Category: General

Used it this morning at Shanghai Pudong airport. Internet check in is not for nothing anymore. After printing out your boarding pass on your home printer, at least Singapore airlines has a separate 2 check in counters for internet check-in and they serve first internet check-in customers first and then normal customers. The beauty of this is that almost no one was using internet check-in this morning. The normal queue was 50 persons long, while i just strut to the front of the internet line to deposit my bag!
Don’t remember this trick being of too much help in europe where its common to do kiosk check-in anyway.

Awaiting my 0815 Shanghai airlines flight to Beijing this morning at the Hongqiao airport. Which reminds me, I’ve not been here since the move to Pudong around 2001ish. Even then, never had the chance to fly domestic in China (Hong Kong is not really included for me). As expected, its decidedly chinese, people do talk louder here, and there are hot water stations everywhere to fill up the quintessential tea flask. Surprisingly its a no smoking zone. At the front entrance theres a heavy air filled with cigarrette smoke as everyone takes a last pull before going into the torture chamber. Time to get from home to airport? The usual 20mins and another 20mins later I’m inside the waiting lounge. If all airport was this painless. I’m also guessing that the fact that its not even 7am now and its a domestic terminal has to do with the apparent efficiency. Anyhow, got to plan for my half day assault on the forbidden city, weather permitting.

One day after dropping my nokia into the sink wet, and spending a whole day drying it by leaving the battery out, spending 15mins under the hair dryer, this phone is alive again! It was wet enough to have water spraying out once shaken. Nice. Water was seeping in through the keypads and all and it survived. At least for now…

I’m currently at Taipei’s Taoyuan Airport on the way back to Shanghai today with 6 hours in Hong Kong. Been some time since my last time in HK and nice to be back there again. The itinerary today will be 2hrs in Tsimtsatsui and Mongkok to grab some 5.11 gears before going back to the airport for the 7pm flight. Will hope to grab a bowl of wontan noodles on the way. Goody goody.

…while washing my hands in the wash basin. Just happened sometime ago. First thing to do: turn it off (which was difficult as it was locked and takes a couple of key presses), remove battery, use dry towel. Looks like I wont have a use for my Nokia E61 for a couple of days while waiting for it to dry. There’s no hand dryer anywhere in this office in Taipei, and so I will need to wait till I get back to the hotel tonight to do that.
In the meantime no one will be able to get me on the phone!

Woke up a while this morning with a little trembling. Felt the pictures on the wall move a bit, and 10 seconds later it was back to normal. Didn’t think too much of it. Did a search on the quake this morning and this is what I got!
Magnitude 6.5
* Thursday, September 06, 2007 at 17:51:27 UTC
* Friday, September 07, 2007 at 01:51:27 AM at epicenter
Location 24.334°N, 122.324°E
Depth 62.9 km (39.1 miles)
Region TAIWAN REGION
Distances 55 km (35 miles) ESE of Su-ao, Taiwan
85 km (55 miles) ENE of Hua-lien, Taiwan
115 km (70 miles) SE of T’AI-PEI, Taiwan
145 km (90 miles) ESE of Hsin-chu, Taiwan

As in, 6.5 on the richter scale! Local time is 1:51am Friday, since this is probably american time since it came from USGS site. Location seems to be in the ocean to the east of Taiwan as in the map below:

Quake Epicenter

Anyway, it was not as big as the last one I felt some time back. This one lasted really quickly.

Am currently zipping 100kmph along the airport highway in Taoyuan county after having touched down in Taipei at 4pm after leaving home in Shanghai at 7am. Flight to Hong Kong was delayed, and had to take a later connecting flight. Which is not really that bad as I got to refill my stomach with a bowl of wonton noodles and the mind with Wired and Outside magazines, which is almost impossible to find in Shanghai. The noodles at the airport does not taste as good as the last time I had it 1-2 years ago. Looks like on the return leg I have to go look for another one in Hong Kong Island. Still, better than nothing.

Did some small research today on CF cards and the various specs you see on the packaging. I still don’t trust speed specs on packages, and I bet many list max speed rather that average throughput so comparison in shops by looking at packaging info is almost impossible. But I think we can all agree that at least you buy what you need today and not for the future as prices drop really fast.
What I found today is this thing called PIO modes that camera and cards somehow comply to. Depending on your camera, if you support an older PIO mode you may not be able to use the full speed of your CF card. Lets not talk about point and shoot cameras, 99% of them would probably do fine with the normal cards without the user knowing the difference.

Latest card like the Sandisk Extreme IV supports PIO mode 6, also known as UDMA in marketing-speak. Only the latest cameras support this card, like the D3 and D300 from Nikon. So, I take this to mean that you will not see close to 40mbps specced on Extreme IVs unless you use compatible cameras. The D200, D2X series and D2Hs supports PIO mode 6, so probably Extreme III will give close to IV performance. Got to check Rob Galbraith’s database to be sure. Which my oldish D2H will find an Extreme III an overkill! However, still think Extreme IIIs are a good buy if I can find a fast card reader to offload the data. 4mpix pictures are small, only 3mb per picture, so 40mbps write is overkill.

Will be out looking for UDMA card reader. About time I spend less time waiting for photos to be downloaded.

Lets see… where shall I go this saturday? Yahoo weather saysthunderstorms in the afternoon. Some sunlight. OK. Mind made up. Will be
at the Shanghai south long distance bus station early Sat morning to
catch a bus to Ningbo. Report to come later.

I don’t know a lot of people using Sony’s rebadged Konica-Minolta DSLR, in fact I don’t anyone at all using that line, but one thing is for sure… Here in Shanghai, the number of shop with the large orange display for the Alpha is just staggering. Any photo shop you go into, you are bound to see it, ranks after Nikon and Canon for visibility. But still, I don’t see a lot of users out there.