Here they go again, thinking slow again. The Chinese Communist Party is holding its 5-yearly National Congress (NCCPC) 中国共产党全国代表大. 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 […]
I don’t know what’s going on, but today my internet connection has been abysmally slow. It went pear shaped around noon and has been shit ever since. It was intermittently bad over the weekend, but today it has been next to useless. And I have work to do. Never mind, China Telecom are still able […]
Once again, Liuzhou’s branch of China Telecom lost all internet connection for several hours today. It remains hideously slower than normal. There I was at 11:30 this morning, happily wasting time when I noticed that my computer wasn’t playing along. A brief glance at the ADSL thingy (technical term) showed that I was no longer […]
I don’t know if anyone other than me is interested but here are a few stats on this blog for 2013. There were 197 new posts. I make that an average close to one every two days (1.85 for the purists). The most popular posts were 1) A Bite of China (posted June, 2012) 2) […]
China Mobile are promising that Liuzhou will become a “wireless city” when 4G service is introduced in the second half of this year. 4G technology transmits data to wireless devices and has a theoretical speed as high as 100 Mbps. Unsurprisingly, they promote this by pointing out that it takes 16 hours to download an […]
Those who know me well know that I am always up for a bit of classy literature and the occasional poem or two. And I am well able to discern ‘found poetry’ when I find it. I was having a bit of a discussion with a dear and knowledgeable friend when I went off on […]