Men at Work in Dali

… all the animals in our house and garden already know that we are extremely friendly and understanding gardeners. We welcome squirrels eating our sunflowers, we share the hemp with our birds, we hatch scary green caterpillars in our only cherrytree and we never destroy big spidernets …

However, recently a whole vole family turned up and dug long tunnels in and along our lawn. Well, we thought that this would a bit too much stress for us and our German Orderliness. But somehow we managed to remember that mice really hate garlic and so we planted lots of garlic-bulbs right into the tunnels.

But next morning and very much to our surprise we found many garlic thrown back to the lawn leaving nice clean air in the spreading vole tunnels.

Does someone out there know how communicate with our voles in a friendly manner to make them understand that we dislike their tunnels very much

This is probably the must successful (people) transporter built ever and you find those in tens of millions allover China and Asia.

The basics : It is run by a single-cylinder, fourstoke diesel-engine of ~3 litres, it is being cooled by boiling water and it is based on direct fuel (anything) injection. There is a massive flywheel to prevent it to take off the road right away. The motor weights 400 kg and it produces 25 kW. This is enough to carry more than 10 people, 20 pigs, or a legal load of 750kg. The maximum speed is 80 km/h. Of course, it makes a remarkable sound and exhaust smelly fumes. You can by it from 350 US$ + commision + airmail …

Fancy to have one ?

I have seen this beautiful machine, the farmers friend 农友, in the triangle of YunNan 云南, SiChuan 四川 and Tibet 西藏 . Can you see the Chinese and Sanskrit characters ?

Maybe Our Lord knows the number of Chinese Weblogs and thankfully there are many in English language too, if you want to check out what is going on here, a good start is China Blog List .

However, if you still think browsing through chinese websites is like watching boring bonehard ideological teachings, think twice and have a closer look at the 冰 风 茶 馆 Teahouse .

Or check out Hugo Restall’s site here

And, Oh goodness, lao(3) tian(1) ye(3) 老天爷, I have never ever seen such a noodle performance before (again thanks to H.R.) like this one from a noodle shop competition …

… seit dem Turmbau von Babel ist die unsere arme Welt in Tausende von Sprachen zerfallen und das Kommunikationschaos ist ueberall,- es ist sogar da, wo man die gleiche Sprache spricht. Fragt Karine, die wird es euch gleich bestaetigen.

Da waren wir gestern auf dem Weg zu unserem Hausberg und weil die Wege da oben nicht immer ganz einfach sind, hat die Bergwacht fuer uns Langnasen folgende Schilder aufgestellt.

Jetzt glaubt ja nur nicht dass euer oder mein Chinesisch viel besser ist Wer weiss wie es richtig heisst, kann nach Dali kommen und mit uns die Huehner  essen.  Aber kommt bald  sonst sind sie weg.

This is for some time now my toy and I know a lot of my friends are green of envy. If you don’t believe the ad, have a look here . Zongshen 宗申 is the world’s fastest growing Motor Company and rumours said that they were trying to buy Piaggio before they then entered a cooperation with their Italian competitors.

I like the bike, it cost only 800 US$, the only disadvantage is the suspension which is not really designed to carry 160 kg of us old foreigners.

LaoYang, 50 and his 3 workers have managed to remove 55 sqm of tiles and rubble, they have laid the pavement, our new tiles, they did 2 showers and then miraculously even cleaned the whole building site. Time spent 5 days, money involved 400 US$.

Because most spamming machines are a bit daft and haven’t got a clue how to do math, I will ask you to answer a simple question before you can post a comment Do you like to know how it works ?

Recently we felt quite bored and started a building site on our deck in the third floor. We had all our tiles and the floor pavement removed and then we started to rebuild it all over again.

Because this was so much fun, we decided to do the same thing again in our bathrooms. Now you can find big heaps of rubble, sand close to our house and there is a fine layer of cement everywhere :

Don’t worry, we are really fine, however please allow us some time to get these things straight. We will back in a couple of days.

I have read so many times that it is not a bright idea to have the very same provider running the nameserver and the webserver altogether. Now I know.

It is a quite straightforward process to move your website around from one location to another, if you have made the right backups, however when it comes to move your registered name, you may find that the rules of the registrars are not funny at all and the behaviour of the providers may not be very helpful at times.

I am having no problem with my old provider , he is really great. However my new house is quite a nightmare. Strato is one of the big players in Germany and they are indeed as German as they can be. For what they call security-reasons, they insist in receiving snailmails and faxes and their procedures are like cemented in Krupp-Stahl. their customer service is like an automated system repeating the faq. The technical performance of the root-servers are outstanding though and this is the reason I still love Strato.

So I am now going to drag my registrations to a free DNS Service and I hope that this will solve the issues almost forever.

:-)

Many of the pictures here, those with the friendly big round faces I owe to Wing . Moving weblogs around in the web can be quite a nightmare, thankfully Joe has written a comprehensive guide to do this. Aaron has done an incredible good site-architecture and design for Logahead , I owe him many good ideas and useful scripts.

If you got stuck with your site, just drop me a note, I am only a few mouseclicks away