Alright I know I say that these posts are going to be short but this one really might be, it is the third 12+ hour at work day for me and I am tired. Besides nothing really interesting happened today to me.

Mostly I struggled with travel and communication. I setup SkypeOut which is pretty cool as it allows me to call the US for .02$ a minute. I was able to call all sorts of people except for the one phone number I was trying to reach. If anyone has any suggestions for how to get Skype to call a Motorola v220 it would be much appreciated.

I also started looking at air travel prices because my visa has this 30 day time of stay restriction. After the initial sticker shock of 1000$ for a trip to Korea (Thanks Expedia) I decided not to use companies that people I know work for. It led to a mixed experience. Korean Air was easy and setup so nicely that I had no trouble finding flights. Of course they were still 425$. Air China however reminded me of a Kafka novel, they show you all their international flights and their schedules, they just don't provide a way to buy or price said flights.

After quickly calculating this 30 day things cost at at least 2500$ for my stay here I decided to pursue a different plan and am going to try to get my visa modified to give me a longer stay. Initially it looks like this should work. I just need to get a proof of residence letter from the hotel. I will let you know how this works out.

Yachi pointed me to a blog about a guy who is staying in China. He lives in Shanghai, before that he lived in Beijing and before that he lived in Snoqualmie. Turns out he is married to Holly Barbacovi who works at Microsoft and used to be the recruiter for our group. Now she is the recruiter for MS China. Small world.

The only truly exciting thing that happened today was that I managed to order two meals by myself with no English. Not that I was speaking Chinese but pointing and pantomime seemed to get me by. The exciting thing was that with dinner I was able to get a Coke and pay for my order with no register screen to tell me the amount. Actually I just started offering the cashier dollar bills until he stopped accepting them and gave some back to me but it worked and i think I paid the right amount :). Ohh that reminds me, I also went to my first all Chinese meeting. Awesome I understood about 2% but that 2% paid off. When someone stopped and asked me a question I was able to answer it semi-coherently and the discussion of the topic had been in Chinese (with tons of English technical words, which is what allowed me to cheat).

Alright I need to get back to the hotel and sleep for seven hours. Check out Jaylib - Champion Sound - Stones Throw. Two of the best producers in music, Jaydee (Representing the D) and Madlib, the genius behind Quasimoto (See a couple of days ago). The rhymes are always at least interesting and you will be hard pressed to here better music.