About China blogosphere, travel, and entrepreneurship

We had an internal contest on “Planning Your Chinese New Year” in Kango before Chinese New Year - we want to share with the US team that how Chinese people celebrate this annual holiday. One of my colleague Xu from Hubei said he was going to visit a Temple Fair (庙会，miàohuì) and I was very exciting about it since I’ve never been to a temple fair so asked for some images. Here are some great ones Xu shared with me.

Can you tell how many red lantern in this super lantern?

Another challenge of counting how many lantern are hanging on the tree!

年年有余（鱼）: Have fish （saving）evey year!

Hope to give you a sense of what the people like in China in a temple fair.

I don’t have an idea about of what’s the yellow stuff? Xu, can you tell us?

Temple fair is a traditional CNY event with long history. Today, it is a market fair that people can see Chinese New year decoration, buy stuff, eat local snacks and also see traditional folk performance. It is also an opportunity to feel the happiness of Chinese New Year from the crowds. Meg went to a temple fair in Beijing this Chinese New Year, check out her Baiyunguan Temple Fair trip.

Those fine thin lines. Telling us where to wait while the guy in front gets served. Telling you what not to do lest you risk undesired consequences. Fine thin lines are part of everyday life in both the West and in China — and a quick comparison between the two is always something of interest.

The West: A Line is Always a Line

In the West, a line is always a line. In particular, the Swiss have taken it to perfected extremes; the Swiss are amongst the most law-abiding people I’ve ever seen. The average Swiss (by that I mean someone in his or her 30s or older) obeys all rules, never honks when not allowed to do so, waits in line, and pays his or her taxes on time. The Law is seen as something that is always present, always in force, and never to be toyed around with.

In probably what is the most extreme example I’ve experienced, I sent a letter to the US (this was back in 1999) with just CHF 1.40 of stamps (they needed CNY 1.60). The letter was forwarded to the US, but I got a reminder (a kind one at that) from the Post Office that I needed to stick in a CHF 0.20 stamp to repay the bits I didn’t pay before.

CHF 0.20 isn’t much — it’ll only get you ketchup at the local McDonald’s. Yet there I was, obediently sticking in a CHF 0.20 stamp — and sending the reminder back to the Post Office.

China: The Line is a Line, But…

In China, a line is a line, but — you see, I use the word but. The “but” factor is big in China. If there’s an exception, that exception will nearly always be used.

China does have a Constitution, which is regularly (but also healthily) updated, and its collection of laws is impressive, to say the least. Yet those fine thin lines are less visible to a Chinese. As a result, you get the “grey factor”: violations that aren’t grave, but are nonetheless troublesome — as they’re illegal. Did that taxi driver stop on (not in front of) a pedestrian crossing? The lady walks across the street, undeterred; nobody complains.

Yet the taxi driver did make a mistake. It’s just that it’s not too big. Nobody really notices. And that’s the odd thing in China: unless something is really big, nobody really cares.

Cuntrasts

I’m using the Rhaeto-Rumansh word for “contrasts” because of what you’re about to see below. You’d expect relatively more chaotic China to be a hotbed of flagrant violations of this or that rule or law. In fact, quite a number of people are keeping bus lanes the way they are — for buses only. A CNY 200 fine might be the deterrence here, but increasingly, more and more Chinese drivers are of the opinion that the traffic code is no longer written on toilet paper, and so are leaving the lanes for buses to use. (A few “special cars”, though — mainly those with folks “in power” — still dot the lanes from time to time…)

Something we’d like to see more: bus lanes that actually serve their real purpose…

Compare this with what seems to be shoufa Switzerland (shoufa (守法) being Chinese for “law-abiding” — I had to get the S’s right).

The Swiss… crossing the line, too…

You see that Beemer obviously flirting with that “verboten” (forbidden) hard shoulder. This is rare in Switzerland, where even littering can get you yelled at. Yet when I was in Switzerland late last year, I found a German car speeding past me at what must have been 170 km/h.

Which reminds us that even in a supposedly all-legal society, we still have those people not playing by the rules…

After reading Scoble’s take and Ethan Zuckerman’s post on BIL (the emergent, self-organizing, and anarchic companion conference to TED), I was motivated to register myself, Min Guo, and natural language processing scientist Boris Galitsky (who also works for Kango) for the conference. Boris will likely give a talk about machine understanding of feelings and sentiment, which is what we are doing at Kango.

Here is the speakers at this moment (full speakers list on the wiki):

• Open source-style security for the physical world - Christine Peterson
• The Genocide of the Curious Mind - Martin Codrington
• Millicomputing: The Coolest CPUs and the Flashiest Storage - Adrian Cockcroft
• Advancement of the TED Prize - Bill Erickson
• Brainstorming A Vision - Tyler Emerson
• How to Be a Successful Heretic - Aubrey de Grey
• An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything - A Garrett Lisi
• Hacking the Human Fantastic - Todd Huffman
• Short Film Fest - Aileen Mapes
• Photography for Everyman - Jason Youn
• Coworking to Coliving - Digital Utopia - Cody Marx Bailey & Bill Erickson
• Darknets - fascist gated associations, or intentional community - Baron RK Von Wolfsheild, CSA, CTO. Qtask, Inc.
• Always the Next Human - Quinn Norton
• Motivation Psychology. Learning Optimism. - Kai Chang
• The BIL Social Graph Experiment - Nikhil Nilakantan
• Social Bonding - Jonathan Sheffi and Lexi Bright
• Growing Up Gifted: The State of the Art of Raising Brilliant Minds - KV Fitzpatrick
• The Rise of the Machines and the End of Transit - Brad Templeton
• Stem Cells- Everything You Wanted To Know But Were Afraid to Ask - Daniel Kraft
• Breathing and Other of Life’s Little Secrets - Ilsa Bartlett
• Telephone Pictionary and the Future of Computational Semantics - Rion Snow
• Why Virtual Worlds are Good for the Soul - Lisa Galarneau

My thought is to quasi-live-blog the conference onto CN Reviews and then David Feng and our other CN Reviews readers can comment on the potential implications to China (of which I am certainly not an expert).  For example:

• Genocide of the Curious Mind - How can you better cultivate curiosity and innovation among Chinese employees and companies?
• Millicomputing - What types of extremely small computing devices are most relevant to China?
• Darknets - private networks and individual freedom.  Any potential for increased freedom of thought and speech in protected private networks?  How could this also be negative?
• End of Transit - what advances in transit technology could be applied to China in the future
• Why Virtual Worlds are Good for the Soul? - are all those high school educated, male, internet bar users playing MMORPGs doing anything socially or personally redeeming?

Go to the schedule and see if there is something you would like us to report on.

What should we make sure we attend?  What questions are worth asking?

Has the Internet become the misinformation superhighway?

This morning, I woke up all happy, knowing that the Airport North Freeway now has ETC capabilities. I’ve the gear in the car: all I’ll need to do is to zip through the ETC toll gate lane, and get from A to B without stopping — even through those toll gates. Furthermore, by taking the Airport North (as I call it), I avoid the jams on the main Airport Freeway.

Well, too good to be true — apparently. The Internet report claiming that ETC systems were all clear on the Jingcheng, Jingkai and Airport North Freeways, as well as on the 6th Ring Road (which all, by the way, charge you dearly for every mile you make) is fake (at least bits and bobs are). There are still ETC-unfriendly toll gates on the Jingcheng Freeway heading to Shunyi, Miyun and Chengde (the exit which is supposed to take you to the Shunyi Olympic Rowing-Canoeing Park still has an ETC gate out of action), I’ve never seen ETC on the 6th Ring Road, and the Airport North Freeway’s ETC plots are getting nowhere.

Your faithful evening newspaper… sometimes with fake news…

I’ve fallen victim into being gullible enough to believe just a trickle of the reported rubbish. Some folks reporting the news are just waiting to get hate mail from their readers… (or they’re probably lazy enough to not tell truth from fiction). Here’s the stuff I read, believed, and fell victim to:

• September 28, 2004: they said the Jingcheng Freeway from the 3rd to the 4th Ring Road was reality. Was not.

• Much of 2007: we were indoctrinated with the fact that the Mozart Line, Subway Line 5, would open on September 20, 2007. Not the case.

• January 2008: they said they’d redo Gucheng Station so that it’s a single central platform — no longer two side platforms. Guess what: no way Jose.

Some news end up being copied verbatim. Let’s hope they’re all real!

Here are some I did not fall for…

• The Airport Freeway is supposed to start at Sanyuanqiao to the east and end up at Capital Airport in the west. Redo your geo lessons, mate!

• And finally… Line 1 is supposed to be blue, and Line 2 of the Subway system, red. That’ll make them laowais get really confused!

Someone keep an eye out on those reporters — they come with notebooks, microphones and cameras, but sometimes come without — proper analysis.

Which is pretty sad — did they not say that the media here is supposed to serve the people?…

Yours truly is making headlines these days. OK, the People’s Daily has still not carried a big pic of David Feng as of late — but the generation your co-blogger belongs to — that of the 80s (80 后) — is making all those shockwaves on the Chinese mass media.

Those 80s folks (read: not folks in their 80s as in age!) are big in terms of money — in the case of the PRC, more like “Maobacks” than “greenbacks”. For many a Chinese in love, their idea partner must know how to deal with the cash (more often than not, the lady has the last say). (This is not the case with yours truly — a firm believer in the absolute 50%/50% rule and economic freedom — but then again he’s with someone already…)

Here’s a breakthrough of what the “generalized masses” are doing in terms of money:

Late 70s and Early 80s: Saving Up

Born when China was shaking its way out from the Cultural Revolution, and nurtured at an age when marriage of a Chinese citizen to a foreigner had to obtain superior government approval to marry, those born in the early 80s are much like their late 70s counterparts in the sense that they tend to save up quite a bit more than those born even a few years later.

Those in the early 80s tend to spend their money wisely. They may wish to save up for some big house, car or speedboat (if they’ve the cash, that is). Most folks in this age ground are already somewhat successful in their biz endeavours, have had quite a bit of cash to keep things going, and are able to make ends meet with the least bit of pain.

Folks in this age group probably have little to worry about. They know how hard it is to make money (legally), and they’re not one to spend whenever the spirit moves them.

Mid to Late 80s: The Yueguang People

And then there are those people who spend like mad.

When I went with someone who is probably better known as “niu-bi” (from New York), we got squashed into the subway by folks more our (as in David Feng’s) age — quite literally. The masses alighted at Wangfujing for their regular Sunday shopping spree. It was a dead giveaway: these were the folks born in the mid to late 1980s. For them, spending cash is something programmed into many a brain — as in ROM.

Those who can make it to Wangfujing actually earn quite a bit more than their somewhat less-than-rich variant (or trendier variant), who get off the train at Xidan. Pop into either two shopping meccas on a typical Beijing Sunday, and you’ll see a sea of young folks (many with a redwood-in-height guy or drop-dead gorgeous gal) shopping until they can take it no more.

Those folks are so into shopping that they spend pretty much their entire month’s allowance or income. At the end of the month, they’re out of cash. These folks make up the yueguang (月光) phenomenon: at the end of the month (月), they’re out of fluid stuff (光), hence making that phrase known as yueguang.

Yueguang is officially frowned upon by yours truly, by the way, but this official policy is easily relegated to the trashcan thanks to microphone mania, something that happens every so often.

Economics with David Feng Characteristics

And then there’s yours truly. A hybrid product of the period when 5 fen bus rides, rice ratio tickets, FECs and planned economy receipts were disappearing, and of the Swiss world of buying gold at your bank (the real stuff!), losing everything to the damned dot-coms (not that damned, actually), and having accounts in yuan, yen, Swiss francs, and all-those-currencies, here’s what I’d like to call Economics with David Feng Characteristics.

Back in the year 2002, David Feng started a massively failed attempt at bringing back (at least on a personal level) the era of the planned economy. In place were rations — a maximum of CNY 30 for the subway would be an example every month. The idea: you’d split your income (or pocket money) into all kinds of different rations (the food ratio, the subway ride ration, and all that kind of stuff). To make things faster, they’d all be stored in bank account cards. Neat idea.

The thing collapsed nearly on the spot. The immediate victim: David’s purse, now chock-full of plastic cards with one digit before the decimal point. Meanwhile, the rations remained in essence nonexistent. A grand plan — bust, right on day one.

In more recent years, though, David’s been steadily moving away from the personally-loathed yueguang masses to one of salting away cash for a rainy day — in the form of non-Renminbi savings. The Aussie dollar yields the most in terms of interest, so many a Renminbi is converted into Hong Kong dollars, and then reconverted into Australian dollars. Additionally, David’s thinking of going back to gold — the price of gold can only go up…

Finally, to keep the whole system from collapsing, David’s doing more paid jobs and has enough to keep going from one month to the other with plenty of cash to go around. Keeping reserve cash helps (especially when it comes to paying those all-too-high freeway bills), as does buying local brands, and constraining those “just-for-the-heck-of-it” spending sprees.

A mix of those different 80s folks? Nope, we’d like to call this Econ with David Feng Characteristics. It is, after all, not the personal finance methods practised by the average local.

I emailed Livid before our CN Reviews Livid interview post about him was up. V2EX was an online community that Livid started based on his open source project, Project Babel. Because of the freedom of expression of V2EX members, it was unplugged by regulatory authorities and was later blocked at the keyword level by the Great Firewall.

He told us something about V2EX that was totally unexpected. He said:

“Most things will eventually be turned into memory. So I’ve decided to shut down V2EX.com within 24 hours. I wrote down some of my thoughts on: http://www.livid.cn/doc_view.php?doc_id=5731“.

Then I checked the V2EX site using a proxy server just now and it says only 4 letters “ciao” on the big white screen, as said in the post <消失的未来> (Fading Future) he mentioned. It is a sad news.

Here is my translation to his post. I didn’t do it in word-to-word, but tried to keep the original ideas.

V2EX.com was a website with black color background to originally designed to present my personal stuff. But all the applications I developed (including an RSS aggregator lividot and a dictionary lividict) disappeared in the unplugging “accident” in early 2007.

Maybe I can tell you the exact reason why I built a site like V2EX two years’ ago. To prove something? But I can’t tell the reason now.

I don’t want to use the word “to get hurt” to describe what we have experienced. Maybe this is the best, no better way out. My thoughts have changed a lot in the past two years.

I think I spent too long hours before my computer, and I don’t think this is a good thing, for many reasons.

I believe there are a lot of people who spend at least one hour a day on Google Reader or reading blogs for a variety of complicated reasons. Is “being bored” one of the reasons?

Why can’t we spend more time on tangible things? Why can’t we spend more time to travel or to love a real person? Why must we spend more than 8 hours sitting before a computer? When is the last time the skin of your feet touch the sand on a beach or earth? Is that true the green in your eyes are only the trees along the roads in cities? Is Twitter a must have in our life?

I want to focus on what I really care about, and those are not only limited to the scope of the Web, such as douban and facebook. All these tools are trying to bring to the digital realm the realness and beauty in our life. But then some of us, even all, will consider the digital form as the backdrop of our world but not part of the world. Why?

Chinese abstraction from his blog:

最早 V2EX.com 只是一个有黑色背景的用 ColdFusion 做的陈列我的一些作品的网站. 那些作品已经悉数消失于 07 年初的拔线事件. 包括一个 RSS 聚合器 lividot 和一个词典 lividict.

或许 2 年前我会很明确地说出自己做一个像 V2EX.com 这样的网站的原因, 为了证明一些什么东西? 而现在我说不出任何明确的理由.

我不想用 [ 受到伤害 ] 这样的字眼来形容我们所有人在这个过程中所经历和体会到的. 或许, 青春本来就应该是这样的. 全无更好的出路.

2 年了, 我的很多想法改变了.

我觉得自己在电脑前坐的时间太长了. 我想, 这并不是一件十分好的事情. 原因很多.

我相信这里或许有很多人每天实际上都花超过 1 个小时甚至更多的时间在 Google Reader 或者别人的博客上, 这么做的原因很复杂, 不知道其中是否有任何 [ 无聊 ] 的因素?

…

为什么我们不能将更多的时间用于旅游, 用于去爱一个真实的人, 用于接触这个世界的更多角落呢? 为什么我们一定要这么每天在电脑面前坐超过 8 个小时呢? 你的双脚的皮肤有多长时间没有接触过泥土和沙滩了? 你眼中能看到的绿色是否只是城市里的行道树? 难道我们听的音乐只能是从 iPod 耳机中流出的而不是亲自坐在演奏者面前? Twitter 对于生活难道是必要的么?

我想关注那些我真正想关注的, 而关注之物的选择范围不应该只是从 www. 如豆瓣和 Facebook 这样的东西在试图把我们生活中一切真实的, 美好的东西都映射为电子化的存在形式, 然后我们中的一些甚至全部人则把这样的映射当作了世界的背面而不是部分. 为何如此呢?

…

 

Even though I only met Livid once, I feel sad about it, especially surmising the reason why he shut the community down from the post above. As our commentor Charles mentioned, Livid is working on another project, footbig. I wish him good luck!

I want to reponse to Livid’s questions in his post:

1. I spend long hours at the computer because: a. I need information for decision making, for fun, for education and just for no reason; b. I need it for my work at Kango;
2. I read blogs because I am seeking the wisdom of both the crowds and the leaders.
3. I want to spend more time travel too; but I have many friends who simply HATE to travel. Does everyone have to want to travel, Livid?

What do you think, CN Reviews readers?

We’ll get back to the “regular” Mind the Gap articles next Wednesday (I can hear the moans, I know…), but this Wednesday, I’d like to remain a traveller, and get local… or, eh, domestic, rather. I recently (well, actually, just today) went on a trip to the “other” metropolis in the making — Tianjin, about 100 kilometers southeast of Beijing.

I tell you, ladies and gents, there’s quite a big gap between internationalized Beijing and still-internationalizing Tianjin. If you thought that Beijing was Western Capital-ist already (and nearby Tianjin, itself just a hundred magnetic kilometers away from the capital, is just as Westernized), well…

The first thing I noticed was that Tianjin was getting more and more — American. Those of you given to zipping away on your Interstate freeways probably recognize the font right away. The CBDOK, so Tianjin must be a city. And how do you define cities? At the kiddie level, a city must have “tall buildings”. The more, the merrier.

Here’s how the capital turns out in terms of stratospheric structures:

Here’s the Tianjin variant: OK — remember, when I first visited Tianjin back in May 2004, I saw a misty, somewhat spooky, and a little broken-down city back then. Just about a hundred miles from the capital, and I see that kind of stuff — you know, somehow, it makes me quite frown-ish. I was thinking, hey, this is Tianjin: it’s supposed to build stuff just as good as Beijing. They’re both municipalities. They’ve got the land. Tianjin’s even got the sea right next to it. Tianjin has to do better than that!Tianjin did do better — cranes in Tianjin are about to surpass those in the capital in terms of the sheer quantity.

Ah, but Beijing has the central part of the CBD still — unbuilt. Want to play catch-up, Tianjin? Beijing’s still thinking… of building better, and bigger, buildings…

And yes, at that, more and more jams…

The Subway

Having being stuck in horrible jams since Time Immortal, yours truly is now a devoted subway convert (and that’s the case more and more with Mozart in the subway these days — or did they remove it?).

The first thing I notice was just how similar Tianjin subway stations look to the Beijing counterparts. All cubes. The Tianjin one is, in fact, a glass cube through and through (given that, did Beijing play catch-up when it opened its “glass cube” entrance at Dongsishitiao recently?).

Meantime, the Beijing variant is still cube-ish, but not all glass: Once you’re inside, however, Tianjin seems to lose out. Here’s the standard set by your big bro — the nation’s capital: Tianjin’s reduced to just about this: I say reduced because two things were massively reduced: peace and quiet (they kept on playing some really annoying cartoons; when Tom and Jerry debuted on Line 5 in Beijing some time ago, they at least were a bit more quiet), and the platform screen doors (it’s only half and half — I have a tendency to absolutely abhor “half and half” things).Copied Names

Tianjin should be sued whole.

Either that, or I’m seeing Beijing names in Tianjin itself. Take, for example, Fuxingmen Subway Station. Both of these stations are on Line 1 in both cities!

Beijing’s variant is this:

In Beijing, Fuxingmen is an underground-only matter. It’s old, it’s got a central platform, it’s a bit dark at times, but it’s an interchange for Lines 1 and 2.The Tianjin version of Fuxingmen station looks like this:

Believe it or not, it’s above ground, new, looks like a Beijing Subway Batong Line station, and is — new (I think I just said “new” two seconds ago). And nope, no interchange facilities here.Scarier is the fact that you are reminded that this is a blatant rip-off of the Beijing Subway, station name wise, by the station signage:

OK — now out of the Subway, and back on the roads. It seems like the capital has indoctrinated the Heavenly Ford (that’s what “tianjin” (天津) really means in Chinese): we have Yuquan Road, too: Traffic LightsHaving being puzzled by Tianjin through and through (the roads were the worst: virtually nothing lies exactly due north, east, south, west, and stuff like that, unlike the capital’s grid), I looked for my escape outside this metropolitan madhouse.

That’s where the traffic lights got me. They’ve a “combo” traffic light system where they have only one centralized traffic light — but it’s one where the arrow changes colors. If you don’t look and are used to seeing the green in the rightmost part of the traffic light, you’re in big trouble:

At the end of the day, I made it out of Tianjin alive. When I saw the Beijing lights again, I knew that I had survived to live to another day in one piece…

UPDATE: We emailed Livid after posting this interview, and he shared with us the sad news that Livid is shutting down V2EX.  We posted on his announcement here.

One must be a great person to be able to develop a good skill (on something).

-Livid, Jan. 5, 2008 @ Chamate Jing An Temple

We met Livid Torvalds (Liu Xin, 刘昕) for the first time this January. He has blogged on his personal site Livid’s Paranoia since 2005. I picked up the number on his blog as on Feb. 2, 2008. The blog had been viewed for “3,388,186 (# of estimated site page view) +3,067,590 (# of estimated RSS aggregator view) times, average 3727.38 times per article” and he posts “5.68 new articles per week” on average. This is an amazing number for an independent site without Google Adwords. Livid is also famous for his community project called “V-the-number-two-E-X” (which according to Livid is now blocked at the keyword level with the Great Firewall (aka Net Nanny on Danwei). We will call it “the V project” in this interview.

Livid seemed to be very familiar with the tea house Chamate where we met. He ordered a drink without looking at the menu. He surfed Internet on his unlocked iPhone (one of 400,000 iPhones in China) and showed a webpage of his project’s Community Guideline to us. He speaks English very fluently.

Here is a summary of the conversation between Livid & CNReviews (Elliott Ng and Min Guo).

CN Reviews: What are you busy at recently? I noticed that you are working for 6.cn from your facebook profile.
Livid: (giving us his name card) Can you tell what’s the special about this business card? (We couldn’t figure it out) There is no title in this business card! I am still “free” while working within this company. I met the CEO also in Chamate, I respect him and want to work with a great person like him.

CN Reviews: We know you from “the V project”, Wang Jian Shuo mentioned it a few times on his blog. What does it mean?
Livid: It has two meanings: 1. Way to Explore. 2. Way to Extreme. (V = way)
Way to explore: I found there is no place to go in the Chinese Internet world. Why? For example, if you go to the major (main stream) portals/websites, you will see most of those contents are trying to appeal to human being’s lowest part. These are not something I want to explore. The V project is for people who want to explore other things.

To keep up our curiosity, we have to keep exploring the new things. This is part of our human condition, a part of human evolution. I believe that all things are to be born and then to fade away soon. We have a deep urge to keep exploring.

CN Reviews: Is this like Digg?
Livid: No. Digg is just about what is popular, and mostly about technology. I think this “Way to Explore” is more like Wikipedia. Wikipedia is an ideal way to explore and organize new knowledge, things and ideas. I want to create a space for people to keep exploring via discussion and sharing.

Author Note: There is an interesting difference in Western views of Wikipedia vs. Chinese views. To Livid, Wikipedia represents freedom to explore…a project that shares knowledge via the community. In the West, Wikipedia just represents knowledge and has less of a feeling of exploration.

CN Reviews: What do you mean by “Way to [be] Extreme”?
Livid: Way to Extreme: I like the style to push things to the end, to its extremeness. Only by this means, I feel satisfied and happy. I took this term from “Extreme Sports” and “Extreme Programming.”

CN Reviews: When did you start the V project?
Livid:
- 2005/10: It was started as an internal project of kijiji.cn and I was responsible to build an open source platform.
- 2006/03: It was official launched as “Project Babel”. People can download the open source code that the V project is based on to build their own communities. So far, there are around 1,000 “Project Babel” on the Internet. For me, year 2006 is a year of happiness and pureness.(for focusing on programming and helping more people to use the source code).
- 2007/01: It was blocked for the first time.
- 2007/02: A few VCs approached me to talk about this project
- 2007/05 - 07: Some new features introduced: group blogs, built-in “Creative Commons” license to 9 original templates; Gtalk status update widget.
- 2007/09: It was blocked for the second time.
- Now: It is a keyword in the list of GFW.

CN Reviews: Tell us more about why it was blocked?
Livid: A journalist from Life Weekly (三联生活周刊, a magazine found in 1920s) magazine interviewed me in Dec. 2006. A few days after the story was published in the first issue of 2007, on Jan. 11 2007, the net wires connected to the servers were ordered to be unplugged (Livid’s notes in Chinese here) and all the data were not accessible.

CN Reviews: Why?
Livid: It was because of the report. I didn’t go to college and dropped out of high school, but I was able to learn to program, build a community and develop an open source project all by myself without going to college. The “related authority” thought my website was distributing ideas that would create doubts on the current education system. More and more people raising a question like “should I go to college” is not what this authority would want to see.

CN Reviews: Who are the community’s members in your site?
Livid: Mostly students who 1) feel that they don’t know where to go (in Internet) and 2) want to build communities by themselves; 3) who are not Lusers.(Wikipedia: a painfully annoying, stupid, or irritating computer user. ) They want a community of Truth, Love and Realness (v.s. Rumor, Hatred and Fake). Can you believe that a super popular internet game recently launched is “successful” because its rule is to “kill more people to create more hatred to game up”? For example, the ranking of a kingdom is calculated by the number of victories in wars, and the murderer/killer is rewarded with double points whenever she/he killes a person. Of course, you can through in CASHES to buy your weapons and status. This is not the place my community members want to go.

CN Reviews: What are the most popular topics in the communities?
Livid: Whether of not to drop off school, or go to college.

CN Reviews: How would you describe the V project in the Internet world in China?
Livid: A small mirror of China Internet.

Author Notes:
The ONE hour conversation with Livid was too short for us. We see Livid as a small mirror of Chinese new generation bloggers and want to understand him as a “Post 80s” (80后, bā líng hòu) Chinese geek via the first big project he started. Of course, Livid bears many other tags, such as “single child”, “drop out”, “freelance” “creative” and even “mac”.

He feels disappointed that there is no way to access more knowledge. Wikipedia is great, but it is not accessible now. He believes that a person must to be a GOOD person in order to master a skill. I know there are exceptions but I lean towards to agree with him, or I wish what he believes is true.

“More than one-fifth of the world’s population is children of the 80s, The post-80s generation of China has alternately been dismissed as emotional and self-centered, or lauded as passionate and creative.” CRI said. I don’t want to and don’t know how to categorize Livid, yet. I sincerely wish Livid find more happiness and satisfaction in his new projects.

Apendix:

Profile of Livid

Name: Liu Xin 刘昕
ID Used: Livid Torvalds | Lividecay | Castalia
DOB: May 31st, 1985
Home Town: China -> Yunnan -> Kunming
Music: Opeth | Lacrimosa | Rhapsody | The Doors | Nirvana | Smashing Pumpkins | Suede | Lube | Beatles | Dido
OS: Mac OS X
Language: Mandarin | English | Deutsch
Drinks: Starbucks Natie
Hobbies: Literature, painting, programming and 读秒
High school: Kunming No. 3 High School, Middle Schools of Yunnan Normal University
Wish: Get yself satisfied everyday
Spiritual Leader: Myself

I remember those days of the 1980s. Were it not for its size — tiny at just a single terminal and about 14 docks — visitors to the capital of the PRC would still be served by what used to be a white-and-green Terminal 1, which used to handle all flights, domestic and international. The terminal is still there, but has been redone so that it now looks grey, and is used only by two airlines running domestic-only services.

Then, 1999 came — this time, the airport grew by leaps and bounds (OK, by quite a bit). A new Terminal 2 came in with more gates than Terminal 1 could possibly think of, and the architecture inside the new terminal was so good, it looked like CDG. All they were missing is that Indicatif Roissy, which used to be the SMS alert for your aeronautically cheerful blogger’s mobile phone.

On a late Beijingology photo shooting spree, I headed today for Shunyi and Huairou. On the trip back, I used a side highway next to what’s pretty much now Terminal 3. The first thing that caught my eyes was a signpost for the “2nd Airport Freeway” (they could have easily renamed this one the “Airport East Freeway”). That was it. I noticed that cars were turning right into this new aerial megalopolis in the making.

The temptation was too much. I turned right, drove ahead, and saw this:

  Ladies and gents, I kid you not: the airport at first looked like a mix between SFO and the bridges connecting the roundabout road with Terminal 1 at Beijing Airport. Until now, my glimpses of the airport’s newest terminal were strictly bird’s-eye-view-only.This was too different. Dedicated taxi lanes, bilingual signage, onramps to the freeway… I had a feeling that the guy that slipped in that automatic keyboard backlighting feature on the PowerBook G4 did this. To Swiss eyes, this looked pretty much it.

The other thing that got me interested was the vast array of roads in the new terminal. It looked like some kind of new town sprung up right next to the new building. Contrast that with the terminal-only Terminals 1 and 2 (pardon the pun) — it’s either straight up, straight down, or back to the freeway. This one gave me a feeling that it connected to a nearby towns or something.

And connect to a nearby towns it, in fact, did — not far from Terminal 3 were Gangshan and Tianzhu towns. Oh sure, traffic in these towns were ghastly, but they were never built as places to let the bulk of traffic through!

That’s just the outside. In two weeks, it’s the inside — but in a very different way… By the way, Terminal 3 opens on February 29, 2008. Six airlines, including British Airways, will move in; Air China is to follow in March 2008.

“That hair.”

Some guy with obviously too long (for David Feng, at least) hair decided to rock to some tune on his MP3 player (which, sad to say to many a Mac revolutionary, is not an iPod). Clicked to his favorite tune. Then started shaking his head like there was no tomorrow.

“The next station is Zhichunlu. Please get ready for your arrival.” Yes, I was more than ready for my arrival — or departure, rather, from that crammed place near the door. And, yes, from that trembling teen in front of me. (Don’t know how old he is, but you see, I had to make the Ts fit…)

It suddenly dawned upon me. More and more young Chinese folks (especially guys my age) are donning weirder and weirder hairstyles. To have hair the length of your average girlfriend was now more and more “OK” in Beijing. Meanwhile, the most “handsome” kids have hair that look nothing short of — hedgehog-gy. This makes your reclusive blogger look more like a relic of the Mao era, hair-wise, than anything. (Reading the People’s Daily on a daily basis — heck, if for nothing more than just to keep my Chinese going — doesn’t make me any more “modernized”, so to speak.)

Spot the different hairstyles (or lack of them!) at this Beijing Subway station…Of Long and Colored Hair

The kind of hair I can’t stand (and that puts me in a firm alliance with many a university head) is when young guys grow long hair. To me, it just looks plain “non-man”. It could be that we are used to the clichéd norm that a guy has short hair, and a girl has either short or long hair, but to me, long is plain wrong.

Worse is when the hair is dyed. To stop looking old, Dad dyes his hair on a regular basis so that to many a bigwig (and ordinary citizen), he looks black all the way through (at least hair-wise). Yours truly is likely to head down the same path. Yet here we have those young, out-of-control kids dying their hair weird colors. Golden hair seems to be all the rage amongst young guys. To your black-haired blogger, anything other than the hair color you were brought up with seems just plain wrong.

You know what’s really funny? As David Feng starts this tirade de tête (French for “head”) on CNReviews, one of his Twitter friends is starting her own tirade about dying her hair black or another color. Either she’s brainwashed me, I’ve brainwashed her — or it’s just pure coincidence.

By the way — if you do not decide to dye your hair any other color (and if your hair is black) — do not say that I brainwashed you by means of this post!

The “Beiyuanlu North” Hair

I call the hedgehog-like hair the “Beiyuanlu North” variant for one thing: when a friend of an Apple pal quizzed me on what Subway Line 5 station looked most like a hedgehog, the answer (which was right, by the way) came out in less than an attosecond (I think): Beiyuanlu North Station. I mean, seriously, look at it!

OK, OK… since when have we been comparing people’s hair to subway station architecture?
I have seen way too many guys my age (or younger) being shuai (帅) or handsome with that kind of hedgehog-gy hair. It’s not exactly that they carry a complete replica of Beiyuanlu North station on their hair; it’s more that the hair “spritzes” out (that’s David Feng Language for “hedgehog-form hair distribution”) so that in the end, the hair looks more like a hedgehog. It’s not exactly like a hedgehog, by the way (certain not when the creature is not in “National Defence Mode” against their “People’s Public Enemy Number One”); you get one long hair this bit, and one short hair the other.My friends are in a bit of mix regarding my hairstyle, which looks like a bad mix between Luo Jing (of the 7 o’clock news program fame) and a kid who hasn’t grown up (fully) yet. One of my former Taiwanese friends suggested I go bald (this was not the reason, by the way, why I hung up on him). Some months ago, when I was still single, a friend threatened to introduce me to potential girlfriends only if I changed my hairstyle. (FYI, my girlfriend now accepts my hairstyle — just the way I thought it would all work out.)

On a personal basis, at times I feel so disgusted with the new hedgehog hair style what whenever I catch some guy with the hedgehog hair style on TV being some kind of star, I secretly hope there was a rock to smash into the telly. It’s just me, I guess, a bit (or too much, at this) “old-fashioned”.

And here I am, thinking Mom and Dad were already too “old-fashioned”…

And Now, Something For the Ladies…

Many a Chinese girl’s hair is black — their male counterparts are far more innovative, hair-wise. That said, I know one friend with golden hair (or black-golden hair the way I see it).

I personally see nothing wrong with her kind of hair. And I see nothing wrong with too-short hair or too-long hair. I do, however, hold a personal (if nothing else) grudge against those coloring it red.

To me, it’s not anything about it being right or wrong.

You see, to me, it looks downright scary.

Having said that, the vast majority of my feminine friends are big subscribers to the near-ubiquitous ponytail. I have mixed views of the ponytail — personally (and this may just be me), I prefer long hair over ponytailed hair. Having said that, though, at the end of the day, what a lady decides to do with her hair ultimately is her own free choice.

Freedom is a good thing.