China — Leave a comment
26
Feb 13

Busy Busy Busy

I feel like I haven’t written anything on here in such a long time and it’s true! I just checked and the last time I wrote anything was more than a month ago. Which is far longer than I’d like, but there are certainly reasons for it.

On top of the normal part-time day job I’ve had working at Synnex I’ve also been tackling other freelance web projects. When you add them all up it really doesn’t leave much free time for me. The two projects I’ve been working on are rebuilding Shangrila Farms (a natural products company based in China) and a soon to released redesigned website for an architecture firm called Latitude Studio.

Still lots of little things to do and now I need to focus on how to manage them moving forward. I’d also like to have some free time in the future to development my ideas more as well as organize some other things.

China / 汉语 — Leave a comment
12
Jan 13

A Day at the Planetarium (Part 2)

Now on to part 2 of my planetarium post. Now I’ll go through some of the more complex words I discovered. Many times I found myself understanding the meaning of the word in Chinese, but forgetting how to express it in English. Why might that happen?

Well the closest comparison I can make is to tell you to think of each Chinese character as a Latin root. Let’s take the word predict for example. It combines both the roots pre and dict. In Chinese one word for it could be 预言(yu yan). The first character 预(yu) can mean “in advance” while the second 言(yan) can mean “to speak”. That lines up identically with the Latin roots of the English word.

So let’s talk a little bit about optics光学.

binoculars - 双筒望远镜; double / tube / telescope
reflecting telescope - 反射式望远镜; reflect / emit / telescope
catadioptric telescope - 折反射式望远镜; break / reflect / telescope
refracting telescope - 折射式望远镜; break / emit / telescope

I know lots of Latin roots in English just from exposure to the language, but I’ve never set out to specifically isolate and study them. I have taken the time to study the individual meanings of Chinese characters so in a way I might be better at learning new words in Chinese. It’s an interesting though and I’ll leave you with some more words I found on my trip.

太阳; the Sun
太阳系; solar system
太阳活动; solar activity
太阳风; solar wind
色球; chromosphere
光球; photosphere
对流层; convection zone
辐射层; radiation zone
核反应区; core
极光; aurora
地球磁层; magnetosphere
日冕; corona
流星; meteor
流星雨; meteor shower
陨石; meteorite
光环; rings
小行星; asteroid
轨道; orbit

China / Places — Leave a comment
12
Jan 13

Bathroom Signs

I don’t know what it is about putting signs above the urinals with poor English, but many public restrooms have them. Knowing China one might think that they’d all be the same, but actually there many different ones circulating. Here is the most recent one I discovered at the Beijing south train station.

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I can understand bad translations in smaller shops and places, but they are flat out everywhere! From the much praised high speed trains to important public buildings. It’s not that expensive to have a sentence or two translated properly. I always imagine two scenarios when I seeing bad translations or voice recordings in highly visible public places.

  1. A random girl from one of the administration offices is asked how to write or say something in English. They quickly take the answer without questioning it further and it goes straight into production. I say girl, because from what I’ve seen it’s usually girls who work with English in this kind of position.
  2. A government official lets his girlfriend, wife or lover do it without questioning it’s quality. I think about this everytime I hear the English voice translation on the subway here in Beijing. In all of China, they let someone who has a very funny accent and can’t make the L or R sound.

How about tossing me some benjamins or maos to do it?

China / 汉语 — Leave a comment
27
Dec 12

A Day at the Planetarium (Part 1)

What happens when you let me loose in a Chinese planetarium? It seems I come out with a frightening new list of words to add to my studies. I was actually surprised that I only learned 2-3 new characters. Most of the new words were just combinations of characters I  can already recognize. So I thought I’d make a post or two about them with comments about what the characters that make up the word means. The post today is going to focus mostly on planets.

Planet – 行星; travel / star

the Sun – 太阳; highest / sun

Mercury – 水星; water / star

Venus – 金星; gold / star

Earth – 地球; local / sphere

Jupiter – 木星; wood / star

Saturn – 土星; soil / star

Uranus – 天王星; sky / king / star

Neptune – 海王星; ocean / king / star

Pluto – 冥王星; dark / king / star

Of course these literal character by character translations might not line up exactly with how the names were actually chosen, but they are definitely relevant to the meaning of each word. I included Pluto, because it was included in the planets exhibit.

South Korea — Leave a comment
02
Dec 12

48 Hour Korea Trip

So as a previous post mentioned I made a quick trip to South Korea this weekend. I didn’t do much beyond walking around, shopping a bit, sleeping and eating. The trip was so short I didn’t plan anything beyond how to quickly get to the hotel I planned on staying at. I just planned this, because wasting any time getting lost and I might as well have just stayed at the airport. But it all worked out without a single problem.

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I went to Dunkin’ Donuts for brunch, but was rather disappointed in the actual donut I got. I just wanted to have some similar to the standard chocolate sprinkle donut. They we all too fancily decorated and sweet. A simple donut is a win in my book.

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After that I wandered around the major shopping streets a bit and then started walking to Namsam Park, which I have always enjoyed walking through when I’m in Seoul. I just did a quick hour walk as it wasn’t the warmest of days.

For more pictures you can just go to my complete Seoul photo gallery.

China / South Korea — Leave a comment
01
Dec 12

Google Play “Mate”

It’s an odd thing to notice, but when you change countries the available downloads on Google Play change a bit. The first picture is from South Korea and the second from China. You’ll notice the first one is full of cute cuddle cartoon things and the second has two scantily dressed Asian women. It actually used to be worse. I remember checked the app store in China a few months ago and there were three of them in the top ten.

I’m not really sure what generalizations that could or should be made from it. Is the Chinese internet censored so much that they need apps with mostly naked women? Do Chinese men think about naked women more than Korean men? You can make your own decision about it.

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China — Leave a comment
29
Nov 12

Visa Inspired Trip to Seoul

So as you may or may not know I’ll be going to Seoul, South Korea this Friday and returning on Sunday. You might be thinking why would I fly there for two half and one full day. It’s a great question and I wish the answer was better than it being the most economical option to extend my stay in China.

I’m sure it’s the same with many countries, the United States included, but dealing with a visa is rather tedious, time consuming and loaded with grey area. The web has numerous contradictory or incomplete articles about the formalities and procedures required. Actually I’m starting to believe they might all be true and people just get lucky, go to the right office, know somebody or accidentally stumble through the process.

I have a one year multiple entry “F” business visa, but I can only stay for a maximum of 90 consecutive days in China. What that means is I must leave the country every 3 months for at least a day, then when I return I get a new date of entry stamp that allows for another 90 days. I know other countries have similar rules, but I’m not entirely sure of the logic behind it other than a hassle. Do they have some secret pact with the transportation industry?

Actually there are other ways around it, but I worked out that it’s actually cheaper to just take a forced vacation and then return. In retrospect the concept of a forced vacation isn’t all that bad. Too get a one time 1 month extension to my duration would costs about 1500 RMB. To cancel my current visa and get a 1 year work visa with no limitation would be over 6000 RMB after medical fees. Flying to South Korea for a day or two with hotel fees is  only around 2500 RMB.

At first it sounds like getting the work visa would be cheaper, because after all leaving every 90 days at that trip cost would be over 10,000 RMB. But leaving every 3 months allows me more freedom if I change employers, which I’m hoping I can just get another company to support my visa in a few months. If I get the year work visa and then need to change in a few months, I have to cancel it and then pay for it again under another companies name.

All in all it’s a topic I’ve talked to people about and researched a lot, but at the end of the day still feel like I know so little about how the actual process works.

Yii — Leave a comment
26
Nov 12

Yii: Creating a New Project

Creating a new Yii project in Windows XP or 7 is very easy, but does require some basic commands via the command prompt. I’ll show exactly what you need to do to get the base project up and running.

First, you’ll need to make sure you have Yii downloaded and extracted somewhere on your computer. You can visit the Yii website to get the latest download. For this tutorial I’m using  build 1.1.12 so it may vary depending on your version.

Next, you’ll need to make sure your web server is up and running with at least PHP 5.1 supported. Take that folder you extracted and move it just outside the root web visible directory.

Now let’s get down to the command line stuff. Run the command prompt and use the following to create your first project.

[yii path]\framework\yiic webapp [install path]/[project name]

One example of this format might be:

root\yii\framework\yiic webapp root/public_html/newsite

If all the director paths are write and there are no typos then it should prompt you to install Yii. All you need to do now is type yes and it should be ready to go. Using your browser navigate to the new site and you should see the default Yii setup.

WordPress — Leave a comment
24
Nov 12

WordPress: Favicon Everywhere

Having a favicon is a great way to make your site stand out, but many themes don’t offer the ability to customize it. Even if it’s offered in the theme customization it doesn’t usually transfer over to the admin side of the site. So let’s look at how to get that favicon to appear everywhere.

First you’re going to want to upload a favicon into the root directory that WordPress is installed in. You can name it whatever you want, but for this example it’s just going to be called ‘favicon.ico’. Next you’ll need to edit the header called ‘header.php’ of your website theme by adding this line of code. You can add it directly after pingback link reference.

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="<?php echo get_bloginfo('url'); ?>/favicon.ico" />

That should take care of the website front end, so now we need to get that favicon on the backend. This is more easily done by adding a new theme function. You’ll need to open up your current themes ‘functions.php’ and add the following lines of code.

/**
 * Adds a custom favicon to the admin area
 */
function pa_admin_area_favicon() {
	$favicon_url = get_bloginfo('url') . '/favicon.ico';
	echo '<link rel="shortcut icon" href="' . $favicon_url . '" />';
	}
add_action('admin_head', 'pa_admin_area_favicon');

That’s it! Your favicon should now appear on all sides of the site. You can also have different favicons depending on the theme by saving the icon in the theme folder and then using the following to find the icon in your theme folder.

get_bloginfo('stylesheet_directory')
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