Asia | Dominik Mayer – Products, Asia, Productivity

No news from the lrz. They didn’t even bother to reply. Today I played around and checked “Allow using NULL encryption” in the configuration dialog. For the moment, VPN works. I hope it’ll last.

A friend said all the noodle people use animal oil because it’s cheaper. Aaaaaaarg. Bu hao. Hen bu hao. I will never be able to eat noodles again. We had just found a noodle woman a few weeks ago and last week I thought she used animal oil. Now I know…

As if Chinese wasn’t enough, Ouwen and I decided to learn Korean. Last week a Korean friend has been at home and bought us the book “Korean made easy for beginners”. Looks very good.

Would be great if the lrz could finally fix the problems with their VPN server that I’ve reported over a month ago. The golden shield prevents me from accessing several sites. This blog is one of them.

I’ve tried twice but never got beyond two posts. With me being in Shanghai and twitter’s increasing popularity I’m thinking about giving it a third chance. Let’s try it for a few days.

Because of Labor Day on Thursday Tongji moved the classes from Friday to Sunday giving us three days off. The downside is that we have to go to school on Sunday. At first I thought it was a joke but it’s obviously not.

Ubuntu 8.04 brought me Firefox 3 Beta 5 which is not yet supported by one of my crucial add-ons. Chinese Perapera-kun translates Chinese words by hovering over them. Very useful.

Now I have to get along with these:

• Chinaboard: Translates whole expressions
• Google Translate: Not very accurate but provides a rough overview
• dict.leo.org: German/Chinese and Pinyin
• Dict.cn: English/Chinese

The midterms are over and learning for them has improved my Chinese quite a bit. Inspired by a student of Sinology I had decided not to study any tones as memorizing doesn’t work, I can’t speak them anyway and most Chinese also understand me if I don’t use them. That doesn’t mean that I won’t try to learn them by speaking.

In the midterms we solved some exercises in teamwork and I would have never thought that one day a Chinese would copy from me in a Chinese exam. ;-)

According to Tongji it’s no problem to stay longer as long as TUM agrees. So the question is: Do I really want to stay longer? I don’t know. Fortunately I don’t have to decide right away.

I asked my coordinator in Germany and she said I could stay longer. Let’s hope that I’ll get another admission from Tongji. If everything works out I would fly to Munich, write my exams and come back to Shanghai.

The beginning of our two day study trip to Linan organized by the International School. Price: 50 Yuan (about 4,50 Euro).