Earthquakes

Had  two earthquakes here yesterday that I felt.  Luckily I am an hour away from Christchurch, so don't get the worst of it.

Care package from the USA

Friends in the USA sent me a care package..



A Waffle House menu/placemat, and it's not clean.. like it's been used. A nice americana keepsake, and something I wanted as one before I left the states. Also a pack of Icelandic pepper lollies.

Tips for living well in Shanghai

I've written up the highlights of another forum thread, this time related to tips for living well in Shanghai. As before, the thread covers a period of around five years, so some may be less relevant than they were when posted (assuming they were relevant then).

Forums: Shanghai Expat.
Sub-forum: Lifestyle Recommendations.
Topic: Tips for living well in Shanghai.

Priority Requirements

- Getting a temporary residence slip from the nearest PSB within 48 hours. [1]

Travel

- The maglev to the airport is cheaper if you can produce a ticket for travel on that day. [1]

Markets

- Approaches to bartering. [1]
- Determining the fair price for something before leaving home. [1]

Stores

- Goods are not weighed at the counter, but rather by assistants at scales. [1]
- Places you can buy foreigner food. [1]

Home

- People performing a service in your home should be informed not to smoke. [1]
- If getting internet installed, speed check it before the technician leaves, making sure he fixes it. [1]

Convenience

- You can get your visa/passport delivered to your home for a small fee. [1]
- Buying pre-paid SIMs from tobacco stands. [1]
- The last week of the month (after payday) is not the best time to go to the bank. [1]
- Carry cash and small notes as not everyone can give change. [1]
- The best public restrooms are McDonalds and KFC and you do not need to be a customer. [1]
- Have a english / mandarin speaker on speed dial, so you can call them to translate in an emergency. [1]
- Pay bills at selected convenience stores. [1]
- Get some decent maps. [1]
- Get familiar with different forms of transport so you have more options. [1]

Restaurants

- Declining the tissues you do not want, but have to pay for. [1]

Avoiding being ripped off

- Always ask for a receipt after you finish a taxi ride. [1] [2]
- Beware the maroon taxis. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
- Spotting counterfeit money.  Where to buy ultraviolet pens that help. [1] [2] [3]
- Spotting a fake fa piao. [1] [2]

Safety

- Cycling and unsafe taxi drivers. [1]

Being prepared

- Carry toilet paper as toilets may lack it. [1] [2] [3]
- Carry antibacterial cleaning gels as toilets may lack soap. [1] [2]

Etiquette

- Pushing and shoving in crowded spaces is normal. [1] [2] [3]
- Bowls of liquid might not be for drinking, but for washing hands. [1]
- Smiling and staying calm in all circumstances to help save face and resolve a situation. [1] [2]
- Always arrive on time, better to be early than late. [1]
- Friendly general phrases which help. [1] [2]
- Don't criticise how China works. [1]

Getting help

- A phone number that converts between english and chinese. [1]

Private blogs

On the rare occasion, blogs I enjoy reading go dark. They turn on a private mode, where they add anyone who will be allowed to access it onto a whitelist. A common reason, is to avoid the controversy that their posts may incur. Whether this is negative people adding unwelcome comments, creepy internet stalkers from their past or to hide their opinion from parties who may otherwise take offense.

This is all well and good, but from the viewpoint of a whitelist member, it is inconvenient and awkward. If I want to read their blogs, I actually have to go to them, log in and read the posts in place. You can't add them to Google Reader and have it take care of abstracting away the log in process -- not even when the blogs are hosted by Blogger, which Google also owns. And this means, that it is easy to forget to check out these "dark" blogs. And forget commenting on them, let's say you forget the blog for a month and then coming back comment on a selection of posts made during that last month. Just like a public blog, there's no easy way of knowing if your comments were replied to, but worse still, even if there was a comment feed you couldn't subscribe to it anyway.

I'd love to know there was a way to make Google Reader work with these blogs. How hard can it be? One line of code, right? Their help system works well, and gives me this.

My housing situation

Illustrated using other people's pictures..

Buying a second-hand car: WoF

As I am looking at buying a second-hand car, I've been doing a bit of research about the options. One thing I didn't know, was what someone posted on Emigrate NZ:

No one is allowed to sell a car without a WOF which is less than one month old (exception being brand new cars that dont require wofs for a few years as they are brand new).

Usually that means the car you are buying has to have a new wof before you buy it.

It is possible to sell a car without a WOF, but only if it is sold "as is"

Doing a quick google for "second hand car wof site:govt.nz" gives me this link on the Land Transport NZ web site corroborating the claim.

Finding removed content on Sourceforge

Sourceforge is filled with noise. Projects that were created and never started, projects that were started but never really taken anywhere and in general just such a mass of projects that searching there for new and interesting ones is too much effort. Occasionally, someone will mention an interesting project hosted there and that's pretty much the only way I go to sourceforge these days.

While casually browsing through the Flipcode archive for articles related to software rendering, I stumbled across a reference to a project called 'sw-shader'. At some stage, the open source project was cleaned out when the technology was sold to TransGaming where it was improved and released as SwiftShader. None of the downloadable source code archives or binaries once made available by the project were available any more, and the homepage set to redirect to the SwiftShader page at TransGaming.

This isn't the first project that has "gone dark" on sourceforge. Another is 'flux3d', a project for the FluxPlayer source code. And another was for the Elephant versioning file system, although I cannot remember the name of its project.

In the past, you used to be able to go to a sourceforge server where tarballs were automatically generated for all projects and find a snapshot of a project's CVS repository. This seems to have gone the way of the dodo. You also used to be able to go to a sourceforge server where the files made available for download by a project (removed or not) could be browsed. This appears to also have gone the way of the dodo. Sourceforge claim that data is not deleted, only hidden, yet it seems almost impossible to locate that hidden data, where it was trivial before.

Please note that data that users or SourceForge.net administrators "delete" from the SourceForge.net site is merely hidden, but retained for perpetuity. It is not necessary to restore this data if flagged as deleted; contact us for assistance.

One of the sourceforge mirrors is browsable as a folder hierarchy of downloadable project files. As can be seen in the given link, no files are present for the 'sw-shader' project. 'download.sourceforge.net' cannot be connected to either, so that is a false lead.

Eventually I found a link to another mirror where sourceforge project files are accessible, one that contains all files, hidden or not. Files are available for the softwire project and the sw-shader project. Also for the flux3d project. I have no idea whether there were ever checkins to the CVS repositories.

It's not the most ideal solution. It used to be so much easier to track these things down. It's possible that I could contact sourceforge and ask, but I wanted to see whether I could track down what I wanted without the break in attention span that the delay involved in that contact would cause.

Shipping books to New Zealand via M-Bags

The bulk of my possessions that I actually wanted to ship back to New Zealand were books. I had around 200kg of books, to a large extent from the C.C.P. North America damages bookshelves which employees can help themselves to. The original plan was to ship all of them in boxes by sea, but as tends to happen, I recalled the movie Fight Club and Tyler Durden saying along the lines of "the possessions that you own, come to own you." So I threw most of the books in the apartment complex dumpster and went with the cheapest easiest way of shipping for the rest. Someone suggested I should have ebayed the ones I didn't keep, but it seemed kind of unethical.

The cheapest way of shipping I found was to use M-Bags. Like most things in the U.S.A. where bureaucracy is involved, the U.S.P.S. doesn't give a simple description of how to ship this way. But the gist of it is that you go to the post office and they give you a number of bags that look like this:


Along with these sacks, they give you an address tag to fill out. You can see the one attached to this sack in the upper right of the photo above. And they also give you a customs sticker. You fill out the customs sticker declaring the value of the books, and describe them. I put "personal possessions (books)" as I was moving back to New Zealand and can ship possessions without Customs charging me for them.

I was a little worried about the condition the books would arrive in, so I wrapped them in shrinkwrap to protect against water damage, then wrapped them again in bubblewrap. I also held back on sending too many books this way because I was concerned about whether it was worth it, comparing the U.S. price of the books versus the cost of shipping this way. This proved to be a mistake as everything in New Zealand is very expensive.


It turns out I was right to be worried about the condition of the books in these sacks. Even at the post office in the states, I was concerned whether the velcro strap used to fasten the bag shut was anything more than a token effort. The first bag to arrive at the N.Z. address I sent them to, didn't. Several bubblewrapped bundles of books arrived.

Given the amount of money I spent to ship these books, I was a little bit worried by this. Several days later more bubblewrapped bundles arrived along with the second sack. Another worry was that some bundles might have gone missing, but an inventory showed that all the bundles from both sacks were present. It was just as well I put an address label on each bundle, with my name and address. Not sure why I did it, but if I hadn't I might have lost a whole sack of books.

There was a little damage to the hard-cover books, with bent corners, but other than that the only other damage was due to the missing sack. Somewhere along the lines, someone had combined book bundles for easier courier shipping with hard plastic tape, crushing a book or two.

Here's a page complaining about price increases in M-Bag shipping. It looks like it used to be a really cheap way of shipping books (which is pretty much all you're allowed to put in M-Bags).

I was just looking up prices here in N.Z. for two of the books (A and B) I shipped. The combined price of these two books easily covers the shipping cost of one of the sacks.

Back in New Zealand

I resigned from C.C.P. two weeks ago.

Back in 2007, I was working at a small company in Iceland wanting to return to New Zealand, but the unknown logistics of a move in a country where English wasn't the primary language were slowing the decision. Then a friend asked if I would be willing to come work for C.C.P. again, but this time in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A. to work on another MMO. So I decided to make the move and live there for a year to see what life in the U.S.A. was like, open to the possibility of staying longer if it appealed to do so.

A year and a half later, it suddenly occurred to me that it was time to return to New Zealand. I was more interested in working on low level systems, and the type of work I was doing was on the level of high level gameplay functionality. After talking it over with my boss, despite his willingness and flexibility to alter my job to make it more appealing for me to stay, I realised that I had made a concrete decision to return to a country that felt like home. I was tired of sitting in an office, staring out a large window seeing blue skies and sunshine, wondering why I had to be inside for the best part of that day.

I'd recommend working for C.C.P. North America on their MMO project to anyone who might consider applying, the programmers there are among some of the nicest, easy going and competent people I worked with (except David Press - I kid David, since you'll probably read this).

It's so nice to be unemployed with no fixed abode.

Live in Iceland: Moving apartments

My current landlord gave me notice that I have to move out of my apartment around a month ago, and was quite flexible about when I actually moved out. By law, the notice period by either party is usually three months. And it is a nice amount of leeway to find a new apartment, especially at this time of year when university is starting again and the good ones are snapped up almost immediately. So having a landlord who is happy for you to move out as soon as you can, can make it a little easier and cheaper, not having to pay two rents at the same time in the worst case.

As it is nice to know what needs to be done as part of this process, and to have a record of it for next time, I thought I would write it up here. On the agenda today was to transfer my telephone and internet connections to the new apartment. My telephone connection is through Siminn and my internet provider is Hive.

So first I called Siminn. Apparently you need to know the old phone number for the apartment you are moving to, so that they can reconnect your existing number there without sending a technician over which would incur charges (the salesgirl rattled off numbers like 7000ISK for the base fee and possibly 5000ISK more). I had a number I believed was the right one. However, the lease uses a different definition of which floor the apartment is on than what Siminn had for the phone number, so there was some confusion about whether the number was right.

After calling my landlady back, and discussing this I just decided to have faith that getting connected to the same place as her old number was sufficient. So I called Siminn again and went through the process, the salesman I got this time seemed unconcerned with the difference in floor numbers for the apartment. The process of transferring a phone number is supposed to take 1-3 working days. However, he then asked me if I had an internet connection and arranged for it to move with the phone number. He also mentioned that transferring the internet connection would take 1-5 working days. Excellent, that simplifies things a lot! Now I don't need to call Hive.

I hope however that the difference in floor numbering isn't a problem.

The lack of a cellphone is a big inconvenience in this day and age. A workplace isn't guaranteed to have phone system (given that all other employees have cellphones and are owners anyway so can use them for work business) like my current job or it might have a computerised phone system which is awkward to use like my last job. But something I have found with both my bank and now Siminn, is that they are more than happy to use an email address as a point of contact, in the absence of a cell phone. Communicating an email address over the phone however is sometimes not that easy. But as I get incoming emails pretty much instantaneously, it is a good way of making sure I am contactable. In the situation of not having a cell phone, it does make me wonder how people got by with just normal telephones before cell phones became common -- it just seems such an inconvenience to have to make sure you are in your apartment in case a call comes.