Hainan China

Girlwing, her parents and I went for a eight days vacation to Sanya on the island Hainan, which is a tropical island south of China. Hainan is famous for its beautiful beaches, fancy hotels, pretty seashells, tasty seafood, giant Guan Yin (观音) and sweet coconut candies.

To the left you can see the first hotel we stayed at. GuestHouse International Hotel in Sanya is quite fancy with a great view from the top of the mountain and not too far from the beach. We payed around 400 yuan per night for a room.

The Guesthouse by night.

This little friend was waiting outside our hotel room one morning.

One day we went to NanTian Hot Springs outdoor spa. There they have fish that feed on visitors. They like exotic Swedish flesh.

Another day we went to see the giant GuanYin. On the way there we stumbled over some ancient grafitti. This one say longevity (长寿).

Here you can read "Live long and prosper" (寿无量).

These are common in temples and used for praying.

The entrance to the temple. Over the entrance you can see "二不" which should be read from right to left and literally means "not two". I leave it as your homework to figure out the deeper meaning of that.

The goal to our journey. A view of the giant Guan Yin.

Guan Yin again.

Next day we spent some time in the town and I found several interesting things to take pictures on. This is some strange tea.

When it is hot and the sun stands high, you should protect your skin from the strong sun.

Selling narcotics.

Need a copy of a key?

Or maybe buy some second handed shoes?

Here we are selling meatballs, fish balls and other kind of balls cooked in oil on a stick. To the right they sell lemonade.

In Hainan you can buy all kinds of fruit for really great prices.

Fruits are sold everywhere.

Lottery is the weeks highlight.

Selling more drugs.

A dried fish store.

An ice cold soup made of fruits like watermelon, sweet potatoes, cocnut, beans and some more stuff mixed with coconut milk and ice.

A lotus flower in a pond in the hotel area of the second hotel we stayed at.

Our bedroom in the more fancy Crowne Plaza in Sanya.

The hotel beach.

The hotel beach.

They serve drinks as well. Nice :)

This is the hotel area where we borrowed a tandem bike.

The Crowne Plaza is a really big hotel. This is just the hotel lobby. Second floor is housing a café. I like the ancient style. The hotel were the location for the miss world the same year we where there, but earlier.

IgoLocal

A new tool for weiqi players has emerged. It is called IgoLocal. This one can be seen in two different ways, and they work perfectly for both.

One is as a reaction against too much focus on online Interenet go servers and the lack of real life social interactions over a physical go board. The other is to see it as a very useful tool for beginners to find other players and go clubs in the area where they live. If a beginner have no one to play against then they will soon loose interest in the game. And why not use this tool to find go players or go clubs in other countries when you are out traveling? I'd like that!

This new site is aiming at working as a real life physical go server. You register on the site and point out on the map the approximate location of your home. It is not important to point out exactly where you live as long as it is in the correct city area. Then you can see on the map if there are any other go players that live near you and send messages to those players. You can join a go club and discuss topics in an online forum.

You can set up games for people to join or accept some others games. After joining a game you are supposed to physically meet in some nice location like a park or a local pub and have a nice time over the go board. This is a good idea, both to get new friends and to expose the game of go to the public and in that way hopefully attract more players to have all the fun we already have.

IgoLocal have a nice looking and easy to use interface. If you are curious then you can read more about it here. There will be more features in time but it is impressive as it is already.

In the first day after release the site had 150 people registering and now as of this writing, three days later, I can count to 398 players and new players register all the time. We are now 6742 active players on the EGF ranking list and there are probably the same for USA. If we count all the casual players that are not going to tournaments we probably have to triple those numbers. I do not dare to guess the huge amount of Asian players. Let's hope a lot of us knowing something about the game of go to register and we will have a very powerful tool to use.

So spread the word to your go playing friends to register and you will see that you might get some new friends in your area  to play and socialize with.

Double Rainbow

There are some really creative people on YouTube with a lot of time to use. I just stumbled over this video clip.


Yeah he seem to be high or something. Nothing creative about that clip. But when some creative person get their hands on such a video clip they can make something really interesting of it. Like this!

Quite cool ha? :)

Stockholm summer go club

The first time this year for me at Stockholm go club this summer. We play in the Bolero café where we can eat and drink beer. In the picture you can see my opponents in the pair go. We lost... :(
But it was fun anyway! :D

Project party - Bowling

Bowling is so fun! I suck at it... but it is still fun... :)

Project party - Burger

Free dinner is never wrong. :)

Project party - First beer

We are done with the BMC ITSM 7.6 upgrade project. It was a huge success so now we have to celibrate. This is the first beer at the local pub close to work.

Guitar hero

Hugs in the kitchen

BBQ on the balcony

Beer in the sun.

How Many Squares are there on a Go Board?

Kami Kaze: How many squares are there on a go board? Go away and think about it for a while and then come back and we will discuss it!

20 kyu player: 361 of course.
Kami Kaze: Wrong...

10 kyu player: No silly, that's the number of vertices. There are 18x18 or 324 squares.
Kami Kaze: Wrong...


(A pause follows, but frantic calculations occur.)

1 dan player: Aha, there are also squares 2x2 and 3x3 and so on, which means that the total is 18x18 + 17x17 and so on making a grand total of 2109!
Crowd: Aaaahh very clever!
Kami Kaze: But wrong...

3 dan player: You've forgotten that they aren't squares, they are rectangles. There are no squares on a go board!
Crowd: That's a dirty trick.
Kami Kaze: And still wrong...

(Another pause, and many puzzled faces.)

Crowd: Well how many squares are there on a go board then?

Kami Kaze: It is perfectly true that the smaller areas are rectangles, and each of these is one twelth longer than it is wide. Therefore, if we take an area twelve rectangles long and thirteen wide, we have a large square, and this is the only size which works. There are (19-12 ) x (19-13) or 42 such squares. The answer is forty-two.

Douglas Adams: We all knew the answer, it's the question that we didn't know. Thank you Kami Kaze, the whole question of the meaning of Life, The Universe and Everything is simply "How many squares are there on a go board?"

Marvin: I tried to tell them, but you know what humans are like, they have the attention span of a dead gnat. Here I am with a brain the size of a planet, and having worked out all the possible games of go, the meaning of life is to have two eyes except in seki when ......

Crowd: Which restaurant shall we eat at tonight?

(The crowd departs leaving Marvin talking to himself.)

Marvin: I can tell you what the strictly correct komi is if you really want to know? Oh never mind me, just carry on. I haven't got any feelings of course .....

(From Sensei's Library)

Go Rules Dispute Video

Mr Breakfast posted a video about the go rules dispute I wrote about earlier. It is a video of the actual event. Not the best sound but quite interesting to see! :)

Go Rules Dispute

I found an interesting anecdote on Sensei's Library. Two strong European players are playing an important tournament game in EGC 2002. The rules for the tournament were the Ing 1991 rules.

Player A was leading with around 30 points in the end of the game and it was a sure win. But he didn't know the specifics about the rules that was used. Player B who was in for a sure loss in the game is an expert of rules of all shapes and forms. He saw his chance...

Player B found a loophole in the rules and used it to try to get a win. Basically it is about the dead stones on the board for both players. You are supposed to capture them and remove them from the board. Player B did this while Player A just passed, as is common under other rules. Finally when both players had passed Player B said that his stones that were captured in the opponents territory are now alive and the game is now won by him. Confusion emerged!

This lead to a dispute and the judges had to be called in. They ruled in favor of Player A. The decision got appealed to EGF rules comity that also ruled in favor of Player A. The intent of the rules won over the letter of the rules.

This has been a dispute among go players since then and is still under discussion almost ten years later. It is interesting to read but it is easy for the discussion to get ugly from time to time. Especially against Player B.

Personally I think it is not so complicated and it was a very correct decision to let Player A get the victory as he deserved.

One can argue that Player B did nothing wrong when he tried to play the rules when he otherwise would have lost. And I can agree, that nothing wrong was made, if I only look at the rules that was used. But I think it is very ethically wrong by Player B and I am sure that this is not what Mr Ing meant when he invented the rules. The whole point with Chinese rules is that the rules should not decide the outcome of the games and if the players don't agree they should play it out on the board and it is there, on the board, that the game should be decided by the players. The rules would work good if both players knew them.

Obviously the rules had to be changed. Otherwise this can happen again. So the Simplified Ing Rules was created. You would think that the creation and use of the new rules should end the above mentioned dispute? Not at all... and it will continue for quite some while...

Chinese New Year

Happy New Chinese Year! Now it is the year of the tiger. This is something that is celebrated by all Chinese people. Much like we westerners are celebrating our new year at the 31st of December.

This year, like last year, we celebrated it together with the employees of Huawei. This year Girlwing was the hostess together with a college.

We started with eating a lot of tasty Chinese food and drinking Swedish beer. A couple of the Chinese employees had some fine BaiJiu with them from China and I was treated with some. Quite tasty but also strong with 43% alcohol.

When everybody were done eating it was time for some performances and snacks. This is to my understanding very common on occasions like this. Many of the employees were involved in some way with singing, dancing and fun games. Many of the employees children made performances as well. One thing that struck me is that this would never work in a Swedish company's party. We are too shy and would need a lot of beer and wine to have fun together, not to mention spontaneous singing in front of a crowd . Not a single person at this party got drunk. Another difference is that in a Swedish party there would possibly be some social dancing and that is probably very rare in any Chinese party and there were of course no social dancing at this party.

Most of the celebration was made in Chinese and much of Girlwings role as a hostess was to translate what was said to Swedish. As to be expected most of the Swedish guests left quite early after the food. Probably because they didn't feel like a part of the group when they couldn't understand everything. That is a bit sad but it can be understandable.

The whole celebration is anyway for the Chinese people, who are kind of stranded here in Sweden, so far away from their families at home. It is for them like it would be for us to be all alone over Christmas in China, but a hundred times worse. Family and friends are very important for them, so it is very valuable to be able to do this together with the colleagues and friends they have here so far away from home.

E-mail support with humor

I am maintaining a BMC AR-System environment with ITSM applications supporting ITIL applications including Incident, Problem and Change. This system is sending out a lot of e-mail notifications to all the users. Quite often the end user reporting an incident answers the receipt e-mail asking questions or sending additional feedback. Very often the system just receives autoreplies about the users being on vacation or on paternity leave.

The autoreplies we don't care about but the questions and feedback can be interesting to pay attention to. I want to build some workflow to filter out the interesting stuff and attach to the relevant ticket in the system or automatically deal with them in some other way in the cases where it is not possible to find the corresponding ticket. So far I didn't get the permission to do this development.

Instead I was asked to set up an autoreply in the exchange account for every incoming e-mail that comes from within the company. In this autoreply we are just going to inform the end user that they've sent an e-mail to a system and no person will read the e-mail and that they should send the e-mail to some support address.

So I did, but I was a little bit concerned that Exchange was not smart enough to deal with the auto-replies from end users on vacation. If our system sends an e-mail to a user on vacation and and the users e-mail account sends an auto-reply to our system that send an auto-reply back to the user that sends an auto-reply again and so on... You get the picture. It will become like a ping pong match.

I sent an e-mail to our e-mail support group asking about the risk of an ping pong match. I really liked their answer.

"Usually Exchange is smart enough to not start a ping pong match that it can not win. But occasionally it can happen that they get excited and someone smashes in a backhand volley."

OK it didn't wipe away all of my concerns, but still I really like to see some humor at work. :)

Work Xmas party

The day after Huaweis Xmas party, it was time for an Xmas party at my work. For as long as I have worked there I have never heard of such a party. So I went there to hang out with some of my colleagues.

It started around 17:00 but we came there after 17:30 and by then the whole corridor was packed with people eating, drinking and talking. It was a nice way to mingle with hundreds of known and unknown. Most of them were unknown to me, but if we had this a little more frequently then soon it would be a totally different thing. I believe this is good for the atmosphere at a workplace so I would like to see this maybe twice a year.

We were offered some small plate with different pieces of food. Not much at all so I wish they had some bread to fill the belly with. But there was candy here and there so I ate quite a lot of chocolate. With the food we had the option of beer, wine or water. I think I had at least five glasses of wine so I got a bit drunk, but at a party like this most people need to get a bit drunk to create the friendly atmosphere to get people to talk to each others.

During the evening a choir walked down the corridor and stopped here and there to sing some Xmas songs. They were quite good. Better than me at least... :P

The party was supposed to end at 19:00 and by that time they started to clear off all the food and drinks. Many of us were not ready to go home yet so we stayed and talked to after 20:00. By then most people were gone and my friends went downtown to keep the party going in some bar. I went home to Girlwing to help her prepare for our guests from England that will come in the weekend.

I think it was fun and it was good to see people I work with in a relaxed situation. I really home we will do the same for next Xmas.

HuaWei X-mas Party

A couple of days ago I got an invitation to Huawei´s X-mas party at the Chinese Embassy in Sweden. As I was told the dress code was "Business Casual". I thought about this for a while and came up with the idea that for some people this will mean to wear a full suite with tie, because this is what is expected of them in their office. For others this will mean a nice sweater with a shirt under it. The only suite I have is about ten years old and only worn during friends weddings. So I was not so keen of wearing a suit, but a nice sweater and a shirt is something I can wear to dress up. I quite often wear this at work but I felt it was needed to buy something new.

So I went to the store and asked for help to match up something good for me. I am not afraid of something colorful so I got a nice red sweater and a blue/gray shirt to have under it. With this I wore a pair of beautiful black trousers and pair of shiny black shoes. I was so handsome.


The party started at 16:00 with mingle and simple Chinese performance. I could not leave work that early but I got on the subway at about 16:30. On the way I took this picture of the invitation card.
Notice that the R.S.V.P is 18th Nov and I got the invitation late on the 8th Dec. No big deal... Just check out the invitation... I think it is fun that I was invited at all.

About 17:15 I arrived at the embassy with some other of Huawei´s customers and one of the employees that I know. That felt good so I knew that I was going in the right direction. In the entrance of the gates to Chinese territory inside the embassy there were some security guards and employees of Huawei. I knew one of them since before so there was no problem for me to enter. I didn't even have to show my invitation card, but I showed it anyway just for the fun of it. He just waved to me and smiled and I walked in to the Chinese land.

Soon I entered the main building and welcoming me was my sweet Girlwing who for the moment worked with greeting all the guests. I was directed to hang of my clothes in the employee area. Then I walked around among the guests and looking to see if there was anyone I ever met before during my life as a Remedy ARS Consultant. I didn't see any familiar faces from that time. I was hoping too much. Most of the people were purchase managers, CEOs and similar people responsible for decisions about purchasing telecommunication equipment. Not much close to the people that is responsible for IT support and IT process tools. Another thing that struck me that everybody were wearing a dark suite, with a discrete tie. Hmmm.. I am not wearing a suite.... I am wearing a nice read sweater. I was standing out very clear from the crowd. Oh shit... Actually I didn't care that much about this... but instead I was feeling sorry for all the people being so stiff, boring and imagine less. I was expecting some people to wear suite but I didn't expect everybody to wear that. What does "Business Casual" mean really?

Girlwing introduced me to some customers she met through her work and I talked to some of her colleagues. I also watched when some calligraphy artists were writing some of the customers names with Chinese characters. There was also a person there making Chinese tea in the proper way for the customers to taste.

So far the party looked like a western party with some Chinese details. So now it was time to continue in a Chinese way. That means that everybody should do something together. Usually that involves everybody listening to speeches or watching performances. So everybody goes in to a room filled with chairs, just like in a theater, in front of a stage. First we watched a short tourist advertisement movie about Beijing. It was interesting for me with many beautiful scenes. This movie was probably the embassy's idea.

Then there was some performances. Here I think they did a mistake of NOT informing the audience that they didn't bring the best performers they could find in China. Instead they had asked some young Chinese students who for the moment are studying in universities here in Sweden. In Asia it is impolite to say "No" so off course they participate if their country asks them to perform for the Swedish customers.

In China it is very common that the parents pay a lot of money and energy to get their kids educated. It is also very common that the kids get some extra education to play some instrument, dancing, calligraphy or playing weiqi. So many student are skilled in those arts. So we got the opportunity to enjoy some traditional instruments by these student. They were very skilled but it was obvious that they were not professionals. In the dancing acts there was one girl that was very good while the others didn't really match up to her skill. There were also two singing acts and here came the second mistake in my opinion. They sang in English. Hey, we Swedes are quite good in English and we know how these songs are supposed to be sung. But it was cute... I only wish that they had sung in Chinese. In that way we would have no idea if they made any mistakes, and it would be more in theme with the traditional Chinese instruments that were played in other acts.

The funnies thing with the whole act were the two presenters that talked between the acts. Especially the girl. She had no idea of her lines and she had to look in the note hidden in her hand all the time. At one moment when the male presenter asked her "Do you like to see movies" and she looked at the note and hesitated for two seconds and then said "Of course". Was that so hard to remember? ;)

Anyway I enjoyed the show and I understood quite soon what the deal was, but I was afraid that many in the audience didn't get it and thought that it was bad. It was obvious that the students didn't get so much time to practice before the show so I hope they were pleased with what they delivered. All credits too you all!

The performance took a while and now we was starving. As soon is was over everybody had to leave the room so they could remove all the chairs and make the room ready for the food. It was an Asian buffet. So tasty! It almost felt as I was back in China. Someone said it was the embassy's chef who had made all the food. If he did... Good chef! And it was a lot of food. After everybody had eaten about two thirds of the food was still left. I was so hungry and focused on the food so I forgot to take any picture of it. :P

After everybody was filled with Chinese food it was time to round things off with a great show of fireworks. This was the most amazing fireworks show I ever witnessed this close. The whole show took about 30 minutes or something like that. The last five minutes there were some really big pieces. The ground shook of the explosion when the rockets left the ground. The alarms of several of the embassy's cars went of "wee wee wee wee". Several seconds of nothing... and then the most amazing colors and lights lit up the sky. Again and again and again. I am still amazed... 8)

When the show was over and we walked out from the embassy, the police came and checked out what was happening. Probably someone had called them about explosions over at the embassies. I am not surprised... :)