The Simpsons Movie and Pixar's Ratatouille opened this week. I've watched neither. This week has been pretty nerve-wracking for me, as my new boss (we've had some internal regrouping) descended from Sydney to pay a visit to our largest Philippines customer.
It was also the first time I've talked to my boss (other than email), let alone met him. I'd met my previous boss (who hired me into Oracle) before I was hired, so that was a far less stressful situation: my corporate fate wasn't (yet) in his hands, so I could be more circumspect about it.
But anyway, FY08 should be an interesting year. We have lots of interesting new kick-ass products (that are technically fantastic, as a side-effect) and I can't wait to take them for a spin.
I also kept running into fellow Philippine Linux Users Group grouch William Yu and his boss Kenneth Palacios at our customer this week. Wonder what they are selling..
Tomorrow it's time to build the boat. There's a hardware store not far from home where I can buy one sheet of 9mm plywood, hoof it home, and start cutting bulkheads.
As an aside: the novelty of the E90 has worn off. It's now nothing more than a huge bloated phone. I'm always "happy" with the E90 in my trousers pocket. I don't clip it to my belt because I don't feel like putting a huge "rob me, I have a $1000 phone" sign on my back.
The E90 is just really convenient for checking mail on the fly: the GMail Java application is nice and responsive (although I hate the input-box mode switch when you want to type stuff in.. a J2ME artifact, I suppose) and I can even check my work mail (via Collabsuite) with the Safari browser. And seeing that teeny tiny "3.5G" icon in the corner is blast. Didn't even known Smart had HSDPA now.
Saturday, July 28, 2007
Monday, July 23, 2007
More E90 Communicator Niggles
This phone is rapidly becoming immensely popular here at the office. Just like Nokia thought it would, the combination of corporate phone plans and large IDD usage means the carrier is motivated to shower the users with high-end handsets.
I just discovered a few more annoyances.
First, with the WPA2 802.11g wireless network at home, the phone cannot browse. Certain sites don't work (cannot resolve in DNS) while others cannot be contacted at all even when I key in the IP address in the browser. I can, however, without fail, access the Linksys administration web server from the E90. Perhaps my problems are a vagary of Smart Bro DHCP DNS assignment. But our notebooks don't have any problems.
Here in the office with WEP "security," everything works fine. I should just use WEP at home and use MAC address blocking for some level of "security" if I want to use the E90's WLAN capabilities at home.
The GMail Java application has the capability to crash the entire phone.
The inbox is horrendously slow.
This phone is a paradox of speed and slowness. For example the Messaging inbox is quite slow; same for the phone book. But Acrobat Reader is fast! in many ways the phone interface is intolerably slow, compared to say a Palm. But I don't know if there's anything better out there. And in my gut I trust Symbian more than I trust Microsoft.
I just discovered a few more annoyances.
First, with the WPA2 802.11g wireless network at home, the phone cannot browse. Certain sites don't work (cannot resolve in DNS) while others cannot be contacted at all even when I key in the IP address in the browser. I can, however, without fail, access the Linksys administration web server from the E90. Perhaps my problems are a vagary of Smart Bro DHCP DNS assignment. But our notebooks don't have any problems.
Here in the office with WEP "security," everything works fine. I should just use WEP at home and use MAC address blocking for some level of "security" if I want to use the E90's WLAN capabilities at home.
The GMail Java application has the capability to crash the entire phone.
The inbox is horrendously slow.
This phone is a paradox of speed and slowness. For example the Messaging inbox is quite slow; same for the phone book. But Acrobat Reader is fast! in many ways the phone interface is intolerably slow, compared to say a Palm. But I don't know if there's anything better out there. And in my gut I trust Symbian more than I trust Microsoft.
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Nokia E90 Communicator Smackdown
Last week, I disconnected my Globe Telecom postpaid line, which I've had for ten years. I did this because, in spite of my huge phone bills, Globe customer service declined to give me a handset.
I learned from a former colleague who's at Globe, that their budget for customer retention is much lower than their budget for acquisition. This is why some unknown Joe Blow from off the street can walk into a Globe Hub, and walk out with a Nokia N95, whereas me, a customer of ten year's standing, cannot get the time of day.
Well, it's not my loss.
Smart provided this with my new subscription:
The (for now) latest, greatest Nokia E90 Communicator. With a huge screen, very long battery life, HSDPA, WLAN, GPS, and an entire alphabet soup of features I don't care about. Actually it's very similar to the N95 software-wise, except for the dual screens, the large internal screen, and more memory.
So far, it works as advertised. It is a phone, after all. I can make calls, write SMS (very convenient with the QWERTY keyboard), browse the web with the Safari-derived browser (which hangs in Meebo, unfortunately), run the GMail Java applet.. very nice.
However the E90 also comes with a 3.2-megapixel camera, and, just to show that mobile phones have a long, long, long way to go in the camera department, I took a bunch of photos out our bedroom window. These are nighttime shots, without flash, at long distances and high ISO.
Guaranteed to bring out the worst in a camera's performance.
I think this is a more interesting comparison than the rather idiotic ones I see all over the net where they compare photos taken in broad daylight: because, when there's a lot of light, even the crappiest of digital image sensors will perform acceptably. It's when you're starved for light, that the crap gets separated from the cream.
First the contenders (this is a rather lopsided comparison, but I think it's fair given that the E90 currently costs more than $1000):
And for the out-of-window photos:
First the E90, at default settings. From the EXIF data, Nokia chooses 1/15 second, ISO 800, f2.8, 5.6mm focal length. I tried several shots and never got less than 1/15 second, so that's the lower bound on the shutter speed.
Is there anything recognizable in this picture?
Next up: a three-year old Canon Powershot SD500, also known as the Digital Ixus 700. Three years ago this was the top-end Canon compact digital camera, and even today, with its DiGiC II chip, 2.0" screen, and 7.1-megapixel sensor, it's still a decent performer and continues to take out the trash, namely the lower-end compact digital cameras:
Now we see what the scene was supposed to look like. Canon chooses f2.8, 1 second exposure, ISO 400, with a 7.7mm focal length.
Finally, the Canon EOS 350D digital SLR, a two year old design. This one's at ISO 1600, f2.5, with the 50mm standard lens. Kind of unfair, advanced-amateur class camera, with one of the fastest reasonably-priced lenses in Canon's catalog:
Doesn't look much different from the Ixus at this zoom level, but I can see a lot more tonality. All the photos were not levels- or brightness-adjusted, taken straight from the camera and just scaled down in Picasa for upload.
I also took crops of the line of cars in each photo, to show the detail when zoomed in a bit. First the E90:
There really isn't much to see there, and the auto-focus capability is downright incompetent. The shutter lag is in the 5-second range. This is like a digital camera from 1997 (or worse). I should know, I had one of those..
The Digital Ixus shows the shortcomings of its small sensor when the photo is blown up:
We can see quite a bit of sensor noise, this is at ISO 400. But the image is still usable, and a universe better than what the $1000 mobile phone can cough up.
The Digital Rebel XT has much less problems, even at ISO 1600:
The quality is so high that it's not funny at all. But this is to be expected, the imaging chip on the Digital Rebel XT is comparable in size to the screen on the other two devices.
So in the end the E90 gets a royal smackdown. Did I mention its browser also hangs on Meebo? the E90 does everything, but the only thing it does really well is the phone functionality.
Everything else is fair-to-middling at best (or, in the case of the camera, downright horrific). And for $1000 you can get a low-end notebook that doesn't hang on Meebo, and a low-end Canon digital camera that would perform about as well or a bit worse than the Ixus I used.
I would never actually buy an E90. It's so not practical.
But.. it does everything. And lots of times, that's enough.
I learned from a former colleague who's at Globe, that their budget for customer retention is much lower than their budget for acquisition. This is why some unknown Joe Blow from off the street can walk into a Globe Hub, and walk out with a Nokia N95, whereas me, a customer of ten year's standing, cannot get the time of day.
Well, it's not my loss.
Smart provided this with my new subscription:
The (for now) latest, greatest Nokia E90 Communicator. With a huge screen, very long battery life, HSDPA, WLAN, GPS, and an entire alphabet soup of features I don't care about. Actually it's very similar to the N95 software-wise, except for the dual screens, the large internal screen, and more memory.
So far, it works as advertised. It is a phone, after all. I can make calls, write SMS (very convenient with the QWERTY keyboard), browse the web with the Safari-derived browser (which hangs in Meebo, unfortunately), run the GMail Java applet.. very nice.
However the E90 also comes with a 3.2-megapixel camera, and, just to show that mobile phones have a long, long, long way to go in the camera department, I took a bunch of photos out our bedroom window. These are nighttime shots, without flash, at long distances and high ISO.
Guaranteed to bring out the worst in a camera's performance.
I think this is a more interesting comparison than the rather idiotic ones I see all over the net where they compare photos taken in broad daylight: because, when there's a lot of light, even the crappiest of digital image sensors will perform acceptably. It's when you're starved for light, that the crap gets separated from the cream.
First the contenders (this is a rather lopsided comparison, but I think it's fair given that the E90 currently costs more than $1000):
And for the out-of-window photos:
First the E90, at default settings. From the EXIF data, Nokia chooses 1/15 second, ISO 800, f2.8, 5.6mm focal length. I tried several shots and never got less than 1/15 second, so that's the lower bound on the shutter speed.
Is there anything recognizable in this picture?
Next up: a three-year old Canon Powershot SD500, also known as the Digital Ixus 700. Three years ago this was the top-end Canon compact digital camera, and even today, with its DiGiC II chip, 2.0" screen, and 7.1-megapixel sensor, it's still a decent performer and continues to take out the trash, namely the lower-end compact digital cameras:
Now we see what the scene was supposed to look like. Canon chooses f2.8, 1 second exposure, ISO 400, with a 7.7mm focal length.
Finally, the Canon EOS 350D digital SLR, a two year old design. This one's at ISO 1600, f2.5, with the 50mm standard lens. Kind of unfair, advanced-amateur class camera, with one of the fastest reasonably-priced lenses in Canon's catalog:
Doesn't look much different from the Ixus at this zoom level, but I can see a lot more tonality. All the photos were not levels- or brightness-adjusted, taken straight from the camera and just scaled down in Picasa for upload.
I also took crops of the line of cars in each photo, to show the detail when zoomed in a bit. First the E90:
There really isn't much to see there, and the auto-focus capability is downright incompetent. The shutter lag is in the 5-second range. This is like a digital camera from 1997 (or worse). I should know, I had one of those..
The Digital Ixus shows the shortcomings of its small sensor when the photo is blown up:
We can see quite a bit of sensor noise, this is at ISO 400. But the image is still usable, and a universe better than what the $1000 mobile phone can cough up.
The Digital Rebel XT has much less problems, even at ISO 1600:
The quality is so high that it's not funny at all. But this is to be expected, the imaging chip on the Digital Rebel XT is comparable in size to the screen on the other two devices.
So in the end the E90 gets a royal smackdown. Did I mention its browser also hangs on Meebo? the E90 does everything, but the only thing it does really well is the phone functionality.
Everything else is fair-to-middling at best (or, in the case of the camera, downright horrific). And for $1000 you can get a low-end notebook that doesn't hang on Meebo, and a low-end Canon digital camera that would perform about as well or a bit worse than the Ixus I used.
I would never actually buy an E90. It's so not practical.
But.. it does everything. And lots of times, that's enough.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Playing around with Oracle Coherence
Oracle Coherence (formerly known as Tangosol) is one really cool piece of technology. And, from my very basic playing around, the learning curve to get something "cool" done is very, very shallow.
In a sentence: it's just two JAR's.
Coherence has a bunch of caching schemes (replicated, distributed, tiered, optimistic..) but I've only been playing with the default, which is the replicated cache. In its absolutely simplest form, what Coherence does is provide a network-transparent hash. Which optionally (via configuration setting) we can set to be persistent.
By hash we mean "key value pair," which the Perl-heads out there (and the Microsoft registry devotees!) are very familiar with. In Coherence, the key and value can be anything serializable: so we can store not just scalars, but more interesting things as well.
Creating a new cache is trivial:
Later on, if we want to store something in the cache we've just instantiated, we do this (here it's just a scalar, but that's already tremendously powerful):
And if we want to fetch something from the cache, we do
This is all simple fun and games, and may not strike the casual observer as anything revolutionary. But it is.. Because that innocuously-named cache is network transparent. That means, we can fire up another Java application somewhere else with
and our second application automatically sees all the key-value pairs inserted by the first application. And it's transactional! (e.g. if you muck around with a particular key in one application, you will get locking semantics). This is truly revolutionary.
A few minor gotchas I've gotten mixed up with:
Coherence cache replication naturally has overhead: I've clocked my sample program (Nokia Traffica log-file parser, originally implemented with TimesTen) at a smallish 3,000 hash puts per second, with two nodes (JVM's) running over TCP/IP on the same host. This really won't get the TimesTen crowd out of bed, because replicated TimesTen can do 20,000-plus inserts per second.
But it's hard to horizontally scale TimesTen. If you want more TPS out of TimesTen, you have to get a bigger and bigger box. While Coherence can scale to over 1,000 cluster elements. With that many nodes, you can have an aggregate hash put capability in the millions per second.
And that is something to get out of bed for.
So what are you waiting for? get your free developer download now! (completely un-crippled, like all Oracle products). Like I said, it's just two JAR's, a nine-megabyte download. That's fifteen minutes even over a dialup connection. You can be playing with grid computing (with no cluster or grid computing background) in thirty minutes. No excuse not to try it!
In a sentence: it's just two JAR's.
Coherence has a bunch of caching schemes (replicated, distributed, tiered, optimistic..) but I've only been playing with the default, which is the replicated cache. In its absolutely simplest form, what Coherence does is provide a network-transparent hash. Which optionally (via configuration setting) we can set to be persistent.
By hash we mean "key value pair," which the Perl-heads out there (and the Microsoft registry devotees!) are very familiar with. In Coherence, the key and value can be anything serializable: so we can store not just scalars, but more interesting things as well.
Creating a new cache is trivial:
import com.tangosol.net.CacheFactory;
import com.tangosol.net.NamedCache;
NamedCache mycache = CacheFactory.getcache("mycache");
Later on, if we want to store something in the cache we've just instantiated, we do this (here it's just a scalar, but that's already tremendously powerful):
mycache.put("my_name", "Orlando Andico");
And if we want to fetch something from the cache, we do
String val = (String) mycache.get("my_name");
This is all simple fun and games, and may not strike the casual observer as anything revolutionary. But it is.. Because that innocuously-named cache is network transparent. That means, we can fire up another Java application somewhere else with
java -cp coherence.jar:tangosol.jar:. -Dtangosol.coherence.cacheconfig=myconfig.xml myapplication
and our second application automatically sees all the key-value pairs inserted by the first application. And it's transactional! (e.g. if you muck around with a particular key in one application, you will get locking semantics). This is truly revolutionary.
A few minor gotchas I've gotten mixed up with:
- the Coherence hash map is stored on the heap, so if you're going to be storing bazillions of bytes there, make sure to use the -Xmx switch to increase your JVM's heap size.
- Coherence uses TCP/IP to propagate replicated updates. If you have a default Linux install with all the ports closed thanks to our friend iptables, the grid won't work!
Coherence cache replication naturally has overhead: I've clocked my sample program (Nokia Traffica log-file parser, originally implemented with TimesTen) at a smallish 3,000 hash puts per second, with two nodes (JVM's) running over TCP/IP on the same host. This really won't get the TimesTen crowd out of bed, because replicated TimesTen can do 20,000-plus inserts per second.
But it's hard to horizontally scale TimesTen. If you want more TPS out of TimesTen, you have to get a bigger and bigger box. While Coherence can scale to over 1,000 cluster elements. With that many nodes, you can have an aggregate hash put capability in the millions per second.
And that is something to get out of bed for.
So what are you waiting for? get your free developer download now! (completely un-crippled, like all Oracle products). Like I said, it's just two JAR's, a nine-megabyte download. That's fifteen minutes even over a dialup connection. You can be playing with grid computing (with no cluster or grid computing background) in thirty minutes. No excuse not to try it!
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Google Money
I now have $2.65 of AdSense revenue! that's accumulated, mind, not this month.
How underwhelming! I should write a cool Flash game and rake in the bucks like that Desktop Tower Defense guy. On the other hand, nevermind.. it really does seem that my interests (telescopes, boats, travel..) are of no interest to anyone else.
How underwhelming! I should write a cool Flash game and rake in the bucks like that Desktop Tower Defense guy. On the other hand, nevermind.. it really does seem that my interests (telescopes, boats, travel..) are of no interest to anyone else.
Another Week, Another Dollar
Bad pun on Jewel song.
Flew back to Manila last Saturday. My flight was delayed by three hours.
As an aside, Philippine Airlines is using a brand-spanking new Airbus A310-200 for their Shanghai flight. It has Recaro seats too!
And an interesting "double winglet" on the tip of the wing:
I want to put a winglet on my leeboard.
On the topic of quality education, here's another photo from my hotel room:
The barely-visible white telescope dome in the near-left is at the Fudan University High School. Like I said before, that school looks pretty modern. It kind of sucks that almost everything in the Philippines is worse off compared to the neighboring countries I've visited.
Kind of hard to see in this photo:
But those are two very large wind turbines I saw from the plane. Back when I was a kid, my uncle who worked for PNOC Energy Development Corporation did quite a bit of wind-speed studies in Ilocos Norte. They even put up a GTZ-funded wind turbine there. The propeller was two-bladed, about twenty feet long, and twelve-year old skinny Orly could lift it. It was made of carbon-fiber.
Now, a totally independent company has set up a wind-turbine farm in exactly the same place in Ilocos. I guess some use came out of that wind-speed data after all..
Back to the long flight delay: good thing my notebook had enough batteries for me to play Desktop Tower Defense for most of those three hours.
Desktop Tower Defense is quite an addictive game. I "discovered" it on my Jakarta trip: nothing much to do, not speaking the local language, I holed up in the hotel and played this Flash game. The guy who wrote Desktop Tower Defense is reputed to be earning $8000-plus per month on ads alone! I wish I were him!
There really does seem to be a market for ad-supported games online. It's actually more "attainable" than pro-blogging for people like myself: it's hard to come up with interesting and original content. It's significantly less hard to write code.
Flew back to Manila last Saturday. My flight was delayed by three hours.
As an aside, Philippine Airlines is using a brand-spanking new Airbus A310-200 for their Shanghai flight. It has Recaro seats too!
And an interesting "double winglet" on the tip of the wing:
I want to put a winglet on my leeboard.
On the topic of quality education, here's another photo from my hotel room:
The barely-visible white telescope dome in the near-left is at the Fudan University High School. Like I said before, that school looks pretty modern. It kind of sucks that almost everything in the Philippines is worse off compared to the neighboring countries I've visited.
Kind of hard to see in this photo:
But those are two very large wind turbines I saw from the plane. Back when I was a kid, my uncle who worked for PNOC Energy Development Corporation did quite a bit of wind-speed studies in Ilocos Norte. They even put up a GTZ-funded wind turbine there. The propeller was two-bladed, about twenty feet long, and twelve-year old skinny Orly could lift it. It was made of carbon-fiber.
Now, a totally independent company has set up a wind-turbine farm in exactly the same place in Ilocos. I guess some use came out of that wind-speed data after all..
Back to the long flight delay: good thing my notebook had enough batteries for me to play Desktop Tower Defense for most of those three hours.
Desktop Tower Defense is quite an addictive game. I "discovered" it on my Jakarta trip: nothing much to do, not speaking the local language, I holed up in the hotel and played this Flash game. The guy who wrote Desktop Tower Defense is reputed to be earning $8000-plus per month on ads alone! I wish I were him!
There really does seem to be a market for ad-supported games online. It's actually more "attainable" than pro-blogging for people like myself: it's hard to come up with interesting and original content. It's significantly less hard to write code.
Friday, July 06, 2007
Last Training Day
It's been my last day of training!
Finally I can go home (tomorrow). Up to yesterday, the only places in Shanghai where I have able to set foot are the airport; my hotel; Oracle University office in Harbour Ring Plaza; KFC near the office with spicy (but scrawny) chicken pieces; Bank of China near the office; and the Starbucks next to the Bank of China branch.
Oracle University's office is on the 32nd floor of Harbour Ring Plaza. My instructor seat is right next to a window, where I can see this:
The tall building under construction with cranes on top is the Shanghai World Financial Center, which will be the tallest building in Shanghai when completed at 492m and 101 floors. The somewhat-shorter building beside it is the Jin Mao Tower, which is (currently) Shanghai's tallest building at 420m and 88 floors, currently the fifth-tallest building in the world.
The building with a crown on the left is the Westin Bund Center.
Here's a panoramic view of the skyline outside the office window. I took this photo around lunch. The lunch-time traffic is really horrendous!
Notice the satellite dishes on the building in the above photo. Here's the Google Earth image: it's kind of surreal to also see them on the Google Earth overhead view (on the "Bank of China" labeled building).
I've been commenting about the lack of dumplings for the past couple of days, so my colleague Sean (that's him cut off on the left) accompanied me to a local restaurant near the office. It wouldn't look out of place in Binondo - dimly-lit and with no airconditioning.
Check out those dumplings! I paid for lunch (because I need to liquidate some of the money I advanced on my company card) but the total bill for our lunch came out to only 33 RMB. About 200 pesos. For both of us. And with all those dumplings.
That included the two platters with lots and lots of dumplings (4 RMB or 24 pesos each per platter), the large bowl of noodles (10 RMB or 61 pesos), and two cans of Coke. The Coke was pretty expensive at 7.5 RMB (45 pesos!) for each. Sean is from Chengdu and he mentioned that this particular noodle dish is a Xian specialty and only cost 3 RMB (18 pesos!) back home. It had beef and parsley in it.
I've noticed that "multinational brand" stuff is quite expensive here.
Sean was telling me that food is so cheap here. Then he tells me that in the provinces, farmers only earn 200 to 300 RMB per month (1200 to 1800 pesos). So the cheap food for city-dwellers comes at the cost of extreme poverty for the country people.
After lunch with Sean, I went to Starbucks because I dismissed class at 2:00 p.m. and I had some time to kill.
That's when I realized how insanely expensive Starbucks is here! the large mocha frappe which I bought cost 31 RMB! that's almost 200 pesos or twice the price back in Manila. And comparable in price to our lunch for two. No wonder there was hardly anyone inside Starbucks. I had a mocha frappe the other day, but I'd bought a couple of city mugs (which cost 125 RMB each) so I didn't notice the price of the drink.
Sean also told me that, while the per-capita monthly income in Shanghai is 3000 RMB (18000 pesos), the reality is that workers like his neighbor who works in a steel mill, only get paid 1000 RMB (6000 pesos) a month. That's minimum wage back in Manila. The average income in Shanghai gets pulled up by all the rich capitalist roaders who live here.
He also said that when he started college, he only had to pay 1800 RMB per year for tuition. That's about 11000 pesos. But now, tuition at his university is 5000 RMB a year or 30000 pesos.
By comparison, in 1992 when I entered UP, tuition was 6100 pesos per semester or 12200 pesos per year. At the exchange rate at that time, that would be 3600 RMB per year (and UP is a government university!) Today, UP costs 1000 pesos per unit or 36000 pesos a year, which is 6000 RMB a year. Very roughly comparable to Shanghai tuition.
But let's not forget that UP is government-subsidized. Ateneo and La Salle cost much, much more. Overall the Chinese seem to get a better deal in the education department. There is a prestigious school (Fudan University) not far from my hotel. They also have a high school, and their high school has an observatory dome for a telescope. Pretty good school, and for 5000 RMB a year, education there is a steal.
Several of the taxicabs I've ridden have advertisements inside, like this one:
"English first." They claim to equip your child with "dualBrain" (yes, it's camel case). They even have a URL. Speaking English is becoming a bigger and bigger deal for the upwardly-mobile classes.
After sending my attendees off and after my expensive Starbucks drink, I decided to see if I could walk to The Bund, which is the colonial-era section of Shanghai along the Huangpo River.
I regretted that exercise and almost gave up, because after walking a kilometer I was covered with sweat. But I decided to keep walking (had to; I was already sweating like a pig). I also saw the only Mazda3 I've seen here in Shanghai, parked on one of the side streets. It had an Axela badge and lots of rice stickers. Seemed to be "V" spec since it had fog lights but no sunroof. Turns out, based on Google Earth, I walked about 1.5km to The Bund, then about 0.5km along the river taking photos.
View of the tall buildings across the river from The Bund walkway, which is like Baywalk back in Manila (lots of tourists, with digital cameras and I even saw one guy with a tripod and a large-format camera, complete with bellows):
A closer look, with Oriental Pearl Tower at the left (third-tallest tower in the world, 468m):
Jin Mao Tower and the uncompleted World Financial Center are somewhat visible on the right (covered by the Aurora building).
Another view of Oriental Pearl Tower, with a (patriotic!) PRC flag in the foreground. I failed to take the picture while the flag was waving, because the Canon SD500 is a damn slow camera (didn't bring the bulky digital SLR). The patriotic scene is somewhat diluted by the large "Sprite" logo on the roof.
More photos of the colonial-era buildings of The Bund:
There's a garbage man in the picture below (the guy with two large sacks).
He was bugging the passersby, asking them for their mineral water bottles. Most of the people readily gave him their PET bottles (after hastily gulping down the remaining water) but one girl was not happy and yelled at him. Even though her mineral water bottle was empty.
Because I was tired and hot, I didn't explore The Bund some more. There was a big statue of Chairman Mao not far away that I saw from the taxi. I would've liked to take a photo of the Chairman. Also there might have been some dimsum shops in the area.
Now I'm back at the hotel. I dread another hotel dinner, but have been unable to contact my other colleague so that might be my fate yet again.
Finally I can go home (tomorrow). Up to yesterday, the only places in Shanghai where I have able to set foot are the airport; my hotel; Oracle University office in Harbour Ring Plaza; KFC near the office with spicy (but scrawny) chicken pieces; Bank of China near the office; and the Starbucks next to the Bank of China branch.
Oracle University's office is on the 32nd floor of Harbour Ring Plaza. My instructor seat is right next to a window, where I can see this:
The tall building under construction with cranes on top is the Shanghai World Financial Center, which will be the tallest building in Shanghai when completed at 492m and 101 floors. The somewhat-shorter building beside it is the Jin Mao Tower, which is (currently) Shanghai's tallest building at 420m and 88 floors, currently the fifth-tallest building in the world.
The building with a crown on the left is the Westin Bund Center.
Here's a panoramic view of the skyline outside the office window. I took this photo around lunch. The lunch-time traffic is really horrendous!
Notice the satellite dishes on the building in the above photo. Here's the Google Earth image: it's kind of surreal to also see them on the Google Earth overhead view (on the "Bank of China" labeled building).
I've been commenting about the lack of dumplings for the past couple of days, so my colleague Sean (that's him cut off on the left) accompanied me to a local restaurant near the office. It wouldn't look out of place in Binondo - dimly-lit and with no airconditioning.
Check out those dumplings! I paid for lunch (because I need to liquidate some of the money I advanced on my company card) but the total bill for our lunch came out to only 33 RMB. About 200 pesos. For both of us. And with all those dumplings.
That included the two platters with lots and lots of dumplings (4 RMB or 24 pesos each per platter), the large bowl of noodles (10 RMB or 61 pesos), and two cans of Coke. The Coke was pretty expensive at 7.5 RMB (45 pesos!) for each. Sean is from Chengdu and he mentioned that this particular noodle dish is a Xian specialty and only cost 3 RMB (18 pesos!) back home. It had beef and parsley in it.
I've noticed that "multinational brand" stuff is quite expensive here.
Sean was telling me that food is so cheap here. Then he tells me that in the provinces, farmers only earn 200 to 300 RMB per month (1200 to 1800 pesos). So the cheap food for city-dwellers comes at the cost of extreme poverty for the country people.
After lunch with Sean, I went to Starbucks because I dismissed class at 2:00 p.m. and I had some time to kill.
That's when I realized how insanely expensive Starbucks is here! the large mocha frappe which I bought cost 31 RMB! that's almost 200 pesos or twice the price back in Manila. And comparable in price to our lunch for two. No wonder there was hardly anyone inside Starbucks. I had a mocha frappe the other day, but I'd bought a couple of city mugs (which cost 125 RMB each) so I didn't notice the price of the drink.
Sean also told me that, while the per-capita monthly income in Shanghai is 3000 RMB (18000 pesos), the reality is that workers like his neighbor who works in a steel mill, only get paid 1000 RMB (6000 pesos) a month. That's minimum wage back in Manila. The average income in Shanghai gets pulled up by all the rich capitalist roaders who live here.
He also said that when he started college, he only had to pay 1800 RMB per year for tuition. That's about 11000 pesos. But now, tuition at his university is 5000 RMB a year or 30000 pesos.
By comparison, in 1992 when I entered UP, tuition was 6100 pesos per semester or 12200 pesos per year. At the exchange rate at that time, that would be 3600 RMB per year (and UP is a government university!) Today, UP costs 1000 pesos per unit or 36000 pesos a year, which is 6000 RMB a year. Very roughly comparable to Shanghai tuition.
But let's not forget that UP is government-subsidized. Ateneo and La Salle cost much, much more. Overall the Chinese seem to get a better deal in the education department. There is a prestigious school (Fudan University) not far from my hotel. They also have a high school, and their high school has an observatory dome for a telescope. Pretty good school, and for 5000 RMB a year, education there is a steal.
Several of the taxicabs I've ridden have advertisements inside, like this one:
"English first." They claim to equip your child with "dualBrain" (yes, it's camel case). They even have a URL. Speaking English is becoming a bigger and bigger deal for the upwardly-mobile classes.
After sending my attendees off and after my expensive Starbucks drink, I decided to see if I could walk to The Bund, which is the colonial-era section of Shanghai along the Huangpo River.
I regretted that exercise and almost gave up, because after walking a kilometer I was covered with sweat. But I decided to keep walking (had to; I was already sweating like a pig). I also saw the only Mazda3 I've seen here in Shanghai, parked on one of the side streets. It had an Axela badge and lots of rice stickers. Seemed to be "V" spec since it had fog lights but no sunroof. Turns out, based on Google Earth, I walked about 1.5km to The Bund, then about 0.5km along the river taking photos.
View of the tall buildings across the river from The Bund walkway, which is like Baywalk back in Manila (lots of tourists, with digital cameras and I even saw one guy with a tripod and a large-format camera, complete with bellows):
A closer look, with Oriental Pearl Tower at the left (third-tallest tower in the world, 468m):
Jin Mao Tower and the uncompleted World Financial Center are somewhat visible on the right (covered by the Aurora building).
Another view of Oriental Pearl Tower, with a (patriotic!) PRC flag in the foreground. I failed to take the picture while the flag was waving, because the Canon SD500 is a damn slow camera (didn't bring the bulky digital SLR). The patriotic scene is somewhat diluted by the large "Sprite" logo on the roof.
More photos of the colonial-era buildings of The Bund:
There's a garbage man in the picture below (the guy with two large sacks).
He was bugging the passersby, asking them for their mineral water bottles. Most of the people readily gave him their PET bottles (after hastily gulping down the remaining water) but one girl was not happy and yelled at him. Even though her mineral water bottle was empty.
Because I was tired and hot, I didn't explore The Bund some more. There was a big statue of Chairman Mao not far away that I saw from the taxi. I would've liked to take a photo of the Chairman. Also there might have been some dimsum shops in the area.
Now I'm back at the hotel. I dread another hotel dinner, but have been unable to contact my other colleague so that might be my fate yet again.
Thursday, July 05, 2007
Houses and Cars
Price of upscale condominium apartment in Shanghai Pudong - 50,000 RMB per square meter. That's 300,000 pesos per square meter or 30M pesos for a 100-square meter condo unit.
Price of condominium apartment in Shanghai, 20km away - 6,000 RMB per square meter. 36,000 pesos or 2.2M pesos for a "Serendra class" domicile. But, two hours' drive or commute.
Price of Volkswagen Golf in Shanghai - 100,000 RMB. Only 600,000 pesos for a Volkswagen AG vehicle! although made by SAIC right here in Shanghai.
Catch: the license plate will cost 40,000 RMB. Similar to Singapore, an attempt to reduce the volume of traffic choking the roads. If you register your car in Ningbo, it will cost much less but you cannot drive your car on the elevated highways here in Shanghai.
So total cost of ownership of that Golf is 140,000 RMB or 850,000 pesos. Still not bad! priced the same as a compact Japanese car back home.
Cheapest car in Shanghai: Chery QQ, 25,000 RMB (152,000 pesos). The license plate costs twice as much as the car! but, I've never seen a Chery QQ here. Apparently you'd lose face in Shanghai with a Chery QQ. But in the smaller cities, they are supposed to be ubiquitous.
Also: very few people drive Japanese cars, because college students are known to vandalize or deface Japanese cars. Well, with a Golf going for 100,000 RMB, who needs Japanese, right?
On the topic of cars, this
is by far the most populous car on the streets of Shanghai. The Volkswagen Santana, which has been produced in more or less this form, since 1986. It's a Passat derivative, initially designed by Volkswagen of Brazil.
SAIC (the Chinese VW joint venture) continues to produce the Santana to this day, alongside the slightly-upgraded Santana 3000. They even have ABS on this thing!
Almost all of the taxis on the road are this car. I have already spent eight hours of my life inside this car. Four days now, one hour from the hotel to the office; and another hour back to the hotel from the office.
To be honest I grow weary of riding in these homely cars. I look out the taxi window and see all these nice cars whizzing past. And I grow weary of the 236 RMB buffet dinner at the hotel. A bland exercise, but I don't have the nerve to go out and find some decent dimsum.
I've been here four days now. Two more to go. I would very much like to go home.
Price of condominium apartment in Shanghai, 20km away - 6,000 RMB per square meter. 36,000 pesos or 2.2M pesos for a "Serendra class" domicile. But, two hours' drive or commute.
Price of Volkswagen Golf in Shanghai - 100,000 RMB. Only 600,000 pesos for a Volkswagen AG vehicle! although made by SAIC right here in Shanghai.
Catch: the license plate will cost 40,000 RMB. Similar to Singapore, an attempt to reduce the volume of traffic choking the roads. If you register your car in Ningbo, it will cost much less but you cannot drive your car on the elevated highways here in Shanghai.
So total cost of ownership of that Golf is 140,000 RMB or 850,000 pesos. Still not bad! priced the same as a compact Japanese car back home.
Cheapest car in Shanghai: Chery QQ, 25,000 RMB (152,000 pesos). The license plate costs twice as much as the car! but, I've never seen a Chery QQ here. Apparently you'd lose face in Shanghai with a Chery QQ. But in the smaller cities, they are supposed to be ubiquitous.
Also: very few people drive Japanese cars, because college students are known to vandalize or deface Japanese cars. Well, with a Golf going for 100,000 RMB, who needs Japanese, right?
On the topic of cars, this
is by far the most populous car on the streets of Shanghai. The Volkswagen Santana, which has been produced in more or less this form, since 1986. It's a Passat derivative, initially designed by Volkswagen of Brazil.
SAIC (the Chinese VW joint venture) continues to produce the Santana to this day, alongside the slightly-upgraded Santana 3000. They even have ABS on this thing!
Almost all of the taxis on the road are this car. I have already spent eight hours of my life inside this car. Four days now, one hour from the hotel to the office; and another hour back to the hotel from the office.
To be honest I grow weary of riding in these homely cars. I look out the taxi window and see all these nice cars whizzing past. And I grow weary of the 236 RMB buffet dinner at the hotel. A bland exercise, but I don't have the nerve to go out and find some decent dimsum.
I've been here four days now. Two more to go. I would very much like to go home.
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Work, Work
Today's work wasn't too great.
I am teaching a class this week. Had a nasty surprise this morning. The entire reason I'm teaching this class, instead of local OU (Oracle University) whom I'm sure are very competent, is because there were supposed to be non-Chinese attendees, so the training would have to be in English.
I discovered that (in addition to the horrific Shanghai morning traffic and the weak A/C in the taxicab) all the trainees are Chinese. And that they would like the training to be conducted in Mandarin, if possible. Oops.
There is something of a language gap. While some of my attendees are really, really sharp (and are doing the exercises for chapters I haven't even discussed), this language gap is bringing some of the others in class to grief.
They don't quite understand what I'm saying. And, I cannot gauge how the class is absorbing what I'm saying, because they don't respond. It's like talking to a brick wall. So I don't know if some of them aren't quite getting the concepts. And the sad thing is, they don't ask. My local counterpart says it's because they are shy.
Ah, the troubles of teaching. The way things are going, I am going to leave here with some of the attendees not getting what their employer paid for. It feels like a personal failure on my part.
On a wholly unrelated note, I have been able to convert some of my older photos into panoramas with the free software panorama suite I've been flogging this past month.
View from the top of the hill at the Summer Palace in Beijing:
Overlooking Kunming Lake, from the Temple of Buddhist Incense, Summer Palace:
Imperial China's Maginot Line:
The "Bird's Nest" Olympic Stadium in Wuzhou, Beijing:
And lastly, a view of Marina Bay from the Ritz-Carlton Singapore. The view at the Ritz-Carlton is spectacular. Even from your bathtub, you get this view. Unfortunely I only had my cellphone handy at the time, hence the lower quality of this panorama:
I am teaching a class this week. Had a nasty surprise this morning. The entire reason I'm teaching this class, instead of local OU (Oracle University) whom I'm sure are very competent, is because there were supposed to be non-Chinese attendees, so the training would have to be in English.
I discovered that (in addition to the horrific Shanghai morning traffic and the weak A/C in the taxicab) all the trainees are Chinese. And that they would like the training to be conducted in Mandarin, if possible. Oops.
There is something of a language gap. While some of my attendees are really, really sharp (and are doing the exercises for chapters I haven't even discussed), this language gap is bringing some of the others in class to grief.
They don't quite understand what I'm saying. And, I cannot gauge how the class is absorbing what I'm saying, because they don't respond. It's like talking to a brick wall. So I don't know if some of them aren't quite getting the concepts. And the sad thing is, they don't ask. My local counterpart says it's because they are shy.
Ah, the troubles of teaching. The way things are going, I am going to leave here with some of the attendees not getting what their employer paid for. It feels like a personal failure on my part.
On a wholly unrelated note, I have been able to convert some of my older photos into panoramas with the free software panorama suite I've been flogging this past month.
View from the top of the hill at the Summer Palace in Beijing:
Overlooking Kunming Lake, from the Temple of Buddhist Incense, Summer Palace:
Imperial China's Maginot Line:
The "Bird's Nest" Olympic Stadium in Wuzhou, Beijing:
And lastly, a view of Marina Bay from the Ritz-Carlton Singapore. The view at the Ritz-Carlton is spectacular. Even from your bathtub, you get this view. Unfortunely I only had my cellphone handy at the time, hence the lower quality of this panorama:
Monday, July 02, 2007
Shanghai
Just flew in today, arrived around 3:00 p.m. Same time zone as Manila. Balmy, 30-degree Celsius weather. A bit cooler. It's almost 7:00 p.m. and it's still light outside. The longitude here is 121 East, almost identical to Manila, but the latitude is 31 North.
Crossed the Shanghai "super bridge" featured in National Geographic Megastructures on the taxi ride from Shanghai Pudong Airport to the hotel.
Here's a picture of the "super bridge" which I snarfed off the net:
A view from my hotel room, once again using free panorama tools:
Hotel room. This is what 888 RMB per night gets around here.
The two Crowne Plaza hotels in China I've been both charge 888 RMB per night. Must be their "lucky" number.
Took a cab from the airport, took an hour and a half and cost 150 RMB (that's 1200 pesos!) I should have taken the maglev from the airport. It overtook us on the expressway, was going about 250 km/h. Thought there was a low-flying plane.
I stand corrected, apparently this German-made wonder can hit 400+ km/h. And it only takes seven minutes to reach downtown Shanghai from the airport.
Crossed the Shanghai "super bridge" featured in National Geographic Megastructures on the taxi ride from Shanghai Pudong Airport to the hotel.
Here's a picture of the "super bridge" which I snarfed off the net:
A view from my hotel room, once again using free panorama tools:
Hotel room. This is what 888 RMB per night gets around here.
The two Crowne Plaza hotels in China I've been both charge 888 RMB per night. Must be their "lucky" number.
Took a cab from the airport, took an hour and a half and cost 150 RMB (that's 1200 pesos!) I should have taken the maglev from the airport. It overtook us on the expressway, was going about 250 km/h. Thought there was a low-flying plane.
I stand corrected, apparently this German-made wonder can hit 400+ km/h. And it only takes seven minutes to reach downtown Shanghai from the airport.
Sunday, July 01, 2007
Messing About in Boats
I've been interested in boats for the longest time. Almost as long as my astronomy interest. I even thought of building a pontoon boat out of 1.5-litre Coke PET bottles. Same concept as "Can-Tiki," which was made out of beer cans.
It also helps that the weather is now rainy, so no more stargazing till perhaps the end of the year.
I was quite happy to discover the Philippine Home Boatbuilders Yacht Club. There are a good number of boat-minded people here in the Philippines, and some of them have constructed some pretty impressive boats. Like this one:
In any case, I wanted to build a modest boat, something that can be put together in a few weekends. There are a lot of what's known as "one-sheet boat" designs on the web. So named because they are constructed out of a single sheet of marine plywood. Unfortunately these are rather small boats.
PHBYC recently sponsored a boat-building activity, they built the Summer Breeze from Simplicity Boats. This is a 12-foot boat that can carry 500 lb of people (that's three people, more or less) and is built from only two sheets of plywood.
However I want to build something a bit larger, but not so large that it can't be "car topped." And it ought to be (relatively) easy to build.
The designer of Summer Breeze has a larger design, which he calls "Least Cuts Boat" or Daydream. This is a 16-foot boat that in base form can carry 1000 lb (about seven people) and is constructed from four sheets of plywood. Not too bad!
I printed out the cut pattern, and transferred them to some manila folder cardboard:
After cutting out the sheets of cardboard and taping them together, we have a handsome sharpie skiff model!
Me being the non-swimmer that I am, I've decided to put floatation compartments in the front and rear of the boat, like so:
The rear of the boat is about 17 inches high, and about 40 inches wide. If the rear compartment is 24 inches long, we have 0.25 cubic meters or about 250 kg of floatation.
The front of the boat is about 20 inches high, and 40 inches wide, however it's triangular in shape. With a 24 inch front compartment, we have 0.15 cubic meters or about 150 kg of displacement.
This gives a total reserve floatation displacement of 400 kg, which means the boat will still float when filled with water, and with an additional 300+ kg of load. Good safety feature.
This still leaves about 11 feet of usable space in the center of the boat. My plan is to also cut down the center frame so that the entire middle portion of the hull is flat. One can lie down there, making it a potential camper.
And here's how it should look (roughly) to scale.
It also helps that the weather is now rainy, so no more stargazing till perhaps the end of the year.
I was quite happy to discover the Philippine Home Boatbuilders Yacht Club. There are a good number of boat-minded people here in the Philippines, and some of them have constructed some pretty impressive boats. Like this one:
In any case, I wanted to build a modest boat, something that can be put together in a few weekends. There are a lot of what's known as "one-sheet boat" designs on the web. So named because they are constructed out of a single sheet of marine plywood. Unfortunately these are rather small boats.
PHBYC recently sponsored a boat-building activity, they built the Summer Breeze from Simplicity Boats. This is a 12-foot boat that can carry 500 lb of people (that's three people, more or less) and is built from only two sheets of plywood.
However I want to build something a bit larger, but not so large that it can't be "car topped." And it ought to be (relatively) easy to build.
The designer of Summer Breeze has a larger design, which he calls "Least Cuts Boat" or Daydream. This is a 16-foot boat that in base form can carry 1000 lb (about seven people) and is constructed from four sheets of plywood. Not too bad!
I printed out the cut pattern, and transferred them to some manila folder cardboard:
After cutting out the sheets of cardboard and taping them together, we have a handsome sharpie skiff model!
Me being the non-swimmer that I am, I've decided to put floatation compartments in the front and rear of the boat, like so:
The rear of the boat is about 17 inches high, and about 40 inches wide. If the rear compartment is 24 inches long, we have 0.25 cubic meters or about 250 kg of floatation.
The front of the boat is about 20 inches high, and 40 inches wide, however it's triangular in shape. With a 24 inch front compartment, we have 0.15 cubic meters or about 150 kg of displacement.
This gives a total reserve floatation displacement of 400 kg, which means the boat will still float when filled with water, and with an additional 300+ kg of load. Good safety feature.
This still leaves about 11 feet of usable space in the center of the boat. My plan is to also cut down the center frame so that the entire middle portion of the hull is flat. One can lie down there, making it a potential camper.
And here's how it should look (roughly) to scale.
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