Shanghai water delivery

I found this in my drafts folder.  Have I already posted a version?  Beats me, but between my cold and my desire to go to bed.. I'm going to assume I haven't and just post it.

---

If you're drinking water in Shanghai, you have several options. You can boil the tap water to kill the germs and drink that, but then you still have the heavy metals. You can buy bottles from the supermarket, but then you're killing the environment with all that discarded plastic and it gets old carrying the bottles home. And you can also obtain or buy a water dispenser and have 5 gallon bottles delivered to your home.

I'm at the point where I am buying a water dispenser. The word on Shanghai Expat was that you can get one for around 100 RMB at a store like Gome. So I located my nearest Gome store on Changshou road and went there.

The process of buying something at a store like these, let alone a water dispenser, is long and complicated. You start off buy going to find the good you want on the shelf, then you negotiate in limited Mandarin with all the old ladies standing around. Then one of them goes off and fills in a form, and gives it to you. Then you head up stairs to the payment counter, and pay the girls there. Then they give you two slips, one of which (the white one) is to give to the collections counter and the other (the pink one) is your fa piao / receipt.

So you head over to the collections counter, where someone takes the white slip and goes to fetch whatever you bought.

Then you grab it and leave.

The next step is to get the water bottles to accompany it. On Shanghai Expat people seem to talk about preferring three brands mostly. Nongfu Springs, Watsons and Nestle. Nongfu Springs is a local cheaper brand, but no-one seems to talk about getting it delivered. I normally drink Nestle, so I decided to stick with it and order that. After a bit of Googling, I managed to find a Chinese language Nestle web page. Life must have been so much harder for people living in China before tools like Google Translate were around.

There are three types of water offered. Distilled at 28 RMB, mineral water for 19 RMB and purified water at 17 RMB. It is kind of confusing which to choose, but Shanghai Expat comes to the rescue again. People advise against the distilled water because it lacks the minerals and salts of normal water, which causes problems in the long run. The word is to buy mineral water.

So I called the listed number, pressed 2 for English. Then gave my address, named how many bottles I wanted, agreed to pay a 40 RMB deposit for each, chose which type of water I wanted and they will be delivered tomorrow between 12 PM and 5 PM. It is not exactly ideal to have to stick around home for five hours!

I've since left Shanghai, and didn't bother getting the ~40 RMB refund per bottle.  The Nestle delivery service was consistently helpful, and went out of their way to get me the water.  If they came at the wrong time, or when I popped out, they'd ring and sort out a new time.  I'd recommend anyone living in Shangai use them.  Many of the locals simply boiled the water, maybe that's good enough for you.. but maybe you should think twice.

Mnemosyne 2 finally released

Just noticed there was a new release of Mnemosyne, the spaced repetition flashcard program I use which also happens to be written in Python.  It's ten times larger than the previous version, but at 20 megabytes that's not a big deal.  A quick look suggests that this is due to the inclusion of mplayer and the updated version of QT being used.

There was no information I could locate about the repercussions of installing 2.0 over an existing 1.x installation, so I went ahead and installed it under a different menu and installation directory name.  Either as part of the installation process, or when first run, it located my existing cards and imported them.

The revision interface looks pretty much the same.  The card browsing interface which I didn't screenshot, is much improved however.

There's also new support for synchronisation with mobile devices built in, and a whole range of other more standard features used in the implementation of the new version.  I haven't had a chance to explore these yet, but am looking forward to it.

The older version had support for user authored plug-ins written in Python, which I only used to convert Chinese pinyin numbers to tone marks.  Unfortunately, there's no matching support in the new version yet.  For a long time, it seemed like this was one of those projects where the author had given up on it and was effectively distracted by a never-ending "rewrite".  Glad to see it's not the case.

Planet MUD-Dev update

One new blog has been added to the aggregator:

• NaGaDeMo Websocket MUD.

Two blogs have died and been removed from the aggregator:

• Lysator.  An extremely productive developer, inspired me to work on my own MUD.  Kicked off the one he worked on because of politics, presumably the blog has been discarded.
• Ruby MUD.  This one has been dead a long time I believe.  The link was there in case it came alive.

Updates:

• This blog.  Turns out it was pointing to the awkward feedburner thing I have stopped using because it got in the way of subscribing to labels.

Frankly it is a miracle the aggregator is working.  Bluehost has changed something and python no longer works in the shell, however the cron script appears to bypass the shell configuration and uses the default Python installation.. and hence things still work.

If you know of any MUD blogs which meet the criteria and are not already here, then please sing out!  Also, if you're involved in any community projects like the Imaginary Realities thing, some blog posts about the progress on a weekly basis might be a good idea.