-
Not talking
I remember, 2 years ago in May 2005, 5-days into my 30-day SE Asia trip, lying in bed at my hotel room in Penang, staring at the ceiling and thinking: I’m alone.
That was about 5 days into my 30-days in SE Asia. In SE Asia, the tourists avoided me thinking I was native on account of my skin color, and the natives didn’t try selling things to me ( Read more... ) -
Smells, Sounds, Colors
It’s been a while since I posted.
When I arrived, people told me that about 1.5 months in, you hit a doldrums where the “high” from being a new city has worn off, you get tired of constantly feeling stupid, the lack of close friends + family hand heavy, minor annoyances build up into something intolerable, and really you just want to go home. I’ve ( Read more... ) -
Native Chinese, Overseas Chinese, and Chinese American
What does it mean to be Chinese? This question has been bouncing through my mind for the last few weeks here.
I grew up predominantly speaking Chinese at home. I watched Chinese TV shows, listened to Chinese Pop, ate mostly Chinese food, picked up Confucian moral, etc. This would make me at least partially culturally Chinese, no? That’s a lot ( Read more... ) -
Geting a ticket to Osaka for this weekend
It’s hard to believe, but we’ve been in Beijing for 3 weeks now. It’s about time for us to leave the country. Hannah and I are currently in Beijing on a mutliple entry “F” visa. This allows us to pretty much enter/leave the country as much as we want. However, we can only stay within China for 30-days at a time. We landed on February 11th, so ( Read more... ) -
Living in Somerset
FYI, all the chinese below is in traditional. This is because I can’t figure out how to get my IME to output simplified. :-/ I’d say about 80% of the characters are the same. Oh well.
Corporate housing for the Beijing office is handled by Somerset ZhongGuanCun (Read more... ) -
Day 3 in Beijing
Beijing is slowly returning to life as the Spring Festival ends. The office is still dead, but supposedly it’ll reopen full swing tomorrow.
Neither Hannah or I have gotten a desk yet, so we’re still squatting in conference rooms. :) Hopefully this will change tomorrow.
( Read the rest of this entry » ) -
Day 1 in Beijing
Hannah and I arrived here in Beijing yesterday and attempted to have our first day in the office. This attempt was partially thwarted by everyone still being on vacation for the Chinese New Years :)
( Read the rest of this entry » ) -
bit shifts and c++
So, I remembered hearing in school that the C++ spec didn't define whether or not a bitwise right-shift was done with an arithmetic or a logical shift (sar and shr for the x86 people). Well, turns out this is partially right. Here's the relevant clause:
Clause 5.8.3:
The value of E1 >> E2 is E1 right shifted E2 bit positions. If E1 has an ( Read more... ) -
NTSC -> PAL?
I need something to convert an from an NTSC s-video or composite signal to PAL. Any ideas where to find such a thing?
Also, anyone know whether or not one can reprogram their video card's tv out to output in PAL instead of NTSC?