I’ve been tinkering around for a while on a new project: a website for image storage. It’s not ready to go live just yet, but I’m going to finish it up and push it out there to see what people think.

What I’ve been using it for so far is to move my images out of del.icio.us urls and into my own copies. It turns out bookmarking funny or cool images is good in theory, but media urls on the web are remarkably ephemeral. About a third of my images were lost to ‘url not found’ or similar problems. I’ve been using Amazon S3 as storage for my new website, storing my 150 images costs about 5 cents a month.

Beijing Life

This is my third week of living in Beijing. One interesting thing is the Internet. On one hand the internet in China is bad for obvious reasons (thanks Cisco). On the other hand it’s nice to have a fast Ethernet connection in your house, and to have a parallel 2000kbit connection. Pinging a US servers takes about 250 milliseconds.

Oh yeah I have a new apartment:

Things you may notice:

• My washing machine buttons are written in some alien language
• Chinese buildings avoid the use of the evil number ‘4’ in floors: so the building have 3a, 12a, 12b, 23a, etc. The 12a is because westerners have their own irrational number phobias.

Not in picture: No oven. Chinese have no use for ovens I guess?

My cell phone number I bought was extra cheap because it has lots of 4s in it. Phone numbers without 4s or with lucky numbers can cost a lot more.

My new bathroom doubles as a shower. I have a Shower-head on the wall and every day it’s Hurricane Katrina in my bathroom, until the floor drains work their magic.

Fast food

One interesting thing in Beijing is their fast food. I’ve identified 4 major chains here: McDonalds, KFC, 7-11 and Pizza Hut. I haven’t had any McD yet, except for their cheapo ice cream: 30 cents for a cone. KFC has some weird asian sauce dishes, and 7-11 serves Chinese food standards like Kung Pow chicken. Pizza Hut I haven’t gone to yet because the US version is so awful, but here it’s insanely popular with Chinese kids.

I’ve also seen Starbucks, which even has a direct ripoff chain here called ‘SPR’ which looks very very similar.