22:17
This is the end of the long 7-day Spring Festival Holiday, the longest one in the entire year. Relaxed time always flies fast enough. When you take the time to look back, it already pasted away.
To avoid the situation that after many years, I will completely forget what I did during the Spring Festival of 2009, let me create a small memo to summarize the holiday.
Note: I surely know that each paragraph of this article deservers a separate article to provide more information. Let me just summarize at the highest level, and then find a chance to write more. Leave me a comment to tell me which part you love me to write first.
Visiting Museums
The most meaningful thing I did was to bring the whole family (Wendy, Yifan, and the extended family) to the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum. As Wendy put it after the day long visit: "I found out it makes sense for a city to have a science and technology museum." I do agree. It redirect our attention from our daily life to much more broader scope, from mathematics, to space technology, from IT, to human, from animals, to rain forest. It is a space that will bring happiness to people. From the daily life point of view, everything inside seems meaningless ("I know how electricity works, so what? Salary increase?"), but from the insider point of view, e=mc2 is much more meaningful than daily routines. :-)
Yifan obviously enjoyed walking on the winding paths in the rain forest, and chasing the pattern the spotlights projected on the floor than anything else. I have decided to get an annual card (it is said to be 240 RMB per year) for me, so I can bring Yifan more often to this museum – it seems it is a more interesting and educational place than the Hymall shopping center. :-)
Today, while others visited the Carrefour in Zhendai Thumb Plaza in Pudong, we brought Yifan to the Zhendai Museum of Modern Art. Wendy commented again: "It is useful to have an art museum." I agreed too. It was about "Intrude: Art & Life 366". I love the art exhibition a lot. If you have a chance, visit there. It is free whole day on Wednesday, and cost 20 RMB per adult.
Short Trip
The 3rd, and 4th day of the holiday (according to Lunar Calendar) were spent in the Silver Pearl Garden in Qingpu. It is a resort built by the ICBC (Industry and Commercial Bank of China). It is a common practice for state-owned companies to build their own resorts for internal use. Several of our friends stayed there for one night in a pretty big villa – Again, Yifan enjoys the trip a lot, which is what I care most. He obviously gets used to outing like this. One year ago, he just cannot stop crying at nights in hotels.
The hotel is located near the Daguanyuan of Shanghai, along the G318 – almost at the boundary of Shanghai and Suzhou, and not far from water town Zhouzhuang. The Diansha Lake surround the area, and makes it a perfect place for short trips – much nearer than Suzhou and Hangzhou but provides similar feeling of escaping from the city and daily life.
My Car – Goudaner – Broke Down on the Road
At about 5 years in age (I cannot believe it that we have already had Goudaner for almost 5 years), my cute car finally broke down on the road for the first time. It is because of the problem with the electricity generator. It just stops providing electricity to the battery, and without battery, the ABS system, and the Air Bag system stopped working. To maximize the safety for the passenger, the central computer shutdown the whole car – pretty reasonable design, since as long as the car moves, people will ignore whatever happened with the car. I tend to do it, at least.
I spent one day calling many different towing companies, to finally tow my car to the 4S service center of FIAT (the only one left in Shanghai after FIAT pulled out from China), and had the electricity generator replaces. Pretty expensive (1100 RMB). It is also a signal that Goudaner is no longer young. Many parts need to be replaced one by one in the next few years.
Other Time?
For the rest of the time, I did some programming. Let me quote Wendy for the third time, she said "Are you feel relaxed when you code?" I said yes.
I spent some time to replace the old http://user.wangjianshuo.com code, so all the pages are static pages, instead of PHP powered pages. This greatly improved performance of the site, so you won’t see whose (hopefully) CPU Exceeded Errors. However, give me some time to rebuild the individual blog entry pages. Currently, if you click your name under each comment, chances are, you will see 404 Page Not Found error. I promise it will only last for one week.
The other great thing I found was "Rsync over SSH". I will stop here to avoid annoy my reader with too many technical details.
I also had great conversation with Alexandra Harney, YLF fellow, and author of book "China Price". We talked a lot about the recent situation of Chinese economy, and tried to predict the future in some way. I also attended a 5G Gathering among the core team just now – a very different organization than it was started 3 years ago.
That’s it. Hope you also have a great Spring Festival holiday (if you have one), and again, let’s share the energy of the new year of Ox (or Bull in stock market terms).
22:42