Adsotrans

Not exactly working late at the office, but am reluctant to leave as my new Ubuntu-powered Fujitsu ultraportable (S6410) tears through:

• downloading 400 MB of java tools and resources for generating the Chinese Perakun plugin.
• downloading 600 MB of a bilingual english-german corpus from http://statmt.org
• downloading 300 MB worth of open source flight simulation software from a Ubuntu mirror
• generating an English language model with SRILM for SMT work

It’s been about a month since I purchased the new laptop and I’m pleased with it (not to mention the new office bandwidth - I’m getting a sustained 200kbps from http://statmt.org on a 600MB file hosted somewhere in the United States). There are minor compatibility issues with Ubuntu and the keyboard that keep me from totally recommending it. The most irritating is that applications occasionally stop recognizing keyboard input when other windows open and I have to shuffle around closing things until I can type again.

Still, the most surprising thing I’ve found since buying this machine is how rarely I switch into Vista and how quickly - once there - I start chafing at the lack of productive software tools. It seems that whenever I’m in Vista I need to throw myself through hoops downloading and installing software. Was it always this much trouble? Or have I just become more reliant on a wider range of software? I’m still stunned that Vista doesn’t include a codec capable of DVD playback by default and that Fujitsu didn’t bother to install it by default. Between Apple’s momentum with mobile devices, Ubuntu’s ease-of-use with apt-get and Microsoft’s attempts to flagellate me with Vista (which often goes unresponsive for non-trivial pauses while it “thinks” about God-knows-what) and Microsoft Office 2007, I ‘m happy to be out.

Why doesn’t Microsoft run a software repository anyway?

Just when I’d met China halfway and accepted the lunar cycle, I got this email explaining the “Cycle of Organs”. It is hands-down the strangest list I’ve run into in six years of working and living in China:

一、晚上9-11点为免疫系统（淋巴）排毒时间，此段时间应安静或听音乐 。
二、晚间11-凌晨1点，肝的排毒，需在熟睡中进行。
三、凌晨1-3点，胆的排毒，亦同。
四、凌晨3-5点，肺的排毒。此即为何咳嗽的人在这段时间咳得最剧烈，因排毒动作已走到
肺；不应用止咳药，以免抑制废积物的排除。
五、凌晨5-7点，大肠的排毒，应上厕所排便。
六、凌晨7-9点，小肠大量吸收营养的时段，应吃早餐。疗病者最好早吃，在6点半前，养
生者在7点半前，不吃早餐者应改变习惯，即使拖到9、10点吃都比不吃好。
七、半夜至凌晨4点为脊椎造血时段，必须熟睡，不宜熬夜。

Writing this on the plane back to Shanghai, after an extended weekend of sorts in Beijing. First things first, I’ve got to give some love to the new airport here. It involved a leap of faith to head to Terminal Three (Shanghai Airlines hasn’t updated its ticketing system to let passengers know… ahem… where exactly the plane is), but that was the right decision. And the new terminal is a thing of beauty. The architects followed the design of the Pudong terminal in Shanghai: large and amazingly clean glass walls stretch up on all sides towards a curved roof that arches across the entire breadth of the terminal. There’s an enormous feeling of spaciousness and general organization. Also a touch of the Hong Kong railway terminal in their decision to place the restaurants and shops that dominate the concession area on an elevated platform. Kudos to the team that designed and built it.

What can I say about the weekend except that it was good. Flew to Beijing on Sunday and encamped at a hostel in the university district. Spent Monday morning wandering through 中关村 in a quest for the Fujitsu outlet: I really like their ultraportable S-series because the machines are light, compact, have great battery life and come with a 13-inch screen, which hits the right balance between size and usability: it’s usable on a plane but still “feels” like a fullsized machine. Eventually found them tucked away in the basement of one of the main complexes, and bought an S6410. Have been using it for two days and am happy with the choice. The only downside is that the machine came preinstalled with Vista, which refuses to play nicely with SSH, despite my best efforts to coax the firewall into opening port 22. Assuming I can massage the wireless card into working with Linux I’ll be happy to remove it. Sad to see that Linux has made essentially zero progress in the laptop market since my last purchase about three years ago.

Spent Monday afternoon and evening working in the 978 art district, and then Tuesday morning back in 五道口 at the cafe that used to be 雕刻时光 but is now called 桥咖啡. I asked the waitress about the name change, and she muttered vaguely about some sort of falling-out between the owners. Whatever it’s called, the cafe is still a good place to work. Had breakfast, telecommuted and ended up in an interesting conversation with a former speechwriter for Pierre Trudeau who is doing management consulting work in China. We talked about both Canadian and American politics (he is very positive on Obama and considers the liberal party to be in disarray). After lunch I rediscovered the old Beijing tradition of the 午觉 and was pleased to find my laptop picking up the Wifi signal from 桥咖啡 about a fifty meters away and through several walls of cement. Way to go Fujitsu!

Headed to see a friend of Echo’s at BCLU later that afternoon before taking the subway to 国贸 for Danwei’s Second “Plenary Session” that evening. The event was well-organized: Jeremy handled the panel while Rob fielded questions from the crowd. There were the standard roster of throwaway questions everyone equivocates on, but still some surprises. The most interesting panelist was a woman from Channel Four News in Britain who deftly skipped past the politics when asked about the protests in western China to point out that no-one in the Western media has access to what is happening on the ground and there isn’t much informed reporting that anyone can do about it.

Ran into Jim, Joel, Elyse and a few others at the session. Chatted with Jim about Marx and the British Labour Movement, and eventually headed off to Sandglass where we hooked up with Joel and eventually Chris and looted the fridge until around 2:00am. I was surprised by how of the Beijing crowd had headed down to Moganshan for the conference on literary translation. Did not sound like I would have enjoyed it though. Waking up early to argue over the wording of sentence-level translations? Sounds like a combination of work and group struggle session.

Only hiccup has been getting back. Shanghai Airlines booked my return ticket for the 27th rather than the 26th and I didn’t catch the error since I’d simply asked for a ticket on Wednesday morning.

Tags: beijing, danwei, sandglass

With nothing else newsworthy anywhere else in the country, Xinhua appears to have dispatched its entire workforce to Beijing to crank out articles like this, this, this, this, this, this and this about the 两会. This has made NewsinChinese possibly the most boring site on the Internet. Great reading for those looking to polish up their own Chinese resume though.

A better place to spend some quality time is at Howard Lee’s new site on the Chinese constitution. Howard is a lawyer-in-training in San Francisco and his site offers a fantastic annotated/edited version of the Chinese constitution accompanied by its official translation. Don’t be fooled by page title, the lion’s share of the work here has been done by Howard, who spent significant time editing dictionary entries and adding new content to help Adso get better at parsing legal terminology.

The site is definitely worth a visit. As someone who used to translate real estate contracts, I know that Howard’s work will be appreciated by those in the field who use Adso as a translation support tool too.