And here they are : this past trip’s purchases that I brought back.
Sunday/ the trip’s little acquisitions
Saturday/ in Seattle
It’s still Saturday but I’m in Seattle and thrilled to be home. Check out the pictures and their captions from the trip out of Hong Kong with a stop-over in Seoul.
Saturday/ on the way to the airport
I am about to go downstairs to check out and hop on the shuttle that takes passengers to the airport a stone’s throw away. The South China Morning Post reports on an on-going story of a local Shenzhen company that is sueing Apple over the iPad trademark. So far a Hong Kong court has ruled in Apple’s favor and a mainland court against them. I suppose in the worst case Apple can call its pad an ‘iTab’ and continue selling it in China. It is not known how many iPads have been sold in China so far. Another report tells of Kim Jong-il’s eldest son that was kicked out of a Macau hotel after running up a bill of US$15,000. 
Friday/ at the Sky City
The week went by in a flash, and I am on the way home to Seattle. I sent a last urgent e-mail when everyone was boarding the bus for Dameisha. From there we had a van take us through the border. Right now I am in the Marriott Sky City hotel by Hong Kong airport for my flight out in the morning. The first three pictures are from Shenzhen and the two bridge pictures from Hong Kong on the way to Lantau island where the airport is.
Wednesday/ winter cheer
On Wednesday night we had a beer and a burger/ a British fish-and-chips at the Sheraton Dameisha to bid a colleague good-bye that is leaving the project. (The project is nearing its completion for all of us anyway). The LED decorations are still in place outside the hotel, and add some cheer to the winter nights. The Water Sky Hotel across the street has a new white sign. Very nice, but I miss the old yellow neon tube one that it used to have. At least the warm red one for the Meisha hotel close by, is still in place!
Tuesday/ it’s no Party without a red Solo cup
I will leave it to my savvy readers to identify the Party leaders on this very red iPhone cover from one of my colleagues here at work.
But what’s with the red cups? Well. Those are red Solo cups. Around since the seventies, and manufactured in the state of Illinois, the plastic cup has since arrived as a pop culture icon in the USA. It is the informal beer, wine or soda pop goblet of parties everywhere. The cup’s merits are even praised in a (somewhat silly) song released last year by country singer Toby Keith. Warning : semi-explicit lyrics ahead !
Red Solo Cup from Toby Keith’s 2011 ‘Clancy’s Tavern’ album (songwriters: Beavers, Jim / Warren, Brett/ Warren, Brad/ Beavers, Brett) –
Now a red Solo cup is the best receptacle / For barbeques, tailgates, fairs and festivals / And you, sir, do not have a pair of testicles / If you prefer drinking from glass / A red Solo cup is cheap and disposable / In 14 years they are decomposable / And unlike my home they are not foreclosable / Freddie Mac can kiss my a—
Monday/ Garfield speaks Mandarin
I only know Garfield* the cat from newspaper cartoon strips even though I’m sure there is a lot to be seen of him on the Cartoon Network in the USA. Here on the hotel’s TV channel he speaks Mandarin, but his antics are easy to follow. He is his old self with regards to laziness and eating obsessively! The name of the pooch is Odie. That’s him with ears and tongue flapping while leaning out the car window.
*created by Jim Davis and published since 1978. Garfield is named after Jim’s grandfather.
Sunday/ just marry!
‘Just Marry’ says the English on the hood of this Porsche wagon parked in front of the hotel where we stay. Even though Chinese weddings have been influenced by the way it is done in the West, some key differences remain. The couple registers the wedding first, and then one or more wedding banquets (xǐ-jǐu 喜酒 or ‘joyful wine’) will follow – and those are far more important than the actual wedding itself. The bride and groom also have their pictures taken days or weeks before their wedding day with glamor shots from historic sites and picturesque spots.
The Year of the Dragon is an auspicious year for marriage in China, and so the number of marriages in 2012 is expected to be up 10% or more compared with recent years.
Saturday/ Boris Becker on tennis rules
If you were king for a day in your sport, what big change would you make? asked CNN in a 
segment today of four sports champions. Tennis (Boris Becker*): Abolish deuce-advantage scoring – to make matches shorter. Golf (Gary Player) : Push back the tee by 50 yards for professionals – to accommodate newer club and golf ball technology. Athletics (Sergei Bubka) : Use radio transmitters to report time differences between runners. Soccer : Use goal-line technology – to indicate if a goal was scored or not.
*On 7 July 1985, Becker became the first unseeded player and the first German to win the Wimbledon singles title, defeating Kevin Curren in four sets. At the time he was the youngest ever male Grand Slam singles champion at 17. Four years later in 1989 Michael Chang would win the French Open at an even younger 17 years of age.
Friday/ gringos at the Tequila Coyote Cantina
Friday night found nine gringos (foreigners) upstairs at the Tequila Coyote Cantina., a Mexican restaurant in the Futian district in Shenzhen. There was even a page with Tex-Mex items on the menu. After some translation difficulty for our request for a pitcher* of margarita cocktail mix, the restaurant improvised and brought the good stuff out in a Carlsberg beer pitcher.
*the Chinese word for pitcher is ping 瓶
Thursday/ fugu フグ day in Japan
Every year on Feb 9, the Fisherman’s Cooperative in Tokyo offers fine torafugu (Japanese puffer fish) to the Imperial Palace. The picture is from NHK TV. Fugu has become one of the most celebrated and notorious dishes in Japanese cuisine. It must be meticulously prepared to remove toxic parts and to avoid contaminating the meat with the lethal poison tetrodotoxin found in the little fish’s organs. There is no antidote, and the poison is not affected by cooking. It attacks the nervous system and leaves its victims unable to breathe. The best the emergency room can do for you is to pump you full of active carbon (to absorb the poison from your stomach) and put you on life support to see if you make it !
Wedensday/ lady finger bananas
I got these ‘lady finger’ bananas from a colleague. She got them from a seller at a gas station a few hours away. The little bananas are sweet, and are grown in Australia as well.
Tuesday/ the outlook : still gloomy
.. and not only for weather, as I look out from the back of the hotel on the 8th floor over Dameisha at 7am in the morning. The Wall Street Journal reported on Feb 1 from Shanghai that the average housing price in 100 major Chinese cities fell for a fifth consecutive month in January as China’s property market continued to slow. But look at the graph : the declines are fractions of a percentage, and seem to decline at a steady pace. So not a sharp plunge in the Chinese real estate market for now.
Turning to the US real estate market, check out the S&P/Case-Shiller 10 city Index, a graph I found at http://www.housingviews.com. Home prices are down some 30% from the peak in late 2005. And there is no bottom in home values yet .. even with 30-year mortgage rates at a record low.
Monday/ Shenzhen shopping
These pictures are all from Shenzhen’s Futian district, from the Central Walk mall and the mix-C mall. There is still evidence of the start of the 2012 Year of the Dragon everywhere.
Sunday/ controlling the crowd
On Sundays NHK World TV shows the work of artists and graphic designers, and I liked the crisp look of these pictures of that illustrated how good layouts and some forethought can make it easier for everyone in the crowd. Of course, everyone has to play by the rules ! The website is www.mizuhiro.com.
Saturday/ more fireworks
Those of us ‘left behind’ by our colleagues – they go home to Shanghai and Beijing – did our usual beer-and-a-bite at the Sheraton hotel on Friday night. On Saturday night another fireworks ruckus erupted here in Dameisha, this time from behind the Sheraton. I noticed that the right section of the hotel is dark .. it is winter after all, and the weather not nice enough to go to the beach.
Friday/ the Korean mind
I am still looking for an opportunity to stop over long enough in Seoul to stay in the city for a day or two. This picture book I bought at Incheon airport provides very interesting insights into the Korean history and the Korean mind (a map of the Korean consciousness, says the cover of the book by Won-bok Rhie).
Formatting note : iPads may not display all the pictures in the correct orientation .. not sure why.
Thursday/ United-Continental ‘marriage’ update
Bloomberg Businessweek gives a very interesting update about the merger between United and Continental Airlines in their latest issue. The picture is from my iPad .. I’m still getting used to reading my magazines this way!
The new merged airline sent enough coffee into the sky last year to brew 62 million cups. (And Starbucks that was served on the old United has lost the contract for the new merged airline). Continental people in Houston have had to move to Chicago where the new headquarters is. But one of the biggest and most frightening challenges so far has been merging the flight information systems. If data were corrupted in the switch-over from two systems into one, the airline could find itself without vital information about its flights : destination and arrival times, flight numbers, or locations. For the final test last October, they flew an empty 737 Continental jet from Houston to El Paso, made believe it ran into a mechanical problem and made it turn around. At Houston they changed the flight number and sent it to Austin. Everything worked and the information was updated in the United system. Then on Nov 2 just after midnight, they took the United system off-line. For the next hour the United flights were tracked manually while the Continental system information was flowed into the United system. Plans were in place for mass cancellations of flights the next morning if there were problems with the cut-over. At 1.23 am the entire Ops Center was looking at the the tracking screens as the United system came back on-line, and burst into applause. The Continental flights showed up. The only small glitch was that flights that had crossed the international dateline during the outage had 24 hours added to their arrival time.
Wednesday/ dragon fruit ‘huǒ lóng guǒ’
We still go to lunch every day at 12.00 noon to the cafeteria : a welcome break from the slog at work. These dragon fruit are from a fruit seller close by. I didn’t buy any today but will get some next time and report back how much they cost.
Tuesday/ the Big Freeze
We are at the point of ‘freezing’ our test system, the same way the little water fall in the pictures from NHK World TV’s weather report has been frozen. At this point in an SAP project, all the moving parts of the Quality Assurance System come to a stop. No more tweaks to the custom code we added, no more changes to the extracted data which will be converted, and even on-going little defect fixes have now been put on hold. It’s not that the system is a house of cards that will collapse, but before you go to Production, you need to draw a line in the sand and say ‘This is it. This is the car, the Magnificent Flying Machine, the solution – we built’. We will go live (switch it on), and then after that any change to it is called Production Support.
