Until today I hadn’t heard this song for years and it’s just as well. Wow. The super-white band attempts to rock out and do frat-barbecue-ready funky hip-hop, with a guest rapper making annoying interjections and then taking over at the end to jam awkwardly with the sounds of a cheesy organ. Yeeuck.

The social networking website Facebook must be reaching some sort of critical mass amongst expats working in China. In the past month I’ve received 3 requests from friends to join. So despite the fact that I already have profiles I rarely update on Friendster and on Myspace, and that I have already devoted 20% of my brain cells to the task of remembering silly passwords, I caved and made myself a barely filled-in profile on Facebook. I’ll update it more later when I’m not at work.

This brings to 5 the total number of social networking sites to which I belong.

I now know my answer to the question,”If everyone else jumped off a bridge would you too?”

In response to a question from the Associated Press, Yahoo said:

Yahoo is dismayed that citizens in China have been imprisoned for expressing their political views on the Internet.

The Chinese government thought about replying,”We just love it when foreigners try to tell us how to run our country.” But they came to one of two realizations:

1. that the anti-cultural-imperialism dodge only works when the cultural imperialists are in the wrong.
2. that as soon as a local company (perhaps one of Yahoo’s business partners) completely replicates all of Yahoo’s functionality they can cut the unruly foreign company loose and promote a local company who plays by party rules.

Shi Tao, the Chinese reporter Yahoo helped put behind bars, is due to be released from prison in 2015. I wrote about him in this earlier, related post.

I’ve been working for the past month as apprentice Editor on a film in southeast China, both living and working within a studio lot. It feels a little like the middle of nowhere, inside the walls of an industrial studio compound. In all directions I’ve only noticed lots of concrete –a huge parking lot, a few restaurants, and a lot of closed-looking businesses. Everything is 1-2 stories, a mega-strip-mall.

Last night around 11PM I decided to take a walk outside the hotel. I walked past dark buildings in the warm (humid) night air and followed interesting noises. I stopped under the overpass of a nearby building and listened to women talking while they washed clothes. I heard some rowdier sounds and followed them to the open window of a dorm full of bunks at a nearby technical school. I walked further and met three 20-year-old students of a film school who were sitting on the curb while their classmate strummed a guitar and sang Chinese (rock?) songs. I sat with them for a while and we had a nice conversation. I introduced myself and they told me their names, but the only name I remember is that of 楼岩 because he explained to me each character in his name (loufang de lou, yanshi de yan).

My answer to their question, “Is America better than China?”, was probably longer than they expected. All expressed a wish to one day visit the U.S. as well as France and Japan. They kept handing me the guitar expecting that I could play it and were reluctant to believe me that I could not (is there some stereotype about Americans and guitars?).

Who knew there was more than just parking lot in the immediate vicinity (an entire film school?). I’ll try and get out more. There are people to meet, interesting things to see, and there’s always a language to practice.

Apple released their web browser, Safari, for Windows a couple of days ago, and since then it has been downloaded over a million times. I’d love to know why all those people downloaded it. Was the reason:

• curiosity
• they’re running OS X on their other computer and like Safari
• features
• performance
• security
• to test web pages for browser compatibility
• because they’re playing the game “Steve Jobs says”

Speaking for myself, I downloaded it out of curiosity, and ran it for a few minutes on Chinese Windows XP running under Parallels Desktop (running an Apple app inside of Windows on a Mac – kind of like making turducken out of fruit and building materials). It seemed fine for browsing, I remember feeling that it looked better typography-wise than IE or Firefox on Windows, but I didn’t quantify that feeling with any testing. A million downloads in two days is a big number, I’d love to know the reason why Jane Doe Windows user would download Safari rather than or in addition to Firefox or IE7. I’d also love to know why Apple released Safari for Windows –does Apple feel that releasing a browser for Windows with a bit of a Mac look and feel will attract more people to switch over to OS X?

Once upon a time banks wanted you to entrust your money to them. You were doing them a favor –loaning them your money. They’d invest it and make a profit, and there were no fees for opening and using an account. The bank would pay you interest and give you lollipops. It was during those salad days that I opened my bank account at my local Rainier Bank branch.

Then came the dark times. Little local Rainier Bank with it’s charming Mt. Rainier logo was bought by the generic-sounding and looking Security Pacific Bank, a huge interloper from Los Angeles. I now had a Security Pacific Bank account. My checks featured a logo¹ that seemed straight out of the corporate dystopia envisioned in the film Robocop.

Then Security Pacific Bank was itself acquired/merged with Bank of America (partly caused by what Wikipedia describes as a disastrous “aggressive acquisition strategy”). I now had a Bank of America account –still free, I could still use ATMs, and BOA’s graphic design was a slight improvement over Security Pacific’s.

There were many things that sucked about BOA, but they never sucked enough to make me bother to take my money elsewhere. My versateller checking account only allowed me to bank via machine –if I so much as said hello to a teller I had to pay around a $3 fee. They touted the restrictions on this account as if they were a feature rather than a way to say “we don’t really want to deal with you”.

I think BOA was also one of the last big banks to make account information accessible on the web. While other banks had opened web sites, BOA still only offered a cheesy application that would run on Windows 3.1 and could connect to their proprietary system using a modem. For a couple of years I would always make sure to mention this are ripe for improvement to tellers (”thank you for your suggestion, now please pay the $3 ‘human interaction’ fee”) in the hopes that the request would trickle up to BOA brass. Another annoying thing about BOA (and perhaps is a reflection on the state of US IT education in general) was the fact that Bank of America never consolidated the account information from all the myriad banks it had acquired into one database system. Logging in to the BOA web site was a multi-step process because first one’s location had to be verified –account numbers in different states had different schema and were never merged. When I moved to California, I would have to argue with tellers that yes, I really did have a Bank of America account even though it had two fewer digits in its account number than they required.

Through it all I’ve stuck with BOA, perhaps because I thought it would be a hassle to switch banks, perhaps because I thought it was cool to have the same account for most of one’s life. But finally BOA has communicated to me in no uncertain terms that they don’t care about my business. They’ve taken all the Versateller accounts (free checking and lack of fees when accessed through ATMs) and have converted them to “MyAccess Checking” accounts or some-such equally meaningless name. This new account type includes a $5.95 monthly service charge. Since I’m in China and don’t get my mail every month, I’d already been charged this offensive fee for a couple of months and didn’t know that my account type has been switched from “free” to “you pay us for borrowing your money” until I called their customer service number. By dropping all free checking accounts, BOA has made it very clear to me that they don’t care about the money of individuals, so I have finally taken my business across the street to Washington Mutual.

WaMu is another big bank, but appear to actually like and respect their customers. The process of filling out the WaMu application for an account took about 5 minutes on their website, If you’re a former Versateller account holders who’s fed up with BOA’s lack of customer focus you might check it out –or if you’re eligible to join any local credit union those tend to be good too.

1. I don’t care if the logo was designed by Saul Bass, it’s still the epitome of corporate blandness [↩]