moving. Chuck has also offered to let us know what’s available in other cities, but exploring the Nánjīng option only feels fair since it was our unofficial plan up until this point.

In other news, I saw the season finale of the Venture Bros season 2 thanks to bit torrent and MySpleen. And I must say the 2 part finally was a brilliant cap to an excellent season. I was going to try to sound all fancy and give a critique of the show, but I’m much too fanboyish for that. This show is awesome!! If you haven’t seen I, then I feel very sorry for you. I watched season 1 as often as I could on Adult Swim, not an easy task since it aired at 1am (the show now airs at 1am and 5am). But I thought the show contained a rare brilliance found in television. I liked the show so much that I had a friend download all of the episodes when I lived in Florida. It obviously took some time for Adult Swim to pick up season 2, and since the show is hand drawn it took longer to create season 2. But after arriving home from my summer travels, I discovered that it had been unleashed on cable television and thus, on the internet. But like I said this show is awesome, the references to things like David Bowie, Led Zepplin, Star Wars, Rocky Horror, the six-million dollar man , Easy Rider, and Magic: The Gathering are just hilarious and speak directly to a geeky heart. But since the show is entirely based on a spoof of Jonny Quest (although both Jonny Quest and Race Banon actually appear in the show) its not too far a leap to just spoof everything from Scooby Doo to the Fantastic 4. Anyway, if you still don’t know what I’m talking about follow the links above and get this show pronto!

If you haven’t noticed by most of the links above Wikipedia, that Wiki is now open in China! Maybe you never knew that it wasn’t, so I’ll tell you that it wasn’t, but now it is! Sorry to cut this short but I’ve got to knock out one last day of teaching to make it to the weekend.

_Nathan

I’m coming to you live from a clean computer. It seems we’ve come out on top except that I haven’t re-installed Windows yet. Elizabeth’s machine is running clean and happy but somehow I’ve failed to switch back to the old empire. I did try re-installing Windows at first, but when the installation failed I just intalled Suse 9.2 again and decided to take a break from the M$.

I think a lot of people ( at least a lot of peopleI know ) go through this phase. We get fed up with Windows being a pain, or somebody gets hurt with something crashing and we swear we are switching. We can’t afford to buy Macs so we turn to the free alternatives. You can choose one of the easier installs ( Fadora, Ubuntu, Debian, or openSuse ) and start feeling good when it goes so well. Then things start looking up when you find out that you have the basic stuff you need like FireFox and OpenOffice and the break from Explorer seems pleasant and liberating.

But just like moving to a foreign country soon the OS-shock starts to set in when little annoyances like not knowing how to change your icons or desktop wallpaper and not being able to find drivers for printers or special devices start to add up. Then when you get to the part where you have to install software from scratch and you find out you can’t use your iPod anymore because you can’t run iTunes most people break down and this point and return, head hung low, to their Windows installation.

But for some reason I’m hanging in there. I suppose it’s a stubborn determination at this point or the realization that in the future I may not be able to afford future Windows OSs or find pirated copies anyway. Traveling around the world on old hardware seems to lend itself to open source and maybe going through the trials of converting to the Linux way of doing things speaks to the pioneer spirit. It could also be that I am cheap and make only $500 USD a month. But whatever the reason I’ve decided to hold out.

So far the things I’ve sacrificed are Dreamweaver, iTunes and/or Winamp, the ability to watch DivX TV shows and movies. and the ability to download easily installable programs I suppose. But there are many open source alternatives to each of these, but so far none seem easy. But at the end of the day what good thing was ever easy?

_Nathan

Unfortunately I seriously have nothing else to talk about except my continuing computer problems. So when last we left off I was copying everything across the network to try and keep the nasty trojan off of my system. And just as I finished with Elizabeth’s computer and thought everything was back to normal both my laptop and Elizabeth’s computer started freaking out! Which means every piece of technology in my apartment was suspect.

I was feeling pretty low at this point, so I retreated to my fortress of solitude (my Suse 9.2 installation on my laptop, I was running dual-boot) so I could have a long hard look at all these drives without the risk of it spreading. I didn’t really know what to look for so I did a search for any .exe on the backup drive that I thought was clean. The only ones that came up were stuff I recognized except for 4. In the System Volume Information on the root of the drive (which is tough to look at in Windows Explorer) hidden in the restore points I found a handful or critically named executables. I started searching for .exe files in the System Volume Information and lo and behold there has been a few trojans that propagate files that way! Whatever jerk wrote this thing sure didn’t want to make it easy on anybody. So I could view Windows files all the live long day in Suse, but I couldn’t delete them. So I booted back into windows and tried to get back into the System Volume Information and couldn’t. It took deep and 3vil magic in the form of cacls "G:\System Volume Information" /E /R MyUsername:f to gain access. Windows was very hesitant to allow me to actually delete restore points that were being used, but with a little help from Microsoft I was able to turn off restore points.

I decided that everything on Elizabeth’s computer was suspect so I broke out my old friend KillDisk and reduced every disk to nothing but zeroed out sectors. After the 3 hours that that took I Re-created some partitions and the re-re-installed Windows. On my laptop I tried to just format my Windows partition and re-install a clean one, but half way through the installation it crashed!! I think the CD was too scratched to read or something, but whatever it was the installation refused to finish. This not only broke my windows installation but screwed up the boot sector and killed my Suse installation! I had had enough. I wiped the whole disk and re-installed Suse only.

As of this writing, I think I’ve killed the trojan. But it’s been like burning down the neighborhood to get rid of a roach problem. I’m seriously considering not re-installing Windows, but I know like the rest of the world I will probably give in and again be at the mercy of M$. Oh well, perhaps someday we’ll all run linux, but I’m afraid that time has not yet come. I’m sorry if some of you didn’t understand any of that, but like I said I don’t have anything else to talk about.

I have to come up with a lesson plan by tomorrow for all of my classes and while I’m at it I should come up with something to teach in my classes this week. I suppose I should be doing some real work anytime now.

_Nathan

To answer Heather’s question, no I didn’t delete 3 years worth of posts. But I did have to do something with them, so last night I whipped up old.whereisnathan.com. You’ll also notice the funky looking skull at the bottom of the buttons down there, that will also get you there. I think I said previously that I tried to use the WordPress importer to no avail, but I think I like this better. A nice look back at a version that I did spent a lot of time and effort on. Also like a miniature museum, except not.

So Golden Week is coming to a close and I will be back in classes again tomorrow. We ended up not doing anything at all, or at least not leaving XiàShà. But yesterday was Moon Festival so we felt like we had to do something so we went out and found a new Thai restaurant that just opened next to the super market right up the road. It was run by a local HángZhōu resident who has just returned after studying abroad in Australia and managing a Thai restaurant in Melbourne. If last night was any indication, it has potential to be the finest restaurant in XiàShà. The service was superb and the food was very good. He gave us a 20% discount for having a limited menu since it was their first week of business and only charged us cost for the wine. I will definitely be going back. And if you live in XiàShà ask me about this place and I’ll tell you more about it.

Well, a boring uneventful week comes to a close and in a few days life will return to normal. Chris and Lindsay will be coming to visit us soon and now that it’s safe to travel I think we’ll be visiting others soon enough. We are long overdue for a trip to Nanjing.

_Nathan

Well today is Mid-Autumn Day on the Chinese lunar calendar. It’s the day when the moon is at its fullest all year. Now I’m not sure why the moon being full corresponds to having family reunions or getting married but that is the result in China. While completely randomly listening to the news yesterday I heard that this week something like 50 million people will be travelling this week. That sounds like too small a number since it feels like every single person in China is travelling. I will at least say that Hangzhou feels like it’s at double capacity. I had to go downtown on Monday with Ashley to the post office and the streets were overflowing with people (on the main tourist drags anyway). It wasn’t unbearable, but certainly noticeable.

But this year I suppose it might be worse because Mid-Autumn Day falls during Golden Week which is week long vacation following National Day. So October 1rst (on the solar calendar) is the July 4th of China celebrating the establishment of the People’s Republic on October 1rst, 1949. But then they decided to try and 1up the July 4 celebration by stretching it into a week. Now usually people will try and go home to see their families on during this week anyway, but once you through in Mid-Autumn festival the urge for the Chinese to travel home is irresistible.

But on a completely separate subject, I’m still fixing Elizabeth’s computer. Not really so much fixing as copying off all of the valuable data so I can format every disk and partition in an attempt to try and destroy the 3vil that now lives inside it. Ok, for all you nerds out there who have an interest in hearing about this stuff check it out. So I don’t know how this thing got in, but it’s a very tricky little bug. First sign was the obvious stupid amount of popups so my first reaction is to go to the registry and see what’s up. I find a little string in the Window->Current Version->Run Key called ‘Trojan‘ or something of the sort and it has a value of ‘C:WindowsWinlogon.exe‘. Now you and I know this means trouble. But get this, I can’t kill the process because Windows things it’s the real Winlogon.exe and is a system process that can’t be shut down. As I was looking around for other nastiness I also found a lot of false bittorrent.exe files all over the place. At that point I deleted the partition and did a format re-install. Now the Chinese are pretty clever by keeping a separate partition only for the Windows installation so after getting it booted up again, it wasn’t 30 seconds before the madness started all over again.

Now my worst fears were realized when I found it had spread to all the partitions and do my other hard drive with ALL my music and videos and other files of goodness. On the root of the other drives there were two suspicious looking hidden system files. A shortcut called pagefile and a sxs.exe. Now I know when I’m in over my head and I could see that this was a lost cause. So I went on down to the local computer mall (a large building with tons of little kiosks with as much random computer equipment as possible stuffed into them) to see what I could do about getting myself an external HDD.

I’ll just say I got the drive (two of them actually), but I’d like to take a moment and discuss the intricacies of bargaining in China. Now techniques vary from region to region but here are a few tips I’ve found to be mostly always true.

First, you don’t want to smile too much at first. If you come in looking slap happy they might get filled with blood lust and try and charge you 3 times as much the thing is worth and it will be difficult to bring them down from there.

Second, don’t speak English. Now I guess I should start out by saying that if you say something in Chinese and they repond to you in English you might want to give this up. But if you find a vendor who doesn’t speak English at all, you must resist the urge to ask them if they speak English or if they can find someone who does. This helps slightly with putting you on the level of an equal and not some foreign devil who speaks and incomprehensible language. If the bargaining over prices stalls, try and make small talk. Ask where they are from. Maybe you’ve been to their hometown and you can tell them how beautiful it is. Ask about their children. Maybe you’ll get to meet them and you can tell them how cute they are. If you don’t speak Chinese that well, then just practice the phrases necessary to make it seem as if you know what you are talking about.

Third, determine a budget and stick to it. In fact only bring that much money with you. Yesterday I went in there with only so much cash, when it came time I told them I only had a certain amount and actually showed it to them. If you can put the cash in front of them it might help your cases since at that point they see you aren’t just blowing smoke. You have real money and it could be their money if they can work out some sort of agreement. At one point they did ask me if I could go home and get more. I ignored this question and acted as if I couldn’t understand the question. Don’t be afraid to walk away. There is always someone else who will sell you the same thing cheaper. Finding this person may be a challenge, but don’t doubt this truth.

Last, when all else fails just stand there. This one drives me crazy as I hate just standing there no doing anything, but sometimes it must be done. Elizabeth is great at this one. This is the tester for the sales-person because at this point he/she has to decide how much they want to sell you something. If they are serious they will pause and look at their calculator seriously, they may start punching numbers in there seemingly at random and scratching their head. By the way, they will always have a calculator in which to show you the price. If you stand there poker faced long enough either two things will happen; one, they will break and give you the price your asking or at least come to a final offer stage, or two they will decide you aren’t worth it and start putting the thing you want to buy away.

In the end, if they do crack it will probably come with something like “because we are such good friends” and don’t take this lightly. This means you have an in and that this person wants to continue doing business with you. Seconds later you will probably receive their name card which might be completely in Chinese. Yesterday I got lucky and I could read his whole name, this only further cemented our relationship.

Well, the blog is looking pretty empty these days what with me getting rid of the last 3 years of posts. But give it a little time and I’m sure it will feel like home again.

_Nathan

Well almost. But I promise this is the last of the major site-breaking updates for a long time. I have officially demoted blogger to number 2 and put WordPress up as the main engine. WordPress does indeed include a importer but I couldn’t get it to work and I think it’s a nice break anyway. Kind of ringing in the new world order I suppose.

So a few things you should be aware of: Comments are back, please use them. The ‘Board’ is still fighting me a little as I try to integrate it more, so I’m punishing it by forcing it to open up a new window so you don’t lose complete touch with the site when you use it. I’m still working on archives for the new hotness, but if you really need to go back and read all my old posts I’ll be making them available soon. Also, I think I’m a liar about the rss feed moving. Wordpress will no doubt put it in a different place and I still don’t know the deep mysteries of this new magic. Ok, I think I just made the ‘atom’ button work over there on the right. If you can’t get the feed going from there try this: http://www.whereisnathan.com/?feed=atom

Ok, well now that that’s out of the way allow me to tell you have I’ve been. I go through phases where I hate computers. Like right now, this site is taking far too much of my time (and yet I keep working on it) and Elizabeth’s computer just got some sort of wicked viral-spyware that totally brought the system to its knees and corrupted pretty much every file we own. Sucks. So today as soon as I assure I have a site again, I’m going to buy an external hard drive and hopefully use the network to try and protect myself from the foulness. I hope the net admins here are on their toes or else this could get ugly, I have no idea if it can spread over the network or not. I’m assuming not since it hasn’t got to me yet. We’re pretty sure it came down throw bit torrent.

So whatever I was hoping to do with my vacation has now gone up in smoke since it looks like I will be fixing computers instead. And possibly working on my lesson plans that are due in a week. So sorry there isn’t any sort of crazy cool thing I did this week to talk about. I’m pretty much sitting around in my pajamas in my apartment thinking about what a loser I am. Oh well, at least in the US you guys are just going to work as usual since you (probably) don’t celebrate the rise to power of the Party in our glorious China. Well, happy National Day anyway. Be sure and look at the moon in the next few nights since it will be moon festival soon. Look at the moon and thing of me. Somewhere I’m eating a moon cake.

_Nathan