Below are the 15 most recent journal entries recorded in John McPherson's LiveJournal:

Monday, February 2nd, 2009
12:05 pm	holidaying in china I am currently taking a holiday in China, visiting my wife who is working here on contract. On the way, we spent a few days in Singapore - they were having below average temperatures with lower-than-usual humidity, and after the warm NZ January weather it didn't actually feel uncomfortably hot like it did last time I was in .sg. We bought a laptop at Sim Lim mall, which is 7 stories high (as well as having a food court in the basement) and is all solely computer/electronics/camera shops. We are in Guangzhou (formerly known in English as Canton) which is a city of around 8 million. The province (Guangdong) has around 100 million people I think, and the area between here and Hong Kong, known as the Pearl River Delta area, is where many of the factories that make the exports are located. Chinese New Year was on the 26th of Jan this year, so many of the factories were closed this week while all the migrant labourers went back to their home cities/provinces, and kids have been letting of firecrackers almost continually since then. Maybe coincidentally, the weather has been much better with blue skies and sunshine, when it was grey and overcast for the first week I was here. We took a weekend away at Shenzhen (the city just across the border from Hong Kong), staying at a beach resort called Dameisha, which would be very hot in summer, but was a bit cool in winter. The train between the cities is very modern, reaching speeds of over 200kmph but smooth enough that you wouldn't believe we were going that fast. It's been much easier to adjust to being here than I thought it would be - almost all road signs and many shop signs/adverts have English as well as Chinese on them, even though few people here can speak much English. There are lots of Western-style malls, and in many cases the prices are significantly higher than in NZ. Eg a 120GB Classic iPod retailing for NZ$399 in NZ costs the equivalent of NZ$650 here, so there are obviously enough well-off people here, even if the large number of low skilled workers make very little. Labour costs being low means that things like clothing and taxi rides are very cheap by NZ standards, although you'll pay closer to NZ prices if you buy clothes at a shopping mall instead of a market. (Ironically, clothes from a branded store might even have been made in Europe and imported into China.) As for the Great Firewall of China (as implemented by our ISP), so far I've only encountered 3 problems: any mis-typed domain name gets resolved to a catch-all, presumably to show ads in your web browser. bit-torrent doesn't work at all. This seems to use packet inspection rather than just port numbers. I had half of ubuntu downloaded via bittorrent at singapore, and couldn't get the rest when I arrived here. Web browsing is all forced through a transparent proxy that disallows any url ending in ".flv". This can be trivially defeated manually by adding a "?" or "&" to the end of the url, but I guess it's effective enough to stop 99.9% of users. (At least they are using open source software to oppress us - the http headers include "Server: squid/2.5.STABLE3") (Comment on this)
Friday, April 6th, 2007
10:41 pm	back in NZ We've been back in New Zealand for 7 days now, and we had a great time in Thailand. We spent most of our time there at Hua Hin, which is about 3 hours drive from Bangkok. It's a beach resort, although big enough that you need transport to get around if you want to do more than just stay at your hotel/lodge and beach the whole time. We ended up hiring a scooter for 2 days (it only cost about the equivalent of NZ$14 including filling it up with gas) and we had a blast going around the town for shopping and sight-seeing: Note that we didn't get to choose the colour of the scooter or the helmets. On the same day that we got it, we got pulled over by a traffic cop who was checking licences but he seemed happy enough that we were tourists, telling us that he thought we were Thais... On the flight back to NZ, Gwen managed to crash the A340's entertainment system for her seat merely by pressing a few buttons... and it obviously runs on linux: I found this mildly amusing until we couldn't figure out how to restart it. (Replacing the handset and removing it from the arm-rest again seemed to reboot it). And the message it gave - "seat rebooting" - sounds like something written for geeks rather than for typical end-users. On the whole, the entertainment system was quite sucky. While her system was rebooting, it gave lots of debugging information (scripts being run with the "-x" option for you linux geeks), and just gave the feeling of something written either by mediocre programmers, or (more likely) wasn't given enough testing. It used a touch-screen but it was very laggy and sometimes didn't register your "clicks", so if you touched a button and nothing happened, you naturally press it again, and then the system seems to get confused as all the clicks get processed at once. I also thought the UI could have been improved (there were left and right arrows for scrolling that scrolled by a whole page instead of just moving the cursor 1 place in the list). And if you watch a movie, you can choose what language you want the audio to be in, but every choice included showing Chinese subtitles, with no way to say you don't want any subtitles at all. After the heat of Thailand, we were pleasantly surprised to find it still reasonably warm in NZ. Anyway, I've just finished my first week at my new job and things have gone well. I'll try to keep posting semi-regularly even if nothing exciting happens from now on :) (Comment on this)
Friday, March 16th, 2007
9:46 pm	update It's been a long time since my last post - quite a few things have happened since I last posted. My wife Gwen came over from New Zealand and we soon decided that the salary vs cost of living wasn't good enough for us to stay in Spain, so we will be back in NZ to live and work soon. But first, we are seeing some of Europe - we have been to Paris, the French Riviera, and Venice. We are currently in Split, Croatia, which is on the Mediterranean Coast but not as densely packed as "Western" European countries on the coast, and things are quite a bit cheaper than the euro countries. The coastline is beautiful, and the weather has been fantastic. It's early spring but it's consistently around 20 degrees during the day and we've managed to get slight tans. Apparently the NZ summer hasn't been very good at all, so maybe I've seen better weather here over autumn/winter/spring than I would have seen there! Tomorrow we leave for Budapest. Yesterday was a national holiday in Hungary and today was a public holiday, although there was a large political protest there today that apparently turned violent and had police firing tear-gas... hopefully things are better by tomorrow! After that, we will spend a few days in Thailand on the way back to NZ. I think if I ever fly NZ to Europe again then it is better to spend a few days in Asia rather than try to tough it out and travel continuously the whole way. (Comment on this)
Saturday, December 2nd, 2006
12:56 am	interesting experiences A couple of odd/funny things that have happened to me recently: 1) It is getting close to Christmas (as you already know), and since I need to post presents back to NZ I've tried to get it all out of the way already. (Long story short - I have bought everything I need but haven't posted it yet). While walking around looking at shops in the "old town", I found a Gothic-themed shop. I didn't think it would be terribly serious, so I popped in, on the off chance I found something suitably small and exotic enough to buy as a gift. After a few minutes in there, I noticed the other customers (predictably in black leather and with terribly dyed black hair and bad haircuts) looking at me (in a white-ish business shirt with a collar and wearing glasses) as if *I* was the freak. Anyway, not finding anything small enough to post back to NZ that was also not tacky, I decided to leave. When I tried to open the door, it was locked - the owner of the store had come and locked the door when I wasn't looking. Terrible thoughts about human sacrifice of non-goths went through my mind briefly until I realised the owner, not trusting the general public, had locked the door while he went out the back to look for something for the other customers. Still, that seems pretty odd looking back, even by the standards I would expect for someone running a some for goths. After dropping my flatmate off at the airport (he was going to Barcelona for the weekend - you can fly there one way for about the equivalent of $NZ36!), I was driving his car back from the airport early in the morning when the fuel light came on. Luckily enough for him, I was alert enough to remember noticing that his car took diesel. Unfortunately, I got very confused at the petrol station because all the pumps said "gasolea" on them. Eventually I figured out that the ones that say "gasolea A" on them are diesel, but I felt pretty stupid standing in the middle of the forecourt holding the pump nozzle in my hand sniffing it to make sure it didn't smell like petrol. (To be fair, the pump also said "desel" or something similar on it, but I was confused because it also said "gasolea" on it, which sounds suspiciously like gasoline). I also had trouble figuring out how to open the petrol cap on the car... I spent several minutes looking for the release button near the driver's seat but couldn't find it, looked outside at the petrol cap to see if it needed the key inserted into it, but it didn't have a key socket. After looking for the release button by the driver's seat for another few minutes and giving up, I eventually figured out that the petrol cap opened by just being pushed in. Stupid VWs. Who would figure that out without already knowing that? And as promised, a photo of a moustache. Now that November is over I can get rid of it again... I'm more worried about the wrinkles and grey hairs... (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 21st, 2006
11:59 pm	a few more differences I had a whole lot of other minor differences for the last post that I forgot when I was writing it up. So, here are some of them. Weekends Everything is closed on Sunday apart from bakeries and newspaper agents. (and presumably petrol stations). I think it's the labour laws. (I vaguely remember in the 80s we would occasionally drive out to the Placemakers in New Brighton when my dad wanted to buy stuff, since they were allowed to open on Saturdays.) I think it's the law here, since 97% of the population is [nominally at least] Catholic. Supermarket shopping you have to weigh your own produce and get the little barcode sticker for it from the scales before you go to the checkout. This means figuring out which button on the scales computer to press. Also, toilet paper comes in packs of 40 rolls. At least, that's what we got when we first stocked up the apartment. You feel slightly self-conscious pushing that around in your trolley. I later discovered that a small supermarket near us does sell them in smaller packs, I think it was only 8 or 10 rolls per packet there. You have to put a coin into the trolley detach if from the trolley ranks, and you get your coin back when you return it. This sucks if you don't happen to have a 1 euro coin on you when you go to the supermarket. Fortunately, I now have a small plastic fake 1 euro coin that works well for such purposes. Further to the point about less personal space/more touching - people talking to you don't see anything wrong with putting their hand on your arm or shoulder while they talk, although admittedly this doesn't happen all the time. At the airport, police wearing white gloves frisk people at the metal detectors, rather than using a beeping wand like they do in NZ. Noone seems to be offended. At my local gym, the showers are communal rather than private. (Although they are still separated for the sexes, at least.) Smoking Like most other Europeans, they smoke a lot. I forgot what it's like to go out in the weekend and come back with your clothes reeking of smoke. I visited my bank the other day, and the "cashier" (you sit at a desk when you meet them, it feels more like a meeting with the bank manager than with the cashier) has an ashtray there for you, in case you want to smoke while banking. Time Everything starts later, and finishes later. Well, apart from the banks which open at 9am and close for the day at 2pm. The council workers emptying the rubbish bins don't seem to see anything wrong with doing this at 11:30pm on a weeknight, even in our tiny town. In Barcelona, I saw the council workers cleaning the streets with water tankers at 2am. Of course, in Barcelona I also saw people out walking their babies and/or their dogs at 1:30am when I was exhausted and on my way home to sleep. In Spain, they use the same word for "morning" and "tomorrow". I guess that's because by the time they are up and ready to start doing serious work, today's morning is almost over... On a completely unrelated note, I've been growing a little bit of a moustache for "mo-vember", although I was a late starter. Maybe I'll have a photo ready for the next post. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, October 27th, 2006
7:15 pm	Bilbao (again) After my time in Barcelona, I have now moved to a town near Bilbao. The Basque Country looks very similar to New Zealand to me... green and hilly. I spent a day in Valencia before coming to Bilbao, and Valencia is a very nice city. I visited the America's Cup village, where New Zealand obviously has a good presence. We drove the 7 or so hours from Valencia to Bilbao through the dry middle of Spain, which was conquered variously by the Romans, the barbarians/visigoths (I think), the Muslims, and then finally the Christians, so the old cities have a wide variety of architectures. Here are some photos of landscape. I've been here long enough to notice what I think are the main differences and similarities between the Spanish way of life and the NZ way of life. Myths/Observations In the bits of Spain I've been in (Barcelona (part of Cataluña region), Valencia, and the Basque Country) they don't like bull-fighting, I haven't seen any women dancing while wearing long flowing red dresses, and they don't sleep during their lunch breaks. These bits of Spain also have their own native languages and have significant minorities that would like independence, so maybe they don't fit the typical stereotypes. At a recent Cataluña/Basque soccer match played in Barcelona, there was a massive banner in the crowd that said (in english) "Catalonia is not Spain". I guess it was in English because they refused to speak Spanish, and other Spanish people can't understand Catalan. People seem to have a much different idea of personal space and physical contact. If you are walking and talking to someone, they'll walk much closer (close enough to keep bumping you) then people in NZ would. Similarly, in a packed bus people aren't offended if you keep bumping together, and people in bars don't mind leaning over and on you to get to the bar to order a drink if you are sitting in the way at the bar(!) Food Food in Spain has been a lot like the food in NZ, I guess since we're both temperate climates. I guess they eat pig/pork products as their main meat where we have beef as our main meat. In Barcelona, they have meals (like us) where you can tell what the food is just by looking at it, and you have a proper sit-down meal. In the Basque Country they are more likely to eat pinchos (called tapas in other parts of the country) which are basically lots of different types of finger food. At the supermarket, the extra virgin olive oil was sorted by the variety of olive used to make it (!!) Language: Most of the sounds in Spanish are sounds that we also have in English, although often they don't understand my accent/pronounciation when I attempt to speak Spanish. There are a couple of sounds I have real difficulty with though - "j" isn't just pronounced as an "h", it's more like a "rk-gh" sound. Also, they roll their "r"s... not a "grrrr" sound from the throat like some English speakers make, but rolled with the tongue on the tip of the teeth more like a "drrr" sound... , it sounds like "d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d" (for you #wlug'ers). Basque - the Basque Country has its own language that has been around for thousands of years, and is nothing at all like the Latin-based languages. It has lots of "t"s followed by "x"s. I don't understand much spoken Basque yet (only picked up a few words), but then I don't understand spoken Spanish yet either (because they speak too fast...) (Comment on this)
Sunday, October 8th, 2006
9:40 pm	Pyrenees In the weekend, several carloads of us drove about 2 hours to the Pyrenee mountains, which separate Spain and France, and did some walking. Even though it's October (early Autumn), it's still quite warm during the days (mid/high 20s) although it's definitely cooler at nights and taking longer in the morning to get light and warm up. We looked for (and found) several different types of edible mushrooms - I managed to learn the appearance of 3 types. We ate some for lunch today and we're still ok, so I guess they know their stuff. (I think some of them have been camping out that way since childhood so I figure they've had a lot of time to memorise the good species.) A few photos are on my home server, assuming it hasn't crashed, and the dynamic DNS is updating, and the moon is in the right phase, etc etc. (Comment on this)
Friday, September 29th, 2006
12:33 am	La Mercè So there seem to be a lot of young people ("jovenes") in Barcelona who like to stay out late. We went out on the Friday night of La Mercè festival after work to the "Forum" where there was a carnival and free concerts etc. There were guards on duty at the metro stations, which seemed a bit odd since it wasn't very busy, and the concert venue didn't seem too crowded either - there were even people walking their dogs and/or babies (in pushchairs) around. I figured it was to do with the light drizzle and forecast rain. Anyway, it got busier and busier the later it got. We left about 1:30am by which time there were a lot of young adults/teenagers around, and at the metro station it was almost chaos. A train pulled up that was wall-to-wall young people, and it took them almost 3 minutes to clear the platform and all get up the stairs, at which point another train pulled up that was wall-to-wall young people... they were all in a very cheerful mood though. We ended up getting into the middle of town too late for the last train back to Sant Cugat (the Barcelona metro trains were running 24 hours a day during the festival, but the other trains that go out to the other towns weren't), so we had to wait 40 minutes for a bus, which was also pretty crowded (shoulder-to-shoulder) with young people. It took my old body a lot of sleeping the next day to catch up! (Comment on this)
Thursday, September 21st, 2006
8:57 pm	post-conference The conference in Bilbao went well as far as the company is concerned in terms of raising interest and our profile. My talk went ok I think, although there weren't many questions. There were several speakers from well-known companies such as ask.com, netflix, and yahoo who were really interesting and gave out what I thought was some quite frank information about their recommendation systems and problems they faced, and the numbers were impressive too. Bilbao is very green and hilly, and it rained every day I was there (with an impressive thunderstorm on one day as well), so it didn't feel too different from the Waikato, although it was warmer. Apparently Barcelona had very heavy rain and thunderstorms as well though, so maybe it was just a storm that passed over the country and it isn't normally that wet there. The food in the Basque Country was great - lots of intricately made plates of snacks ("tapas" or "pintchos"), and you just take what you want from the line of dishes on the counter and pay when you're finished. The heavy rain on the last day over parts of the country meant that the air network was running late - my flight that was due to land at 10:20pm landed around 1am, well after the trains had stopped so I had to queue for 35 minutes for a taxi. He got a tad lost around Sant Cugat (stuck on the motorway) but when we got to the university I knew enough to figure out the way from there. It's another long weekend in Barcelona coming up - Monday is the Mercè Festival, celebrating the patron saint of the city. (side-note for any networking geeks... ever heard of the .cat top level domain? I didn't know regions could get their own...) (Comment on this)
Monday, September 11th, 2006
4:44 pm	Bilbao conference I have arrived today in Bilbao, in preparation for a conference my company is helping to organise. I had a window seat from Barcelona, and the geography between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic coasts looks really different to anything in New Zealand, although I noticed quite a few hydro dams. The Atlantic side (where Bilbao is) is much greener. The conference proper starts tomorrow, and my presentation is on Wednesday, so I'll post again afterwards to say how it went. Speaking of the Mediterranean, today is a holiday in all of Cataluna (the region that Barcelona is in) for their national day, so because it was a 3 day weekend I was lucky enough to get a ride up the coast to a beach where I swam in the (much warmer than Pacific Ocean) Sea. I now have photos on my home (in NZ) server, here. It's using a little gallery script I wrote myself, so if you notice any bugs in it please let me know. Offtopic - Incidentally, it took Telecom New Zealand 23 days to enable ADSL on our phone line, but what really rubs salt into the wound was their call centre telling us that they could connect it in 5 days if we changed from our ISP to Telecom's Xtra. This is an abuse of monopoly, and demonstrates why the Government (and lots of IT industry people) want to allow other companies to install their own network equipment on the phone network - known as unbundling - so that other ISPs can connect customers as fast as they want, if there is a market for it. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, September 2nd, 2006
6:46 pm	Work I've officially started work now (on the 1st Sept), although there were not many surprises since I'd already been spending some days there over the last 2 weeks. It looks like there'll be lots of interesting theoretical and practical problems to solve :) They are sending me to a conference in Bilbao in a week - I was originally going to go straight to the new office they are setting up there, but it's taking longer to get ready than expected, so I'll be in back in Barcelona for most of the month. (Not that I'm complaining... the weather has been great so far while I've been here). I'm slightly frustrated at myself at the lack of language I've been picking up, I guess I was a bit optimistic about it. Apart from not having a very big vocabulary yet, people don't understand me when I try to use the words I do know. I'm at least learning the Spanish words for all the different foods I come across. And it doesn't help that I can't easily tell if people here are speaking Spanish or Catalan - Catalan looks a lot like French to me, and I got a tad confused when people said "merci" (Catalan for "thank you") which is just like the French. But I managed to buy stamps today and send some postcards, although I'm not entirely convinced I put them into the right public mailbox. I was in the Sant Cugat town centre, and all the little boutique shops really do shut down between 2pm and 4pm for lunch/siesta. I also saw the church in the middle that has the bells I can hear from our apartment... it's not enough to count out the hours, it has a smaller bell every 15 minutes, and the bells don't stop at night time. I'm glad we don't live any closer :) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 30th, 2006
7:59 am	Barcelona! I went into Barcelona on Saturday for some sight-seeing, and again today for business (organising the necessary paperwork to get a work visa). The sight-seeing photos are online. Quick descriptions: first photo - the spanish word for "fire engines" is "bombers", which I find amusing (near our building at university is a sign [in spanish] that essentially says "beware of the exiting bombers") the mountain by the sea with the gondola up to it is Mountjuïc The first cathedral (with the big spire) is the main Barcelona Catedral, but unfortunately the beautiful front facade was covered in scaffolding, so you only get the side view here (with the gargoyles).google map location Then random buildings I liked until you get to the famous Sagrada Familia (Holy Family) church by Antonio Gaudí (which they think might be finished by 2020) (google map Finally, this shipping company's name was too incongruent (in english at least) to pass up taking a photo. I may also have a rant brewing about the train system here, but at least I have them figured out now. :) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, August 26th, 2006
4:11 am	Settling In I'm starting to settle in now... I'm used to working fairly late, but I'm not so used to having lunch and dinner so late. Last night we had dinner at a catalana restaurant then went to a few bars and got home very late (or rather early) but still got to the office at a proper time. I haven't taken any more photos even though I've been meaning to (and I charged the battery up all ready to take some). Half of us from the office went out to lunch - I'm not quite sure where, maybe it was in nearby Terrassa - and the food was pretty good: smorgasboard salads, and then a meat or fish dish as a main followed by dessert for a fixed price of €10. I found out at lunch time that the apartment building has a swimming pool for the residents! Funny that the others in the apartment didn't tell me... the weather is still nice and warm so maybe I'll have to spend some time this weekend in the pool. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, August 24th, 2006
6:07 am	Sant Cugat des Vallès I'm staying in the company's apartment in a suburb about 30 kms from the middle of Barcelona, in Sant Cugat des Vallès (Saint Cugat Valley). It's quite hilly around here, and each little valley has its own suburb. Have a look on google maps - it's just beneath the AP-7 motorway sign. (close up of the suburb - close the popup window to see the university.) The university where the company has its office is just on the other side of the motorway. The driver of the first taxi I got into at the airport apparently hadn't heard of that university, and didn't seem to understand the printed directions (in Spanish) I gave him, and kicked me out of his cab! It takes about 10 minutes to get there from the apartment (1 stop from our nearby train station). Incidentally the train is free at the moment since both stations are undergoing maintenance, but I suspect they'll fix that soon when the uni term starts and all the students are back. Sant Cugat seems like a fairly well-to-do suburb, although admittedly I haven't seen many others, so maybe they all feel like this. Here's a photo of the apartment across the road from ours (they all look pretty much the same) The prices of goods at the local supermarket seem about the same as in NZ after exchange rate conversions; I bought some NZ Pacific Rose apples yesterday, and you can even get NZ gold zespri kiwifruit (for NZ$9 a kilo...), although on the other hand I got some nice camembert for only €6/kg (about $12/kg). I've also been eating lots of chorizo. I've spent a few days at the office meeting people, but since I don't officially start until September I'm going to do a bit of sight-seeing for the next few days, if I can figure out the trains :p (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006
8:32 pm	Hello World So, I'm now in Spain, where the minimum temperature for today is 22, going up to 30. I heard it's hailing or snowing in Hamilton and Christchurch... I've now had a long sleep and feel adjusted - I never sleep very well on planes, and didn't get much sleep before leaving due to being incredibly disorganised. (I was packing til midnight, then had to catch a 4am shuttle to Auckland since I left it too late to get a booking at a better time for my 11:45am flight. The shuttle driver forgot to give me my credit card back, but luckily I wasn't too zombied out and noticed. 10 hours to Singapore (where the checkin people gave me the wrong part of my ticket back and I wouldn't have been able to continue) and then 12 hours to Frankfurt (where I almost missed my flight when they changed gate number without me noticing) and then 2 hours or so to Barcelona. Things feel very relaxed/lazy in Barcelona, maybe it's just the summer weather. I'll give a better overview of Barcelona next time (I've only been here about 30 hours) and what I'm going to be doing. Oh god, I just read back over this and it reads like "this is what my cat had for breakfast...". I'll put less personal crap in next time :) (3 Comments |Comment on this)