a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
The first picture of the roadside banner is mine – taken from the bus Monday morning. It is close to where we work. Dapeng Fortress (picture and information from Wikipedia) was built in 1394 as a military fortress against pirates. It later developed into a town during the Ming and Qing dynasties. In 1571, it sustained a siege of over forty days by Japanese pirates equipped with scaling ladders.
Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson’s 3D animated ‘The Adventures of Tintin’ based on Hergé’s famous cartoon character has premiered in Brussels this weekend. It will only start showing in the USA on Dec 21. Tintin fan that I am, I will have to go and see it.
The Tintin books have been translated into 60 languages. The picture shows this week’s TIME magazine cover, and next to it the Japanese translation of ‘King Ottokar’s Sceptre’ that I bought when I was in Tokyo. It was not easy to find the bookstore that carried it !
From the TIME article – Hergé drew his panels in an elegant, instantly recognizable style that has been so influential, it has acquired a name : ligne claire, or clear line. Its hallmarks are steady even lines, gorgeous washes of color, precisely detailed backgrounds and stylized, cartoonish faces.
Here are pictures of my jaunt to Hong Kong on Saturday :
I’m sitting in the taxi on the way to Luohu train station and border crossing in Shenzhen. Look for the signs that say ‘To Hong Kong’ and eventually you will end up at the customs check point. For some reason an inordinate number of Mainlanders wanted to cross today, so the ‘Foreigner’ section and lanes inside were just swamped with people as well. But an official called the few of us that were obviously foreign : ) out to a barricaded lane they carved out for us. ‘Thank you, thank you’ I said as he let us through. Once on the Hong Kong side where you pick up the East Rail Line to the city, it was smooth going. I took it down south all the way to Hung Hom station in the heart of Kowloon. The pink mural is from there, showing the wavy roof of the station. Of course there is a bus terminal and taxi stands outside as well. But I took the train to Tsim Tsa Tsui from there where the people picture was taken and where I ogled some Swiss watches in the windows. (Which one is best? The super square design from Jaeger Le Coultre, or the one with the Salvador Dali-ish numerals from Frank Muller?). Then I bought some newsmagazines, a math book ‘Alex’s Adventures in Numberland’ and a few grocery items before I headed back. The Shenzhen Shangri-la with the UFO restaurant at the top (in the center of the last picture below) is my personal landmark when I arrive back at the sprawling Luoho train station.
The red arch advertises a boat and yacht show here in the Shenzhen marina across from the hotel. I will try to get more pictures this weekend of the rich peoples’ toys. Four of us from work had beers and a bite at the Sheraton. Mine was a fancy pad thai in an egg net with shrimp (not sure how egg is used to make a net, but there it is). Back at our own hotel I just relaxed and watched some TV. It was not possible to escape the coverage of Gadhafi’s demise or the Greek debt crisis. And watch out below for the space junk of a German satellite about to come down. Looks like South Africa is safe, but Seattle and Japan might get pommeled !
Here’s another example of the little gift candy boxes that one’s coworker might hand out to you when he or she gets married. The words on the box remind me of Queen’s raucous song ‘Sweet Lady’ from their album A Night at the Opera (lyrics below, not for the faint of heart!). At the time of its release it was the most expensive album ever recorded.
Sweet Lady from A Night At The Opera (1975), words by Brian May
You call me up and treat me like a dog
You call me up and tear me up inside
You’ve got me on a lead
Ooh you bring me down you shout around
You don’t believe that I’m alone
Ooh you don’t believe me
Sweet lady sweet lady
Sweet lady stay sweet you say
You call me up and feed me all the lines
You call me sweet like I’m some kind of cheese
Waiting on the shelf
You eat me up you hold me down
I’m just a fool to make you a home
Ooh you really do and you say
Sweet lady sweet lady
Sweet lady ooh c’mon stay sweet
My sweet lady
Though it seems like we wait for ever
Stay sweet baby
Believe and we’ve got everything we need
Sweet lady sweet lady
Sweet lady stay sweet
Stay sweet sweet lady
Oh runaway come on
Yeah yeah
Yeah yeah
Sweet lady
We are (almost) done playing in our Sandbox system and now hard at work writing Functional Specifications. Functional Specifications will be used to write Technical Specifications, and then SAP’s programming language will be used by our development team to write code. But wait! Is SAP not pre-coded, packaged software? What needs to be coded, then? Well, we are tweaking the way the standard system works so that the screens and the functions make for a better fit for the business environment.
So what could be tweaked, and what should be left as is? Ahh : that could be a matter of fierce debate! As an example : on the classic Work Order screen below, changes on the HeaderData tab’s layout should be avoided. That is just too radical. It will confuse users that have used SAP elsewhere, and make the Germans ask Was ist denn hier los?! What is going on here? if they are called on for bug fixes or support. But it should be fine to have the system do additional checks for the accuracy of entered data, depending on which one of the ‘System Conditions’ was selected.
Mandarins are indigenous to south east Asia, and sometimes these are given as freebies in the cafeteria where we have lunch. A closely related fruit of this kind is found in South Africa, where they are called naartjies in Afrikaans, originally from the Tamil word nartei meaning citrus.
This plump little ‘loose-rinded fruit from a spiny orange tree’ as Merriam-Webster describes it (see below), was easy to peel and delicious!
From Merriam-Webster dictionary
man·da·rin
noun ˈman-d(ə-)rən
definition of mandarin
1 a : a public official in the Chinese Empire of any of nine superior grades b (1) : a pedantic official (2) : bureaucrat c : a person of position and influence often in intellectual or literary circles; especially : an elder and often traditionalist or reactionary member of such a circle
2 capitalized a : a form of spoken Chinese used by the court and the official classes of the Empire b : the group of closely related Chinese dialects that are spoken in about four fifths of the country and have a standard variety centering about Beijing
3 [Swedish mandarin (apelsin) mandarin (orange), ultimately from Portuguese mandarim mandarin; perhaps from the color of a mandarin’s robes] a : a small spiny orange tree (Citrus reticulata) of southeastern Asia with yellow to reddish-orange loose-rinded fruits; also : a tree (as the satsuma) developed in cultivation from the mandarin by artificial selection or hybridization b : the fruit of a mandarin
— man·da·rin·ic adjective
— man·da·rin·ism noun
Isn’t the pattern on the lid of someone’s teacup here at work just beautiful? I think it is.
Here’s the scene at the ‘restaurant across from the Sheraton’ where we had dinner tonight. There is also ‘the restaurant under the tree’ and the ‘spicy restaurant’ here in Dameisha : our way to simplify the Chinese names. The little group with white shirts by the window is a band that provided live music. My favorite dish of the evening was the eggplant and beef, shown in the picture. And the last picture is just of a hotel with animated neon stripes, close by.
I tagged along with two of my colleagues to Luohu Commercial City. It is a shopping mall right next to the Shenzhen-Hong Kong border’s customs building (first picture). Wikipedia says the place is notorious in Hong Kong for its bargains, and that many “one-day” visitors from Hong Kong venture no further into Shenzhen than the mall. Most of the items for sale in the mall, however, are either counterfeit or cheap replicas of designer brands, and the mall has a reputation for selling low-quality goods through high-pressure bargain tactics.
So it’s not for people like me that 1. hate haggling over prices, and 2. want the real thing! But there we were – and it wasn’t long before a ‘guide’ latched on to us, inquiring what we were interested in buying, and then taking us a store owner that sells it. The guide was a nice young kid and I hope he gets money from the shop-owners he brought us to. I am pretty sure he does. We also stopped at a little hole-in-the-wall tea shop, and the owner sat us down and served up green tea, oolong tea and jasmine tea. We loved the green tea and each bought a ‘brick’ of the stuff. Then we hopped in the taxi and came back to Dameisha.
Come end of day Friday we had completed a 7 day workweek that started the previous Saturday. Oof. So Friday night I just put my feet up (on the hotel bed) with some 7 Up I got across the street. The xǐ 喜 on the can means like| love| enjoy| joyful thing. I guess that’s the same as ‘up’, as in getting one’s spirits up. 7 Up was created by a Charles Grigg, who launched his St. Louis-based company The Howdy Corporation in 1920. The original Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda was launched just two weeks before the Wall Street Crash of 1929! The very cool artwork is from the 7 Up website. The submarine is my favorite!
FTA stands for Free Trade Agreement, of course. Finally went into law on the US side (still to be ratified by Korea). And what is ‘free’? Well, there are no import tariffs on a number of designated categories of goods. So President Obama says he’d soon like to see South Koreans driving Chevys, Fords and Buicks. Well, I’m sure the Koreans would like to see Americans drive more Hyundais, and they will possibly eat more American beef in return (screen shot from NHK TV Wed night).
Speaking of beef, yukhoe refers to a variety of raw dishes in Korean cuisine, usually made from raw ground beef seasoned with various spices or sauce. But in April and May this year, four people died and some 35 hospitalized after eating yukke (what it’s called in Japan) in the Tokyo area. Yukke is now served there under new standards (recent newspaper article from Tokyo newspaper). But they can still count me out. Cook or grill my beef, please!
There is a tropical depression (named Banyan) off the coast of Hong Kong that has produced a steady rain the last three days out here. This is bad news for the already-flooded areas in Thailand as well, I’m sure. The arrow sign is at our turn into Ping Kui Road every day to work, and I wonder if there will be enough light energy collected by the little solar panel to make the left and right arrow flicker at night – there probably will be.
I have munched on the last of my fancy dark chocolate Kit Kats I picked up in Japan (aww). Japan has green tea Kit Kat also, but I steered clear of that. Or maybe I will get some the next time I stop over in Narita airport. My love for Kit Kat goes back a long way; it has been around for 76 years now and I recall the plain red and white packaging shown in the 1969 picture below. Back then it was milk chocolate, and that was it. But it was very good !
One of our US colleagues brought us some Pilão coffee from the States. I have to confess that at first I thought it was Italian! .. but NO, it’s from Brazil. Brazil is by far the world’s largest coffee producer, responsible for around 30% of the world’s supply. Coffeereview.com says ‘Cafe Pilao represents the down-home style of Brazilian coffee. Most North American coffee drinkers will be put off by its almost composty fermented fruit notes, but others may enjoy this ambiguous flavor character’. So I will have to try it for myself and report back. The review site didn’t mention that the coffee is Rainforest Alliance-certified – I hope it is !
Before Germany started shutting down their nuclear reactors, they exported 1,400 GW-hrs per month, says Bloomberg Businessweek. Now they have to import about 2,000 GW-hrs per month, much of that coming from France and the Czech Republic. Aha! I thought so, was my reaction when I saw the article. So it remains to be seen if the Germans can replace their lost nuclear-power generating capacity with wind, solar and other renewable resources.
We are working this weekend – to make up for the extended Chinese holiday weekend. The US jobs report of Friday was also reported on Japanese TV here. (Yes, for a Japanese illiterate person I watch way too much Japanese TV, but it’s fun to figure out the graphics). The symbol 万 man means 10,000 – so it says 103,000 jobs added. In English we don’t have a symbol for 10,000 but myriad means exactly that, actually. So a myriagon is a polygon with 10,000 sides.
Of course the 9.1% would be the official US unemployment rate, unchanged.
Here is the proof coin set I bought at the Japan Mint’s store in Tokyo. The coins range from 1 yen (aluminum), a 5 yen brass coin, a 10 yen bronze coin and a 50 yen cupronickel coin, to a 100 yen cupronickel coin and a 500 yen nickel-brass coin. The ¥500 yen coin is worth big bucks, about US$6.50! And what the little 1 yen coin has going for it, is that it can float on water- wow. What a nice demonstration of surface tension in water. (The picture is from the web. I have some used 1 yen coins and I will try that when I get home to Seattle !).
Wednesday night I had dinner at the Denny’s across the street from the hotel one last time, then caught the Narita Express at 7am Thu morning at Tokyo station. There’s the sleek machine in the picture, gliding in and stopping so that the car doors line up exactly with the markers on the platform. I learned of Steve Jobs’s passing away at the airport on CNN. The picture is from a discussion of the iPhone 4S in Japan earlier in the week. iPhones were previously limited to one carrier (Softbank), but will now be available from a second carrier (KDDI), similar to the at-first-exclusive-to-AT&T and then-also-Verizon situation in the USA.
It was rained all day Wednesday in the Tokyo metro area (picture from NHK TV station) and I had on-line work to do, but I still managed to run out to Akihabara. It is also known as Akihabara Electric Town and located less than five minutes by rail from Tokyo Station. As the name indicates, it is a major shopping area for electronic, computer, anime, and otaku* goods, including new and used items. *roughly translates as geek; a person with obsessive interests in anime, manga or video games. The store is gigantic : 7 floors of Best Buy, Toys-R-Us and Office Depot stuff. The displays in some areas are just overwhelming but the store is very well laid out and run. The friendly guy in the picture explains how to measure your wrist size for watch straps, the blond anime girl is from the floor in the DVD/ CD section – why waste floor space if it can be put to good use to advertise the merchandise? The last picture is from outside. By then my shoes and socks were wet in spite of the umbrella I borrowed from the hotel and I called it quits and went back.
