Category: General

Slowly Dying in Shanghai

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Feb 6, 2020 The COVID excrement had just hit the blades of the rotating oscillator and China was shutting down all international travel. I booked a single ticket for my wife back to the states and kissed her goodbye. She had to return to retain her US Greencard, and I had to stay to take care of Thor, our French Bulldog. He was 8, too large to fit under a cabin seat, and too old to survive a trip in cargo. Plus only one airline would fly snub-nosed dogs at all. The next day, all international flights were cancelled. The Continue Reading →

Things I Miss Back in the States

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I’ve been living in Shanghai for nearly 10 years now and for all this city has to offer, there are still a few important things it lacks that I miss back in the States. Food Specifically the Cultural Variety of Food. I constantly, and repeatedly, find it really strange that in a city of 25 million people, and growing, there is very little variety of food. It’s almost all Chinese. I know, you think that’s a stupid thing for me to say. After all, I’m living in China. But even in the mid-west of the US, you can find many Continue Reading →

Random Barkings

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First I’d like to start off with this excellent TED talk by my favorite MythBuster, Adam Savage: Here’s the Chinese YouKu version: http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNDE1NTM1NDY0.html Living in China has it benefits, and its retractions. One of the biggest disadvantages, for me at least, is the censoring done on Web sites. Google is heavily blocked, facebook, wordpress.com, and twitter, youtube, as well as many others. (correct: I’ve embedded a YouTube that I can directly view from China…) For quite a while now, I’ve wanted to post quick little mini-blogs about things I see/experience from time to time. Things that are not ‘big’ enough to deserve Continue Reading →

Urban Exploration

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Soon after arriving in Shanghai early last year, I learned (the hard way) the importance of having a man-bag/purse…I lost my wallet! It was a bit hard getting used to at first, toting a purse around, macho as I am (ha), but the benefits quickly became apparent. There is lots of stuff one needs when wandering around the city and relying on my better half/very significant other to schelp it around for me was not exactly fair. So, after some hunting I found a very nice leather one made by a Chinese company, Victoria Cross, for 350¥. It was small/compact, Continue Reading →

Miscellaneous Musings

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Over the past month I’ve been playing around with various tech, so I thought I’d share what I have learned (aside form NEVER try to install Windows 7 on a USB drive) Team Viewer Microsoft Windows 7 has what appears to be a nifty built-in utility for remote access and assistance into remote PCs. Its called Microsoft Remote Assistance. However, typically for M$, it don’t work and there ain’t much on microsoft.com about it as they have removed it. I struggled with it for a couple of days using its “Easy Connect” option (which wasn’t…easy). I never got it to work Continue Reading →