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Thursday, August 7, 2008 (from Micah Sittig on Blogger)

Jupiter is still loitering in the sky above our balcony these days.

A view of Lujiazui from our laundry room in Zhangjiang High-Tech Park.

Friday, August 1, 2008 (from Micah Sittig on Blogger)

Retweeting @imnewer: RT @vvrabbit Retweeting @icorey: 当前北京四种人： 1、避运的：外出旅游避开奥运； 2、受运的：留在北京忍受奥运； 3、宫外运的：恭迎外国人参加奥运； 4、怀运的：只敢怀怨在心，但不敢发帖去骂

Got some errands to run now, maybe I'll translate this later. It uses plays on words to describe people's attitudes towards the Olympics using terms related to pregnancy/contraception.

I'm posting this for the language part, not for the Olympics. Ugh.

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Wednesday, July 30, 2008 (from Micah Sittig on Blogger)

I spent a bit of time these days (summer vacation, heh) on a couple of BBSs, but I've only been making one show up on my homepage because I was introduced to the other one by Jodi and she's a more private person than I am when it comes to revealing personal information (I'm sure you can figure out which one if you've been connecting the dots, but it's not like the tabloids would care or anything). Having the threads in which I post show up involves a bit of trickery because Chinese BBSs make it hard to pull/poll public feeds of posts by user, so I end up entering each thread by hand after I post to it.

This makes me wish there was a way to centralize control over my BBS posts across multiple BBSs from one interface. Instead of having to open a separate tab for each forum, I'd like to log into a single account and see which of my threads have been replied to in all of the different forums I post in. This would require the different BBS admins to opt-in or install whatever software made this possible, and it would run against the anonymity that a lot of people like in BBSs. But if we could get past or work around both of those obstacles, it would make something like Friendfeed possible for the BBS part of the internet and that would be cool, I think.

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Tuesday, July 29, 2008 (from Micah Sittig on Blogger)

It's hard to give credit for things you quote from the Chinese internet because so much of it is copy-and-pasted a million times over, so it's near impossible to know the original source. Here's one such thing that I found interesting:

本人对车牌略有研究，以下是详细介绍。
沪A、沪B、沪D上海市区，沪C远郊区

确切地说：上海的汽车牌照中，蓝色的，沪A、沪B、沪D、沪E都是一样的，为什么有A、B、C、D之分？很简单，沪A用完了就往后排到沪B了，照现在这个趋势发展下去，以后要有沪F、沪G、沪……，呵呵！

其中，蓝沪C是郊县牌照，按规定只能在外环线以外行驶，就是不能进市区。

上海的汽车牌照共有四种颜色，分别是黄色、蓝色、白色、黑色。

黄色：大型客车、卡车或营运车，例如：公交车、载重卡车，只有沪A、沪B、沪C三种，黄底黑字，牌照格式为：沪A（B、C）*****，“*”号中是字母或者数字。另外，对于集装箱卡车，就有“沪A*****挂”的样式，多了一个“挂”字，对于教练车，驾驶学校的，就有“沪A*****学”的样式。黄沪C是郊县牌照，按规定只能在外环线以外行驶，就是不能进市区。

蓝色：小型客车、私家车或营运车，例如：出租车和私人轿车基本都是蓝牌照的，有沪A、沪B、沪C、沪D、沪E共五种，蓝底白字，格式同黄牌照一样。其中沪C和其它的通行范围不一样，仅限外环线以外。

白色：警察和武警、部队使用的牌照。

警察：有沪A、沪B两种，格式为：沪A（B）*****警，白底黑字，其中“警”字为红色，没有通行范围限制，哪都能去。

武警：格式为：WJ(08)-*****，白底黑字，其中“WJ”是武警的意思，“(08)”代表上海市的武警部队编号，“*”号里全是数字。另外还有一种，WJ(08)-*****消，“消”字红色，就是消防员开的救火车。

部队：上海属于南京军区，格式为：南R*****，白底黑字，“南”字为红色，就是南京军区的意思。“*”号里全是数字。

黑色：领事馆牌照，黑底白字，格式为：沪A*****领，比较少，是各国领事馆专用的。

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Monday, July 28, 2008 (from Micah Sittig on Blogger)

Tonight on Channel Young they had a short segment where they highlighted 错别字, wrong characters on public signs. One that they singled out is the first character in Yoshinoya's name:

According to the host, the first character should have been 吉, where the top horizontal line is longer than the second one. What makes me curious is that the "wrong" character is used in graphics throughout Yoshinoya's Japanese website, but that the text in the website's copy that shows up in my Firefox on Windows XP has the "right" character:

吉野家

Is this a real mistake? Is it a calligraphic thing, or a Japanese/Chinese difference?

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Monday, July 28, 2008 (from msittig's Xanga)

We've been running low on groceries lately as it gets harder for Jodi to go out because of her big tummy. This has resulted in a few meals scrapped together with whatever we had in the kitchen, which has not been so bad because Jodi is quite talented in that area. A recent example:

Sliced and chilled tomatoes sprinkled with sugar, meat and lotus root balls covered with steamed rice, and a spicy pea-and-pork stirfry.

The last item goes great mixed together with steamed white rice and as Jodi would say is very 下饭, literally "down rice" because you end up downing a lot of rice with it.

Tonight before I go to bed I'm going to watch the Daily Show and dig into a couple of Shanghai Pies (British-style meat pies made with Australian beef) that are sitting in the fridge waiting to be warmed up in the oven. Yum.

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Monday, July 28, 2008 (from msittig's Xanga)

On Saturday we went to the house of the grandparents of one of the friends that Jodi found for Charlotte online. They are a pretty typical Shanghainese family, and this is the spread that they laid out for the large group of parents and babies that came to their house that day. Is this the kind of food you'd expect at a party?

Clockwise from 12 o'clock: a couple kinds of fried and very fragrant fish, frog legs, Pepsi, Shanghainese shengjian buns, chicken wings, steamed jujube cake, watermelon, KFC family bucket, more watermelon, Thai rice crackers, homemade sushi, a mix of steamed rice/corn breads, various kinds of pressed and marinated tofu, boiled soy beans, boiled taro root, slices of lunchmeat sausage, something I can't remember that involved peanuts, and boiled chicken pieces.

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Monday, July 28, 2008 (from Micah Sittig on Blogger)

An explanation for all the new photos I just put online: on Saturday we went to the aquarium at Changfeng Park (which we still enjoyed on our second visit, Charlotte's first) with a bunch of Jodi's online friends and then spent the afternoon at one family's house. Here's a few of pictures from our outing. More on Flickr.