Thanks for visiting.
欢迎关林来！
Well, I’ve been gone from China almost exactly a year now (couple more weeks). It’s much harder keeping up with Chinese when you don’t hear / see it a lot. Looking at websites isn’t very useful.
I’ve spent some time online chatting with friends, which does help quite a bit. Also, reasing some text material. Not the same as chatting however.
Right now, I’m in Minnesota (USA), so time zone differences make it almost impossible to catch anyone online to do voice chat. Late evening (here) does work for their morning, but people are usually at work, etc.
In October, I will be returning to India.
Last year, after school was out, my wife came to China, and we toured around a bit, trying to catch the Eclipse south of Shanghai (completely clouded over), and then going by train to Lhasa, where we spent 5 days. The hotel that we had been booked into wasn’t very good. I was able to get us transferred to another one in the same chain, same touring company, that was at least 2 stars better. The second one didn’t have anyone who could speak English, and even their Chinese wasn’t very good. It was a Tibetan run hotel. I think we were the first Americans to ever stay there. Service and food was good. It was run by a doctor, who was semi-retired. She only saw children, in a clinic room within the hotel a few days a week.
One of my bad habits (procrastination) is to read others’ blogs, especially if they relate to my own life here in China, or to software development, etc. I especially like language learning topics (no surprise there).
Here’s a couple recent good ones. Be sure to read the comments, which are especially thoughtful.
Bad Habits:
http://www.lostlaowai.com/blog/general/the-seven-habits/
Good Habits:
http://womenlearnthai.com/index.php/the-habits-of-highly-effective-expats/
And another interesting one on learning languages:
http://womenlearnthai.com/index.php/let%E2%80%99s-talk-thai-how-the-brain-learns/
Anyone have a post about 7 ways to avoid doing homework?
I found a nice site with an easy to use way to help you dial another country. Since I am currently in China and I call both the USA and India, here’s some examples from http://www.simplecountrycodes.com/
| TO |
FROM |
Dial: |
| China |
India |
00 + 86 + area code + phone number |
| China |
USA |
011 + 86 + area code + phone number |
| India |
China |
00 + 91 + area code + phone number |
| India |
USA |
011 + 91 + area code + phone number |
| USA |
China |
00 + 1 + area code + phone number |
| USA |
India |
00 + 1 + area code + phone number |
For today’s assignment in “Zonghe” (Comprehensive) I have to write about a Tang poem (partly because I couldn’t memorize it on the spot, citing the fact that I didn’t know what the words meant – hence found it hard to remember).
Part of the assignment (I think) was to find out about the poem, so I found a web site (in Chinese), with a brief article, etc. For fun, I also ran the page through Google Translate. It’s really funny. (I hope the link works). It seemingly turns it into a modern "news" article with the impression of terrorists, and depression affecting the economy, etc.
Here’s the poem in Chinese and pinyin:
宿建德江 孟浩然
Sù Jiàndé Jiāng Mèng Hàorán
移舟泊烟渚, 日暮客愁新。
yí zhōu bó yān zhǔ, rìmù kè chóu xīn.
野旷天低树, 江清月近人。
yě kuàng tiān dī shù, jiāng qīng yuè jìnrén.
Maybe I’ll attempt a translation if I get feedback from people 
I came across this site today, and thought it might be useful for recording day to day items or homework because of the many dimensions that it tracks about each item written. It’s free software, specifically targeted at creative writing. It also (somewhat) handles Unicode. I’ve tried
it out with both English, Chinese, and Sanskrit (UTF-8), although it doesn’t correctly handle printing for Chinese or Sanskrit. I’m going to write to the author about that.
I have no relationship with them whatsoever and receive nothing from mentioning their site.
http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter5.html
There’s a much better write up of the software, and how it helps organize your writing along many dimensions at the same time here:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/ywriter-word-processor-for-creative-writing/