Are you a romantic? Need some help here

JISHOU, HUNAN — My friend Nora and I have cooked up a plan, and we need the help of some hopeless romantics out there in Internet land.

Nora’s friend wants to propose to his girlfriend soon and wants to give her something really special to convince her he’s the right guy for her. Trouble is, he is as poor as a church mouse, so Nora came up with an idea. Here’s where I (and you) come in.

We want to compile a video of different people in their native languages (or in any languages they can speak) to say the following: “Will Sun Dan please marry Xiang Pei Dong? He is a really great guy!” [In Chinese, that's "孙丹嫁给向培东？他是好男人！" Sūn Dān jiàgěi Xiàng Péidōng? Tā shì hǎo nānrén!]

Since I have Facebook friends all over the world, I volunteered to ask them to contribute to the video. This is the first request. I will ask many of you directly over the next few days. I am hoping for a good cross-section of languages. If you can make a video while standing near a prominent local landmark, that’s even better. Don’t worry about pronouncing their names just right. They’ll understand.

You can send your greetings (audio, video and written) to my addy: john DOT wheaton AT gmail DOT com. Then Nora and I will do the compilation. The deadline is Dec. 31. So, do it now!

Spam is weird

JISHOU, HUNAN — By that headline, I mean comment spam, not the tinned meat. For weeks now, spam comments to one particular post I wrote in 2007 have been sneaking past my anti-spam filters. Every day, I have to manually delete at least two or three.

The comments are typically completely generic, complimenting the post or the blog in general, promising the writer will follow me, or imitate me, and by the way, mentioning some product or service the commenter is hawking. Some are more subtle, and make no product/service references, but the associated emails and URLs tip their hands. Here’s one spambot example, for some payday service:

I was recommended this blog through my cousin. I’m not sure whether this submit is written by way of him as no one else realize such targeted about my problem. You are amazing! Thank you!

And it’s just that one post. All I can guess is someone has linked to it on some spamifying service, and it’s now gone viral. Ironically, the post is about my site being hacked by a spammer.

As an experiment, I will either change the post’s headline (and thus its link) or remove it entirely in a few days.

Odds’n'ends

JISHOU, HUNAN — I had some time on my hands recently, so I spent it tweaking the website.

I’ve joined the China Blog Network, and you’ll see a widget linking to it in the right sidebar. One blog I’ve been spending time reading is Wok With Me, Baby, a cooking blog written by an ex-pat in Shanghai who cooks Western-style food with mostly locally available ingredients. Her chili recipe looks good.

I found a cool world map widget that shows visitors’ locations. I saw it at Respectful Insolence, a medical blog by the sharp-tongued skeptical Orac. Although I already have a Clustrmap, the spinning globe was too cool to pass up.

The Status Update plug-in doesn’t seem to be updating my Facebook status, but I’m not going to sweat it until Nov. 22, when FB shuts off RSS feeds to FB Notes. I’ve already discovered that tweets can be fed to FB status lines.

We had our first English Corner of the new school year today. A big crowd of mostly freshmen, who for some reason seem younger (several 17-year-olds among my students) and more geographically diverse than before. I’ve met several students from Xinjiang, in the far west of China, and the dining hall is now serving some halal food to accommodate the Muslims among them.

One of my seniors has been accepted to the University of Sheffield, and I expect other unis will send her offers. She applied to nearly 20 schools in the UK. I told her it was overkill, but what are you going to do?

The Chronicle of Higher Education Global edition has an interesting article, The China Conundrum, which describes the problems Chinese students and their American universities face as more and more Chinese come to the States for undergraduate study. The largest demographic among foreign students now is mainland Chinese, some of whom have fabricated their qualifications — especially their spoken English skills — to garner places in US universities.

I have discovered how to watch American TV shows on the Internet, so for the last several weeks I’ve been catching up the last four seasons of CSI. I know it’s too late to say it, but Laurence Fishburne did a great job in that show. Ted Danson is a surprising and welcome addition, though. I missed having an eccentric genius like William Petersen on board.

All for now.

Facebook does it again

JISHOU, HUNAN — Facebook readers, after Nov. 22, if you want to read my blog, you will have to come here. Facebook in its ineffable wisdom is shutting off external feeds to Facebook Notes.

Here’s what I read today as I opened FB:

You currently automatically import content from your website or blog into your Facebook notes. Starting November 22nd, this feature will no longer be available, although you’ll still be able to write individual notes. The best way to share content from your website is to post links on your Wall.

Well, that’s just great if you have 24/7 access to Facebook, but I don’t. So, thanks for nothing, Facebook techs.

Maybe some clever coder will work up a WordPress plugin to at least post links to my FB status, but it seems FB is trying to close off all external access, except for approved apps and moneymaking links.

[Correction: I found Status Updater, a WP plugin, that can send a link for each post to my FB Status. Setting it up is not very straightforward; you have register it on FB as a new FB application. If it works, it will update my status every hour. We'll see.]

Meanwhile, my WordPress to Twitter feed is working fine (Twitter account liguy743), so I’ll explore a Twitter to Facebook feed. Surely, FB would not want to shut out another major player of the Internet.

(Incidentally, you can still subscribe to my RSS feed.)

Now I can tweet ,too!

JISHOU, HUNAN — By way of this post at China Geeks, I can now use my phone in China to send texts to my Twitter account. It seems there is a Chinese service, fanfou.com, that allows its users to feed fanfou posts to an existing Twitter account.

Of course, whether I remember to use it remains an open question. I haven’t developed a Twitter habit, since direct access to it is blocked in China. Another issue is this work-around only works in one direction. I can send tweets out, but I can’t read comments or replies.

Meanwhile, I noticed that my blog posts were not automatically being tweeted. In the process of updating a plugin, I managed to disable the automatic feed. So, this is a test of that, too.

Google+ offers end run around (over?) Great Firewall of China

JISHOU, HUNAN — Maybe my problems with Picasaweb are over for now. While the Great Firewall of China seems to screw up uploads to my Picasaweb albums, it doesn’t seem to prevent uploads using Google+ Photos. It’s still snail slow, but at least I can get it done.

Then again, my access to Google+ seems to come and go, so I probably just shot myself in the foot publishing this tidbit of news.

Members of the Dogg family, together at last (sorta)

Snoop and Wheat, together at last

This photo is from August, when I visited Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in LA. Somehow teaching classes got in the way of posting it.

Some website tweaks

JISHOU, HUNAN — I’ve belatedly gotten around to allowing readers at the website to share posts with friends using Google+, Facebook and Twitter with three WordPress plugins. The buttons to click will be at the end of each post.

Since all three of these fine services are blocked in China, I need some feedback to see if the buttons look OK and their functions are working. My proxy connection comes and goes randomly.

One of the plugins also allows sharing with services like digg, del.icio.us and reddit. Pardon the dumb question, but in this Facebook-Twitter-Google+ age, does anybody really use those services anymore? I don’t want to clutter things up with lots of superfluous buttons.

Take two tablets, and call me in the morning

JISHOU, HUNAN — Come listen, children, to this story of transpacific electronics shopping.

I haven’t quite graduated to be a wholesale exporter of electronic goods, but it seems every time I visit the USA, I end up being a courier of some sort of assorted gadgetry. This time, I even bought one for myself.

Last trip, I brought two media players from China to the USA as gifts. These Android-powered “MP5′s” cost about $45, play movies, music, etc., on a 4.5-inch touch screen, and are very popular among Chinese students. It seems they’re also popular in the US, since I had a request to bring three more with me on this trip.

Ditto my iPad courier service. On my winter trip, I picked up an iPad for a friend in China, and got to play with it for two weeks before I handed it over. This time, I had to get an iPad2 for his cousin.

While I was in Beijing, I visited the Zhongguancun district, where scores of computer and electronics shops huddle in several malls. Unlike American malls, most shops in China that sell similar merchandise are clustered near each other, making shopping and bargaining really easy for the consumer. I figured this was the best place to pick up the MP5′s (the brand name is Bmorn, model BM-581). We found a shop with good prices, but it was pretty busy. My friend Alex played with her iPad while I noodled around the Android tablets on display.

Before my winter trip, I sort of sneered at the whole iPad phenomenon. My experience with Windows-based tablets did not exactly win me over to the future of tablets, but I did like the touchscreen features of my long-gone Palm Treo.

Then I got to play with my friend’s iPad. It changed my mind pretty quickly. It was easy to use, and I could see how it would be a lot more convenient than lugging around my brick of a Lenovo notebook or squinting at the tiny screen of my Nokia e63 to read my emails or surf the Internet. A few disadvantages restrained my enthusiasm. First was the cost. Five hundred bucks is just a bit much when you consider I already have a smartphone, a MP5 media player and a notebook computer. (Which I usually leave at home, due to its heft.) I had some trouble adjusting my typing reflexes to the touchscreen’s virtual keyboard. And for some reason, even when I had a strong WiFi signal, the iPad would inexplicably drop the connection.

So, I decided, thanks but no thanks. My friend can have his iPad. No gadget envy there.

Well, meanwhile, I had read about Android tablets, since my stepson was keen on getting one. These are cheaper and have the look and feel of an iPad without the traditional high Apple price point. But I really hadn’t seen anything cheaper than about $300, which was still too high for my budget.

My YuanDao N10 Android tablet

Back to the noodling at the Beijing shop. One of the models on display was a 7-inch tablet that seemed pretty good. Startup seemed to take an agonizing length of time, but once it finished booting, it was pretty responsive. So, I had to ask how much it cost … $150.

My brain went into budget-busting mode. Having the tablet would make surfing the Internet, checking email and so on easier than using my phone. The screen was bigger than my Bmorn media player, so I could see my movies easier. And it was small enough to slip into the small shoulder bag I use to carry my travel documents and what not when I’m traveling.

The back of the new gizmo

So I bought two. One for me, and one for the stepson hankering for one.

Here’s some details about it. The manufacturer is a Shenzhen-based company, YuanDao (原道), model N10. But it’s an OEM item marketed under other brand names. I found one at Tigerdirect.com for $200 with the moniker “Mach Speed Trio Droid 7 Internet Tablet.”

It runs Android 2.3 on a 1GHz Rockchip CPU, has 512 MB operating memory and 8 GB storage space, which is expandable with a microSD card. It has WiFi, Ethernet and Bluetooth built in, and can connect to 3G networks. There are two mini-USB ports, headphone connection and a 1.3 MP front-facing camera.

I’m pretty happy with it, despite its even smaller virtual keyboard. I’m still getting used to Android, which just seems less polished than iOS, but after three weeks nothing really bad has happened. I guess I’ve joined the tablet generation.

Funny car sticker: You got the right nozzle?

Got the right nozzle?

I saw this sticker this weekend over the fuel door of a parked car. The caption reads 力油嘴呢? li you zui ne? and the “+93#” refers to the octane value. Freely translated, it means “You got the right nozzle?”

The car is an Emgrand EC8 (the Chinese name is 帝豪品牌 di hao pinpai — literally, Grand or Heroic Imperial Brand), a luxury marque of the Geely Holding Co. of Zhejiang. Geely is already exporting these cars to the European Union, Africa and Asia, and may soon enter the US market. Geely is best known for buying Volvo from Ford Motor Co. last year.

While I’m on the subject of cars, a few weeks ago I rode in the back seat of a co-worker’s Škoda automobile, which had the roomiest back seat second only to a Checker Cab (or a Hudson Hornet). Škoda is a Czech brand that exports to China and other Asia-Pacific countries, and the UK. His model would be equivalent to a Buick Regal, another popular upscale car in China among those who can’t afford the stratospheric prices of a BMW or a Mercedes.