Not getting any outside press, there is a large mountain fire in Dali, Yunnan. I just went there a week ago, see panoramic. There is only one news story on this at news.google.com as of this post.
They are putting out the fire, which has been blazing for at least two days now, with the use of horses. Helicopters cannot be used because of the high elevation of the mountain range.
The fire has been escalated by high winds in the last week (very noticeable here in Chuxiong.)
For all my fellow expatriates in China trying to update web sites, post blog entries, or simply transfer files back home:
I just switched my hosting to Media Temple from Dreamhost, and I couldn’t be happier. I would say:
- connection times
- initialization times
- raw up and down transfer times
are a minimum of 20-40x faster that Dreamhost.
Literally, I just FTP’d 50 imagines down in a matter of seconds, and uploaded them back in almost the same time (during a site update). Dreamhost, it would clog around for 10-20 seconds, reading folders, initializing, then it was start putting along at 3k to 5k per second. It would take anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes.
If you were like me, you just thought it was “The Great China Firewall” in action. Turns out, it’s just substandard service from Dreamhost. I regret not switching when my brother did a year ago. The switch was seamless, Media Temple picks up the phone on the first ring for support, WordPress blog transfers are a easy, it’s fast(!), and the list goes on.
If it makes any differences, I’m in the Yunnan province. Perhaps other provinces are experiencing different things. Also, it should be noted that when the internet was down in China because of the Taiwan earthquake, my Dreamhost sites were the last to come back online (by weeks, not days).
Jusy FYI, this is not an ad, just advise. I think Dreamhost “By The Employees” approach isn’t working anymore.
Update: After more use and evaluation… It’s lightening fast! I feel duped by Dreamhost!
At this geography page, I could only remember these countries (got 102 right):
Afghanistan, Algeria, Andorra, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belarus, Benin, Bhutan, Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, Canada, Chad, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cuba, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Dominica, Egypt, El Salvador, Estonia, Ethiopia, Fiji,
Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, India, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Ivory Coast, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Kuwait, Latvia, Lebanon, Libya, Lithuania, Macedonia, Malaysia, Mali, Marshall Islands, Mauritania, Mexico, Monaco, Mongolia, Myanmar, Namibia, Nepal, Nigeria, Niger, North Korea, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Somalia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sudan, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, Togo, Turkey, Tuvalu, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, Vietnam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe
For studying geography, World of Where is a great app for less than $10. It is interesting how the brain works. If I see a blank map, I can fill in 99%, but recalling just the names, I’m only at 50%.
Third time to Lijiang. As of March 2007,
Do:
- visit Afternoon Sun for the Lavazza coffee and espressos (while in China, I haven’t found Lavazza anywhere)
- visit the Prague Cafe for great ambience, a good mix of Western and Chinese food, good coffee (however, they recently removed their computer and internet)
- all the rest of that touristy stuff (horse back rides, go to Zhongdian/Shangri-La for a while, get lost in the Old Town)
- try to get a shot of the Snow Mountain without clouds, it’s rare
- visit the Snow Mountain and take the tram up the side of the mountain
- try some of the local food, either at the street kiosks (er kuai, dou fu, etc) or just outside of the Old Town. Most places have menus with pictures, if not, just say, “Sui bian ni!” (“Whatever is fine!”) and wait for the bees and intenstines and all that good stuff
- go shopping, but try to find things that are unique to Lijiang (hand made or hand crafted things), and not things you can find in every other city in Yunnan (like Mingzu clothing, fakey jade, fakey silver, Mingzu dolls, traditional “Chinese” clothing, etc)
- help others take photos so a brother can be with his women in the shot
Don’t:
- visit the “screaming bars”, they’re loud, service is bad, very gimmicky
- go to KFC, don’t be like the rest of the lao wai
- expect western food to compare to your home town, it’ll be “just okay” at best (except for the coffee at Afternoon Sun)
- expect the Chinese food to be great (Lijiang is very touristy, food quality is lower than average)
- book a trip with a Chinese tour company. I’ll blog about that later. They’re lame and you only get to see “surface-level” China
- openly complain about no soap in the bathrooms, or any other rant I overhear all the time, you’ll come off sounding crazed and paranoid (ie, get over it)
- buy any jade or silver in Lijiang, it’s overpriced, but worse, 95% of it is fake (doh!)
That’s all I can think of for now. Good luck. Photo above is a flower patch of the main strip in Lijiang.
Took way to long, only reinforcing the fact that I still need a book or something. But now I have my stock 450px template for photos. This is a cha hua, anyone know the name of it in English? I thought it was the camellia? They were on sale in Chuxiong, Yunnan last month, some for up to 100,000 RMB.
Photoshop CS3′s Photomerge feature is the best. No tripod needed. Auto-stretch option. Just set your camera to Manual mode, shoot RAW, get a reading of the sky and set shutter and f-stop accordingly, pan across the area you want to shoot, shoot 1 or 2 stops under 0, stitch it together in PS3, flatten layers, in Levels (RGB screen) move the top right slider over to the left to the “end” of the histogram, crop the shot, don’t fret if there are white spaces in the shot, once it’s cropped use the Transform tool and click the “warp” feature to move those white spots out of the shot and BOOOOOOOOOM, you got a panoramic like no one else.
SEE THE NEW GOOGLEFIED GALLERY!
It’s just wrong. Why am I putting ads on my photo galleries?
Anyway, it’s not difficult to do, but if I get enough interest I’ll post a step-by-step guide on how to add Google Adsense to your Lightroom gallery. Takes less than a minute.
Note to self: Next time create web gallery 768 wide. Use CSS to margin add in the right place. Can lower JPG res.
Lightroom Tutorials, Screenshots, Review
I just finished my review of Adobe Lightroom. Basically, it is the answer for people who:
Don’t use a Flash on a mountain shot
You know how to shoot, you have a digital SLR, and you take good pictures
Are tired of iPhoto’s poor layout and weak architecture
You liked it in the beginning, but after your library grew, iPhoto couldn’t keep up
Are looking for “a better way” to manage and present their photos
File management, slideshows, export to web, print — Lightroom has it all.
Photos to come, will be semi-offline for two days. It’ll be our third time in the area.
Check out the latest photos from my recent trip in Yunnan, China. The town is called Ejia, but it’s not really important because it’s not on any tourist map, and no Chinese tour company will take you there. You have to know one of the 600 people that live in the village. And again, it takes 10 hours to get there from the capital city of Kunming, which is only about 60 miles away.
VIEW PANORAMIC PHOTO OF DALI
VISIT GALLERY