Technology made in China

Technology in University

Technology in (Super) Market

Technology at home

Technology in snow town Bejing

Technology in University

Notebooks and busy professionals everywhere

Service orientation - University employees playing card games

If you are going into University ten guys with (new) notebooks are sitting in a line behind a desk and awaiting students. But, everybody has a different kind of software installed, so if there are waiting 10 guys in front of one employee, the others do not help him, they use their notebooks to play card games. This is difficult to photograph, because you are on the other side of the table, but I made a nice picture from the guy printing the student cards (I am wondering – does anybody know why he had a normal PC instead of a notebook?): In the 20 seconds the card needed to be printed he switched to his card game, absolutely not caring that the guys waiting are watching him. Probably he was sitting behind a notebook in his previous job…

Technology in (Super) Market

Yes, everything is made in China – especially technology related products. And, as I already wrote in the last entry, in Wal-Mart (the big super market with three floors) you can buy everything. Short comparison to Austria: Austrian Cosmos or Media Markt is one department in Wal-Mart. In this week I bought a new headset there, and 3 days later, one side of the headset was out of order and not spending sound in our (compared) silent environment at home. So it was cheap for us – even it was the second most expensive one. The result of such a “cheap buy”: I will have to complain in perfect Chinese language, otherwise they will not understand…

But Wal-Mart is just the easy way to get (not working?) technology articles. We got out later – the Chinese way is to go into the 4 or 5 floor technology shopping center at the opposite street side. In every floor are small “shops” consisting of one or two tables with showcases, sometimes a shelf – and always at least two sellers. If you just pass by (as I said – you are a specialty as non Chinese) the intrusive sellers try to sell their newest technologies with “Hello sir! Good price!”. Then you can differentiate sellers between just 5 sentence English speakers and Chinese-only speakers, but both groups don’t see a language barrier and continue to persuade by talking, talking, talking and offering you a double price than normal of the products…

Technology at home

Notebook lecture in our living room

For everybody who needs some technology lecture – today I got one in our living room. The support guy from Dell came to repair my notebook: Power-supply was a bit damaged, hard drive had bad sectors, DVD was not working all the time and the display panel had pixel defects / white lights.

There is only one problem – the power supply I got is made for China. I contacted the Chinese support, so I have to accept it… The technician gave the advice to use an adapter when I am back in Europe…

As you may see on the picture – I really was frightened if the technician would be able to assembly the parts again to a working notebook. But – I write this post, so it is working again!!

And our network is still working – the junction point of network is hanging out of the wall and IP has to be chosen by yourself, but if you don’t move the cable you have a 50% better packet loss ratio…

Technology in snow town Bejing

Technology for snow weather in Peking

In Austria we have a big snow problem for a few days. Peking has the opposite problem – its very seldom that they have snow. If the Chinese government to not concur with the weather gods opinion, a keen governmental department – the so called “weather modification center” (D: Wettermodifizierungszentrum) gets on duty to produce whatever the weather the government wants to have technologically: Some days ago 28 weather rockets fired more than 500 cigarette packet sized Silver iodine (D: Silberjod) into the cloud cover (D: Wolkendecke) to produce snow as a answer to the continuing dryness. These human weather gods also modified the weather in 2008 to avoid rain during the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.

Imagine, in future we have problems in Austria with global warming and smog because of to much energy consumption and wasting, because of too much cars without catalyst pulling out tons of carbon dioxide etc. – such a weather modification center might rescue Austria and help to get back the German tourists for skiing…

Sources: Chinas Macht über das Wetter, Künstliches Schneegestöber über Peking