In my sudden revival of interest towards blogger, here are some interesting things in the news about China...



Imagethief reports that an entire barren mountainside inexplicably painted green in a village in southwestern China. Some villagers guess that it is a peculiar attempt to improve the environmental standards of the village by introducing some "greenery" to the village. Ouch, at least they could have chosen a less disgusting shade of green?


photo credit

This Chinese new year, the Communist Party has banned all mention or images of pigs from TV commercials, in order to not offend the country's Muslims. You are not allowed to have a paper cutting of a pig or even say "Happy pig year" in advertisements.



In a related CNY idiosyncrasy, the number of births during this especially lucky "Golden Pig" year, which comes only once in 60 years (600 years according to others), the birth date is expected to soar. The graph from The Economist shows what we can expect in some places in China. The issue is so significant, that the government is worried how it will affect how competitive future university/school exams and job search are for these new babies of the Year of the Pig.

Labels: China

Warning to those who have the expired trial version of 2007...

Office 2003 doesn't work after uninstalling the 2007 version! I need the installation CD to reconfigure 2003, which I have unwisely left in the UK :( sigh... :( :(

Labels: microsoft, software

I have always liked Google and quality of the services that they provide, but back in China, I've encountered a few language-related gripes with Google...

Firstly, installing software: I installed Picasa 2 on my laptop, but was very displeased when I opened up the programme and found that the simplified Chinese version of the software was installed. Now I don't have anything against using Chinese software but if given the choice, I would have liked to use English.

Anyway, it turns out that although I have an English version of Windows XP, under my regional settings I have simplified Chinese as my default setting for any handling of non-English coding. So I had to 1) uninstall Picasa2, 2) switch the non-English recognition to English and then 3) reset the computer and 4) reinstall the programme so that it was in English, and then 5) change my language settings back to Chinese and 6) then reset the computer...

Wouldn't life be much simpler if Google enabled people to select the language of installation like much other software out there instead of playing smart and installing the language it thinks I want?


On a similar note, and a more significant gripe, I noticed that signing into my Google blogger account here in China, and also on other Google websites like www.google.com (not google.cn) etc... I am sometimes bizarrely treated with the Chinese version of those websites (with no link saying "switch to English" or "change language"), something that never happened outside of China despite the fact that I have chosen English for my Google language settings. Google's FAQ reveals that Google "makes use of the Web's standard language-preferences mechanism, the HTTP accept-language header, to determine the display language. Browsers can have multiple accept-languages, arranged in order of user preference".

I'm highly sceptical of that statement. My language settings have never changed and this only happens when I'm in China, so my theory is that Google determines from my IP address that I am in China and thus gives the sites to me in Chinese. Either way, I find it very irritating and presumptuous. What if I was a foreigner in China who couldn't understand Chinese - wouldn't that be confusing for me?

Google also states that "you can access the standard Google homepage by clicking on the "Google in English" link from any of our foreign language homepages. If this does not work, your browser is probably not configured to accept cookies. If you want to change your Google interface language without changing your browser's accept-language preferences, you can set your Google language preferences manually on our "Language Options" page."

I can't find that link anywhere and that adds to my frustration... and checking my Google "Language Options" English has been chosen, but it still shows Chinese. And I definitely have cookies turned on. Anyway, I've given up on Google, I'm just using it in Chinese when it decides to come up Chinese and using it in English when it chooses to display English.

Labels: Google, web