Lately I seem not to have a lot of luck with computers. After all the trouble with my Apple Powerbook last month I bought a BenQ that had to be exchanged for a new one after two weeks because of defects. The new one worked fine for a while, but suddenly got extremley slow. First I thought of a virus, but that was not the case. The harddisk was also not almost full, and a restart did not make much of a difference. Starting up took 10 minutes, and Outlook did not work at all anymore. I wasn’t sure if it was hardware or software problem, and decided to give it to one of the IT guys at Toodou. He quickly found that the store had forgotten to install two files that are quite important for Microsoft Office, and that caused everything. It also turned out that the store had installed an illegal version of both Windows and Office (but I guess that is standard in China). So now I need to buy a new Microsoft Office – not difficult I thought, except for the fact that most places only have the Chinese version.

So I started using my Apple again. Sunday morning I did a automatic software upgrade, and was asked to do a restart. I did so and what happened? The laptop got itself into a loop and did not want to start up anymore. I tried a start-up from my recovery CD’s, but that did not work either, because I only had 1 GB of hard disk space left for a new installation. Copying files to my external hard drive was impossible because the OS did not load. So I was stuck. I called the Apple repair guy, and he was there within an hour (that’s great about China, even on Sunday people come right away – try that in Europe!). He managed to get the laptop working again, but found many problems with the hard drive. I was surprised, because I got a new hard drive just a month ago, because the old one failed. Well, the end of the story is that he took my laptop away, and that I am once again without a computer – and without many files that I did not back-up over the last week. So I am using Qi’s old Vaio now to get my work done (my old Vaio’s battery collapsed), luckily we have so many laptops at home.

I wanted to post about this earlier already, but did not find the time yet. Xinhua News Agency reported on Tuesday that the speed of trains between Beijing and Shanghai will be increased from 160 km/h to 200 km/h, leading to a travel time of only 7 hours. According to the article the current travel time is 13.5 hours (although I think the fastest train – the overnight express- takes actually only 12 hours). If you think about it – something Xinhua never does – , it is a bit strange that by increasing the speed by 25% the total travelling time reduces by almost 50%.

It actually comes close to being an alternative to travelling by plane, especially if you travel from city center to city center. On average it takes me more than 5 hours from beginning to end destination when I travel by plane between these two cites, and on occasions much more than that. If the train has good seats, free wifi and electricty for my laptop I will give it a try.

It was a busy week again this week, both at Toodou and China Bay. At Toodou we had several visitors, among other Christine de Baan (see post from Monday), Moody Glasgow and Dennis Tse. Moody flew in for the second time in two weeks, and we had good meetings with him. Afterwards we had dinner at Paulaner Brauhaus (Moody had never had German food before!) and then drinks at Zapata’s and Bourbon Street. Moody used to be a commercial producer, so we had lots of common topics. I mentioned that I started to watch Lost, and that I think it is one of the best series I have ever seen. Moody had not watched the series himself, but he told me that his brother is co-producer of the series (I noticed last night that he is the first name that appears on the credit list after each episode).

Dennis we met this morning in our office. He works for the private equity and venture capital arm of HSBC. Gary knew him from INSEAD and it is great to hear his ideas on what we are doing (or not doing). We told him about our Lhasa – Kathmandu bike trip of course. He does not want to join, but it turns out that he is on the board of an orphanage in Lhasa. That got me thinking, maybe we can also do something charity-related with our bike ride.

Tonight I will meet Sierk from SVP Film for dinner. We plan to go for sushi, sashimi and teppanyaki at a RMB 150 (=EUR 15) Japanese all-you-can-eat-and-drink place at Dongping Lu. I haven’t seen Sierk in a while, so it will be nice to catch up and hear his stories. He was in Beijing in November for the shooting of several episodes of BabyCare with CCTV, and then he spent some time in Holland working on a huge project. He came back to China two days ago, and because he will probably go back to Holland for Christmas next week this is a good time to meet.

iResearch has news about a new TV show:
China will soon begin broadcasting an anti-Internet addiction TV show, reports China Youth Daily.

The TV series is called ‘The Story of Shan Dian Mao’ and will have 38 episodes. The show was produced by the China Commission to Care for the Next Generation, China Youth League’s Online Movie and TV Center, and the China Youth Internet Association.

Problem is that they might not reach the intended target group, as those people are stuck behind their computer screen. Maybe they should also make a version available that can be downloaded?

In China Wikipedia has been blocked for several months now, and nobody knows when (or if) the site will be unblocked. Because I used the site quite often, I have been looking for alternative ways to get onto to the site. It is possible to browse the site through a proxy server, but I found a much easier solution: Gollum, The Wikipedia Browser

What is Gollum (entry, including hyperlinks, copied from Wikipedia)?:
Gollum Browser is a simplified Web browser that only opens articles from Wikipedia. Links external to Wikipedia are opened in the user’s regular browser. Gollum is opened from a regular browser and makes a window that puts the Wikipedia search bar on the toolbar. Gollum was created by Harald Hanek in 2005 using PHP and AJAX.

I have tried it for two weeks now, and am very satisfied it. In case you’re in China and want to use Wikipedia, give Gollum a try at http://gollum.easycp.de/en/

Today Christine de Baan from The Netherlands visited Toodou, where we showed her some of the video clips that people upload. Christine is quite well-known in cultural and art circles in Holland, and the reason of her visit is because she is the guest curator of an exhibition in the Netherlands Photography Museum on contemporary visual culture in China. The exhibition will open on June 10, 2006, coinciding with an exhibition on the new generation of Chinese architects in the Netherlands Architecture Institute, and a presentation of Chinese artists in the Boijimans van Beuningen Museum. Toodou will be part of this exhibition, and we discussed some ideas for this with her.

After our meeting we invited her for lunch in a very small restaurant just outside the office. Literally a whole-in-the-wall restaurant, it is almost in the open air and does not even have doors (note: it was only about +3 degrees Celcius outside)!

But the food is very fresh and tastes great. Actually, the colder it gets the better a hot soup, fried rice, fried noodles and fried vegetables taste. I was not sure if Christine would appreciate the restaurant, so I checked with her before going in. But she seemed to enjoy the new cultural experience. Very brave Christine! In case you read this, when you are back next time I will invite you to some more upscale places.

Gary and I have been talking about it for a while already, but as you can see from the posting below, now it is becoming quite serious: we plan to ride our mountain bikes from Lhasa in Tibet to Nepal’s capital city of Kathmandu. This is one of the most difficult bike rides in the world, not really because of the distance (it’s about 1050 kilometers), but especially because of the altitude. Most of this adventurous ride is far above 4000 meters, and there are some Himalayan mountain passes of over 5000 meter that we need to cross.

But the reward is that we will ride through some of the most beautiful and unspoilt sceneries that you can find on this planet. We plan to start our exotic trip in Lhasa where we will get used to the high altitude for about 3 days before setting off on our bikes. From then it will be bicycling every day for about 16-18 days. We will of course also do some sightseeing along the way, visiting monasteries and monastery towns that we pass through. We even plan to ride our bikes through the valley below the North Face of Mount Everest, and then ride up to Mount Everst base camp (5200m). The graph below gives an indication of the altitude, our plan is to do the trip a bit faster than the plan on the chart.

We will leave for Tibet on April 28 and plan to be back around May 19 from Nepal. We now have the idea to invite some other people to join us. The idea is to have a maximum of 8-10 people for the ride. We plan to hire two jeeps for the expedition that can carry most of the luggage and the tents, and that will carry oxygen equipment. Anybody interested can leave a message in the comments, or contact me at marcvanderchijs (at) gmail dot com. Make sure you are in an excellent condition if you plan to join. We do not have all the details yet, but these will follow in the next days and weeks.

It will not just be sportive event: because we are both highly involved on the Internet, we will cover it on our weblogs and we plan to put daily short video clips and podcasts on Toodou.com. We are also thinking to bring a small camera crew to make a documentary about the trip. If you have any additional ideas, let us know!

Saturday afternoon Gary and I had to discuss a couple of strategic issues and decided to meet in the Old China Hand Reading Room. It was a good place for a rainy, dark December afternoon. Inside it was warm and there was some nice background music. We managed the get the big table in the middle of the room in front of the bookshelves.

In 3 hours we managed to get a lot of stuff done, and at least two important decisions were made. The first one is related to Toodou, and we plan to officially announce it on January 6. We need to do a bit more research on feasibility and regulations before I can write about it here. The other one is more private: we picked a timeframe for our sportive event of 2006, the Lhasa – Khatmandu bike ride (more later in another post).