Astonishingly perhaps, most of China’s computer infrastructure is still running Windows XP, nearly 5 years after all support from Microsoft ended, rendering it more and more open to attack. The above picture was taken in a Liuzhou branch of the Bank of China, just days ago. Most ATMs are still using XP as are many […]
At the heart of Liuzhou’s most modern general hospital, Liuzhou Peoples’ Hospital, is their computer network system which handles appointments, patients’ medical records, prescription dispensing etc. Most importantly, (from the socialism with Chinese characteristics point of view) was that patients could no longer pay before being attended to. No pay. No doctor. At 5:00 […]
My internet connection has just been restored after 26 hours of down time. This was caused entirely by China Telecom, my provider. At 8 am yesterday morning, while I was working on something very important, my internet died. I was cut off. Several attempts to reconnect failed. I was being told the system did not […]
Last summer, after thirteen years, in a moment of madness, I deleted all the Liuzhou information from my website, only leaving this blog. It had become bloated and out of date and I thought I could reasonably quickly edit it and put it back in a leaner and more up to date form. Life intervened […]
As usual, with everyone bored to death by the third day of the Spring Festival, they are resorting to their “smart” phones to pass the time. As usual, this has led to the system overloading and failing as often as not. I’m with China Mobile, although I suspect it’s not with me. All weekend, service […]
Here they go again, thinking slow again. The Chinese Communist Party is holding its 5-yearly National Congress (NCCPC) ä¸å›½å…±äº§å…šå…¨å›½ä»£è¡¨å¤§. This is an utterly pointless meeting to rubber stamp decisions that have already been taken in private. No one ever, ever votes against anything. Some of the oldest guys will be sidelined and some of the […]
Today, I finally did something I have been planning to do for a couple of years. I deleted all the Liuzhou Laowai website apart from the blog and a couple of small side routes. Should you try to access any page on www.liuzhou.co.uk (other than /wordpress) you should see something like this. I have also […]
This could all have turned out very differently. I was having visions of spending time at the keyboard lambasting all and sundry for their corporate incompetence, tax avoidance, general annoyance etc. I would have worked the orange imbecile in somehow, too. A total breakdown in civilisation etc. I had to move house. Always a load […]
All of this holiday week, my internet connection here in Liuzhou has ground to a near halt at around 12:20pm and remaining slow until around 2:20 pm. Baffling. I mean serious slowness to the point that I am getting timeout problems even with local sites. As for the VPN, forget it! Although, astonishingly, Twitter was […]
Local users of social media are up in arms following a report in yesterday’s local paper that a young woman was spotted eating alone in the KFC beside Gongmao Department store – Liuzhou’s first, but sadly not last, KFC. Her offence wasn’t being alone. Her offence was that while eating whatever KFC sell instead of […]