First runs

I didn't post last week for a few reasons, but mainly because I didn't have anything pressing to recount (and yes, I couldn't be bothered...). I don't have a ton to talk about this week either but I promised myself I'd post every week, and missing two would be, well, one too much :-).  I had also committed to stopping smoking, and that didn't actually happen until Thursday just gone, so there's that too. As I'm still suffering from nicotine withdrawal, this will be a short, whiny post...

So much as I love smoking, it is terrible for one's health and so has to be stopped, and stopped as regularly as possible. I have already expressed how I am finding keeping up the pace of study exhausting and in spite of the concentration boost nicotine gives, my energy levels just weren't there. I'm seriously hoping the extra oxygen to the brain will spice it up a bit - I also got some Omega 3 (fish oil) capsules and have been investigating nootropics. A friend (who I won't name) has been on a "brain pill" for a bit now and swears by it... I am very tempted. Even if it is 100% placebo - who cares! I genuinely don't mind paying (lots) for pills with chalk and sugar if in taking them I trick my brain into temporarily becoming more effective at memorising and processing speed. Anyway, I'm not there quite yet.

In the meantime, there is getting over the nicotine withdrawal symptoms. Every time I stop smoking again, and I count 2 months with zero nicotine as "stopping", I am reminded of a book by one of those "70s drug experimenting authors" who likened the withdrawal symptoms from stopping opiods and certain other highly addictive substances to the effects of certain hallucinogenics. Getting off 1 pack-a-day+ of cigarettes certainly does have some strange effects on the brain. And particularly deleterious effects on concentration and focus... I have a month's worth of nicotine patches to ease the most intense periods but alas, it's summer here, and has been approaching 30C. There isn't much Air Con here (at least in places I frequent, particularly my dorm flat) and any sort of sweating and the patches just fall off. That, you can imagine, is most annoying... The other remedy is eating junk food, so I made sure to stock up good and proper beforehand :-)

I have also started exercising, and have had a couple of runs on the hill behind the uni. My body is suitably painful in many, many places but that will all be a distant memory in a week or so. I think I'll be able to get a circuit of about 5-6 kms going, and as there are some pretty steep parts, I may even leave it at that for the foreseeable future. I generally tend to like doing 15 kms+ because that's when you really start to get the heart and lungs working but that is also very nasty on the joints, and I'm going to have to start being a little more careful about that, particularly running on concrete. Sniff, if only they had a rowing machine at the gym...

One of the things that has stuck me here is that the packaging is way overdone. When I say overdone, I mean that you get a packet of biscuits with thick outer plastic, a pretty solid plastic tray which is filled with more plastic vacuum packed individual (or in pairs) biscuits. While you can get something approaching that for some things in France, the plastic is never anywhere near as thick, and it's not that common. Here pretty much everything seems to be that way. A lot of bagged stuff also seems to have gas pumped into it to make the bags look bigger - I got some chippies (that's "crisps" or "chips" for those speakers of dialect ;) ) that literally have about 15g of dried potato for about 10g of plastic - and the bag looks about normal for a "single-serve" bag of chippies.

Another thing that I have been thinking about over the last couple of weeks is the Chinese relationship with "authority" - older, "wiser" colleagues and particularly teachers and scholars. China opened up long ago, and hundreds of thousands of Chinese go overseas to study or work each year. Some of them come back and have attained excellent language skills. So why does no one do anything about the monstrously bad translations on signage everywhere???

Sure, it can be funny but I really don't understand how it's not embarrassing. I would find it terribly embarrassing. Aren't they losing face by having such comical errors everywhere? And it's everywhere!

Where it's not so funny is when it's in a book for learning Chinese. I am using books from (probably) China's premier language teaching university (Beijing Language and Culture University) and there are errors everywhere. Many translations are bad, the Chinese character stroke orders are wrong in many places, and sometimes words have changed meanings to a point where it is very not Ok. Example? The word "xiao jie" (literally "little elder sister") is officially the word for "Miss", as in, "Excuse me Miss, could you tell me how to get to the train station?" Except that now it means "prostitute". I remember it didn't mean that 20 years ago when I was in Fuzhou, because I mistakenly used it to get the attention of a male waiter and my friend Li was very uncomfortable as the poor fellow reluctantly came over to see what we wanted. It does now though, and has for a decade or so. And the books are regularly reissued, because, like, they're supposed to be the best. Of course my teachers are well aware of the errors, as are many, many of the people at the Beijing Language and Culture University. What gives?

The only explanation I can come up with is that no one wants to tell the poor chaps who wrote the books (or signs...) because the venerable and wise people couldn't possibly be wrong. Or at least a young teacher/engineer/scientist could never tell the older teacher/engineer/scientist that it's wrong and needs changing. But what happens when the specs on a high-speed rail line aren't correct???

A friend told me that the ageism here in China's tech scene is even worse than it is in Silicon Valley (so at 30 you are already approaching the upper limit...) and I can see a logic in it. If everyone is 25 then there is no (serious) face lost by telling a colleague he has written bad code and needs to rewrite it. That couldn't happen to a "senior" (so, like a 40 year old!) developer, it would mean losing face. But as anyone who has worked on code that has to scale to hundreds or even thousands of servers (instances, containers, blah) knows - if the code is bad then you MUST tell the dev to fix it. Inefficient, broken code MUST NOT be allowed to get into prod, let alone stay there. So you only hire/keep coders who won't lose face when they are told their code is broken? I have no idea...

Some random picks to end with:

Every morning at first light a couple of squirrels jump from the roof onto the tree just in front of my balcony and hang out for an hour or so

Not just online, Viagra knock-offs in store in a pharmacy near you (well, near me anyway!) 

Chillies drying...

... In front of the (abandoned) Yuxi West train station

Oldies rockin' up the park

I never said I wouldn't post food porn...

The straw that broke my anti-taxi/Didi commitment. It wasn't supposed to rain at all, and rained very hard for something like an hour and a half. Of course I didn't take an umbrella... Now I know how, next time I'm taking a Didi (Chinese Uber)!!!

Last night's light(en)ing extravaganza

Tonight's sunset