Monthly Archives: June 2004

ADSL is also Unavailable in my Home

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I couldn’t imagine that I would face the challenge of getting Internet access after I move into my new home (Dahua Jin Xiu Hua Cheng) in Pudong. I was disappointed that I cannot use cable modem here. I called China Telecom to install ADSL. Today, I got confirmation from China Telecom that I cannot install ADSL in my home either. The equipment here is not ready for installation. In their technical term, the ADSL port is not available for this area.

Well. There is a long way to go to get Internet access and setup the Network Infrustructure as my previous apartment.

During my free chat with Andy, I learnt that China Unicom offers some kind of CDMA Internet access card – basically a SIM card – that enables a laptop to access Internet like GC75 + GPRS, but faster and cheaper. There is a package of 700 RMB for unlimited Internet access at speed of 200+ kps. (The data is not confirmed yet). The equipment (the PC card) needs to purchase separately.

People are asking me about which is the best broadband solution in Shanghai. Based on my limited experience with some providers, I still recommend ADSL from China Telecom. See my brief review of Broadband Internet Providers in Shanghai.

Cable Modem Unavaible in Pudong

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I thought Pudong is a completely new area. I was wrong. Tonight, I borrowed a cable modem from Xiao Gao, hoping to install it in my home. Since the cable modem authentication is bound to MAC address, it should be connect-and-play without entering user name or password.

I connected the black magic box of cable modem to the cable port but the cable light didn’t turn on. I called 96877 for help. They checked the address of my apartment and told me: “Sorry. The cable TV system is not upgraded to support duplex data transfer right now. So it is impossible to install cable modem in your apartment”.

I asked whether there is a plan for the upgrade, the answer is “I don’t know”.

This reminded me that Pudong is not built from ground up. The areas are upgraded from counties and villages where the basic infrastructure is still not as good as Puxi. Puxi has been a CITY for two hundred years while Pudong is not. I cannot expect a brand new area there. Pudong new district, the government, is new, while Pudong is old, very old.

P.S. I helped Patrick, the first user of my Apartment Offered Form to put his apartment on this site. To avoid putting such advertisement (although it is free public service) to the headline of this blog, I marked all such posts’ date to be May 22, 2004.

Getting a Link is Like Receiving a Gift

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“Dave Sifry, founder of Technorati, told me once that getting a link is like receiving a gift. It’s a social gesture.” (via Scobleizer). What a fantastic idea. I pays attention to my referral log to all incoming links – just curious abut what others say about me or my blog. It should be the same for most bloggers. Gift is a sweet word, just like the feeling of getting a link. Let me distribute some gift today.

Isaac

Isaac is a smart guy. His personal website isaacmao.com (Chinese site) is a FVS for me (I just invented this abbr. FVS = Frequently Visited Site). His is among the first few bloggers in China. Later, he co-founded cnblog.org. Now, it is the gathering place for academic bloggers. By academic, I mean most contributors to cnblog.org are taking blogging serious and doing research on blogging as a technology and social phenomena.

There is always interesting stuff on his site, especially his english site. It has a cool name META.

Topku

I never met Topku yet. topku.com is a popular site. The nick name topku has an interesting story behind it – it should be read as To-PKU, where PKU means Peking University. Topku is an active contributor to cnblog.org and a firm fighter against Fang Xing Dong’s blogchina.com

Zheng

Zheng is another famous guy that I wanted to meet for a long time. I read a lot on his blog http://blogs.51.net/ (Chinese site). His article quality is super good, with good thoughts, although I cannot understand (or have patient to think hard enough) all the posts (example).

Other websites

Here is some of my friend’s blogs.

Claire’s Blog – Claire was an intern here. She can speak French. She stayed in France for some time and worked (as an intern) in U.S. for some time. Her blog is among the most emotional blogs. There is another emotional blog Chinese tea. :-D

Eddy wrote a lot about his son. He uses his blog to record the days his son grows up. How lovely! The domain name yinzirui is the name of his son.

Eric is a geek. This is what I wrote about him in LinkedIn

Zi Ying is among the smartest people I know in this world. He is a great developer with unexceptional knowledge of computer. He is also a high-tech geek who never stops explore new things. He owns blue tooth equipments and changes his PDA more often than I change my tooth-brush

What I said is true. He ran to me yesterday and show me his new SmartPhone. He changed his mobile again. Thanks to Eric that I am able to use the GC75 GPRS Modem so I could update this blog at home in the last month.

I have several geek friends in my friend cycle like Eric. Xiao Gao is another. His girl friend is studying in Switzerland. He named his domain name by his girl friend’s name – Tanqi.

He is the kind of guy who digs into the technical details. I am very surprised that he bought a IBM tablet-PC like equipment at only 800 RMB. The 14′ LCD display comes with a PC inside, a touch screen and wireless LAN PC card. Now it is running Windows 98. Haha… He spent too much time on programming at Tanqi.com. Before Tanqi.com migrated to SPS, it has forum, wiki, blog with comment, pictures, font replacement functions, but with almost no articles, so with not many visitors. LOL.

Frank is of strong characteristics. He quitted Microsoft and joined a college to teach computer. He is going to Kanas this August. I am not sure if I can go there as I planned.

Grace uses her blog as part of her work. If she starts a personal blog one day, she will definitely become a good writer because she always has the latest news.

run2me.com is a continuously updating site (although not everyday). Check his trip to Paris. It is very nice. Run is so humorous that he issued 5 website logos to celebrate one month’s opening of his site in Nov, the last year.

Eddie told me excitedly that after I put a link to his site, his site got 500 visitors in the following three days.

Airport Construction Fee

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Airport Construction Fee

I don’t have the impression to pay for this fee when I was in U.S. or Singapore. Michael asked about whether it is required for departing passengers or arriving passengers. The answer is, it is for departing passengers only. You need to hold your flight tickets and the airport construction fee receipt to enter the waiting area. It is collected at all airport in China.

Fee

It is 90 RMB for international flight, 50 RMB for domestic flight and 30 RMB for branch flight (from major city to small city).

Usage

It is gathered and put into the governmental funding to improve the aviation system in China. According to this report, in China, 50% of the airport construction fee will be handed in to the central goverment and the rest 50% will be kepted by the airport.

It is reported that the Airport Construction Fee may be put into tickets so passengers don’t have to buy it at airport.

Who can void the Airport Construction Fee

According to Xinhuanews, the following passengers don’t have to pay the China Airport Construction Fee:

  • International Passenger transitting in China airport. The ratio of transition passengers seem still very low currently. Shanghai, or Beijing is still far behind Tokoyo in terms of aviation hub. Not many flight transits in Shanghai or Beijing. So chances are, you are not in this category.
  • Diploma passport holders taking flights to leave Mainland China.
  • Children under 12 (including 12)
  • Domestic transition flights with interval less than 8 hours.

Update Airport Construction Fee combined wth tickets September 3, 2004

See this article Airport Construction Fee Included in Tickets for more information about the change.

Update Airport Construction Fee continues in 2007 May 11, 2007

With all the requests from passengers to cancel the airport construction fee, it is announced that the 50 – 90 RMB construction fee will continue to be collected in 2007, making it the 16th year to collect this fee. According to this news, 30 billion RMB has been collected from this so far.

Shanghai Map Viewer 0.5 Restored

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In the last few weeks, after moving my server to IpowerWeb, the Shanghai Map Viewer does not work as it well as before. Actually, the IPowerWeb only support Perl and PHP while the previous version 0.71 was written in ASP + Access database.

In the last few days, I migrated the application to PHP version so the original links to this site is not broken. Now, only the most two baisc functions work.

1. Navigate using the thumb view.

2. Navigate via 8 direction arrows.

3. Display places names if it is encoded in URL, such as Jian Shuo Wang’s Pudong Home, or Ramada Hotel (Pudong).

4. You can add a point to the map now and embed the map into any web page.