June 2006 – Urban Giraffe

Summer in Guangzhou

So far I can describe my summer in Guangzhou with one word: wet.

It may just be the tail-end of typhoon Chanchu which, after having devastated the Phillipines, messed up much of South-East China and came very close to Hong Kong. Or this may be perfectly normal.

Friends tell me that I should expect the summer to get hotter and stickier. All very therapeutic I’m sure, but now I understand exactly why there is always so much washing hung out from Chinese windows.

When it’s not being hot and sticky, it’s being hot and rainy. In the space of one day the weather can change from this:

Rainfall in Guangzhou

To this:

Now that’s what I call variable!

Spring Cleaning

An attempt to give my website a bit of spring cleaning has resulted in several new WordPress plugins.

The first is Tidy Up, which adds the ability to run HTML Tidy through all your posts and comments and produce a report on the quality of your HTML. If you’re feeling brave you can also have the plugin automatically fix any problems.

Next is Search Regex. As the name would suggest, this is a search and replace plugin. It allows you to search and replace phrases inside posts, pages, comments, and meta-data. In addition to plain text searches, you can also use full PHP regular expressions. This makes it very easy to bulk-modify a WordPress installation, should you decide to move directories. Several other similar plugins exist, but I couldn’t find one that provided the regular expression capability that I needed.

Thailand

Although a little delayed, I did recently have a wonderful trip to Thailand. Being the over-active kind of person, I wrote about this at length here. Maybe someone can learn from my mistakes.

At the same time I was sent this photo, allegedly from a public toilet in Bangkok. I’m not sure what it’s advertising, but it’s a great idea.

All that Jazz

Let me start this by stating that Jazz is not my thing. Not at all. It instantly brings to mind Starbucks-esque nondescript croonings that send me to sleep faster than just about anything.

With that in mind the rest of this post is about Jazz. Twice.

It was with some trepidation that I found myself paying a visit to the Backstreet Jazz Bar, situated in the lovely environs of Guangzhou’s Ersha Island. Around the corner is the Xinghai Concert Hall, and at the end of the street is the Pearl River. You can’t be any better situated.