David Feng’s Mac Blog

Yet… China’s not in the list of iTunes Store countries yet, locking me out. Have to get the update “by crook or by hook” (I hope that’s how you say it), because I need the email app and the note app.

Not sure if the new update does copy and paste. The two mobiles I work with (or the one I worked with) — the Sony Ericsson P908 and the current Nokia E62 — all can do copy and paste. Hope Apple ain’t lagging behind!

In the meantime, I do email the old way — webmail. And tweet via m.twitter.com.

Ah. The Web. :-)

…that BeiMac is not, strictly speaking, a Chinese site… less a “mainland Chinese” site. And as much as I’d like to think of it as a “Swiss Mac site” (Swiss precionism at the very least), it’s not Swiss, either.

Some mainland sites look like some of those people rushing through a quick noodle lunch. You can’t expect dainty stuff from these people… and you can’t expect “Web dainty”, so to speak, quality from some mainland sites. It’s often lost in those tiny bits that do or do not matter — the right punctuation, the right spacing, and stuff like that.

So what is BeiMac? It’s a Chinese-language site… but it’s not totally a Chinese site as in fully compliant with “Chinese standards”. We don’t have a guobiao number. We don’t really look like a lot of mainland sites that go image nuts.

We’re just ourselves, actually, and I kind of like it this way.

…and quacks like a duck… simplified or traditional, it’s a duck.

Im Namen Gottes! When can they stop copying each other? This time, it’s SC 0:1 TC… nobody uses「支援」on the mainland… it’s all「支持」…

It sucks really bad that Leopard is delayed (giving potential ammo to the evil MS imperialists), but here’s a good thing: Apple’s QC, sliding since 2001, may be getting a kick in the derriére and start building Swiss quality gear with the Apple logo on top of it again:

Less bugs, better features.
I’d rather have a clean, polished, and bug free OS than one that was rushed out the door so the iPhone could be shipped. Giving Apple more time will allow a more stable release, and who knows, maybe an extra feature or two.

How about an OS that works just out of the box? If the MS imperialists smoke up with any ammo between now and Leopard, a glitch-free Leopard out of the box might kind of startle the imperialists.

They’ll wonder why their illegal, copycat OS came out all screwed up and with about a gadzillion and one bugs all over it.

And why our Leopard is going to be virtually bug-less.

And that’s one huge kick (a la TNT force) in the imperialists’s Hintern.

Excuse the expletives in the title. But I refer to one grey afternoon in early 2006. I was at the Wangfujing Xinhua Bookstore and was applying for their “Consumption Record Card” and their reader club. This being a State-owned enterprise, of course, I got the typical “Chinese Planned Economy” treatment, which meant that:

1. the application form was on this piece of stale, grey A4 paper, obviously done with an MS imperialist application software, and with not a dab of color at all;
2. the card they gave me somehow got itself demagnetized after some time (there’s QC sleeping on the job again!);
3. the worst, of course, was the “welcome letter”: a piece of tattered, super-thin A4 that looked like it underwent quite a beating on the printing press.

That was all.

I felt insulted. I was being treated like bull$*&^. So I made an internal declaration: DO NOT TREAT OUR BEIMAC PEOPLE LIKE BULL$*&^.

BeiMac members may receive their welcome letters late — hang in there, guys, we’re doing all we can to fix this. But for the lucky masses that apply at a meeting, they get:

1. an application form that would even make government application forms from Taiwan, Switzerland or the UK kind of faint in comparison (I checked out the Taiwanese ID form out once — I swear they could have done a better job). On the form, the areas you have to fill out are marked in RED, and the optional bobs are in BLUE. Nice and easy;
2. a membership envelope in full color, along with 4 sheets of A4 in full color, greetings from me and our eternally beloved Secretary Ketty Gao (you’ve done a great job with the group), and a look at BeiMac bureaus in and outside China; two pages of the BeiMac world in full color; an excerpt of the user group constitution; and vendor deals, ALL IN COLOR;
3. a password envelope in red and white, along with the password;
4. your membership card.

WE DO NOT TREAT OUR MEMBERS LIKE BULL$*&^T MARK MY WORDS. I mean, seriously, after comparing what we do with what the guys at the Wangfujing bookshop do, I give the floor to a quote from my beloved chemistry teacher Mr. Marchetti:

“You should be shot (although you recently were flogged)!”

Adium is known to the Chinese Pingmin as the Yazi or the Duck (鴨子). When your Yazi isn’t having a good day, however, you get to see this triste little picture:

Fitting, obviously, for Beijing — home of Peking Duck!

You’re heading for Tsuanjude next, Adium!

MacCenter Russia looks south into China. I know zero-dot-one Russian (a bit, thus not the moniker “zero Russian”), but it’s good to see more and more folks focus into the People’s Republic of Macs. ;-)

Shawn King of Your Mac Life: “We’re not happy about the name change. They’ve know about us and the similarity of the names is too close for comfort,” said Shawn King, the show’s host and executive producer. “We are consulting lawyers as to what our next move will be.”

Uhh… yeahh… so MacAddict is renaming itself Mac Life and Shawn gets upset because it gets too close to Your Mac Life. Right?

Actually, Shawn would do a great deal in conceding in this. To be outrageously outright frank, Shawn could really “suck it up” and face the fact that if he wanted to sue Mac Life-to-be now, he could have sued (and could still sue) two (now one) Mac Life mags…

There used to be a Mac Life in the UK. There is still Mac Life Germany — kicking… (last time I checked). (I haven’t been back to Europe since 2004, so I may be totally, totally wrong on this…)

Also, it’s pretty horrible to see our Mac compatriots in a battle — when even Apple is out of the game. Apple initiated the iPod/Pod revolution, but now it wants to legally reclaim the Pod — pretty counter-revolutionary. Now Apple isn’t even in this Mac Life battle, and yet Mac users themselves get upset?

Hey, don’t forget that the Redmond vampire empire isn’t done with yet. Big Bro Bill and Bouncing Ballmer (I can’t forget him bouncing in that 2001 movie) could still target us any day (the market share stats so-called tell the tale.) With the MS imperialists threatening us, I wonder why we’re not really that united. We should be… even with the iPod leading the way, anything could still happen to us (we don’t need to kid ourselves too much).

My iTunes playlists will appear a little different beginning October 1, 2006. In the interests of — essentially — feeding artists I like, I’ll start running a thorough check as of October 1: if the song is “pirated” (that is, if it didn’t come from a CD I personally have), it probably won’t make it to a playlist that was created on or after October 1.

This goes for all mandarin Chinese songs. It’ll apply for all “international” songs by February 28, 2007. For the playlist I’m listening to now, there’s only one song that’s off the Web — a song from m-flo. (Too bad iTunes isn’t open to mainland Chinese cardholders — that way, the list would be fully “legalized”.)

It ain’t much, but for a nation that’s immersed in downloading music for free off the Internet (and not feeding its artists), it’s a little something…

Look at the bottommost line… looks a little Eastern European, maybe…? I’m at a loss… what language is this? It looks Polish to me, but could just as well as be one of those languages used in the Balkans. I do know, however, that it is by no means Russian.

On a normal Mac, the bottom line would be in Japanese. Yet this one must be Eastern European…