The girls and guy of Ventures In Development (password protected) (abandoned site blocked in China) have been in Shangri-La the past few days (or has it been weeks?). They brought down some cheese from up north where it's being produced and I was lucky enough to be around to try some of it. It was quite nice. Not being a cheese aficionado (and not having ever had fresh cheese before, I don't think), I can't make any more specific pretentious-sounding comments about it.

The only online publicity that I've seen about them so far was this article, in what seems to be Harvard's student newspaper (or one of them). Quite cool sounding plans.

Although I had thought that government-owned newspaper China Daily posting uncensored photos of naked women was somehow a fluke, it looks like it might actually be the norm. How utterly bizarre.

The strange thing about this woman posing naked for art photography (not safe for work) is that it's printed in a government newspaper. The surprising thing is that it's still up after several days. And if it's not up by the time that you reach this page, you can look at a screenshot here.

Sometime this May, I noticed advertisements appearing on the bottom of certain web pages (perhaps one out of every hundred or more that I visited). This example screen shot was taken on May 29, 20:11 CST. See the ad at the bottom of the screen shot.

Not sure what to make of all of this.

More of the same can be found here here here and here.

This was especially funny to me since zhuoma locked the bicycle I just bought outside the bar and someone walked away with it.

Maybe a better lock wouldn't have helped either.

The zhongdian guide has turned into an all-time-consuming passion recently. Working on it is a lot cheaper (money-wise) than the other candidate project I had in mind to entertain myself, namely renovating the house. I go through the day thinking, "how do I get more people to use the site? how do I get more people to find the site? what kinds of features do i need to add to encourage people to add content? i wonder if people would switch from so and so other site if i did this?

Current mood: thoughtful

Current music: Some Fun Loving Criminals Song

We got another puppy. This one is a little "tibetan dog" which seems to be another name for "fat wolf." But it's still a puppy now so it does things like cry and wave its paw around while backing up when I give it some attention.

Current music: L'Amour - Rouge Rouge

The other night, a rat ate through my mouse cable. I found a piece of electrical wire, took off all the insulation, split the copper strands into 4 sets, covered the sets with electric tape, and spliced the pieces onto the two parts of my mouse. it's kind of cool looking now that the mouse cable has 4 wires now instead of one bundle.