Life is mostly full of gravel, calculus, gardening and saxophone these days, so here's something from the gardening side.
I went camping a little while ago with some friends in Bon Echo provincial park. It was really nice! I took way too many pictures so I just skimmed through and uploaded the ones that jumped out at me. The rest are here.
if you can read this. it works!
I'm flying to Irkutsk tonight, and I'll spend some time at lake Baikal, then take the Trans-Siberian railway to Moscow, and after some meandering through Europe end up in Tallinn, where I'll be working for a month. Once I get to Tallinn, there will probably be blogging.
In the mean time, my twitter is here.
One reason for the lack of blogging lately is that I have been spending less time on the internet, and more time reading, mostly science fiction novels. After thinking back on it a little, I realised that I've read quite a lot since I came to Beijing, so I thought I'd try to compile a list of what I've read so far, for fun, and to remember. I've tried to keep them in more or less the order in which I read them.
Philip K. Dick:
A Scanner Darkly
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
The Man in the High Castle
Vulcan's Hammer
Now Wait for Last Year
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
Joseph Heller:
Catch 22
Vernor Vinge:
Rainbow's End
A Fire Upon the Deep
A Deepness in the Sky
John Scalzi:
Agent to the Stars
Old Man's War
The Ghost Brigades
The Sagan Diary
The Last Colony
Robert Charles Wilson:
Spin
Axis
Iain M. Banks:
Consider Phlebas
The Player of Games
The State of the Art
Use of Weapons
Excession
Inversions
Look to Windward
I'm currently reading Godel, Escher, Bach (Hofstadter) (picked up where I left off last year), and Visual Explanations (Tufte). Both are pretty interesting, though the Tufte book is by far the faster read. I expect to be done Visual explanations before even putting a dent in the remainder of GEB.
Finally, books that I'd like to read:
Charles Stross:
Halting State
Saturn's Children
Iain M. Banks:
Matter
There are others, but mostly in the form of a vague hunger for books, these are the only specific books I'm wishing for right now, though I'm open to suggestion...
While reading my feeds today I came across this gem: The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks
And since this entry would be sad with no picture, here's some honey I spotted in a grocery store in Yang Zhou.
The weekend before last I went to visit Yang Zhou with a couple friends. We spent a bunch of time visiting the parks and gardens and also some time just bumming around the old part of the city. It was really nice, definitely a welcome change from Beijing.
I'll be posting pictures gradually as I sort the wheat from the chaff. For now, here's two I took while we were between places, just wandering around a bit.
More coming soonish...
The blog has a new look! Yes I finally got rid of my old MT 3.3 templates and got some real MT 4 stuff. It comes with an annoying CAPTCHA that you will have to fill out if you want to leave a comment, but this is necessary because I was getting a lot of spam before. Sorry anyway.
Without further ado, I present the cute cat:
It was spotted in a coffee shop (Sculpting In Time) in the north west of Beijing a few weeks ago, drinking from faucets, lying in the sun, and generally being cute.
I found these two pictures kicking around on my harddrive, and I liked them, so I decided to upload them and make a post about them. Both are about chuanr, which is basically just meat on a stick.
The chuanr pictured here were observed very close to the pingguoyuan (apple garden) subway station. There was no apple garden anywhere to be found, just people, shops, and chuanr.
Chuanr are incredibly abundant in Beijing, typically of the lamb/mutton variety, and ranging in cost from tiny little ones that cost 0.5 RMB, to the ones pictured which were 5 RMB, and probably higher, though I haven't personally seen any chuanr more expensive than that yet.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a Wikipedia article on chuanr, though it is not really very interesting or useful.
This post has been brought to you by the character: δΈ².
Happy New Year!
I was on a short vacation with some coworkers from the 28th to the 2nd and just finished transferring my pictures onto the laptop. I need to sleep soon, so this post will be short, but more will be coming soon.
The three main parts of our journey were to Huangshan (Yellow Mountain), Qiandaohu (Thousand Islands Lake), and Shanghai.
The mountain was great. Lots of rocks, trees, sun and wind. In some places there were even NO PEOPLE, which was wonderful.
Photos follow.
The lake was nice, especially in the morning near sunrise.
And Shanghai was also awe inspiring, though in a completely different direction.
More pictures and explanation to come!
