Mop Acquires Donews

The news of MOP acquiring 100% share of Donews arrived to me first from Yubo on SMS the day before yesterday. After that, many friends dropped me the news on MSN Messenger. I was not that surprised.

Liuren and Keso are my very good friend in Beijing. They helped me a lot when I just started to work for Kijiji, both on professional or personal aspect. I feel very happy about them after I heard the news. Although there are a lot of controversial discussion on the pro side or the con side, but I firmly support whatever decision Liuren and keso made.

Life is all about making decisions and it is only the person who are involved has the right to make the call. Comments are just comments. Donews is the dream of two admirable persons. It is a great place to work, although there are only 4 people working for the company. (BTW, is it a company already? :-) )

I met Ren in a Microsoft community party in 2001 when I was working for the community team, but the first in depth talk only happened in May this year. It was in a Starbucks somewhere in Western Beijing. Ren said some very good words about me. Thanks for that.

After that, I often visit them and really enjoyed talking with them or reading Keso and Ren’s blog. There are some very interesting threads, like this, going on as well. This summer, I was honored to be one of the people reponsible for the Shanghai Donews meeting. The meeting was so interesting. I even spent the night watching the Super Girl Final in Donews office (a.k.a 5G). Many people thought it was a very important night. I thought so, but Liuren definitely didn’t think so. That was a nice night. They have good wine and chocalates. P.S. I finally bought sofa very similar with the sofa in that office at my home. :-)

Good Luck!

Now Donews is part of Mop family. I believe no matter what changes in corperate structure, people won’t change. I’d like to offer my best wishes to my two friends in Donews and hope they have very good luck in the year of 2006.

beijing-keso.liuren-kijiji.shirt.jpg

Image in courtesy of Keso (left) and Liuren (right)

P.S. I didn’t drop a line on the MSN Messenger to them (for Keso, not on Google Talk yet). I can imagine how much SMS, emails or chat messages they need to handle these days. In short, it is a piece of good news. It is a good decision, and I congrate them for the archivement of 5 years for Donews, and years of wonderful blogging for Keso.

P.S. 2. I like the post from Keso after the acquisition. It is so candidate and well-writen.

Getting Back Home Late

Getting back home late from a small gather of old friends. 2005 almost past, and it was nice for us to review the year and talk about the interesting year. Everyone is looking forward to a great 2006. I am the same. It is late so I I will skip blogging tonight. (actually, it is not skipped – just a short one)

Meeting Place: Starbucks, Raffles City

Meeting Place:

Starbucks, Raffles City, 268 Xizhang Middle Road, Shanghai

About the Location

The Starbucks at the Raffles City is not a good store in the Starbucks family. It is small and crowded. However, it is very convinient with the location near the exit of Metro Line #1. It is the nearest meeting place for me (Jian Shuo), and easier to find. I have other locations that I choose to meet people, like Coffee Bean and Tea Leafs, but it is a little bit harder to find and only works for people familiar with the area.

Transportation

Metro Line #1, People’s Square Station, Exit #2.

It is not straight forward to get there. When you get off the train, take the elevator to the uppper floor. Do not exit at any gate. The one to upstairs and other exit checking machines will lead to mass ground maze.

Follow the sign (or follow the flow of people) to Metro Line #2. At the end of the hall (south of the hall if you still have the sense of direction), there are a long role of Exit Machines on the left and there is a U-turn tunnel on the right. Take the exit at the Exit Machines and turn right to enter a long tunnel – always full of people. Go straight ahead for about 4 minutes, and you will see a sign pointing to left – Exit 2. Enter the left branch of the tunnel and take the elevator to the ground. The Starbucks is right at the exit.

Map

Here is the map:

Meeting Place direction is created to help my friends, partners, and visitors to easily locate the location I propose to meet. If there is any error or suggestions that makes the guide easier to follow, please comment using the form below. If will also be handy for others who propose to meet somewhere in Shanghai but don’t know exactly where the location is.

Pressure at Year End

End of 2005 marks the enforcement of the ICP license and recordal requirements. This time, it seems they really mean it.

In my previous story, I outlined the requirements for the registration for website. The first requirement came out in the year of 2000, and asks all website with a domain name to file registration with detailed information with the government. Nothing happened after the deadline.

In 2002, it was said to be enforced again. Nothing happened.

All the websites are in an environment that the law and regulation requires all site registration unrealistically from the year of 2000. The whole five years was under the pressure but not too much action. 2005 is different.

In the year 2005, it is announced that all websites need registration. This time, it seems it will be enforced. At the end of the year, especially recent two weeks, many websites were shutdown.

The homepage of the www.net.cn, the largest virtual server provider in China pops up the following notice:

screen-net.cn-icp.png

Image in courtesy of www.net.cn

It explained the reason why their client’s website were shutdown – because no registration license was found on the home page – it was required by the regulation. The service providers are required to pause the service. This requirement was there for 5 years and these two weeks are the starting point of the real enforcement.

In Shanghai particularly, the network service is very unstable. The backbone network stops function from time to time. Many ADSL users were affected. For several minutes every few hours, Internet seems not accessible at all. I am confused whether the websites are down or just the network infrastructure. For example, the MSN Messenger will logoff for no reason and after sometime reconnects. It is the same for my friends. I bet the MSN Server receives much more logout (lost connection) or logon request these days from Shanghai. Beijing seems not impact from the network failure.

Anyway, the end of 2005 is not a happy ending. The network blocking and shutting websites added a lot of stress to the atmosphere of the new year. It is annoying, very annoying.

High-Tech Company Logo Plate

Hengge and his Blogbus.com is going to move to a new warehouse in Longhua. He is obviously excited about the move and asked me for some photos of logo plate for high tech companies. He think it may inspires him about the design of new blogbus logo outside their small building. I am sorry that I didn’t response in a timely manner. Here are some I grabbed in my photo folders.

© Jian Shuo Wang. Logo on the buildings

© Jian Shuo Wang. Directions to buildings

© Jian Shuo Wang. eBay Main Logo

© Jian Shuo Wang. eBay Main Logo

© Jian Shuo Wang. eBay Main Logo 2

© Jian Shuo Wang. Microsoft main logo.

© Jian Shuo Wang. Microsoft company store

© Jian Shuo Wang. Microsoft Museum

© Jian Shuo Wang. Google road direction

© Jian Shuo Wang. Logo on Buildings

© Jian Shuo Wang. Sun

© Jian Shuo Wang. Stanford Graduate School

© Jian Shuo Wang. A VC at Sand Hill Road

20 RMB per Month Unlimited WAP

It is old news already, but I think it is valuable information to visitors to Shanghai. China Mobile has decreased the price of GPRS. They are offering a package to give unlimited WAP access for 20 RMB per month. Here are the configuration details:

Access Point: CMWAP

Gateway: 10.0.0.172

CMWAP v.s. CMNET

I have been using GPRS from China Mobile for some time but I never really understand the difference between the two AP – cmwap and wmnet. The only thing I know was, to be able to access Internet, for example, from my laptop, or Dopod Smartphone to access Internet website like ebay.com, I have to use cmnet. If I only need to access WAP site, like WAP comment feed for this site, cmwap is enough. CMWap is cheaper – 20 RMB for all-you-can-eat while CMNET is charged by bytes.

You need to answer the question in the configuration section of your mobile.

Now, I understand the situation better.

CMWAP and CMNET are intentionally divided by China Mobile. They are two access points. If you configure your mobile to access CMNET, your mobile phone is assigned an IP address and the client can directly connects to web servers on the Internet, like microsoft.com, yahoo.com, wangjianshuo.com…

CMWAP is an application layer seperate that your client is assigned an IP address in the range of 10.*.*.*, and you can ONLY access sites with IP addresses in this range. That means, only the servers hosted by the closed system in China Mobile. There is one exception though. It is the mysterious 10.0.0.172 configuration. That is the ONLY WAP gate server on the 10.*.*.* network range. With this WAP gate way, you can access all the website (like a proxy) on the Internet that provides WAP protocal, like Wangjianshuo’s Blog WAP Edition. However, it is slow since there is only one point that you can access for the entire China Mobile.

So, just call 1860 to enable your unlimited WAP access today. :-) (Seems I am a China Mobile agent now).

Merry Christmas for My Friends and Family

Merry Christmas! The Christmas Eve arrives.

I’d like to send my Christmas gifts to a lot of people. As the saying: “Friends are the flowers in the garden of lives.” I love all my “flowers”. Merry X’mas to them.

Merry Christmas to Carroll screen-flower.png and Jim . You gave me most of the “Christmas feeling” for sending me may X’mas greetings and inviting me to the trimming tree party. Hope you have a wonderful new year.

Merry Christmas to my friends in San Jose – RC , Nancy , Yumi , Selim , Dan , Max , Erik , Tom , Richard, Rachael, Jacob… The list is too long that I cannot put all names, but X’mas means a lot and give me the opporunity to say how I am happy to be able to be part of this big family.

Also to my friends in San Francisco: Tom (BV Capital), other friends in BV I met in my last trip there, Andreas , Jing , Nina (KQED), Christ (Rojo), and Ginger (Six Apart). 16 hours later, the Christmas eve will shift to San Francisco. Merry X’mas to you!

Friends in Seattle, like Robert Scoble , Zhang Ning , Zhang Chen , Roger , Stone

Merry Christmas to my family in Luoyang, Tongchuan, Fuzhou, Portland, Toronto, New York, Cleveland and York in UK…

Merry Christmas my friends in Shanghai. Oh. I realize it is a really long list that I may not be able to capture all. The recent contacted include: my old friends like Mvm (sorry, the blog is still not back yet), Liurun , Linda , Hacky , Liang Ming , Steven , Yale , Grace , Hwhua , Claire , Danny , Steven Huang , Jiale , Edward , Hotcan , Jackgu , Zhao Yan , Henrygu , Wangchen , Eddie , Eddy , Tim , Helen , Hippy , Zhouxiang , Xiaowen , and many others. I listed about 30 names, but found it not possible to mention all. I do want to say Happy New Year to you.

Merry Christmas to my team at Kijiji – Ji , Vi , Ir , Ga , De , Lv , Me , Se and … just two letters without revealing too much details. ;-)

Merry Christmas to my friends in the IT industry. Thanks Hengge for treating us the Christmas evening dinner, and Happy Birthday to you today. Also Robert Mao and his wife , Gary (from Toodou), ABei (douban), Lv Xinxin (Feedsky), Isaac (special thanks for leading me to the field of innovative application I am in now), Xiaoxiong (askyaya), Zhang Zhang and Lisa , Dash , Xdanger … Also say Merry Christmas to Shangjin , Yang Linhua , Feng Dagang , Wangzhen , Keso , Liuren , Huang Fang , Fang Gang , Yubo , Fang Xingdong

My friends in Hangzhou – Huangwei and Pan Xiaowei (edushi)…

Last but not least, to Wendy . I don’t need to put it here, since we are just back from Christmas Eve Celebrate for only two of use.

Ops. It was already a long list, but it is only very small part of people I want share the happiness of a holiday with. (Sorry if your name is not here, or not in a way that you can easily discover. It is only the top of mind names at in a massy brain of about 1:00 AM). I cherish every day we spent together and expecting for great years to come. When I was at Carroll’s party, many of hers and Jim’s friends went to the party almost every years in the last 35 years! What an accomplishment. I cannot imagine that before to have close and sincere friends for that long period of time. What I learnt was, to cherish every friendship I have and maintain it as long as life lasts…

Look back, I am proud to see how many brililiant friends I have in my garden of life. I hope I am also one of the flower in yours.

Age of Crazy Ideas

It is moving season. Joi Ito is also moving his blog to a new machine – according to Jio, he was changing IP address. DNS always take long time to replicate. I hosted my DNS with www.net.cn. I hope it will be working in the years to come.

Yesterday, talked with Yale in the decent place called Peace Masion (Wendy mentioned this place in her blog). We talked about lots of “crazy business” models, like the million dollar homepage. (In China, it was translated as Bai Wan Ge Zi – million boxes. I believe it is a great translation to reflect the pixel nature of the “business).

These days, Joi Ito also discussed about some strange business, like typo-domains. I believe to really survive in the Internet world, people need to be sensitive enough to these “trends” and “tricks”.

Yesteday, chatted with Xdanger with another site: 9991.com. Its rank raised incredibably high. Within two months, it is the No. 596 largest website in term of traffic in the world. There are lot of untold story behind it though.

On Xdanger’s blog, he mentioned the other 700 replica of milliondollarhomepage. I was surprised how many people replicating the same idea. I actually should not be surprised, since setting up a website or selling online, or blogging is an idea that many people practice everyday.

Copying a successful business model seems to be a shortcut to money (not neccessarily success). Last time, people juked that there are C2C model (Copy to China) and B2C model (Bring to China). It was funny.

It is cold

Yesterday was Dongzhi, or winter solstice. It is the shortest day for locations in the north part of the earth.

According to traditional Chinese saying, after this day, we count days in nines. Every nine day will be counted as a “jiu“. After three jiu, the temperature will drop to the coldest according to how people feel. That is about 27 days from today.

Got Cold

I got gold cold these days due to the exteremely cold weather, and the recent backup/restore/recover work was also anonying. When something happens to digital files like website, people will always regret that we don’t have the latest backup.

Hours after it happened, I drove out to computer store to buy DVD Writer, so I can backup every file or picture I have to my DVD. I drove very carefully, and sometimes slow. Wendy asked why, I said: “None of us have backups for ourselves….”

The 8-Day of Nightmare

Oh. I almost forget how to blog after 8 days – almost the longest pause in the history of three years. Let me explain what happened in the last 8 days.

Ipowerweb, the hosting company

First of all, I’d like to thank ipowerweb for hosting my site since April 03, 2004. The migration to ipowerweb was very painful, so did everytime I talk with them, but I have to say, the hosting experience was not bad – they only experienced very few server down, and for the rest, it is fast and smooth. But whenever customer service is needed, it will be exteremely bad experience for me.

Dec 13, 2005

On Dec 13 (U.S. Pacific Time, and shown as Dec 14 in my blog), my site was suspended by the abuse department. The reason is, they found there are phishing content on my website – which is comment posted by my readers, known as comment spams. There are too much comment spams on my site – that according to the log, every hour, there are at least 20 comments or trackback spam attack for this blog, 24 hours a day, and 365 days a year. So I used blacklist to filter the spams, and added almost 3900 banned words and URLs that frequently appeared in comment bodies.

Even so, there are still huge amount of comment spams appearing on my site, as many of you may see everyday. It was my job to delete everyone of them – about 4 – 5 everyday.

Despite of all the effort, currently, there are still some spams out of the exisitng 13351 comments. Among them, at least one was phishing content that ask people to send their account information to them. That is the factor that triggered the abuse department of ipowerweb, so they suspended my account.

Nightmare to work with ipowerweb

I just want to skip the days to work with them. As a experienced person in customer service industry (particular the years in Microsoft global customer service organization), I would rate the response from ipowerweb was very unprofessional. Of cause, I also don’t think I behaved as a professional customer after the site went down for three days and there is still no one I can talk with. :-(

Finally, it is up

Since all the data were destroyed, I managed to pulled out the data from database, and reconstructed the site. Thanks God that I still know some technical stuff.

There are one challenages after the other, like the DNS replication delay, the domain names, the large file (35M MySQL backup) importing, and file uploading.

During the process, I upgraded to MovableType 2.66 to MovableType 3.2. I kept the resistance to update, because I want to spend time more on content instead of technical stuff – I am that type guy who enjoys geek happiness. If I had spent time to improve the system, I will found myself deeply dive into the technical details, even to create a lot of plugins without writing anything, like my friend Hacky did before.

Sign…

It is interesting that comment spams are my enemy, and it is also the enemy of ipowerweb, and finally, it turned out that I became their enemy to get rid of.

The more interesting things are with the Great Fire Wall in China. Since I banned some spamers, and they happened to be on the ban list of the great censorship machine. As a result, I was not able to view anything in the blacklist tool before. It is the same.

Nightmare may continue

Be prepared that this site may experience further problems in the next few days. Several hours after the site was moved to another server, the site went down again. This time, I suspect to be because the great fire wall of China. People in some companies started to have problems to access the site, and then ADSL users. People in Beijing can still access, but I suspect they will not be able to view the site soon. Recently, the ICP requirements for blogs are greatly strengthed. My friends are complaining that their servers’ network cable are unplugged frequently because of not having recording with MII. The possibility to be shutdown for the site is now a real threat for me.

Wangjianshuo’s Blog is Experiencing Difficulties

Hi all,

Sorry that the blog was down for more than 7 days, since Dec 13, 2005. This is the most difficult time for this blog since it was created. I am working very hard to solve this problem and hopefully, the blog will be online before Christmas.

What happened?

As I explained for the 8 hour down time for this blog, the ISP I chose, ipowerweb.com found there is some phishing content on my site (as they said), and it was their legal responsibility to shutdown the site (also as they said). The result is, they deleted the content I built in the last 3 years within one minute. I am working with them to get the data from the backup server. Meanwhile, I have switched to another hosting company. I should have done this earlier. When you see this small note, it means the DNS change has been replicated to most DNS servers (at least yours), and the website is served from this new server. It is already a big progress.

What to Expect

I was forced to stop blogging for about 7 days. The email conversation with ipowerweb.com was incredibly hard, and there was almost no response after they suspended the site and deleted the content. I have rebuilt the system on this server, and hopeful, to get the content from the backup server soon. Please stay tuned. Meanwhile, I can be reached at this alternative location: http://spaces.msn.com/members/wangjianshuo/

Thanks all for your patience!

Yours

Jian Shuo Wang

Dec 20, 2005

Sorry for Outage 8 Hours

Saw this? Congratulations! You are a frequent visitor to this blog.

screen-account.suspended-ipowerweb.png

Image in courtesy of ipowerweb

There are about 8 hour outage of the service today. All pages under home.wangjianshuo.com are not accessible, including hosting services for my friends mvm, wendy, claire and elfe.

I got an email from ipowerweb.com:

Hello,

Unfortunately, we have been forced to suspend your domain account for

the following reason:

For more information about this suspension, please contact

abuse@vdeck.com. Thank you.

Regards,

vDeck Abuse Department

abuse@vdeck.com

There was no reasons, while the account was suspended. Finally, after email conversation, it turned out the problem was “Your account was suspended for hosting phishing pages.”

What is pishing pages? I guess it is those who post comment to ask you to give them bank account so they can transfer huge amount of money from Africa… After some work, the site is back… I feel frustrated that there is technical problems after about one year of operation without big problems.

homewangjianshuo.com

What a surprise. Someone took homewangjianshuo.com.

There must be a lot of people who forget to input the dot between home and wangjianshuo.com so to bring homewangjianshuo.com some traffic. So they collect the traffic, put it together with other smaller traffic they get from many mis-spelled domains and send it to this site. They must generate some revenue this way.

I feel paranoid that someone started to look into the domain and want to secure more domains. I just bought wangjianshuo.org, wangjianshuo.net and jianshuo.org in case someone take it. The Yahoo! Domain offer of 2.99 USD is cheap enough to secure a domain – but the bad thing is, it offers to new customers only. It is very reasonable though.

screen-homewangjianshuo.com.png

Image in courtesy of homewangjianshuo.com

Cannot Comment on this Blog?

Shirley, I got your email. I am sorry that you cannot post to this site. Maybe others also face the problem. Let me explain why it happens.

To fight against comment spam, I implemented blacklist.cgi to filter the spams. As you may see, there are many comment spams on this site, and I added many banned URLs and words that commonly used in the spams to ban them. The result is, I am banning about 300 spam attempt every single day using the system.

Unfortunately, your comment may be one of the 300 banned spam. You will see what part of the post is considered “spam-like”. You can either add some dash or dot to workaround it, or write me an email or comment on my site (again, you need to workaround on these words), so I can remove some keywords. To be honest, the system does not always work. The auto detection some times does not always work well. I have ever added common words like “yahoo.com” or even a dot (.) to the ban list. A dot means any alphabetic character – which banned many people from posting for quite some time before I discover. So, it not always work. I tried, but be tolerant with me. :-)

Going Back

Packing my package and will leave San Jose and be back to Shanghai. The flight will take off around noon, and arrive in Shanghai at 7:45 PM the second day (Dec 15, 2005).

Thanks for everyone’s host, and offering to host me. I may be back to San Jose early next year. Happy Christmas and Happy New Year to you.

Happy Birthday to Robert Mao

The other day, on the street of Los Gatos, I saw a plate before a garden shop (I don’t know how to put it better. It is a shop selling flowers, garden tools and decorations). It says: Friends are flowers in the garden of life.

I have a lot of flowers in my garden of life. Robert Mao is one. Today is his birthday, and I’d love to send a happy birthday card. My card is special, a page on my blog (this page). He runs UUZone and inspired me a lot about the new ideas, philosophy of life and how to think out of box and get actively involved in the technical discussion around the world – he, as the CEO of a Nanjing based company, actively participate in many international events, that really helped a lot on the business.

Happy Birthday Mao!

P.S. Mao is right. I got the notification from UUZone to notify me about his birthday. I said last time when we met: you are actually running a birthday business.

P.S. 2. The other sweet quote I saw in the shop was: Come into the garden. My flowers want to meet you. :-)

P.S. 3. A Really Good Personal Information Management Tool

Till now, I really want to find a good personal information management tool. Here are my personal challenges:

1. I got a lot of emails. Many of them are a question in my hotmail email box. I replied, and that’s it. It seems we two are the strangers in a metro station that we see each other once, smiled to each other, and that is the only contact we meet in our whole life. Even if we meet sometime later, we have no idea that we have met before. My initial think is, it is nature. Do not try to improve it, since it is how the nature works. In the long run, one’s whole life is something like the 3 seconds in the metro station – happens quickly and disappears as quickly.

2. I have very good friends and important friends to me. I want to have some ways to get connected and say hi sometimes after 3 years we haven’t contacted each other.

3. Meet people. For example, when I come to San Jose, I have many friends (old or new) to meet, but finally, sometimes I forget who lives nearby, whether he/she is in town and finally, we don’t meet.

There are many social network software. But just like a good bed does not solve the sleeping problem. There must be some way (methodology + tools + rules) to help me out. It gives big opportunities to the SNS companies.

Weekend at San Jose

Stayed in San Jose for the weekend. Thanks RC for taking care of me and showed me around the region and Carroll/Jim to host me for their trimming tree party at their beautiful house. I learnt a lot recently about how the U.S. society works. Some very interesting details I found:

Head in or Rear in?

At all the parking lot, most cars will put their head into the slot and rear pointing to the road. It seems the nature way. In Shanghai, most drivers will reverse to the parking lot, let the head of the car facing the main path. This seems to be abnormal behavior. This unified behavior may be because of “reverse to parking lot” is one of the test in the driving test in China. What an interesting result of the unified education! It is the same case to see majority of people in China only use right hand, dress similar with each other, and keep silent at class….

How the City is Constructed

It is amazing how harmony the community and the neighborhood were constructed. I happened to meet Shiloh from VLG. Her expertise was city planning. I learnt the process one need to go through to make any construction. It is a democratic way – you propose the construction to the community with plan, and send notification to surrounding areas. People who disagree will go to the community council to argue about the plan until everything is OK. :-) It seems work very well.

Hotmail Does Not Work

My password for my hotmail does not work now. There must be delay for replying your email. I also have some emails inviting me to dinners, sorry that I cannot make it or reply the email from hotmail due to the password problem, and I don’t remember the email address. :-( How bad. But thank you very much for your kindness.

SFO Pictures

Post some pictures in SFO on US 101. Victor was with me and took the pictures.

Photograph by Victor

Photograph by Victor

Photograph by Victor

Photograph by Victor

Photograph by Victor

Photograph by Victor

Photograph by Victor

Night, had dinner at Los Gatos – I love the small town – the town were lit up for X’mas – really nice place.

Jet Lag Patterns

Jet lag!I hate jet lag.

The pattern for my jet lag is clear and repeartable. Let me keep a record of my experience these days to make sure the next time I travel, I understand which part of the time is the most inefficient and try to avoid important meeting during these time slots.

The First Day

I don’t feel the jet lag the firts day. After UA858 arrives in the morning, the excitement of travel (and obviously combined with the excitement to be able to move after sitting there for 12 hours) makes the first half day wonderful. The lunch will be as exciting as normal, and I will be happy to eat something after being hungry the whole morning. In the after (SFO time), I am still feeling great until around 4:00 PM. I started to feel tired and 5:00 PM is the peak that I would quit from anything to fall asleep. I will wake up 5-8 times at night.

The Second Day

In the morning, I will feel great, and wake up early – it is quite unusual for me. The morning will be very productive and from 1:30 PM, my head starts to be heavy and hard to open the eyes. It will continue to till about 6:00 PM, and legs and feet do not feel comfortable. The night is not enjoyable at all, and I need to go back to hotel to sleep ASAP.

I may wake up 3 times at night.

The Third Day

The third day is better. I start to feel bad when I have to wake up – this is what I call the normal behavior for me. Then the morning continue to be great and feel a little bit tired in the afternoon from 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM. That is. The night is good, and the evening will be wonderful.

I believe the jet lag will appear slowly from the fourth day…

That is me. How about you?

In San Jose Already

Don’t worry about me. Jia dropped us an SMS as early as 6:30 AM Shanghai time about whether we arrived safely. Thanks. I am OK. I am in San Jose already. The weather in California is great – as everytime I visit – sunny, cool wind, and nice color of the trees. California always seems so clean – there is a long way for Shanghai to go to get rid of pollution. I believe it is something meaningful that I want to spent more time on it.

One big accomplishment I made this time is, I drove all the way from SFO to Larkspur Landing Hotel at Hamilton Ave. The trip was good, except missing one exit to CA-85, but I coorected the error quickly at the second exit and get back to CA-85 in 10 minutes – I passed Veritas building and the VeriSign building. This is the heart of Sillicon Valley. Going to the wrong way will hit two famous companies…

OK. That is all, and going to meetings. I hope to update more about the trip soon. See you.

P.S. What a co-incident. I flow to Seattle 364 days ago on Dec 6, and called it the longest day in 2004

Flying to SFO

Flying to San Francisco again tomorrow. I will be back to Shanghai on Dec 15, Shanghai time. During these 10 days, I will keep blogging but keep in mind that the time of the entries will be offset by 8 hours.

Itinerary

PVGUA 858 05DEC 1345 0810

SFOUA 857 14DEC 1355 1930+1

I hate jet lag, and I know I have to experience it again.

Life is the Accumulation of Mileage

I log into my United Mileage Plus account and found out the following information about my preivous trips from the last year.

6-Dec-04 UA 0876 Q Class NRT to SEA 4,769 0 4,769

11-Dec-04 UA 0938 Q Class SEA to ORD 1,720 0 1,720

13-Dec-04 UA 0648 Q Class ORD to EWR 719 0 719

29-Dec-04 UA 0835 Q Class LGA to PVG 7,382 0 7,382

subtotal December 04 14,590

18-Apr-05 UA 0858 V Class PVG to SFO 6,168 0 6,168

24-Apr-05 UA 0857 V Class SFO to PVG 6,168 0 6,168

subtotal April 05 12,336

What a pity that it does not provide information for me for previous years. Life is accumulation of mileage. I hope I have a precious record of where I am at exactly what date in my entire life.

Perhaps Love Movie

A cold Saturday. At night, since there is only one person at home, I drove (I even didn’t know why I drove there) to the Super Brand Mall to see movies. There are many movies on show recently, such as “The Legend of Zorro”, and “Wu Ji”, it seems the most attractive one is “Perhaps Love”. eBay is the sponsor for this film. I was involved in it. I feel deep connection with the film before it comes out already.

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Image in courtesy of the film publishers (Applause Picture?)

It is a nice film. Although it was not easy to understand the story at the very begining. I didn’t now what happened in the first 20 minutes, but later, the story reveals and I start to understand it a little bit. The story is moving, presented in a slow but decent pace.

For me, to memorize people’s face is a super hard task. I failed to recognize who is the “director” – acted by Zhang Xue You, who is the one fall in love wit the girl. Well. I gave up. At the end of the film, the only person’s name I know is “Miss Sun”, the girl. I have no idea about the name of other actors.

I love the group dance. I love it so much. It is not common theme for movies in China before. I fell in love of opera after I watched “Phantom of Opera“, “Nutcracker” (ballet) in New York, “Lion King” in Seattle, “Thoroughly Modern Millie” in Washington D.C.. They are the “primary school” type of education for me to understand what opera is. The opera part of the movie is “splendid”, “wonderful”, and “magnificant”.

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Image in courtesy of perhapslovemovie.com

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Image in courtesy of perhapslovemovie.com

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Image in courtesy of perhapslovemovie.com

There was eBay advertise before the film. Two occurance of the logo during the course of the film and the name appears as sponsorship page at the end of the film.

P.S. Other News I Noticied Today

Robert Scoble is visiting Dublin, Ireland these days.

Hengge was happy to tell me that the new building of blogbus.com started construction these days. He will be the third company moving into warehouse in Shanghai. The first one is Haisong’s etang.com, the second is Gary’s toodou.com.