John – Page 10 – Urban Giraffe

Singing For Absolution – Muse in Hong Kong

It’s funny how the world works. Only the other day I was complaining to a friend about the lack of musical events here in Guangzhou (or, at least, musical events I’d want to listen to) and that if anyone did come over and play, someone such as Muse for example, I’d buy a ticket in a heartbeat. A couple of weeks later and I’m watching TV when an advert comes on for a concert… Muse are playing in Hong Kong – just two hours away. That’s close enough for my prophecy! It took more than a couple of heartbeats, but suffice to say that I’m already booked in and feeling pretty pleased.

According to the site I have this to look forward to:

Following 2003’s chart-topping masterpiece “Absolution”, the trio released their fifth and yet another UK number one album “Black Holes and Revelations” in July 2006. Hit singles include “Supermassive Black Hole” and “Starlight”: the former is a dance tune with a twist that sounds like a cross between Beck and Marilyn Manson with a dose of Studio 54 glamour while the latter is an Abba gig on the moon. “Knights of Cydonia”, a surf-prog number, is another favourite single taken from the album.

An Abba gig on the moon. Nice. Sure beats my ears bleeding from the more local Twins concert.

I’ve no idea what to expect from the concert itself. Hong Kong is not exactly known for it’s rock scene, and the concert itself is conspicuously on Lantau Island, far away from civilisation (next door is the airport). Admittedly this is because the Asiaworld Expo centre is located there (where the concert is playing), but I also suspect that Muse’s prog-rock warblings may cause a few puzzled looks if it neighboured any civilisation.

Hong Kong here I come (again)!

Europe and back again

My first post of 2007 will be spent talking about the last month of 2006. I realise that it’s been a shockingly long time since I wrote anything here (five months, to be exact), and also that I’ve been incredibly bad at keeping up with emails and comments (my apologies to anyone who has contacted me – I will get back to you).

I spent the whole of December in Europe. Two weeks of this was in Bratislava, Slovakia, and the rest with family for Christmas in England. After a year in Asia it was great to go back home and be able to go about my business without being a cause for curiosity. It would be very trite of me to say that nothing had changed. It would also be quite untrue. A lot of things have changed, and none more so than UK airports, which can now be summed up very succinctly: a royal nuisance. Long queues and over-zealous security made every journey an extreme test of patience. Even leaving the train at the airport’s train station was not simple, and security were unhappy that I’d thrown my ticket away between leaving the train and exiting the station.

Best Of Guangzhou

One major frustration I find living in China is that the internet is not nearly as useful as in the West. What little information is available is hard to find, hidden deep in forums, or is covered in annoying animated pictures (a predilection of Chinese web-sites, unfortunately^*).

Anyway, with this in mind I’ve been busy helping to put together a ‘Best Of’ website for Guangzhou, the city in which I currently live. It’s not complete yet, and there are big holes in the information, but it tries to give some real information (or at the very least, information that I would find useful).

Consider this a plug for the aforementioned site. If you’re interested then you can visit it at bestofguangzhou.com. Even better, if you’ve been to Guangzhou or live there now, please do send an opinion or review!

Note to any Chinese web developers – you do not have to fill every square centimetre of screen space with writing or moving images. My computer should not run at 100% just to visit your website.

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.

Anti-spam and HeadSpace 2 plugins

There’s a revamp of an old plugin over at HeadSpace 2, and a new (not foolproof) Anti-Email Spam plugin.

HeadSpace 2 cleans up my oldest plugin, and gives it a nice administrative interface along with several nice new features. The Anti-Email spam plugin was some code that I developed for client that I thought might make a handy plugin for some people. It replaces any email addresses in a post with an encoded version that should fool spam harvesting software.

99th Canton Fair

Guangzhou is all a-buzz at the moment with the semi-annual Canton Fair. This is South-East Asia’s biggest trade exhibition. We’re talking serious big here, and the numbers speak for themselves: last years show had a turnover of US$29,430 million, with 150,000 different products, and 210 trading countries. Not something to be ignored.

As you’d expect, the effect on the local economy is very pronounced. Hotels are all booked-up, and charge wildly exaggerated rates. Restaurants are trying their hardest to catch potential customers, with lots of bright English advertisements and special offers. The whole place feels alive.

From a personal perspective, just walking about the streets, it feels much more like a multi-cultural Hong Kong. Even the supermarkets seem different, and for a few moments yesterday I had a distinct feeling of confusion: am I walking around Chinatown, or am I in China?

Still, there are some differences. The influx of visitors has brought with it an increase in street traders, beggars, and all manner of methods to relieve foreigners of their money. It’s not uncommon to see young mother’s sitting on the street with one or two children, all wrapped up in many layers of clothes (despite the humid temperatures of 30 degrees). Upon seeing a foreigner the mother quickly directs the child to run alongside and chatter in a cheerful manner.

A more seedy effect of all this was experienced when taking a taxi to a restaurant that happened to be close to a popular luxury hotel. As the taxi neared the destination it went through an area crowded with people. Suddenly, there was a rush of noise, and 5 or 6 boys (maybe around 8-10 years old) came forward, pushing cards through a tiny slit in the car window next to me. It felt both disconcerting, and a little threatening. The cards were, of course, for call girls.

The thing I find interesting are the street traders. The fair seems to be very famous nationally, and it attracts a lot of people from the more rural parts of China, hoping to sell their products. In particular, there is one group of people wearing distinctively different clothes that have formed a semi-permanent encampment outside a nearby hotel. They are obviously some ethnic Chinese minority, although I’m not sure where from. They sit on a blanket on the street, all day and night, with their entire family (including Grandma!) and sell everything from jewelry to giant machetes and dried animal genitalia. The latter, I’m told, is because some Chinese believe that eating the genitalia of an animal is akin to an aphrodisiac/natural Viagra. Whatever the reason, it does make you look twice.

Giraffe2 – Wonky edition

Four months into the new year and a total of 2 posts. Not so good. I was working on a new version of my Giraffe theme that would allow all the page elements to be dragged around the screen, but it was taking too long and I just didn’t have time to finish it. Instead, I cleaned up what I already had, made it WordPress 2.0 compatible, and dropped in a few new features. Now presenting Giraffe2 – the slightly wonky edition.

The design remains largely the same. There are a few cosmetic changes, such as cleaning up header fonts, but the majority of changes are to increase configurability. To summarize them all:

WordPress 2.0 only
Supports WordPress widgets
Options page now in the ‘Presentation’ section
Layout can be configured to contain from 1 to 3 columns, in different sizes
Dynamically generated CSS is separated from static CSS (so if you do customize the theme you won’t get annoyed when it starts over-writing all your code)
AJAX comments support
Footer content can be edited
Logo is fully configurable, with a live-update feature – upload your own logos and background, and change sizes and positions
Colour skins can now be plugged in
Top navigation menu is configurable