Last night I had a great time with a friend and his dad. It was one of those nights that started with uncertainty, where the beer guarden we wanted to go to in 老门东 was closed, but a cozy bar nearby was open that ended up being a better time than the night we would have had at the beer garden.

We had some beers upstairs, but when there wasn’t anyone downstairs we took over the mic and started singing some karaoke, using a cell phone with 网易音乐 for the lyrics and songs. I already chatted with the bartenders a bit, one from Dongbei and another was a Nanjing local, so they joined in the fun and sang a bit with us. The friend’s dad was really proud to see his son sing some songs in Chinese and was smiling the whole night. We ended with some 麻辣烫.

The lesson here is that for a good night, always get on the good terms with the bartenders and workers at the establishment. This strategy has led to many great nights in China that are not touristy and genuine fun times.

Side note: At one point during the night, my friend asked me what my plan was when I got home. My plan was detailed: Get out of Mitchel International Airport with my parents, go to the nearest Culvers and order a Chedder Butterburger with Bacon, A concrete mixer, (chocolate custard with cookie dough and raspberries) cheese curds, and A&W root beer. After this he referenced that “at least he wasn’t jaded yet” since he’s been in china a shorter time than I had. In that moment I realized how much I missed home.

So after waking up at 9am yesterday morning and biking back from the bar to get to sleep at 3am, I woke up at 5pm today. So much for fixing the sleep cycle. Tonight I’ll be joining a friend at a bar on campus to get some drinks and chat, so hopefully that doesn’t go too late. His dorm closes at midnight so I should be back soon enough to get to sleep at a reasonable time.

The rest of the day was spent trying to fix my internet at the house. Yesterday morning I woke up and found that there was a gateway on the internet that basically said I need to pay up before I can use the net again. All the receipts I grabbed around the house for our internet had a certain number on it, but no matter what number I put in the “充值号码” input box it would not allow me to go to the payment page, usually saying a general error or that there was no customer with this account. So I’ll just go to the 中国电信 office tomorrow with all these receipts and see what they can do.

Job Search

I’m thinking more and more about not going for a strictly programming/software position, but angling more for a corporate relations position utilizing my efficient use of computers and background in software. There’s a few companies that look promising around the Milwaukee area (Foxconn and JCI) that have a relationship with China and would be considered “technology companies.”

This is because while I can program and have fun doing it, I personally think that it’s a lot more fun communicating with people than computers. The world is a huge place and software is a small (but significant) part of it. My interests and passions are not entirely within the realm of computers: Writing, sales/negotiation, leadership/management, communication, business processes, event planning, just to name a few things I’ve enjoyed in the past.

Website

These journals are great for myself, and maybe people could find something interesting in here such as content from the “Things I’m Liking” section (which I just realized is abbreviated to “TIL” which is apt) or to see what life is like in China, but I think longform blogposts are more important in the long run. Here’s what I got on my mind:

• South Yin Yang Barracks Street: I’ve been writing about the street I’m living on and am less than halfway done now. I want to talk to some locals about their personal history of the street, but the problem I’m running into when talking to people around here is that Mandarin is commonly their second language as they speak in a heavy Nanjing accent to each other.
• China Recap: A friend did this already and found it useful for when they went back home as is provided context to the stories and experiences they shared. This would best be done in a multipart format: Arriving to China and first weeks, First Semester, Trip with my Parents, Summer Vacation, Second Semester, Winter Vacation, and Takeaways. Maybe during the time some more informative blog posts could be spun off into separate articles.
• Tech in China: I’ve experienced the full scope of tech in china, like mobile payments, online shopping, POS systems, social media, internet utility companies, and plenty else I can’t think of at the moment. I’d like to get this into a blog post and also into a powerpoint I could present to the UWM Computer Society.
• Some technical hackernewsy sort of post: There’s a very low barrier for entry for getting something on hackernews or lobste.rs – I saw some recently that were maybe four paragraphs of an opinion (“Windows 95 icons were the best!”) where it was more about a headline that people could reminisce about or ‘discuss.’ I’d like to see if I could do better than this in a way that is informative and fun to read but also sparks enough conversation and discussion in the comments to work up the ranks on either website.

One thing on my list for the website is to make the front page only blog posts rather than a mix of the journal and posts sections, but in order to do this I need more compelling posts.

Also, I need comments in some capacity. There’s too much of me talking to myself, and a discussion would be better (if anyone reads these in the first place.) I’ve heard horror stories about Disqus, how they’ll put scripts in their part of your web page to track people, so maybe there’s a better self-hosted solution (maybe isso?) Captcha needs to be a thought too and I need to review the code of any of these solutions to be sure input is sanitized.

Lastly, webhooks need be set up sometime. This blog is a hugo static site hosted in a private repo on gitlab. Whenever I publish a post or make changes, I need to commit and push my changes, then ssh into the server to pull and deploy. This should be easy with caddy’s http.git.

Things I’m Liking

• blog.winny.tech: A friend’s blog, so far about emacs and linux. Check it out so he keeps writing more stuff :)