Big head pics @ Dimei shopping mall (迪美购物中心)

Ever since acting as Fred Savage’s best friend in the hit TV show ‘The Wonder Years’, I’ve always had a thing for photo shoots. On a recent trip to People’s Square (人民广场) with my crew (geddit? CREW?!) I decided to try to recreate the magic of the 80′s and relaunch my TV career by hitting up the crazy Japanese photo machine…with interesting results.

First thing to do is choose the ‘style’ you want. The choice seemed to be between garish, horribly garish, super-garish, extra-garish or spangly. We chose spangly.

Next you go into a big (could fit 5 people easily) booth and you have about 3 minutes to take as many pictures as you want, with as many different backgrounds and styles as you can fit into the time limit. All ok so far. As soon as your time is up, however, you’re given a ridiculously short time in which to choose the six that you want to keep…and then for some reason we had to cut this selection down to four….Ok I admit my Chinese is not really up to the level of a 14 year old girl yet, so I *may* have missed something obvious…

Anyway, now all the photos are done, you go to a little touch screen with two pens and then basically deface the images with all sorts of stars, animals, glitter and other stuff which a grown man should probably not be seen associating himself with in a public place. God bless you and your blind eyes Asia.

Once you’re done (you get about 3 more minutes to cover your pics in crap, which is more than enough) they print them out and voila….

Costs
A page of pictures = 40rmb
Scan and bluetooth to phone = 20rmb
Two girls pretend to be your friend = 100rmb
The results…priceless.

Firefox 3 – Download day omg exciting

Ok it’s not really that exciting, although I’m very interested to see how Mozilla handle the big launch of their new flagship product. Let’s see!

Download Day

So on Download Day (here in China it began at 2am on the day AFTER Download Day, but hey…) I went to the Firefox website and low and behold, the front page offered me Firefox 2.0. I checked my new huge clock and confirmed that it was 2.05am. Annoying. Ok so I go to sleep…

…*Yawn*…Good morning! Well it’s 11.49am…off we go to the Firefox website!

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The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments.

Doh. Refresh, refresh, refresh…woo it works! Maybe it’s just my connection (which is about as dependable as Marcus Brutus at the moment). Now it offers me the download – with space ships in the background! I do like spaceships, although what particular relevance they have to this product I’m not sure.

Click on the download button….

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The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments.

Doh. SURELY it’s my connection…Refresh, refresh, refresh…woo! Instructions on how to download. Looks very simple! Just four steps!

Step 1 – Start the process by clicking Run. – Ok this is a bad start. I’m using Firefox 2.0 to download Firefox 3.0, and when I click on ‘Download’, I don’t get a ‘Run’ option, just ‘Save File’ and ‘Cancel’. If I was using the ‘Could my parents do this’ test then that would have been a bit of a hurdle.

Step 2 – Give permission to launch the setup wizard by clicking Continue after the file has downloaded. – I would do…but it’s still downloading…8k/s…must be my connection, right? RIGHT? Maybe millions of people are downloading it. MILLIONS. But c’mon it’s only 7mb…there must be some better way of distributing a small file to millions of people….Oh wow it finally downloaded! There is, of course, no ‘Continue’ button…I’m going to try ‘Open’.

Step 3 – Follow the steps shown in the setup wizard. – Firefox 2.0 warned me that this file might contain malicious code! Do I *really* want to open it? Sure…I think…That is until Windows Vista pops up with its two cents…DO YOU REALLY WANT TO OPEN THIS FILE?! IT COULD BE DODGY! Caution to the wind, I continue…

Oh crap – Firefox must be cLose Weight Exercise/”>Lose Weight Exercised to continue installation! What does this mean for live bloggers everywhere?! Surely they don’t want us to continue our stream of thought in IE? Hmm…fast install (20 seconds or so?)…and we’re straight into ‘Firefox Update’ – checkng my ‘add-ons’ for compatibility with this version of Firefox. I didn’t know I had any add-ons. It looked like this ‘Firefox Update’ thing hung so I pressed ‘cancel’ and we’re IN TO FIREFOX 3.0 WOO HOO!

So…umm…what’s new FF? There’s a refresh button! I like it. The green arrow at the right hand end of the address bar is gone. My anonymouse toolbar is gone. RSS feeds all seem to have made it intact. The ‘red X’ to cLose Weight Exercise/”>Lose Weight Exercise tabs is now a lovely dark shade of blue. The spaceships have been replaced with doves – SYMBOLISM!

So…load up WordPress admin…Hmm…no CSS…Reload (with new reload button)…success! Well, looks like nothing’s really changed too much ;)

I don’t know what Step 4 was, because I had to cLose Weight Exercise/”>Lose Weight Exercise the browser. But I’m sure it was great!

Nerd – Anti Matter

Awesome song from N.E.R.D’s new album, ‘Seeing Sounds’.

The Great Wall of China (万里长城) @ Badaling (八达岭)

不到长城非好汉
He who has not climbed the Great Wall is not a true man.
Mao Zedong

So recently we went to the Great Wall of China (万里长城) at Badaling (八达岭), about 50 miles away from Beijing. It’s the most visited chunk of the wall due to its proximity to China’s capital, and it’s really well suited to visitors and tourists like us! Woo hoo!

Check out the massive sign on the hill, advertising the Olympics. There’s going to be a lot of recycling done in China in November…

It was about 40rmb (£3) to get ‘in’ to the wall, and then you could choose to go left or right. How exciting! As we knew nothing about anything, we went left! I was pretty happy with our decision as it seemed like our direction was the ULTRA HARDCORE one…

…as this steep picture suggests! It was quite worrying seeing some of the people (60+ yrs old) really trying to hold on to the guardrails as their lives flashed before their eyes. I was also crapping myself at various points, especially when J revealed his ‘tactic’ of running down the wall (“it’s the safest way to do it”)…

We saw this mad set of stairs on the side of the wall…but J assured me that he’d seen a documentary about the GWOC a few weeks ago and this was NOT a battering ram. I was sad.

Walll walll walll!

All along the wall there are small rooms where you can sit and emo-photo (or hide from the rain). I preferred the former.

It’s a really long wall.

This picture was meant to show off how steep this section of the wall was, but it ended up with J doing the robot / Ric Flair strut.

Seriously I have no idea…

Well we made it to the top, so why not reward ourselves with some ice-cold beer or four! Interestingly, the price of beer decreased the higher you got – the shop at the gate charged 30rmb per can (£2.20ish), but at the highest point that we could reach the lovely ‘travelling salesman’ woman charged….5rmb! China: Where supply and demand make no sense.

Cheer up (LAWL)

Beijing approves Olympics ‘cheer’ – Start practising!

In pictures: BB9 housemates arrive – Shotgun Stephanie…

Top US Democrat Barack Obama holds surprise meeting with defeated rival Hillary Clinton – Dream ticket incoming?

Ronaldo ‘wants to play at Madrid’ – What’s the betting that he doesn’t go anywhere and then is booed again by his own fans next season? Lovely!

O2 to offer £100 iPhone… in time for Xmas? – They’re alright I suppose.

50′s Baby Moms House Burns Down – It wasn’t me

Top 10 Most Pirated TV Shows on BitTorrent – Yeah! The Ultimate Fighter!

The Shanghai Beat: Graffiti Shanghai – Youtube video about ‘writers’ in Shanghai (see how cool I am?)

Betfair.com – Euro 2008 starts tomorrow! Time to invest!

Fun stuff

Daily Mail cites video game as proof of terrorist doomsday plot – Thank God they haven’t seen Men In Black

9/11 an inside job, says Irish pop folkster – Corr(s) blimey!

Girl Sues Cops Over Sex Tape “Screening” – If you’re not in it, you can’t see it

Big Brother 2008 (UK) – Launching June 5th! Prepare yourself Daisy!

The iPhone is a piece of shit, and so is your face. – Unbiased review of the iPhone against the Nokia E70

Things younger than Republican Presidential candidate (oh, and did I forget to mention war hero?) John McCain – He’s older than nachos?!

Challenge of Nintendo’s Wii Fit is finding it – Nintendo sending US Fit boards to Europe…

Crank 2: High Voltage – 2009 will be a glorious year for cinema

Food crisis

Our house is currently in the grip of a food crisis.

It began yesterday morning, when we ordered delivery from McDonalds (we were recovering from a particularly havoc-filled night). As we sat eating our Big Macs and chicken nuggets, a strange feeling of ‘wrong’ filled the room. It was like the end of a Japanese horror movie, where the ‘ghost’ which has been following the 7 year-old girl around is finally revealed.

The nugget that I was eating did not feel like a nugget should feel. It was too soft, too moist…too liquidy. I looked over at my partner-in-fast-food, and he knew what I was thinking. Actually, he was one step ahead of me, as he was already on his way to the bathroom to throw up. When he was done, I shoved past him and threw up too.

McDonald’s had made us sick. It was a betrayal of truly epic proportions. It felt like my parents had killed my twin brother and then slowly fed him to me over the course of several years, only much more upsetting. I can’t think about eating McDonald’s now without gagging. This may be permanent.

For the last 24 hours we’ve been coming to terms with the ‘dodgy dinner’. What if we can never eat McDonald’s again? We tried to cook some hash browns tonight in the microwave…but they were frozen in the middle and soggy on the outside. And tasted like dirt. You can’t recreate what McDo offers.

Now we need to know – what do normal people eat on a daily basis? What are our food options? What taste as good at 10am as it does at lunch time as it does at midnight? What is your go-to food?

It feels like I lost a friend yesterday. I’m hollow, empty. What is the point of living day to day with this feeling? I decided to find out how long I was going to be around for, and so did…

Life Expectancy Calculator – 85.5 years

…and got the horrible news that I would be alive for another 21700 days (approximately). Unless we can find some great new foods (and fast!), I think it will be substantially less than that…