China things

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Well, it's been several days since my last posting because our computer contracted 3 viruses in one night. The perils of living in China. The irony, or not, is that we had just updated our anti-virus software.

So, I phoned the computer teckies to help me. The rep showed up at my house, spent an hour or so working on the computer and then told me the problem was big and I'd need to bring the hard drive to the shop where they would remove everything from the hard drive and reload it.

5 days later, they phoned to say the task was complete and that I could come to retrieve the computer, which I did. I asked them to come help me set it up in my home, so 15 minutes later, a man showed up to do it. It was taking a while and then I heard him on the phone, speaking quickly. I could not understand everything that was said but I did understand the key words, "broken," "electricity," "none," and "I don't know." So, the hard drive went back to the shop where it was quickly determined that the problem was that the shop technicians had switched the power from US 110 to China 220 and forgotten to switch it back. So, with a quick flip of the switch, we were back in business. Back to my house we went, I in my car and he on his bike, and about 2 hours later, the computer was up and running. Total cost: 150 rmb, $22.06.

The photos above are unrelated. On a 5 mile walk last week, my friend and I discovered a pipe across this terribly polluted creek had sprung some sort of leak. The photos do not do justice to the image. The water is a terribly murky green black color and the pipe is streaming steam of some sort. Scenes like this one are not unusual, sadly. People hardly even notice them. On my way downtown on Sunday I noticed a huge power line drooping down along the side of a busy road. No one even looked twice at it as I stared from my car in traffic.