Steve's China Blog

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Vacation at Cherating Beach

I thought I would try to upload some photos from my vacation (again) even though the internet connection is still terrible. It took a long time since I could only upload a photo or two per day. I hope you enjoy it! Here's a quick rundown of my trip...

On Friday, 22 December I finished work early and caught an afternoon flight from Dalian to Beijing. Phyllis was nice enough to come see me off before she had to go into work. Thanks Phyllis! I checked into my hotel in Beijing and met up with my friend, Jackie, and we went out to dinner at Peter's Tex-Mex Grill. It was great! Jackie ordered the enchiladas and I ordered the chimichangas. The next morning I had to wake up early and catch a flight from Beijing to Kuala Lumpur.

The reason I woke up so early is that I knew it would take a long time to check in and go through immigration and customs in Beijing. It was very very crowded (even for such an early flight) and it took about an hour just to get through immigration. Surprisingly, the flight to Kuala Lumpur was on time and I arrived there in the early afternoon. At first I was very surprised... where was everyone? The airport at Kuala Lumpur seemed deserted after being at the airport in Beijing. I had included time for flight delays and going through customs in Malaysia, but there were no crowds or delays in Kuala Lumpur. My flight to Kuantan was not for a few more hours, so I wondered around the airport for awhile... They have a Cheers bar in the airport! My flight to Kuantan arrived there at around 10:00pm and the bus ride from the airport to the resort was about 40 minutes. A whole day of travelling is tiring.

The resort I stayed at is really nice. Surrounded by the South China Sea on one side and a jungle on the other, so it seemed very isolated and peaceful. Here are a few pictures of the place...

















It is hard to see, but this yellow bird came up to my balcony every day and would sing a pretty song and then knock on my window. Maybe someone fed him before from my room...



The resort actually has two seperate beach areas... the north beach at the main resort area and the south beach. The north beach has large waves and a strong undercurrent...





...and the south beach was calmer...





To get to the south beach you have take a tram along a little road through the jungle or walk. I walked... more to see.





A big lizard (about a meter long) I spotted in the jungle...



This resort is more of the family resort than other Club Meds that I have been too, so Christmas day was very busy. In the morning they had a Christmas parade through the area for the kids (the Malaysian Army was nice enough to have a band come play in the parade)...




... a visit from Santa with gifts for all of the children...








... and a show and beach party for the adults so they could have a little fun while the kids were busy elsewhere...




... and get soaked after getting sloshed...



There were a lot of things to do at the resort such as sailing, snorkeling, swimming, trapeze, rock climbing, etc... I went swimming, went to the golf driving range a few times, and shot some archery almost every day. Toward the end of the week they had an archery tournement, and I came in second and got a silver medal...

It is almost like the silver medal I got in an archery tournement at a Club Med in Mexico a dozen years ago.



I also ate... a lot. The food here was really wonderful...







I even took a half hour class on Chinese cooking given by the Chinese chef here...



I made some crispy stir-fried shrimp. Yum!



One of things that was funny at meal time was that some days a bunch of monkees would come out of the jungle and come over to try and steal food from people while they ate...





Most of the time though, I just laid about, relaxed, and watched the ocean. After living in a crowded Chinese city for so long it was so wonderful to just go some place quiet and be alone. One day we had tea...

We had teas from China, Japan, and Korea.



On New Years we had a great party. Lots of dancing and celebrating...



... and celebrating with lovely company...











On January 2nd I had to say good-bye to this little bit of paradise, and begin my trip back. I left on a very early bus to Kuantan where I flew to Kuala Lumpur, then Shanghai, and then back to the freezing cold of Dalian. Brrr.

Friday, January 19, 2007

Network connections

Networks Disrupted By Taiwan Earthquake Struggle To Recover

An undersea earthquake struck off the coast of Taiwan on Wednesday, complicating efforts to repair six submerged cables that were severed by a stronger quake nearly four weeks ago.


This makes me remember back when we had 300, 1200 and then 9600 baud modems.

Friday, January 12, 2007

Parts (geek warning)

I've been trying to upload pictures to the blog for awhile now without too much success. I finally got one uploaded which shows the inside of my rebuilt computer.



The package that was shipped to me in a previous post was a new motherboard for my desktop computer, which I wanted to upgrade. I brought back a bunch of new components for my computer during my trip back to the US back on Thanksgiving, and so much has changed it is pretty much a whole new computer. Here are the new parts:

Asus P5N32-E SLI Motherboard
Intel's E6600 Core 2 Duo Processor
Seasonic M12 700 watt power supply
Corsair XMS2 (PC2 6400) 2GB memory
Two eVGA Geforce 7900GT 256m graphics cards (in SLI mode)
Western Digital Raptor 150gig hard drive
Western Digital Caviar 320gig hard drive
NEC DVD Burner
Thermalright Ultra-90 heatsink for CPU

I got the last part (the motherboard) the day before I went on vacation and it took about 3 to 4 hours to put all of it together and it runs great! I've tested out a few programs that would not run on my old system, such as Battlefield 2 and Medieval 2 Total War, and they run great and look awesome. I even got a chance to log into Everquest before I left for vacation (and the earthquake happened) and turned the graphics settings all of the way up... Nice! Almost like a new game after playing it for years at a low graphics setting. I want to see how Everquest 2 looks after the internet connection here has improved, but as it is now I can't do anything with my internet connection at home.

It seemed to be running kind of hot when I first started testing it, but after adding a third fan and moving them around it is running much cooler. I have one 92mm fan pulling air through the CPU heatsink, a 80mm fan pulling air into through the bottom of the case, another 80mm fan blowing air out the back of the case, and a 120mm fan in the power supply blowing air out. I am thinking of switching the CPU fan so that it blows air through the heatsink rather than pull air through it to reduce the wear and tear on the fan itself since it currently has the heat coming through the fan, but it would be moved further from the fan which blows air out of the case which might not run as cool. I'll have to try it out and see what happens. And even with all of the fans running it is very quiet. The only thing that makes noise is the DVD drive.

When it is running idle the temperature is at around 30°C for the CPU and around 35°C for the motherboard. Running a lot of programs runs the temperature up, but it has not gone above 50°C now that the fans are well placed and the thermal grease between the CPU and heatsink has settled some. The graphics cards seem to stay at around 50°C to 53°C, and I might look into ways to cool those off later. I don't think I am going to overclock anything on it, since that adds to the heat and also reduces the lifespan of the components. It would be a major pain to replace them.

Friday, January 05, 2007

Back from Malaysia

I got back from Malaysia on Tuesday night. If you have not heard there was an earthquake in Taiwan and a lot of the cabling that runs from there to Hong Kong got cut, so our internet connections in asia pacific has been disrupted. Since my connection is so bad now I will wait to post about my computer upgrade and about my trip to Malaysia later. I hope they'll have it fixed soon!