As my fury of blog posts in the last two days might indicate, RedYawning is back online and I’m back to posting. I’d been keeping track of some interesting anecodtes while it was offline and I dequeued them when the server came back to life.
Things have been going well these last three weeks. Ami came and visited for the first week, before I’d started work and I showed her the sights of Shanghai and we took a day trip to Suzhou. Taking a train ride here is quite an adventure. The trains are quite nice (not super cheap but not expensive either) but the crowds they pack on are unbelievable. All the trains are scheduled and while waiting, you sit in a massive waiting room for your track. Unlike any other train system I’ve been on, you don’t line up on the platform itself, but once the train has arrived you walk down from the holding pen over to the platform and board as quickly as possible (which usually means a lot of pushing and shoving).
I started work last week, on the 16th floor of Metro Tower in Xu Jia Hui and celebrated New Years Eve in style at the Nightcat Club on Tian Yao Qiao Lu (the same street the office is on). It’s a new club (so I hear, they’re all new to me) about 15 minutes from the Xu Jia Hui metro station. On the work side, I’ve got a little cube with about a whole lot of people all around me but I’m sporting three computers right now. My old tablet, a new Dell Precision 380 and a Dell X1. The coolest part of all the new hardware has got to be the 19″ flat panel display.
The apartment is coming along and it’s starting to feel more like home. I went to the Grand Gateway mall and bought a super thick comforter and a space heater to supplement the built in heater/AC unit and it’s getting more comfortable in the evenings. I think partly my body is adjusting to the cold. I’ve also got my DSL running along with my WAP so I’m fully wired up there as well.
That’s it for now. Since I’m online again I’ll be able to give more of a stream of data rather than this massive dump.