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A Girls’ Night Out

27 Jul

I make it sound like it’s just another holiday: the girls going out, night after night, for drinks and food. I promise that really isn’t the case. (Well, maybe my fingers are ‘slightly’ crossed…)

After a couple of hours preparing for tomorrow’s lessons and after-school activities (forensics and finger-printing with 47 kids in STEM club!), we went to our favourite corner bar for well-deserved refreshments. It was a far more civilised affair tonight; I think the locals have already grown blasé about their English invasion. Still, the sight of seven girls out drinking on their own is an unusual sight here, regardless of the nationality.

We really have got the knack of this pointing and ordering lark, receiving exactly what we thought we had ordered: “meat on sticks” (lamb, we think), toasted bread buns and vegetables. We gave what looked like chicken’s heads a miss, along with the kebabs made just from fat. Perhaps another night. Washed down with a couple of pints of local brew from the roadside bar, we had a delightful evening for £2.50 each.

 
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Posted by on Friday 27 July 2012 in China

 

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A Girl Called Arthur

27 Jul

I love the first day of Summer School: as hard work as it is, I am suddenly reminded why I have come back.

We arrived in Qinhuangdao yesterday. It is a coastal city, a little over 4hrs coach ride from Beijing. The route along the way starts to give way to the ‘real’ China, right down to the wrinkly old farmers in coolie hats. Qinhuangdao has little exposure to Westerners, and so wherever we go, we are met by bemusement. A group of 30+ of us sitting at a roadside bar last night became a local attraction. Traffic slowed and beeped at us as they passed, groups of giggling girls came over to practise their English and take photos with us, whilst the ‘cooler’ boys used us as a background whist their mates took their photo. Countless people stood nearby talking on their phones as if to say “you’ll never guess what I’m standing next to!”.

A small group of us headed off for food afterwards, returning to a table-top BBQ restaurant which was a previous favourite. Once again we caused such a stir that no one seemed to think we were being rude as we walked around, pointing at tables asking for “nage” (“that” – unfortunately their menu contains no pictures!). We ended up with a leg of lamb, corn on the cob, courgette salad, fried dumplings and sesame bread. And beer, though somehow we know how to order that ourselves! The lamb comes cooked ‘pink’, and is finished on a spit over hot coals in the middle of the table. Diners receive what can only be described as a knife and fork on stilts, to hack away at the meat from a ‘safe’ distance. A top notch dinner, assuming you are neither a vegetarian or Health and Safety Officer!

Alas, we are here for another purpose other than drinking, eating and entertaining the locals, and so off we went to school this morning to do our thing. As it is an English language summer school (and as correct pronunciation of Chinese names is so difficult), the children use English names in camp. We’ve had some crackers in the past: who can forget Bumble Bee (a boy), Harry Potter, Shark or Kate (also a boy, though he was gently encouraged to change his name last year). Today I met Arthur, a 13 year old girl. To be fair, she had already sussed it was a boy’s name and asked if I could pick a new one for her. I tried to match it to the sound of her Chinese name as often happens (though not always: see above), but she thought both Joanne and Jane sounded too boyish and she wanted “something prettier” (her words – my apologies!) . After several more suggestions from me and her class mates, she settled on……yup, Arthur. Oh well.

 
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Posted by on Friday 27 July 2012 in China

 

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A Slight Change of Plan

25 Jul

It was inevitable really, it had to happen sooner or later. Sure enough we didn’t have to wait long before we were met with the first “slight change of plan”. Change of plans I can accept, indeed have come to expect. The use of the word ‘slight’ however is, from my point of view, a little questionable.

Some time ago, myself and two other teachers had been asked to deliver a Maths and Science programme during the summer school. This was a new addition to the original programme, which up to now had been solely for English language. The three of us had met up in the UK on several occasions before the trip, to discuss what we would teach, make lists of what we would need, decide how we would split the groups etc, and had obviously spent a lot of time preparing resources (not to mention the baggage space taken up bringing these resources over!).

You can probably see where this is heading….

“Slight Change of Plan No. 1” (From herein referred to as SCoP1) occurred just before breakfast on Day 2, not 24hrs after arrival. The Maths and Science programme had been cancelled. The reasons are purely political and for this reason I won’t go into them here. Nevertheless, the decision has put a bit of a downer on the first few days as we are now rather in the lurch and unprepared for what is to come. OK, so I’ve done the English programme before, but of course I didn’t bring copies of previous work with me, did I?! So much for the relaxing evenings I was aiming for this year. Last minute lesson planning it is then!

Summary:
SCoP1: ongoing
SCoP2: pending (any day now…)

 
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Posted by on Wednesday 25 July 2012 in China

 

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Day 1 – Is it better to travel or arrive?

25 Jul

It must be those rose-tinted glasses in duty free that make me forget on the flight home about all the irritations and annoyances of the preceding few weeks of Chinese summer camp. Instead, by the time I land, I seem only to remember the amazing time I have had and the fantastic experience I have been a part of. And so when January comes around and we are asked to apply for the next year’s programme, I can’t resist. The result? Here I am again in Beijing, about to embark on another English Language summer school.

How quickly it all came flooding back to me.

To be fair, my troubles started before I even got through security at Newcastle, where I found myself in an altercation at security about contact lens solution: he won, I lost my (less than half full) bottle of solution. The 9 hour flight from Paris was a particularly hot and sweaty affair and I managed only about 15 minutes sleep. My mood was not helped by being penned in by two strangers who slept the entire journey, meaning I couldn’t even get up to wander. Note to self: why insist on a window seat on a night flight?

Arrival was typically chaotic. Not the airport – that as you can imagine runs very efficiently – but the chaos of collecting 40 people from two flights coming into two different terminals, and transporting them and approximately 80 pieces of luggage (we need lots of resources…) to the hotel. Entertainment was provided watching our cases being squeezed into the “luggage bus” (essentially a people carrier without the seats). We waved goodbye to our luggage, wondering if we would ever see it again. Thankfully we were all reunited at the hotel: current condition of luggage bus unknown, but the prognosis can’t be good.

Transfer time between landing and check in to hotel: three and a half hours. Oh, it’s good to be back!

 
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Posted by on Wednesday 25 July 2012 in China

 

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Aside
20 Jul

Desperate for an adventure or a glutton for punishment, I’m not sure which. Either way, I’m off to China for the third summer in a row. Despite the heat, humidity and the fact that I have to work to earn my keep, I seem to enjoy my ‘holidays’ in the Middle Kingdom, though after trip number two, felt I needed a year off to enjoy a ‘proper’ holiday.

This year however there is a twist. A little difference that made me want to go again. I will be joined part way through by hubby who, despite enjoying three weeks of freedom during the past two summers, has finally decided to see for himself what all the fuss is about. Between you and me I think it’s the idea of bottle of beer for 27p that was the real draw, though I will continue to flatter myself with the idea that he actually wants to experience all this with his beloved wife.

The other difference this year is that instead of teaching English, I will be teaching Maths, preparing Chinese students about to embark on British GCSE courses. This of course means less singing, dancing and role play, and more functional tasks, investigations and exam practice. Hmm, starting to sound much more like hard work than I was intending it to be…

So, after months of planning, reading travel guides, making lists, buying ridiculous amounts of toiletries, learning to speak Mandarin and collecting resources, I am almost ready to go.

See you in a little over 4 weeks! xx

An Oriental Summer

 
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Posted by on Friday 20 July 2012 in China

 

Brooks PureCadence review

03 Jul

I’d decided that my oldest pair of trainers (Nike LunarGlide+, bought in 2010, IIRC) were getting to be past their best, and were quite probably responsible for a few injury niggles that I’d had recently. I’d never been particularly happy with them anyway (not that I could tell you why), so wasn’t going to complain about a decent excuse to replace them.

Not long after getting the LunarGlides, I’d gone to Northern Runner for a proper gait analysis, and also the chance to try running in whatever shoes I was thinking of getting. As a result of this, I ended up with a pair of Mizuno Wave Nirvana 7. I’d been pretty happy with them, particularly with the feel of the forefoot, but was starting to think that they were just too chunky around the heel.

I went back to Northern Runner, and told them this, and the immediate response was a pair of Brooks PureCadence. As soon as I put them on, I noticed how much lower the heel felt; quite strange at first. A little jog up and down the corridor behind the shop, and I was sold. I tried a similar pair with a “normal” heel, for comparison’s sake, but I decided I really like the PureCadence and walked out of the shop after my card had taken a £100 battering… plus an extra £7.50 for some Lock Laces that I’d got talked in to buying. [Damn, I hate good salesmen.]

I wore them for an hour or two around the house, and was a bit concerned about how tight they felt around the top of my foot, but this is probably attributable to the so-called NavBand, a strip of thick, slightly elastic material that attaches to the outside of the sole on each side and goes over the top of the foot.

The first chance I had to wear them “in anger” was a strides session, the day before a race. Running at an easy pace to warm up felt very strange, and I almost wondered if I’d made a mistake. I felt very flat-footed and clumsy…

After a mile or so, it was time to start doing some strides. As I sped up, I experienced a revelation as the shoes started to “work”. Running fast seemed so effortless, heel strike was almost completely eliminated, and it felt so much easier to get my legs moving quickly than I’d previously been used to.

After doing six stride repeats and a warm-down jog back to the office, I could feel that my calves were a bit tight in unusual places. Probably a result of the lower heel forcing a different (hopefully more efficient) running style. I don’t think I’ll be wearing them for any races longer than a 5K for a few weeks yet, but I’ve got great hopes for these shoes once my legs have got used to them.

Let’s see if I’m still as happy with them in a month or two’s time…

 
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Posted by on Tuesday 3 July 2012 in Running

 

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So alike, yet so different

13 Mar

I’ve recently fallen into the world of Mac OS X. (Fallen, pushed; what is difference?)

I keep getting caught out by the little things that are just slightly different to what I’m used to in Linux.

Take the most recent example: the mail command. I had a little anacron script set up on my Ubuntu box that would generate a summary of a previously-unseen messages in a user’s Gmail spam folder, and send it to that user. (Mostly because Mrs E kept forgetting to check hers.)

While I was perusing the mail man page on Mac OS X, and reading up on various options on Google, I found that the Mac version had a useful -E switch that would allow it to quietly abort if there was no message body, saving me the hassle of having to find a recent port of moreutils so that I could use the ifne command.

The thing that got me stuck for ages was trying to find a replacement for the -a switch in the GNU/Linux version of mail, which allowed the insertion of arbitrary headers, and was useful for setting the sender to something appropriate.

Eventually, after much reading of man pages and search results, I realised that the answer had been staring me in the face for ages, I just wasn’t doing it correctly because the order of the parameters became more important:

echo Wibble | mail -s "Subject goes here" recipient-address@example.com -r "<mail-sender@example.com>" -F "Mail Sender"

That was harder than expected…

(Note to self: WordPress doesn’t tell you that it’s stripping out the content in angle brackets that you’ve just retyped three times…)

 
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Posted by on Tuesday 13 March 2012 in Geeky stuff

 

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Make me one with everything?

21 Apr

I’m a little concerned about Canonical‘s decision to go for Unity over GNOME in Ubuntu 11.04; it seems like a very radical step to take, and could end up backfiring by putting off potential users for a long time.

On the other hand, if it works the way they’re hoping, it could be very successful and bring a whole new league of users to Ubuntu and, more importantly, to Linux. (As the joke says, “Change must come from within.”)

Personally, only one of my home PCs runs standard Ubuntu, and that’s running the LTS version, so I won’t see the change there until next year (by which time things might have changed). The laptops run Xubuntu, the HTPC¹ runs Mythbuntu (as of this week), and neither of those is going to start using Unity in a hurry. (Oh, and for the sake of completeness, there’s an increasingly-lonely Windows box, that gets used for my Nike+ uploads and a bit of development stuff.)

1. That reminds me, I must write something about the HTPC…

 
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Posted by on Thursday 21 April 2011 in Geeky stuff

 

A fine evening’s fettling

14 Nov

There are few things more relaxing than spending a couple of hours in your garage, doing a task that you know how to do, you’ve done before, and you have all the right tools for.

I had a new tyre put on the Falco‘s front wheel yesterday, and I needed to get it put back on so I could use the front paddock stand on the Elefant.

As the front brakes had to come off anyway in order to remove the front wheel, I thought it would be a good opportunity to give them a bit of a clean before it ends up being sat around for most of the winter. Pump the pistons out a little bit, give them a good spray with brake cleaner, a scrub with an old toothbrush, and a wipe with a rag. A little smear of rubber grease around the visible part of the pistons, then push them back in.

There was almost a comedy piston-falling-out moment, when I forget that one caliper had nothing stopping the pistons moving when I pushed the others back in, but fortunately I realised just in time to stop an egress of brake fluid… phew.

Refitting the wheel was a bit of a pain: the design of the front spindle means that it’s easy to end up with the left fork in the wrong place, if you don’t get the spindle positioned correctly. In fact, the first time I had a new front tyre on my first Falco (R.I.P.), the fitter cocked it up to such an extent that it was hard to push the bike around, because the caliper was fouling the disk so much.

Once I was happy with the position of the front wheel and spindle, the brake pads were given a fresh smear of copper grease, replaced, and everything tightened up in the correct order (or untightening, bouncing the forks, and retightening, as per the workshop manual, to make sure the forks are correctly aligned).

A couple of beers whilst doing it, some decent tunes on the stereo, and I was perfectly happy. If only it wasn’t so cold; the next little job (replacing the Elefant’s speedo drive and front wheel bearings) might need thermals, as well as my padded overalls.

 
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Posted by on Sunday 14 November 2010 in Uncategorized

 

O you are Auth-ful…

13 Sep

… or, how Twitter’s changes broke my nice little perl script.

The script for queuing tweets still works, but they all disappear into the void rather than getting tweeted, now that Twitter only allows external applications to connect using OAuth.

I’ve found this handy little article here that seems to suggest that it’s easy enough to do using existing modules from CPAN.

Now all I need is a set of round tuits, and we should be back in business again. I’ve got some ideas for other stuff to tweet, once I get it all working again…

 
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Posted by on Monday 13 September 2010 in Geeky stuff

 

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