I was forwarded an email at work. It’s pretty funny, but serious I think. I urge everyone to take the survey. Hi Mainland China living expat friends, I’ve been asked by a friend of mine to help him out with taking a survey. A Mainland Chinese magazine ran survey results last month on whether Chinese people think foreigners regard them as well mannered or not and how that will effect the Olympics.

Remember a few weeks ago I posted about the crackdown on “illegal drugs” in the sanlitun area? (Was it really a crackdown on illegal drugs? Anyone’s guess…) My follow-up post is here. Well, I was at the same spot on Sunday and they put this banner out prominently for all to see. [ Effective? You be the judge.

I randomly checked my “Links for you” page on my del.icio.us account, and low and behold, I was given a beta account to the new preview.delicious.com. Neato! It sports a cleaner layout, a bit more web 2.0 friendly I think. They also mentioned they got the delicious.com domain - I wonder how much of Yahoo!’s money they spent on that bad boy… Click on the screenshot for a larger version.

Sometimes, something happens in China that really irks me. Ok, well, maybe a bit more often than “sometimes”… 3 days ago, the Ministry of Public Safety, via relevant news outlets and traffic management bureaus, announced an overhaul of the license plate system (specifically, enhancements to the 1992 standard that was running the risk of running out of available plates - at least here in Beijing). Um, o.k… so? Well, long story short, one of the new provisions is they are phasing out the black plates for foreign-owned vehicles.

Last night, I installed Ubuntu 7.10. I had 7.4 installed previously, but I decided to do a complete reinstall. This included repartitioning the drive into, what I think, is a better configuration. I (again) pasted what I wrote in the forums of the Beijing Linux Users Group: A few observations: 1. Wow - Compiz rocks! Those who are allured by Mac’s “beautiful visuals”, they need to check Compiz out. I have no idea why the package compizconfig-settings-manager isn’t installed by default - took me a while to figure that out - I wanted the cube!

In response to my previous post on questioning the use of services like feedburner (especially when feedburner doesn’t really work in China).. I think those China blogs who aggregate (link) with Chinalyst, you may want to change your feed URL in the Chinalyst configuration for your site if you have previously provided a feedburner link (I’m talking to you, Danwei). The problem still remains when I see your post in a Chinalyst feed and I want to click on it to be sent to your site to read more, feedburner gets in the way.