I’ve got to finish backing up the files on my hard disk, which is about two DVD-burns away, and chuck some MP3s onto my player — I listened to a lot of what I had on it during my China trip — and reinstall my laptop to run dual-boot with Windows XP and Ubuntu — the newer Ubuntu version, mind — and pack (of which tasks, packing is certainly not a big deal, even with the presents I’ve got in tow). Transfer some money to people who I’m supposed to send it to, today, and go to my office to …
Month: January 2007
Max Headroom Pirate Hijack?
Maybe the weirdest pirate broadcast you never heard of… or at least, that I’d never heard of.
Sometimes You Gotta Push To Get People To Do Their Jobs
The travel agent booking our flight, for example. She claimed that it would be impossible to confirm our return ticket direct from Vancouver to Incheon. I suggested we fly via Tokyo, and she insisted that, no, this was simply not possible. Only one stop in Tokyo would be possible, she said, and that was the one we were using to get over to Canada. Puzzled, because this sounds stupid, given that all the direct flights to Vancouver are booked but those via Tokyo aren’t, I called Air Canada and asked whether it was true that only one such transit was …
One-Shot Workshops
I won’t be able to make any of these, unfortunately, but you should think about them, if you’re writing SF: Leslie Howle from Clarion West has coordinated a series of one-day writing workshops with Richard Hugo House in Seattle this spring. There are five scheduled: Paul Park on January 28th – Fantastic Places – Making the Unreal Real Connie Willis on February 25th – The Techniques and Tropes of SF Terry Bisson on March 25th – Who Likes Short Shorts Peter Beagle on April 29th – Dialogue Says it All Karen Joy Fowler on May 20 – Soylent Green is …
Insane.
That’s my life these days. So I got to Incheon yesterday afternoon, picked up my keys from Lime, and got home last night. Today, worked on getting seat upgrades for the flights Lime and I are taking to and around Canada. We’re flying to Saskatoon on Friday. We’ll be back nine days later. This is crazy talk. If you’re in or near Saskatoon, Montreal, or Vancouver, and I don’t contact you, don’t feel put out. It’s a very rushed trip. I’ll be emailing whoever I can tomorrow. If I miss you, feel free to inquire. But I have a feeling …
China Photos Up! (Some)
Update (8 February 2019): Well, Flickr has changed its policies, so the photo gallery that was posted here is soon not going to be on Flickr anymore. If I get around to it, the gallery may become available again, via Google Photos or maybe just hosted here on my own webspace. We’ll see. UPDATE (18 Jan 18 2007): Ah, that’s better. I don’t know why a bunch of them were still on privacy mode when I checked this morning. I’d swear I’d set them all to public last night. Original post: I’ve been busily uploading some shots from my trip. …
Morning in Nanjing
Went for a walk last night and found my map utterly unreadable, and unhelpful, so I think I’ll be depending on taxis today. Here’s hoping they’re less fickle than the taxis in Shanghai, who refuse rides to places that are a reasonable distance and everything — not too far, not too close, and they still refused! Today’s plan is to see a bunch of Taiping stuff, and then — depending on how things work out with ticketing — either returning to Shanghai tonight, or else flying from Nanjing tomorrow morning, or, maaaaybe, returning to Incheon tonight, if there’s an available …
Big Change in Plans
Well, my travel companion Randy just left today, and I got some bad news from Lime. It looks like January is a much better time for her to fly to Canada then February — in fact, flying in February looks impossible, because the number of male interns who did not get a position for March is high and many of them are obliged to go directly to military service, meaning a lot of male interns will be gone in February. Which means if we’re going to go to Canada, it’s going to have to be in January. And there’s not …
Shanghai’s Frustrating Side
I’ve had a frustrating day. Some of that I should blame on Lonely Planet hyping things that weren’t so interesting after all… some of it is just Shanghai. Cabbies refusing to take you places even when you show them the Chinese text… a subway system that’s 90% doable but 10% completely incomprehensible… and touts and hawkers who just do not let up. Now some woman in the Internet room at the hotel I’m staying at is vociferously arguing with a guest that all the PCs are the same. She claims the PC that takes 15 minutes to load Gmail and …
Access Again!
So some of the PCs in the hotel actually aren’t so bug-infested and crappy that I can’t connect to my own site! Yesterday, Randy and I met my old student from Jeonju, Lisa. I’ll be seeing her again with a fellow student of hers, Faith, who’ll be back in Shanghai next week. (As will I, probably just for a day before I catch my flight back home to Korea.) It’s odd walking down the Bund… I keep getting flashbacks to The Diamond Age and to the stories I had set in Shanghai. This afternoon I’ll be checking out older bits …