September 2007 Archives

I ate a lot today. I've been having Chinese lessons before work twice a week with a couple of my coworkers, and this week our teacher invited us over to her place for lunch. There was a lot of food and everything was good. The one dish that really stood out for me was fried peppers with garlic. The peppers were large, pointy green ones that were spicy and sweet. I think it was called something like hu pi jian jiao, but I can't remember exactly. Anyway it was really really good. I think I ate about half of what was there and there were six people eating...

Anyway I stopped by the train tracks on the way home from the subway station to take this picture

and I figured I would take a picture of my bike while I was at it, since I haven't posted one yet. Here it is, in all its glory.

As you can see, my shiny new kickstand does a good job of holding the thing up... for now. In the basket are my lock, and a tissue that I use hold my chain when I put it back on after it falls off. Sometimes it doesn't happen for a couple days, sometimes it happens several times in one day. Since it doesn't rain very often I usually get pretty good mileage out of the tissues that I leave in the basket, but I have a spare pack in each of my bags just in case.

Time for sleep now, but hopefully I'll be posting again during the week about the joys of buying coffee beans in Beijing.

are alive! Well maybe not, but at least they were visible today, which was a first. The weather has been perfect for the last couple days. Nice blue skies, low humidity, daytime highs around 25, and of course, good visibility.

What else is new? My bike is falling apart piece by piece. The kickstand rusted in half last week so I got it replaced. It cost me 7 RMB to replace it. There's nothing holding the seat onto the bike now, so if I'm walking it over a curb I have to hold the seat down to keep it from flying off. The chain also falls off sometimes, usually when I'm trying to go quickly, which tends to be the worst possible time for it to fall off. Despite all that I still love riding it. It's a at least a septillion times better than taking the bus to work.

Biking is a lot more fun and interesting here than Ottawa. The traffic here can be incredibly chaotic, especially on smaller roads. There are construction vehicles, cars, trucks, cyclists, and pedestrians going in in both directions on what is essentially a one lane road, because people basically just go wherever it's convenient rather than sticking to the right side. Despite that, AND the fact that my bike is a crappy one speed that is literally falling apart, I feel much safer biking here than I did in Ottawa. People actually pay attention to what's going on and respond appropriately!

Anyway, as soon as I can figure out a good way how I want to take a video of biking up the small road near my place. The larger road that I turn onto is pretty mundane, but the small road is usually pretty interesting in the morning, and sometimes even moreso at night, especially in the rain!

Anyway, more pictures and stuff as I get back into the habit of posting.

Huzzah! Upgrading MT was took about two minutes, but fighting with CPAN to get all the optional modules installed took much much longer. If it needs some library to install a module it would be really great if it would TELL you instead of just failing and spewing out thousands of error messages...

I still haven't got Image::Magick installed because there's a header file missing somewhere. Why? I have no idea.

Anyway, time for bed. The quest for the missing header will resume tomorrow!