Raccolta Online

Wind the Gap… No idea how the Tube would think of this!

(Taken at Erweilu station on the Tianjin Metro’s Line 1.)

Hey. I’m only 26. I don’t make any claims at being the so-called “wise old owl”, but I’m tossin’ around what I found in my bag just this morning. Turns out I have this odd habit of writing on scraps of paper the moment I — well, “think of stuff”.

Advice given in good faith, but what works for one man may not work for another…

• “Why do enemies? Has [peace] become irrelevant this quick?”

• “If it’s broke, fix it. Do it with all due speed.”

• “No two persons or organizations are exactly the same: this is true for even [the girlfriend], the [future family], and [startups to be done by me]. [We] should treasure diversity and embrace mutual respect as a basis in all diplomacy.”

• “[Our way of doing] diplomacy is peace-oriented; the fundamentals are for peace…”

• “All individuals and organizations form unique, nationality-independent cases.” (This was my response after seeing blanket limits or embargoes being imposed on any one nation.)

正體才是硬道理!

2008 年 11 月底攝於北京太平路

滾動中的腐敗…

2008 年 11 月底攝於北京五環綫

First of all, this is what it’s supposed to read:

Dear Dragon’s Gardens Residents:

China Netcom (Group) Beijing Branch
Shenlu Street Telephone Branch
November 11, 2008

OK, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way…

I liked my version a helluvalot better… (for obvious reasons!)

Three China 2.0 people on the Great Wall (Elliott, me and Shel, from left to right) — that was some serious time out not long ago. Oh yes, I remember China 2.0 — Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, the whole thingamajig…

Meanwhile, if flickr’s doing its magic, you should be seeing a blog post here on Raccolta Online. Let’s just say that it… worked…?

It’s bad enough that there are some PRC people out there without the official papers and stuff. It’s worse that in the Jing, you’re — well…

…about to witness bus identity crisis?

Found on one of those crazy city buses plying around town…

What It Should Say: Identity Documents Not Accepted
Anli Road, Beijing, November 24, 2008

Yes, indeed… when you’re “harmonized” by your “lingdao” (領導 領倒) in La-La-Land…

What It Says: Hand in Hand — Build Harmonious Labor Relations

Or something like that or other…

And all this in front of the PRC emblem with wacky propaganda font text (thingy)…

November is easily the saddest month of the year — and yet, the most David Feng month of them all. That’s because the month is often seen as a month of massive changes.

A runthru since 1997:

• November 1997: On an unfortunate November 15, 1997, I got house-arrested by The Parental Authorities That Be — and missed a charity show I pledged my bit to. This started intra-familial enmity and mutual distrust which would last for nearly a decade. (Later explanations would reveal the reason: incomplete homework… — you see, this reason was censored for nearly a decade, too…)

• November 1998: November 1998 made a bad situation even worse; I was at a high school where I liked no-one and no-one liked me in return. (I prefer the Chinese prison camps of fame to that high school of infamy; at least there I could practise my then-ailing Mandarin Chinese. By the way, I never got arrested…) Things got off to a chill point where I started sharing bank accounts with someone just to get a car (which required a driving license; back then, I was 16; two more years to go…), and when the relations froze, oh well…

• November 1999: Oh my. Heilige Schiesse. This was the autumn of total, utter, complete “f**k-you diplomacy” that made the bombs that ended World War II look more like rat droppings than anything nuclear. Maybe it was my age back then, but if any old thing got in my way…

• November 2000: For some very odd reason, the US elections (Gore and “Dubya”) got me interested and, odder still, taking a more conciliatory tone in every single thing I do. (I know. It’s weird. Weirder still was the pure water explosion inside the Chaoyang Garden home, where my dad’s toilet had one of those taps go off, out of the blue, inundating the whole freaking apartment…)

• November 2001: Ah. The month — and the year — of mass changes. The former “Why the Mac is so great.com” site got massive changes and visitor increases as it went on MacSurfer, Tagein, Tagaus, and I started doing desktop downloads which the Japanese loved like mad.

• November 2002: Moves towards to the microphone: Prezos, public speaking, the whole shebang. November 2002 was also the very first November with BeiMac in attendance. Good stuff!

• November 2003: Oh man. November 2003 was easily the sweetest thing ever — moves closer to hosting or co-hosting shows, rides and insane bowling parties with uni friends, and stuff like that. Me like!

• November 2004: Ah, but you couldn’t have good stuff go on forever. In April of that year (2004), convictions by Taiwanese classmates (should we call the guy a class-”mate”?) that the always-single me was in danger of being “gay” meant that I had to get myself a lady (that I didn’t like) in April, for fear of mass abandonment by the class masses. The two of us were incompatible in every way conceivable, and we — very much, in essence — declared war on our families (mostly on my family) in November 2004. Add to that the fact that I was sick every other weekend — and you get the idea.

• November 2005: Thank the Love Gods that the era of Dynamite Duo ended September 10, 2005 (signs of a fallout were already apparant in early May 2005). A newly-single me got together with the BeiMac group and received recognition from society at large. I did the keynote at the World Usability Day event for Beijing, and BeiMac received brilliant mass media coverage.

• November 2006: The good that we did to BeiMac kept rolling, and in that same month a year later, the BeiMac Union was founded, which expanded BeiMac ops. An 11-member exec team kept the whole BeiMac biz rolling (at least for a bit).

• November 2007: BeiMac fell out of favor, but that’s because nearly all efforts went into blognation China. I started blognation China on October 2, 2007 as “just another site” in the 13-country network, and a month later, it would have its own launch party and end in late 2007 as one of the “top three sites” (along with Japan and India).

November 2008 will be big. Here’s why:

• I’ve a whole slew of new projects to start. DF NDAs mean that we’ll see more from this as things get finalized, but for the moment, they’ve all been near-finalized; they involve at least tech and Beijingology.

• There’s that great big China 2.0 tour and the Chinese Blogger Conference to look forwards to. I’ll be representing CN Reviews, as well as what I do (techblog86 + BeiMac, Beijingology, just to mention a few), and it’ll be a big party.

• Those two are good enough to start the month in the public eye. In more private eyes, I’ve more “world-friendly” principles afoot to make sure that I’m doing my bit to society at large.

We’ll see how big November 2008 gets at the very end of the month.

My God — November 1, 2008 already? Jeez. Please get ready for your arrival…

No idea why this is the case — I just simply don’t do movies. No why, no what, no how. I mean, dragging me to a movie theater is not half as fatal as lethal injection to me, but I never make my way to a movie theater on my own (or if you must do Chinglish, “according to the own initiative”).

(The sole exception was in August 1998, when I went to the cinemas to take a look at Sliding Doors in a nearly totally vacant movie theater. Of course, Züri was going bolonzos with its fscknut-wonky Street Parade, so there…)

I don’t know why. Potential candidates for “girlfriends” (a title to be left blanko for all of 2009 as my career lifts from the David Feng version of Cape Canaveral, territorial disputes no less, heh…) have come and gone — and they were mad on movies. It’s not that I’m some kind of North Korean replica who is totally isolated — heck, even North Korea has a movie industry (just a tad on the more Kim-ish sides of life); it’s just that I never go to the movies alone. I did go with my previous “people close to me”, but that was the past. (Note I never say “ex-girlfriend” so-called; the term’s not (just) “reactionary”, it’s just not David Feng. It’s like as if the lady was dead already or somesuch…)

But I am a massive sitcoms guy, as well as a TV series guy. Dad recently watched this crazy Chinese situation comedy where China was fighting Japan in World War II. (You could tell it was the case with the sheer number of faked Japanese insults, baka! and bakayaru! included — just with a much more Chinese intonation no less.) ManneZimmer may have caused controversy in Switzerland (it was racist; a Swiss was seen to have referred to an African using a derogatory term) and Fertig lustig was easily fodder for rampant censorship (gender equality was nowhere to be seen), but I do BBC sitcoms like mad. Blackadder, To The Manor Born (I think?), Yes Minister, Are You Being Served? (I love the Ka-Ching; goes along so well with MacUser and Macworld cartoons by Enos and Yang!) and The Vicar of Dibley are my favs. Somehow, I feel that Open All Hours is more controversial — it pokes fun at stutterers, which I think is just downright mean. Just because you can’t pronounce “forecast” right (a la “four-four-four-cast”) doesn’t mean you get a free maths sum (”twelvecast?”) just because this guy happened to have stammered like mad.

Having said that, I am also an emotional kind of guy. Candidates for life partners have been warned (read: propaganda-brainwash-warned) that the command-line (Terminal, not the DOS running dog versions!) trigger for David Feng tears is just mere keystrokes away; I get super-emotional in just about every movie. (Il Postino had me crying in the very end — in a classroom full of eyes-dry girls.)

That’s because I take every movie as a Lernstück…

I dunno… look like one of those houses that went through harsh times? Me myself, I’ve never been through a nuked winter, but… oh well…

Correction: It actually looks like one of those Chernobylized houses, not a part of the Jing going through a nuked winter…

mid-betweener

noun, David Feng language

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A short break between two main meals, such as breakfast and lunch. Intended to stretch out your arms or anything like that — just to take a break from “work as usual”.

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OK guys, it’s 10:30 AM. Time to take that fabled morning mid-betweener and stretch your arms… everyone now…

Yeah… one of those new David Feng langs I just came up with…

A “mid-betweener”, indeed…

Blogging as a mid-betweener… hmm, how literally (quite literally)… break-ative…

(I guess I should hit the red button NOW before I make even less sense. Time for that David Feng mid-betweener…)

We Remember… one of David’s wisdom teeth.

Gone. Chiseled. Hammered out. Wiped out of existence.

Black Monday. October 13, 2008.

Oh well.

You know what? Getting wisdom teeth out is no big deal. All they need is to stick something to “de-sensitize” your jaws, and that’ll be it — they then come at you with a massive hammer in your teeth. They bang it against you, and it feels like they’re taking down a Subway Line 5 station — for about two minutes.

Then, the pain is gone.

Within 10 minutes, you can talk again — nearly as well as you did before the pain.

Within 3 hours, you’re as good as getting back in front of a microphone to do the Subway announcements.

Within 24 hours, the whole stuff is nearly done.

Within about 40 hours, the thing is history.

And that’s where I am right now… left jaw still feels a tad odd without that tooth, but hey, this will pass…

Consider it another trip this Golden OCT, so to speak… We start in the capital of the Republic, of course.

“Subway boy” indeed. Took the Tianjin Metro for a spin… with results: got my postal 匯款 thing done at the Tucheng post office…

Oh man… the Velaro ICE train back to Beijing… good stuff… 330 km/h…