yaean design shanghai: blog > articles from 2010

New Sephora shop, Infiniti mall, Huaihai Lu, Shanghai.

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Not content with adding new tube lines at an alarming rate, Shanghai is also giving all the "old" stations a face lift by building a "new" layer of clean walls over the "old" layer of dirty walls. Literally a new skin buttressed off the old walls. So we'll look spiffy for the Expo! The new face comes with new signs like the above which, in its infinite wisdom, says "For Safety, Please Accept the Security Check. Thank You." Apparently they didn't get the memo re: sign chinglish.

BTW: The coolest Shanghai tube map is at ExploreShanghai.

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Above is a screenshot (taken at the weekend) of the weather forecast for Shanghai over the next few days. According to this forecast it's going to go from +15C to -6C plus snow some time on Wednesday or Thursday. That's quite a jump! Today the forecast is merely from +18C to 0C - no snow. Still a big drop in temperatures. One day of sun bathing followed by a day of artic weather. Global warming in action?

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Above is a graph of RMB vs USD over the last few years via Google Finance. Below is a graph of RMB vs Euro also on Google Finance. Notice the lovely curve on the RMB/USD chart. Compare this to the (more random) Euro chart. Clearly a very long term plan going on here.

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After several days of very cold and windy weather in Shanghai, it's suddenly warm and sunny. Above is what I can see from my office window. I guess I've got bloggers block since I'm reverting to type by talking about the weather.

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Well this is all over the blogs this morning. Google's reviewing its China ops and will stop censoring google.cn search results - announced on the official Google blog, which is on blogspot, which is blocked in China...

To summarise Google is threating to throw the toys out of the pram. And to take its ball and go home. And to tell teacher.

Here's what I've learned: the path to change lies in inclusion not exclusion.

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If, like me, you were sat around during Christmas wishing you could get your hands on 7.5 hours of high definition video shot from the front of a train on Norway's Bergensbanen then you're in luck. NRK have released a bittorrent showing every minute of the train ride between Bergen to Oslo. It's 22GB and will probably take you a week to download.

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Last week we took the office to see Avatar. Purely for research purposes of course. It's a good movie in that it, helped by a very drafty Shanghai cinema, keeps the viewer engaged for 2.5 hours. Probably should have spent a bit of the budget on the story though rather than re-hashing Pocahontas. We saw the movie on the morning of its first day in Shanghai for RMB 45. Since then Shanghai has gone Avatar crazy. CCTV reported that the Imax cinema would increase its price to RMB 200 from RMB 150. However, following online outrage, the Imax has…

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Here's what's on my menu bar from right to left (click on the image above for a larger version) ...

Spotlight: I hardly ever use it. I use find from the command line as it's much more specific. There are ways of turning it off but nothing officially from Apple.

Time & Volume.

Input locale switcher: used when switching the input method to type in Chinese.

Battery & Airport monitors.

iStat Menus: can't say enough good things about this free utility. It's fab. I have mine set up to monitor CPU and network but you can show other things too (disk,…

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The New South China Mall is the second largest mall in the world and largely empty. (It used to be the largest mall in the World until the Dubai Mall came on line. But it's still the largest empty mall in the World.) PBS have made a haunting documentary short about the mall that is well worth a look.

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