So at about 9 am, assuming my parents and best man are ready, we'll be jumping in a taxi for Deshengmen then taking the bus over to Yanqing. At lunch today my parents will meet at least lzh's mum, probably her uncle and aunt as well, and maybe her dad-...

Whither Kevin Rudd? To or from China? Matt Schiavenza muses here, and Matthew Stinson follows up here. All I know about Rudd is that he just won the Aussie election, he speaks Putonghua fluently (did he major in Chinese?), and he used to work in the Aussie...

Definitely getting my chilli tolerance back. In fact, I'm going to have to start really pushing the limit. It's been so long since I had a good chilli rush.... So last night I cooked up a big pot of rice (so that I'd have leftovers to fry today- it makes...

Could it be that this afternoon I made some real progress on catching up all that paperwork that I want out of the way before my parents arrive? Wow. Amazing. I'm treating myself to a bottle of Dragon Seal dry red wine as a reward for an afternoon well...

This may seem odd coming from somebody who seems to live more online than off, but: There is something really scary about the way society is going, especially in relation to technology. It's hard for me to explain, let's just say that the more time I...

So, yeah, today started brilliantly. 8 o'clock class means my alarm was set for 6:30- yeah, wake up in darkness, love that (actually, that's the one thing I really, really loathe about winter- waking up in darkness). And then at 7 o'clock sharp the power...

So I managed to make some progress in catching up on that long-overdue paperwork today, thanks to the power being back on in the computer building (there's not much sadder than a Computer Science department with no electricity) and a well-structured Thursday...

Well, so much for putting more money on the internet account and catching up with that paperwork- stuff that needed to be done on the office computer. Somehow the computer building, where our office and the internet office are located, has had no electricity...

Somebody broke my bike. It was parked at the bottom of the stairwell. Yesterday lzh noticed that the lever for the front brake had been snapped off. I guess sometime on Saturday night somebody accidentally knocked the bike over, it landed awkwardly on...

Spotted in the convenience store up the road: A box claiming to contain whiskey, alleging said whiskey was a product of Scotland. But something about that box made it difficult to believe its contents were actually produced in the Scotland that makes...