This is the first day of 2007. Best wishes to my family, friends, and my blog readers.

I am looking forward to having a great 2007! (Thanks jqian for correcting the grammer errors)

The year of Dog comes. It was said “every dog has its day”. Every 12 years, the dogs have their own year – the year of dog.

I will spend the Spring Festival in Beijing with Wendy this year. It is a special year for us. In my blood, I believe there is still lot of Northern China. I am more aligned with the culture in Beijing. To live in Beijing for sometime was part of our dream – finally, we can make it true.

Let me share a picture of my toy dog with you:

Dog in Seattle airport

Happy New Year for everyone!

P.S. The twelve-year ban for fireworks was unlifted this year. Till 2:00 AM, the bing and bong are still everywhere in the city. It is good that the ban was lifted. Shanghai does not ban. In Luoyang, although fireworks are still banned, but no one enforce it. When I call back home, my talk was sometime interrupted by the background explosion of fireworks.

This is the first post in the first several minutes of the year 2006.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year to everyone, my family, my friends and anyone I know or know me!

Short post? You know how busy I am at the New Year’s Eve. We just fired fireoworks and put on the Chuan Lian on my door. I hang big red lattern everywhere with burning candles in it and had dumpling with Wendy and Wendy’s parents here. I also made phone call with my families and sent/replied many of SMS tonight. Let me update the fantastic night tomorrow.

Update: Feb 09, 2005

The image on the lattern.

© Jian Shuo Wang

The boy and girl on the door of my room.

© Jian Shuo Wang

We will start the 7-day Spring Festival holiday from the day after tomorrow. Firworks started to appear randomly at night and I am very sure there will be a great fireworks show tomorrow.

Image courtesy of Google.com

The Year of Monkey Arrived!

Fireworks Picture of Last Night

© Jian Shuo Wang

The pictures above were taken from the window of my living room. This is the first time I stayed in Shanghai for Spring Festival – before this year, Wendy and I took trains to go back to our hometown. Those were miserable journey since trains are always crowded in this season.

So, it is the first time I took pictures of the fireworks. The fireworks are more splendid than any fireworks I have ever seen. :-D So many families went to the square of the residential garden and fired their own fireworks. Yes. The pictures I took were all fired by local residents. No government fund was involved.

Share Some Interesting Numbers

I’d like to share some amazing numbers with readers outside China. Just guess how many people watched the Spring Festival Celebration Party from CCTV? The statistics came out and the number is 500 million. Although the number decreased a little bit from last year (I remember), this four-hour program should still be the most popular program in the world in terms of number audience.

Also, it is forecasted that 17 billion SMS messages will be sent in China during this Spring Festival alone. The number was 7 billion last year. Think about it. 0.1 RMB for one SMS. It means 1.7 billion RMB income for China Telecom and Unicom alone in several days. I felt the difference since many people who didn’t send New Year greetings last year sent me SMS this year. I got around 40 SMS last night.

Note: Update may not be regular in the Spring Festival (from Jan 22 to Jan 29). :-D Wish you a happy New Year!

P.S. Today, I was interviewed by Jocelyn, from Marketplace.org. The interview is expected to be online tomorrow at http://marketplace.org

Happy New Year, 2004!!

Do you still remember the fireworks picture I posted the same day at the beginning of 2003? Here is my routine work to post the nice fireworks. The difference is, the pictures of this year is much better since I realized the fireworks mode of my Sony P8.

© Jian Shuo Wang

© Jian Shuo Wang

© Jian Shuo Wang

© Jian Shuo Wang

© Jian Shuo Wang

All the pictures were taken between 0:00 – 0:10 AM, Jan 1, 2003 from my reading room. The fireworks is at Shanghai Ever Bright Exhibition Center.

Happy New Year!

Top Commenter of the Month / Year

Although it is the holiday time, I still didn’t forget to announce the top commenter of the month for December, 2004.

The Top Commenter of the Month Award of December 2003 goes to

Carroll 14

WilliamW 10

Xu 8

Top 10 list:

Jian Shuo Wang 101

Carroll 14

WilliamW 10

Xu 8

tutu 6

Vesna 5

dodo 5

Bethune 5

Hailey 4

Zhang 3

sophie 3

Jason 3

erhuyou 3

elizabeth 3

History

This is the history of the Top Commenter Award for the year of 2003.

I started the Top Commenter Award from May of this year. At the beginning of every month, I will select the Top 3 Commenter in the past month and give the Top Commenter Award. I also list the top 10 Commenter.

April 2003

anna

Caroline

Luo

May 2003

Caroline

Luo

annie

July 2003

Nick

Kme

Yoda

Johnny

Gary Soup

Euthenics

June 2003

Nick

cuanyu

Xu

andrea

Augest 2003

toufu

Xu

Dan

Carroll

September 2003

william

tutu

Xu

Pete

October 2003

tutu

WilliamW(combined with previous nickname william)

Carroll

November 2003

WilliamW

tutu

dodo

December 2003

Carroll

WilliamW

Xu

Readers with Most Comments

If you are interested in who are the most active participants on this blog, here is the complete list of all readers who has posted more than 10 comments in the year of 2003.

Jian Shuo Wang 878

Caroline 59

luo 54

David 37

Xu 36

tutu 34

Carroll 33

WilliamW 32

anna 31

Nick 27

cuanyu 24

annie 23

Isaac 18

toufu 16

John 15

Mainlander 14

dodo 14

Carol 14

Vivian 13

William 12

Steve 12

Zhang 11

Tim 11

Shanghai Knight 11

Johnny 11

dave 11

Andrea 11

I am trying to add links to people on the list if I know they have a website. Let me know if I missed you

Just as I stated in Thank You For Your Comments, I appreciate everyone’s participation and your comments have been a more and more important part in this blog.

I want to thank everyone for commenting on my blog. I didn’t expect that so many people were involved. At the very beginning, when I have about 50 blog entries, I got about 10 comments. Later, when I completed my first 100 entries, there were about 100 comments. Now this is the 198th article in this blog and I got 478 comments, doubling the number of the blog entries. These comments shows sparkling ideas and timely information about the world. I appreciate everyone’s contribution on this blog which is the source of my passion to continue writing.

Now I have 419 entries and 3312 comments on this blog – the number of comments are almost 8 times of the entries. That means, there are about 8 comments on every entry by average. Wow. I am overwhelmed by your contribution to add your ideas into the thread of my thinking. Thank you for your contribution!

At five minutes and six seconds after 4 am, the date and time spell out as 01 02 03 04 05 06. Let us all usher in the Year of the Goat with cheer

– TAY YONG HONG

Image source: Icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk

Photo taken at 0:10 AM, Jan 1, 2003 from my reading room

Happy New Year!

I can see the fireworks from just outside my window. I want to share the happiness of the new year with you.