Monthly Archive for June, 2008

Tomorrow I’m go­ing back to California for two weeks. I get to fly on the won­der­ful Air China, which is al­ways an adventure.

Seats can’t be re­served in ad­vance on­line nor by phone, so I’ll have to check-​​in at the air­port ex­tra early to get a bet­ter seat. I hope to get there four hours early.

The two-​​hour pit stop in Beijing will let me visit Beijing Airport’s new Terminal 3, which opened three months ago. It’s the largest ter­mi­nal in the world. (I like airports.)

Air China’s econ­omy seats don’t have in­di­vid­ual video screens, so I’ll get to en­joy the movies on the pro­jec­tion screen with every­one else, like in a theater.

Best of all, Air China pas­sen­gers tend to have a dis­tinct sense of con­duct you won’t find in many other air­lines’ pas­sen­gers. They’re gen­er­ally more – how should I put this – lively.

I can’t think of a bet­ter air­line to spend more than 10 hours on. (Sometimes you have to look on the bright side to main­tain sanity.)

Went to Disc Kart with Jeanne again this past week­end. Three peo­ple flaked, which turned out to be a good thing be­cause I learned that there are only two or three karts that run well. The karts there aren’t main­tained to all have the same level of performance.

I drove four ses­sions this time. The first kart couldn’t re­ally brake. The sec­ond one was faster and braked well but kept pulling to the side. Third one had un­be­liev­ably slow ac­cel­er­a­tion and shouldn’t even be on the track. Fourth one was per­fect and I fi­nally placed first with it, but it doesn’t mean any­thing since the karts all per­form differently.

And it’s no won­der they’re so messed up. Look at the way peo­ple drive there. Straight into the bar­ri­ers! And in the two hours I was there, I saw two dif­fer­ent karts drive onto an­other kart. Luckily no one was hurt. The track of­fi­cials just lifted the kart off each time and let them keep driving.

At one point, af­ter a track of­fi­cial helped a kart get un­stuck, he nearly got hit by three karts en­ter­ing a cor­ner at the same time. He had to jump away to avoid get­ting hit. They didn’t even slow down for him!

I have to ad­mit though, be­ing able to crash into other karts while try­ing to over­take them is kinda fun. No black flag for be­ing an ass. This is some­thing you’d nor­mally only be able to do in video games like Gran Turismo, but it’s to­tally al­lowed at Disc Kart. Just don’t be sur­prised when some­one slams into you in revenge!

“OP, it’s time for your medicine!!”

Just a ran­dom pic my woman came across while brows­ing tianya.cn, a pop­u­lar web­site in China. The thing the guy’s hold­ing reads “brain dam­age tablets”. Go to this page if you want to learn the vo­cab­u­lary in this pic.

By the way, I get the im­pres­sion that on­line fo­rums in China play a big­ger role in so­ci­ety than on­line fo­rums in the US. It’s prob­a­bly be­cause Americans have ad­dic­tive tele­vi­sion shows to watch and pr0n to surf on­line, so fewer peo­ple care about fo­rums. In China, tele­vi­sion shows suck big time, and cer­tain web con­tents get blocked but fo­rums are accessible.