Author Archives: John

I’m in the Starbucks on the first floor of XinZhongGuan, and there is a girl at another table sitting alone reading a book. Every once in a while she laughs and then says something. My first thought was, “that must be a good book”, but when she started talking more frequently, I started to think […]

Anathem is the first Neal Stephenson book I’ve ever read, but after finishing it I’d like to read more. I think I’ll need to wait at least a month, though, to give me time to digest the ideas presented in Anathem. Narrated by Erasmus, an Avout* living on the planet Arbre, Anathem is an exploration […]

I shared some thoughts about Google in China a while back, and I still feel the same way. Now that the Chinese government is making itself very clear, and it looks like Google is about to make a move, I’d like to express more succinctly what I think (and hope) Google is going to do: […]

Like a lot of people, I’ve been following the storm that Google set off with this blog post, and I wanted to share three thoughts. Before continuing, make sure you’ve read the “Clearing Up Confusion on Google and China” post on the WSJ’s China Realtime Report. I’ll reference some of the stats but won’t review […]

My friend Wiley just released his first iPhone/iPod Touch application, and it’s very cool. China Menu is at its heart an ordering tool to use at Chinese restaurants in China. It has hundreds of popular dishes ordered by cuisine and type, and large Chinese characters to show waiters and waitresses. In addition to the dish […]

Here’s what I think might be happening with the health care debate in the United States. The Obama administration figured out early on that a “public option” and “co-ops” could be, in some ways, quite similar. One way of looking at it is that a good co-op system would be better than a bad public […]

Bob Herbert has the definite analysis and commentary on the Gates-Crowley incident in “Anger Has Its Place“: The very first lesson that should be drawn from the encounter between Mr. Gates and the arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, is that Professor Gates did absolutely nothing wrong. He did not swear at the officer or threaten […]

After activating MMS, the only iPhone 3.0 feature I was missing was tethering. A couple of days ago I was finally able to get it working.(1) Google had sent me to this site a while back, but it didn’t have any profiles for mainland China. After dead ends elswhere, though, I decided to try using […]

After upgrading my iPhone 3G to iPhone OS 3.0, I wanted to try out MMS, but it’s not activated by default on the China Mobile network. Google sent me to these two sites, which provide the answer in Chinese. In case other people are looking for the same info, I thought I’d reproduce the info […]