Life in China | Dominik Mayer – Products, Asia, Productivity

So many disappointments, so little fun. It’t time for me to leave Munich, Germany. Time to go to Stockholm, Shanghai, wherever.

The man from lenovo Germany wanted to call me “in half an hour”. I’ve been waiting twice as long now. Seems like figuring out what to do with someone who wants to get a Windows tax refund takes a while.

Ok, so I got a laptop, X61s, rid of Vista and have been trying to install Ubuntu for two days now… without success. When I boot from a copied live CD, the installer reports defective files, a netinstall doesn’t work from home and when I try to install from the ISO file the thing reports a defective CD. But there is no CD and the MD5 hash of the file is correct. Arg.

Thanks to Thanks to ThinkWiki nearly everything’s working now, even the fingerprint reader. But my poor little laptop got a defective pixel. 😢 And I’m in desperate need of clowns.

I need some kind of laptop bag or sleeve. The interim solution of putting it in one plastic and two cloth bags may protect it but is not that easy to handle.

Seeing myself in the mirror, sitting on a bulky, white, upholstered chair with this funny red net holding all the electrodes, wires protruding and hanging around, that was one of the moments where I really regretted that I didn’t bring my camera.

When the lady at the doctor’s office had learned that I’m at a private rather than the compulsory health insurance two weeks ago, the next appointment was no longer in January, it was yesterday.

Another one at another doctor today, but the outcome was similar: They didn’t send me into the waiting room where others have been sitting for some time. I was offered a chair next to the reception and led into the doctor’s office soon.

Moral: All humans are equal, as long as they’re at the same health insurance.

If you’d create a product, let’s say a website, wouldn’t you at least check the meaning of your name in the top ten languages? Well, doof didn’t.

I just learned that I’m only applying for the School of Economics and Management which is completely independent from the one of Mechanical Engineering. In order to be admitted to the graduate program I need to provide information about the management not the engineering courses I’ve heard here.

I only finished one of four yet and will write two more exams before I leave. The last one will take place after my departure. According to Tongji the worst thing that can happen is that they’ll put me in the undergraduate program, so they’ll not reject me. Good. My landlady already found a next tenant.

I think that was the fastest doctor’s appointment I’ve ever had. I left my dentist’s office at most 10 minutes after I entered it. And he had even shown me twenty year old pictures of his Chinese colleagues. Disturbing. But it should be all right in Shanghai, he said.

Ok, the title’s misleading. It’s not the glasses that terrorized the people, it’s me. But the glasses are the reason. I didn’t see that well with the old ones so I went to my optician. Because I couldn’t decide which ones to take he lend me two of them and I asked everyone I could find for their opinion.

Result: Most people favored the ones I didn’t like that much and the others wanted me to keep mine. I finally got the ones I prefered but I’m not sure it was the right decision. :-(

Zi Lin Zhang is the first Miss World from China. She was crowned in Sanya, the “Chinese Hawaii”. The landscape looks great, worth a detour?

According to the pharmacy, the vaccine against Japanese Encephalitis is no longer available. The company is doing more research…

Good to know.