Show notes #1,238

Hello wonderful people inside of the internet, and welcome to the end of another week on planet earth. This week absolutely flew by. On monday i was still in xiamen, and headed back to Shanghai on tuesday. I really recommend a visit to this city if you get the chance.

On wednesday, i had a progress meeting for my dissertation. I was feeling totally fine about it because i’d heard that it was an informal thing, but on the morning of the event we were given a form to fill out with lots of details, and then the other students in the same meeting as me had prepared these long ppts. I had none of that! But i think it went well so that was all okay.

Wednesday evening was spent going through pictures, and wishing there was some nice, simple but functional photo software on linux. Digikam is huge, but it’s what i’m using for now because everything else lacks what i consider to be essential features. That said, even digikam lacks, or makes it kind of difficult to access, some functionality i consider fundamental. The best i’ve found is aves on android, but i don’t really want to use my phone as a device for actually doing productive work. So digikam it is.

On thursday, i once again did some volunteer work with the australian exchange students. This time i had to discuss their projects with their small groups and provide a new perspective as someone who has been living in china for a while. Although i didn’t always have the necessary expertise to answer their questions (i know nothing about the electric battery manufacturing processes in china!) i was really impressed with how mature and thoughtful they were. Much more so than i was at eighteen!

In the evening, me and some other friends made a surprise visit to our friend’s workplace for her birthday. Their office lives in the future: face scanning is everywhere, and the lift doesn’t even have any buttons; you can only get to the floor that you are registered to go to. I have mixed feelings about that, but all i can say is it made getting in a little bit of a headache. Anyway, her colleagues were nice and surprise birthdays are always nice.

On friday, i decided to make some css changes to this site, after seeing what it looked like in dillo and netsurf and realising that browsers that support a bit of css but not all of it don’t really like my reliance on css variables. It made me tempted to add a preprocessor into the mix so that i can continue to write nice css, but have actually decent support for these other browsers. I’ve decided not to do that, but rather to accept that a website won’t look the same everywhere, and make a few changes to the css were i was pushing for too much control, like resetting margins on everything.

Saturday was spent preparing for the sino-western orchestra’s concert in the evening. The big group weren’t playing, it was just lots of little groups and i was in two of them, performing sunburn, and lace from hollow knight. The pieces went well and everyone else played really well. I love the feeling of a performance coming together well.

And today we visited the shanghai christmas market. Back in the uk i spent some time working in a christmas market, so i have mixed feelings about them, and although they tend to be heavily commercial and overcrowded, there’s something heartwarming about so many people gathered together, thinking about christmas. That’s especially important to me in shanghai, where christmas spirit is not so embedded everywhere as it is in the uk. I had a really great time.

And that brings us to now. I’m lying in my bed, writing this up before i’m going to read for a bit and then sleep. Christmas is just around the corner, and i’m really looking forward to it.

Until next time, stay wonderful