Zhanga: August 5, 2006

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Saturday, August 5, 2006 (3 comments)

I'm back after not long in China. I stayed at my dad's place in Hangzhou the whole time, and it was really boring. There is nothing to do there, unless you include shopping for clothes at the nearby mall. At night there is one of those open-air markets where they sell random fake stuff and try to eat white people alive with ridiculous prices, but there wasn't really anything I wanted. I was looking at some switchblades, but not only did they suck and cost 4x as much as what I paid last year, my grandpa also banned me from buying any because apparently they can be used as weapons (??no way!!)

Cuz every time we touch, I feel the static
and every time we kiss I reach for the sky

Sorry.

Oh yeah, there was this enormous place with three stories of computer stuff. Why don't we have those here in the US? I guess Fry's is the closest I've seen, but even there you can't get 10 foot ethernet cables for 5 yuan (~60 cents). It'd probably be $4-10 back home. Seriously, why do mundane stuff like wires cost so much in the States? It all comes from China anyways!

So about the Internet situation. My dad has an ownage wireless dialup card, but either he'd be using it or my sister would be lame. So I just randomly connected to hotspots. For the first two or three days, I could get a signal on my bed but only if I kept the laptop facing a certain direction and kept the area between the laptop and the window clear. Turning the laptop just 15 degrees would take out the connection. My grandpa and his belly were pretty effective at absorbing radio waves, I also found out. This was crappy but acceptable for however long (short) it lasted. Then all of a sudden, the hotspot disappeared completely.

A few days later, somebody nearer put up a wireless router, and I could get online again and could even turn my laptop a bit without dropping. But two or three days later, all of a sudden I could connect to the router but not to the Internet. I logged into the router's interface (the good old admin/admin combination never fails (well, it does sometimes)) and reset the DSL connection a couple of times, but their ISP had cut them off. Oh well. After that I only got on for a little while at a time because being on a windowsill leeching weak signals is really annoying and really hot.

So basically: (1) I use somebody's wireless for a couple of days, then it vanishes into thin air forever, then (2) I use somebody else's wireless for a couple of days, and the access point doesn't go away until later but its connection to the Internet becomes disabled by the ISP. I have no idea how hard the government is on Internet regulations so I'm just speculating, but maybe it happened because I kept clicking banned links (Wikipedia + bunch of random sites) and getting blocked before remembering to tunnel it through my server first. I probably did this at least a few dozen times, and that might have been enough for the ISPs to kill those accounts.

It's pretty sad that I was online at all in China, especially since I was there for such a short time. I am never staying in that place for more than two days at a time again. In fact, the whole city sucks. There's a famous (?) lake, it's really hot, and there you have it -- a summary of Hangzhou in seven words and a question mark.

By the way, I got a new ping pong paddle. Whoever gets to play against the virgin rubber should feel special. That sounds so wrong, and I didn't even mean for that to happen.

By the way (I'm Charles minus the TLA-loving), the morning of my flight, I had set my alarm for 7 AM. Some faggot called me twice at about 6:35, and stupid me thought it was my wake-up alarm so I opened and closed the phone to shut off the alarm (so I have no idea who it was). Stupid faggot made me eat $3 in roaming fees for answering. This is probably more than all my "die 10 cents die bitch" text messages combined have ever eaten. If you're currently thinking, (Urkel) "Did I do thaaaaaaaat?" then I suggest not confessing or (Indian guy) "somebody gonna get a-hurt real bad."

By the way (last one), I was at a 新华 bookstore and I saw something that I just could not resist. A first-person shooter where you're some Chinese dude in Shanghai in 1937! This game is seriously the best game ever made. There is no mention of Japan or Japanese anywhere in the game, at all. It only says 鬼子 (as in demon). It's also really, really funny but I don't know if the game makers were trying to be funny. There are these samurai... and they are hilarious. At one point they create some kind of tornado around themselves and spin at you. They often jump 80 feet through the air with their swords like it's some kind of kung-fu movie. Incredible. It cost me 10 yuan, but I would have paid a lot more for this amazing work of genius.

11:33PM

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