China - Day 16 - The Grind Begins

I want to wish everyone a Happy Fourth of July. I'm quite sad to be spending my second favorite American holiday (the first being Thanksgiving) in a country that is rather indifferent to it, but such is life. This is the second time I've been out of the country for the Fourth of July, the last time was in 2006 when I was in Vienna. Curiously, it was also during the World Cup. I wonder where I'll be July 4, 2014?

Anyway, as the title suggests, things have started to slow down around here. Work has gotten more interesting, thankfully, but a lot of my initial excitement for being here has also worn off. Rather than seeing things that Chinese people do differently than Americans as quirky, I'm starting to look for underlying reasons for those differences. I'm probably going to comment more on that now (although I think I'm also going to cover what I work on so that I don't forget).

July 1
I'm working on creating a fixture to hold a workpiece to be machined in a CNC mill. I'm taking multi-faceted drawings from AutoCAD and recreating them in Unigraphics NX6 as 3D models that we can then use the integrated capabilities of NX6 to generate tool paths and code to machine the fixture. I think they might even let me help machine one of these work pieces eventually. Michael has also given me a second workpiece to look at with the assignment to take an NX6 model of the casting for that part, modify it to final specifications in NX6, generate tool paths for that machining and then to create a fixture to hold that piece. I'm excited that I'm getting exposure to this sort of work, but it is a bit daunting to be handed two projects at the same time. And I'm still having trouble with the tool path generation because the method I use to create them in UG generates paths that Michael doesn't like, so tweaking UG has been frustrating/useless. I wish I had a UG manual to walk me through this, but I don't. Oh well, no one said working in a foreign country would be easy.

On the homefront, I needed to get a power converter to charge my electric toothbrush (yes, I'm spoiled). I tried to convey the sense of an voltage converter to Michael, but he didn't seem to get it (perhaps they don't teach breadth in Chinese engineering, but I was glad to have E40 under my belt), but he understood it when I told him I needed it to charge my camera (a little white lie, but I didn't want to convey myself as terribly spoiled). So, we went to the Xiasha Trade Center (XTC, an acronym too awesome to pass up) to see his friend who runs an electronics dealer, along with about 100 other dealers, in a mega-mall with hundreds, if not thousands, of stores. Actually, stores is an overstatement, the shops there are more like 3-sided rooms stacked to the ceiling with merchandise, open to a common hallway. It is an assault on the senses. Luckily there is some semblance of organization and the electronics dealers and separated from the clothing dealers. The electronics dealers are an odd bunch, they sell all sorts of things, but mostly small computers and things like cell phones. But what I think is really strange is that almost everyone there smokes like a chimney, which surely can't be good for the electronics (or their health). Anyway, getting to the point, we find Michael's friend, who doesn't have the low wattage power converter I need, but he can order one and have it for us tomorrow. So I'm feeling a little dejected, Michael tells me that we should try upstairs, and I figure "Hey, let's give this a shot."

But it turns out the upstairs is not more electronics dealers, but instead is an arcade. For about 3 dollars we play video games for over an hour, mostly the little basketball shooting game. I have quite an advantage at this because I'm taller than the average Chinese person, who the game appears to be designed for. My personal best was 696; however, that was assisted by 5 60 second rounds and a rather touchy sensor that would trigger whenever the rim was hit, regardless of whether the ball went in. Overall, it was quite the fun night, although I was a little sad to not get a chance to go for a run like I was hoping to.

China - Day 10 - Big City, Smoggy Lights

I'm starting to think that the permanent haze the permeates Xiasha and Hangzhou is smog and not exceptionally bad weather. That isn't to say that the weather is good, it's actually rained quite a bit since I've been here, but the haze is too constant for that to be the case.

June 26
Working on Saturday feels weird, but at least it's giving me something to do, otherwise I would have probably holed up in my apartment watching Firefly all day. It was strange to be at work without my mentor Michael (he was out apartment hunting for his little brother, who's also coming to work in Xiasha) because he's been giving me cues on what to do all week. I spent most of the day sitting at my computer and trying to look busy, although I'm not sure how well I pulled that off.

On the homefront, I washed my laundry last night and hung it out to dry on my balcony. I hope it dries in one day, although given the humidity/chance of rain, I'm not sure if it will. When I got home from work today, I saw little child relieving himself in the middle of the apartment courtyard while his parents (and possibly grandparents), looked on. I'm not sure if this is normal in China, but I'm expecting that it is. Almost every small child I see is wearing what more or less boil down to terry-cloth chaps. That was a huge shock to my Western, puritanical sensibilities; I know that that sort of thing would never fly in America.

On a more sporting note, I played basketball with Michael and our neighbors today. I have to say, Chinese pick-up basketball is very different from American pick-up basketball (this could have just been a function of the people I was playing with, but having watched other pick-up games and made similar observations, I'm going to assume this is a cultural difference). For one, their game is much more frantic and finesse based. Guys are running every which way and passing the ball seems to be very popular, if not slightly erratic. Turn overs are very common in both directions and not many guys have pretty jump shots (although, as someone with an atrocious jump shot, I can commiserate). The Chinese game also seems to shirk away from contact. Coming into the game playing the way I play in America, I was able to physically dominate the paint. Yes, I had 7 inches and 30 pounds on everyone in the first game, but in the second, a guy about my size (probably 4-5 inches shorter, though) came in, and I was able to back him down all the way from the elbow to the bucket. He was very surprised when I made driving contact with my shoulder and hips. If not for the paint on the court and the residue of the previous day's rain, I probably could have driven the lane all day. The one thing that really bothered me for some stupid reason was the way they played dead balls. Whenever a ball would go out of bounds, or someone scored or someone got fouled, they would always throw the ball in from off court. It's been 7 years since I last played organized basketball, which is probably why that felt so weird. I guess I'm used to checking it with the defense.

I went to bed relatively early that night to get up at 2am to watch the US play Ghana. Needless to say, I was disappointed, but I don't want to dwell on it.

The basketball court (with puddles from a rainstorm)	Another view of the apartment complex. There are ten buildings with six floors and about 18 rooms per floor with an average of three people per room. For those of you keeping score at home, that about 3000 people living in my apartment complex.

Austria 2006

Vienna is a nice city. Very polite and cosmopolitan, but at the same time kinda bland. It seems kinda like a template for a European city. It lacks London's shitty weather or Prague's filthiness. Frankly, there are worse places in the world, but there are also better.
The one thing we did in Vienna that I loved was a segway tour. Yeah, we rolled around Vienna on Segways. We looked like idiots, but I don't care. I got to ride a segway.
We left Vienna on the Fourth of July, which we commemorated by going to a McDonalds and getting Apple Pies. Oh yeah, hella American.




A giant chessboard at our hotel. I didn't win a single game




A random roller coaster in a random theme park. I, of course, rode on it