Shandang Ass Bacon, from Changzhi, Shanxi Province, China. It is preserved donkey meat. 山西世龙食品有限公司 Scan by Don Tai
Returned, she did, and with it some gifts. Bought in Changzhi, Shanxi Province, China, we received 3 packages of Shangdang ass bacon. And no, I am not being crude, as it clearly states, in English, on the package. I believe there is something lost in translation. Ass bacon is the Chinese to English translation, obviously made by a Chinese person in need of further translation experience, of donkey corned meat. Salty, but otherwise tasty.
Chinese input is fun, for the warped mind that I am. Yes, it is exceptionally difficult to learn Chinese, but after that little hurdle, and significant eye strain, it is fun. Chinese input methods on Ubuntu 14.04 is somewhat confusing, as it is very easy to install, both for SunPinyin and Pinyin yet there are bugs. I installed SunPinyin, and when I could not input certain characters, also installed Pinyin. Here are the ones I found, and their fixes.
Air, you really cannot live without it. Literally. Dirty air gets into everything, especially PM2.5 sized. No household air cleaners or air conditioners can get rid of this pollution. I’m sure a house sized hepa filter could do it, but open a door and your air quality would quickly drop. What would life be if you could not go outside?
Anyway, I thought I’d add city air quality readings to my WordPress blog, but I’m only partially satisfied. I actually want 2 cities but can only get one at a time. There are instructions on aqicn.org Air Quality Widget – New Improved Feed
They have not caught on yet, as many Chinese search engines offer no explanation in English of their services, yet their bots are out there crawling all sites on the internet. I am trying to kill as many bots, scrapers, spiders, crawlers, and checkers as possible, and if I don’t find an explanation of what a site does, I’ll ban the user agent from my site. This might seem a little unfair, but I don’t want bots eating my bandwidth, and to have my ISP force me to pay more for hosting, all because they wish to crawl my site.
Unforseen circumstances forced us to get a Chinese visa in a rush, here in Toronto. The experience left us a bit shell shocked, bewildered and traumatized. So that others do not experience the same, I’ll blog our travails.
Google “China visa Toronto” and you’ll get a couple of companies that claim they can do your Chinese visa. They are correct, but might charge you over double the cost. There is really only one way to get a visa for China, through VisaForChina.org and if you have sufficient lead time and follow certain steps you can reduce the amount of trauma you experience.
Not new, global warming, as a topic for conversation. Oh no. But I fear that it may be unfair for First World countries to point the finger at developing countries around the world and tell them to reduce emissions. They have a valid point. Let us look at CO2 emissions per capita instead.
Talk about a huge inequality. Even in the top 10 countries for CO2 emissions per capita, the bottom 2, Poland and the UK, use less than half of the top 4 polluters.
Panasonic SR-TEG10 5 cup Rice Cooker is simple to use, works well and cooks really delicious rice.
We do not like small appliances on our kitchen counter, so it took a lot of convincing for us to want to buy a rice cooker. Rice cookers are large and take up a lot of counter space. This 5 cup rice cooker, the Panasonic SR-TEG10, however, is really easy to use, convenient and cooks excellent rice every time. In a nutshell, this rice cooker is great.
Hate it, I do, when a product fails before I believe it should. I have ranted about such products here before and I stand by my rants. Specifically you see products fail mere months after the warranty has expired, seemingly on queue for you to purchase yet another replacement. The old one goes into the garbage and then landfill, and the environment takes an unnecessary penalty for our stupidity. Clearly this should not be. I purposely buy products that last a long time, if I can, and take measures to ensure they do last.
Moving from Rogers Cable to OTA TV necessitated the purchase of a new digital TV. We chose the 32″ Toshiba 32L1350UC because it was big enough and still able to fit into our existing multimedia cabinet.Overall the TV works remarkably well and is of high quality. There are a couple odd glitches that I have noticed.
I really wanted to get a larger TV, as the 32″ ones looked quite small in the showroom. I measured the distance from our couch to the TV and brought a measuring tape to the showroom. We measured out this distance to the TV. Surprisingly my kids said a 32″ was big enough, and there was no need to spend more money.
