Solipsism Gradient

The great wall section we saw was all restored recently, but even so it was impressive. We went to a section about 130Km outside of Beijing that is seldom visited by foreign tourists. Then to the imperial tombs nearby, which are also supposed to be better than the ones nearer Beijing.

After several hours of traffic jams we also had the famous Beijing Duck, which was indeed excellent. Today we had a visit to the Summer Palace in the morning, and then took a train to Datong, arriving very late in the evening.

Full day today: Tian’an-men Square, the Imperial Palace, lunch with a “traditional Chinese family”, a trishaw tour through the old (and quite poor) Hutong quarter, the Lama (Tibetan Buddhist) Temple, then dinner at the Beijing Qianmen Jianguo Hotel, imediately followed by the Chinese Opera at their Liyuan Theater. Whew.

Tomorrow, to the Great Wall.

We’ve just arrived at Wangfujing Grand Hotel in Beijing, China. Tired but all went very well; we’re off to get some tourism done, more later.

Update: the CocoaHeads Beijing talk went quite well.

Now at my cousin’s house near Frankfurt (Germany). All’s well and we’ll leave for Beijing the day after tomorrow. Today we visited Aschaffenburg, mainly the Pompejanum and the museum in the old castle.

So, I’m typing this from the VIP lounge at the GRU (Guarulhos/São Paulo) airport. In a few hours we’ll fly to Frankfurt over Paris, and a few days later, Beijing.

Must get busy preparing my talk for Cocoaheads Beijing, was too busy to do anything before our departure. More as it happens!

Non-development developments, that is.

We’ve been busy packing for our upcoming trip to China and other Asian countries. Also, moving from our current apartment to a new one – more packing! I also just sold my desktop iMac (more packing, erh, backing-up); by the time we get back in mid-November there should be a new generation of iMacs out. Meanwhile, essentials are being copied to my MacBook Air, and I’ll work based from that for the next two months.

You can tell that I decided to schedule all traumatic experiences at once! Better to get them done and over with…

Anyway, we go off the coming weekend. On the way to Beijing there’ll be a stopover of a few days in Frankfurt, Germany; enough to de-lag a little, and visit with family.

If all goes well, we’ll arrive in Beijing in the early afternoon of Sept. 25, and in the evening I’ll do a small presentation for the local CocoaHeads chapter. (At this time, that page shows Sept. 26 but we’re trying to move it to the 25th.) I gather that all members are rather young, and will be amazed at someone over 40 writing software!

At any rate, I plan to talk a little about my professional experience, then move to the main topic – tentatively named “Protect Your Application Against Evil Hackers (or, at least, against the lazy ones)” – and finally showing some pictures from exotic places like Brazil and California. If it comes off well, I’ll post the slides somewhere here for downloading.

After a little more than two weeks in China we’ll depart from Shanghai for a 4-week cruise, going to Japan, Hongkong, Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore and Vietnam. On the way back to Brazil there’ll be another few days of stopover in Paris.

Posting updates here from China may not be easy, but I’ll try.

So much for regular posting; either no connection, or too much to do when I have one.

Still, everything else’s been good so far. The weather’s been quite good for San Francisco, though a little windy at times. I met a lot of old and new friends already and took some more nice pictures of downtown San Francisco.

In a couple of hours I’ll be in the WWDC keynote queue. Most speculation I’ve read so far has been about iPhone hardware/software, which I’m not too interested in. However, one nice rumor I’ve heard is that they may unveil a highly scalable CPU from the PA Semi group Apple acquired a year or so ago; one or two such chips could power the iPhone, with (say) 32 in a laptop, 128 in a desktop, and 8 or 16 in a hypothetical tablet. Will a tablet be announced? No idea, though I hope so.

Regarding Snow Leopard, I think the most likely announcement is going to be about price and availability; my tip would be between $39 and $59, and September/October. The rumored “Marble” interface theme sounds unlikely to me.

That said, I’m very excited about the things in Snow Leopard’s underlying technologies, but those are visible only to developers, anyway. (Also: NDA…)

Just arrived at the hotel in San Francisco, trip was OK and uneventful, though of course tiring. The Internet connection is very flaky, but I’ll try to post regularly from here on. Stay tuned.