Alas poor Tony, our (nearly) 21 year old cat, has passed away to the great mouse hunting place in the sky.

Hong Kong is about a big of a culture shock as you could get after a month in mainland China. To suddenly surrounded by people of all nationalities and not the only Westerner in town was the biggest change.

Tomorrow I leave the mainland for Hong Kong after a month of teaching here in Hangzhou. What a fantastic journey it has been!

Thanks to my amazing powers to cyber-transport myself to New Zealand from China, I am able to compare the NZ results on Bing with the Chinese results. Here are the images, let you decide...
( I am guessing that massacre and protests will be removed from "related searches" in the near future. This is what we call a bug...)

Chinese version:

NZ Version:

China's attempt to control the internet via a client side package known as Green Dam seems to be faltering according to Information Week
Add to that, the software appears to be ripped off from a combination of US software maker Solid Oak and some illegal use of BSD licenced Open Source image recognition software - OpenCV - according to The Register

BBC News video worth a look. The title says it all.

It always seems to be party time outside the Wu Mart shopping mall on a Sunday evening. Things were just starting to warm up after I took these two videos. There was a fair bit of American Hip Hop, breakdance stuff happening.

Breakdancing Xiasha, Hangzhou from Andy Scrase on Vimeo.

Dancing competition, Xiasha, Hangzhou China from Andy Scrase on Vimeo.

Thanks to Gené for these pictures.
Click on the thumbnails for a bigger version.

Today we visited the historic town of Xitang, which is an hour an a half drive north of Hangzhou heading towards Shanghai.

Arstechnica reports that Windows 7 will ship in the EU countries this year without IE8 installed by default.

Twitter censorship in China made it into the BBC too.

Thanks to Gené van Heerden for these photos.

Click on the thumbnails to get the bigger picture.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of visiting the famous West Lake area of Hangzhou with my colleague Gené van Heerden and four of her marketing students, who kindly gave up their Saturday to show us around this very scenic spot.

Left is Broken Bridge. Right is a picture of our trusty tour guides. Clockwise from kneeling we have How, Ruud, Alice, and Star.

We found an interesting art place that was in an historic building. It was full of beautiful traditional Chinese paintings, and we interrupted the local artists who were just having their lunch. They seemed genuinely very enthusiastic about their work and showed us their line sketches of the area. These were strictly not for sale.

There was a tourist "attraction" which enabled a passing sucker to dress up in traditional costume. I thought this would provide an excellent opportunity for me to do what I do best, act like a complete plonker. Donning this Chinese Emperor's outfit rapidly brought a huge crowd of onlookers who were obviously enjoying every minute of my ritual public humilation.

One of the more interesting emporia on this street was a traditional Chinese medicine pharmacy and clinic. There was also the added bonus of free green tea to all and sundry who came into the shop. This had a special meaning for us, as we'd narrowly avoided paying around $20 for a cup of tea in an "Authentic Chinese Tea Shoppe".

The guys in New Zealand wanted to see how the building was going outside the appartment.

If you use one of the services such as bit.ly that use Twitter's API outside of China, it seems that you can still post to Twitter from there.

The college I am working at is called the Water Conservancy and Hydropower College of Zhejiang. It is one of 14 colleges/universities in the Xiasha higher education area, officially know as HEDA-Hangzhou economic development area

Despite Microsoft earmarking $100 million to market their new Bing search offering, neither this nor Live Search is available to me in China.

According to Wikipedia serialization is this:
"In computer science, in the context of data storage and transmission, serialization is the process of converting an object into a sequence of bits so that it can be stored on a storage medium (such as a file, or a memory buffer) or transmitted across a network connection link. When the resulting series of bits is reread according to the serialization format, it can be used to create a semantically identical clone of the original object. For many complex objects, such as those that make extensive use of references, this process is not straightforward. This process of serializing an object is also called deflating or marshalling an object. The opposite operation, extracting a data structure from a series of bytes, is deserialization (which is also called inflating or unmarshalling)."

Today's session in China went really well. Some of the students are really getting the hang of this C# - Object Oriented thing, and asking lots of really great questions. Actually, based on what I saw today, I'd be prepared to offer a few of these kids a job back in NZ. They are really switched on and a joy to teach.

And get yourself banished to China..

  Well well well, you are not 10 mins from home in the taxi on the way to the airport to China and the whole family goes completely bonkers.

Well, it was your 70th, Ann, and I wish you well. I hope the next 70 years are as happy and productive as the last 70.

PS Can I borrow that headgear sometime? it might come in useful in some meetings I have to go to.

  Haha what a laugh! Here is the local restaurant next to my appartment. I took this picture after a half hour run through some industrial park where they make pharmaceuticals  and other interesting products that involve a lots of ducting, pipes, and chimneys. The restaurant had an interesting looking menu but was a squeaky clean joint of elevator music and couples dreamingly looking into each others eyes. Barf, pah - leeze.

So the reality is that I spend my evenings occasionally doing some work, watching DVDs on my laptop, Skyping the dog, the missus and the kids (not necessarily in that order) and finding new and unusual ways to IM people.

After a couple of weeks of this I am going to be looking to have some crazy fun and let my hair down explore some strategic business opportunities in Hong Kong. So if you think you'd like to join me, then just let me know

Whilst jogging round the streets of Hangzhou last night with Gené, we noticed the rather bizarre sight of a man with a TV on his shoulder riding pillion on a motor scooter. They casually sauntered across the road in face of oncoming traffic, lights off, seemingly oblivious of any personal danger.

This kind of behaviour is not unusual here, as the roads seem to exist in a state of perpetual chaos. Yet I have not seen a single accident or near miss.

However, I was reminded of some traffic experiments in Germany and the Netherlands where road signage is completely removed. Their experience is very similar, but it took a bunch of European bureaucrats to figure out what the Chinese have known for years.

"The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people's sense of personal responsibility dwindles" is the quote from Der Speigel article linked to above.

The problem in New Zealand and other western cities is that we mix these East and West attitudes to driving with sometimes disastrous consequences, not to mention a lot of predudice

Just try Googling the term "Driving while Asian".

It might take a while before Driving while Asian is as mainstream as Chinese medicine and therapy is becoming in the West, but it is certainly an idea worth considering.