Well, sort of - it looks as if either there is a “technical glitch” only affecting China, or the satellite imagery servers for maps.google.com have been blocked. Note: A friend of mine in Singapore says it works fine. Here’s a screen shot of google maps attempting to look at New York City. As you can see, I’m not zoomed in too far - on the contrary, I am zoomed quite a bit out.

Well, maybe not really, but they’re making a killing! (*cough* no pun intended) We went to the China International Shooting Range (or whatever it’s called) up in Nankou - a suburb of Beijing on the way North to Badaling Great Wall. It’s about a 45 minute drive with optimal driving conditions. From what I have been told, it is inside a military installation that apparently used to be (or still is) a munitions storage facility?

Wow, that was a lame-ass title. A special “Thank You” goes out to Ms. Foo for handling the tickets for our trip to Qingdao. The true master herself in planning for budget travel has succeeded once again! What, did you really think our sorry butts would actually handle the logistics ourselves? I didn’t think so… Train ticket and plane ticket together, including tax, comes to CNY 808. That’s a little over US$100.

Hopefully, that is! 4 years in China, I am finally going to the Qingdao International Beer Festival in August. The above photo is provided by the (I think) official Website about the festival, located here: http://www.qdbeer.cn/2007/into.php3 I have 2 observations: These guys are still using PHP 3. Let’s get with it people - PHP 4 already has a End of Life date. The more entertaining observation: The site is all in Chinese.

In response to my post from yesterday, after asking for a refund, I received an email from someone else at noteburner: Hi Chris, We are sorry that our support staff make a mistake. The ID3 tag could be resevered with iTunes, please click iTunes’ main menu “Edit->Preferences…” , select the “Advanced” Tab. In the “Burning” page, please also check the option “include CD Text”. then burn the playlist to noteburner and the ID3 tag could be resevered.

These guys are a bunch of scammers. Noteburner is a clever piece of software supposed to easily convert your DRM’d tracks (from any service, not just iTunes) into nice MP3’s. “Great”, I thought, as I’ll want to be able to play the music I legally purchased in Linux when I make the move this week. Noteburner does this by cleverly creating a virtual CD-RW in the middle, so in iTunes, you go to create a audio CD from the selected tracks, and Noteburner takes over by reencoding them to MP3.