No-nonsense China Expat Blog

As a follow up to my brother’s god-awful experience with Air China, here’s a crazy recording of a Air China pilot who just can’t speak English at the mandatory level.

Pretty disgraceful…
http://www.youtube.com/v/ob7mc8gIyrE

I’ve been trying to access my Feedburner feeds for about 12 hours with no luck. Could it be? No, please Buddha, no! Don’t tell me the Great Firewall of China has finally figured out we could still read blocked blogs via their feeds.

Ok, perhaps I’m over-reacting, and perhaps it’s just a localized outage or something. However, I try to access the Lost Laowai feed, and nadda. Then I try again with Tor on, and voila!

The site, www.feedburner.com, seems fine. I can sign into my account no problem and all that, but when I try to access any of the feeds at the sub-domain http://feeds.feedburner.com, it’s a no-go.

Please report if you’ve similar problems.

Added: Just moments …

It’s a question that every expat faces when visiting another country. Do you or do you not have a right to comment, complain, or question the politics of your host country?

There is no shortage of such commentary in the Chinese blogosphere, and many foreigners in China (and I’m by no means an exception) turn to posting their opinions of China’s short-comings on the internet.

There is also no shortage of readers who will tell all these writers to shut up or go home.

I sincerely admire the China veterans like John at Sinosplice, who as his site claims, manages to stay completely apolitical in his commentary. Or the guys over at China Law Blog, who remain …

Sorry the site’s been quiet lately folks, but I’ve been knee deep in my new business. What it has caused me to do is take a serious look at my sites and question whether or not I’m happy with the layouts. My blog, The Humanaught, was the first to suffer a stroke from my sword of change, and I’ve now set my sites on Lost Laowai.

Over the next few days I’ll be introducing a new look around here, so please excuse me if I’m slow to post. Rest assured that after things are all shiny and new I’ll be doing my darnedest to dirty things up with my usual blathering.

As the summer heat seems to have claimed some of …

Barely a week goes by without Western media reporting on the latest trademark, copyright or IP infringement coming out of China.

Just today I read that Chinese companies are distributing fake Icewine. Touting it to the rising middle-class that are looking for ways to show off that don’t involve a Mercedes and 30,000 RMB dinners. The wine, allegedly made in the Niagara Peninsula - my home away from China, is little more than cheap Shandong grape juice.

If it’s not copyright issues, it’s dangerous products. Not dangerous products? Well, issues then.

This piranha style “journalism” is a product of our times. Of our ability to access and consume news every minute of every day. It’s marketing meets mayhem. It is as …

Skype, the internet telephony service and instant-messaging application, has been non-operational, globally, for the past 24 hours.

It’s a massive outage: effectively crippling an entire company which was worth US$2.6 billion when eBay purchased it back in 2005. It also leaves the 8 million very regular users (though most newspapers are running with the “220 million users” figure) somewhat speechless, unable to access either the free IM, or the paid calling service.

Since many people across the globe, including a good number of expats such as myself, rely on Skype as an international phone service, a lot of people - and a lot of businesses - have been left stranded, unable to make calls or access their contact lists.

When I attempt to …

As previously mentioned elsewhere, my brother was here in China for about a two week span. I live in Dalian, so we chose to spend the bulk of the time here. I’m not particularly fond of Beijing, but seeing as how one of the only things my brother knows about China and/or it’s culture is the Great Wall, I decided that going there for at least a day was (regretably) unavoidable.

And plus, I’m not particularly keen on scrambling from one tourist trap to another during my hard-earned vacation time. One Chinese city was as new as the next to my brother, and so it was settled - 12 …

Oh, sure, you may THINK that 2008 begins in just five months or so, but for 1/5th of the world (give or take), it all starts one year from now - as today Beijing’s Olympic Clock hits the magic 365 days number. Yee haw!

Many have said that these Olympics will be “China’s coming out party” … and that very well may be true. However, one wishes it was more a “hi dad, I’m gay” kind of party, rather than the flamboyantly homosexual father of four announcing it to his church kind of self-serving spectacle/debacle that it has become.

I mean, the Greeks.. they knew how to show a cool level of detachment to …

Last week, Louis Vuitton opened its Nanjing store. It opened with all of the pomp and ribbon-cutting and champagne and full-page newspaper ads announcing itself that one would expect from LV anywhere in the world. What I didn’t expect, though, was the literal mobs of shoppers that rushed the store the second the doors swung apart.

Nanjing people are known for their, well, modesty. They don’t expect too much in life, so …

Nary a week goes by that the Chinese media doesn’t provide us all with something to chuckle at and re-enforce our “oh those crazy Chinese” mentality.

This week’s big news flub comes right from the top, Xinhua. The State-owned mouthpiece’s English-language Web site ran a serious story about a breakthrough in identifying what causes multiple sclerosis.

As multiple sclerosis is a complicated medical condition, and any sciencey talk is likely to be confusing and hard to follow, the site opted to add a visual aid … in the form of Homer Simpson’s peanut-sized brain….