Peaceful Rise

Last week I visited the XMLBoard website to show one of my coworkers how awesome I am, only to find that the sample site had been crippled under a flood of spam comments. Come to think of it, it's quite surprising thatit lasted as long as it did.  But I suppose that's only really by virtue of the fact that neither it nor any of the sites that used it were at all popular and worthy of spamming to begin with.  I took the script down and replaced it with a solemn memorial.

An hour ago the news came out that there will be a 2 to 6 degree earthquake from 10 to midnight tonight.  This is exciting.  My friends and I decided to meet up for some drinks.  Now the news just came out that the earlier news is a complete rumor, and that there will be no destructive earthquakes tonight, and we should keep on with our regular business.  I don't know who to believe.  I was hoping we could all hide under some tables and drink champagne. In the case that both of these news reports are false and we will actually have some serious destruction tonight, well, then so long and thanks for all the fish.

I took this video maybe a month ago now. Took me a while to get around to putting it together. These were just some clips I took during a really nice weekend visit to Beihai Park.

Ugh.

Check it out, I got paid for this. It's out in print, too. Just another 25 years and I'll have written the great American novel.

I finally started a job on Monday.  It's with New Oriental, the big English training corporation, but the branch I'm with is fairly small and new and does online Chinese teaching aimed at foreigners.  It's supposed to be a new competitor of Chinese Pod , which is well known and seems to make a fairly decent product.  See New Oriental's pitiful efforts at Target Chinese .  Note the panda wearing headphones, and of course the obligatory gong sound as you enter the page.  Fun fact: not only did the Chinese invent gunpowder and movable type, they also invented stereotypes!  Also key are the three sexy babes who really like learning Chinese, and let's not forget Jack, the awesome black dude who will be teaching live class in 2 hours, 15 minutes and 38 seconds.  Better hurry up and subscribe. Here is a picture of my cubicle: I don't know if the picture quite portrays how small this thing is.  I can't really turn my chair if somebody comes to tal...

China Daily came to do a piece at Go Club a couple of weeks ago.  Sadly I had neglected to shave that day, and soon all of China will see how filthy I am.  They don't seem to have put the footage up yet, but you can see a couple of pictures of me on the Go Club website.  As you can see, I was happily destroying my opponent: http://www.beijinggoclub.com/february.html I'll post another link when I find out that China Daily's piece is up.