Before heading to Shanghai, and while I was there, numerous people asked if I was going to the Shanghai Expo which is, as far as I can tell, the equivalent of a World’s Fair.  It has drawn thousands of extra visitors to Shanghai and lasts a full six months.  Well, I couldn’t find a compelling reason to go.  Hearing that there were long waiting lines sealed the deal.  Why do I want to do this?  OK, on to the real story:

The real reason for going to Shanghai was to have another CMIC retreat with Chris.  Peter and Chris had been to Shenzhen twice before, and since Peter’s trip to the US freed up a bed, the idea to spend some time working closely with Chris was hatched.  Well, I stayed about five full days and we worked every day from morning until bedtime only breaking for meals and the World Cup match between Argentina and Germany.

Well, I can’t argue at all with the results of the trip:

• Peter and I blasted through a release of the 1.1 software the day I arrived.  Actually, he upgraded the servers with all the changes while we were asleep and I made sure the system was running as expected the next morning.  A few bugs were discovered (as well as some fraudsters), but we took care of it quickly.
• Chris and I, working side-by-side, cranked out the callback feature making it possible to initiate calls as well as send calls.  I knew we could get this done during the trip, but I was surprised that we got it working end-to-end in just two full days.
• I bumped up my bash command line skillz several notches by just sitting with Chris and asking questions.  I really hope to be able to zip around the shell soon.
• Chris took me on a survey of the Ruby on Rails development system, which looks like a real pleasure to program in.  I can’t wait to learn it inside and out.  I also spent some time alone working on some sample code and problems.

Some fun things we did:

• We worked in some great locations, notably:  1) The Park Hyatt Cafe at the millionth floor (ok, 91st) of the International Financial Center (IFC) building.  We enjoyed expensive (and decent) cappuccino and the best view in the city.  2) Mocha Cafe in People’s Square Park.  This place is hidden behind the entrance to an art museum.  It appears to be unknown to the masses because, despite its size, there were only a couple of parties there.  We enjoyed a hot lunch in the humid pre-storm afternoon, then escaped inside to AC while it poured outside.  It felt good to crank out more code while looking out onto the park in a thunderstorm.
• Watching the Germany – Argentina game in a German restaurant.  We got the best seat in the house simply by asking, “Can we put a table HERE?” From experience, I predicted that Germany would win and that if Argentina got behind, they’d fall apart.  Neither of those was incorrect.  The Germans in the restaurant were quite mean to poor ole sad-looking Maradona whenever his face was shown on the TV.
• Enjoyed the Monday special at Malone’s:  a 50 RMB colossal hamburger at Malone’s.  I hadn’t had a hamburger like that in months.  My was it tasty!  I respect Chris for eating another half of one, including the fries and the pint of beer it came with.  He said the week before he ate two.  Respect.

Some innerestin’ things:

• Shanghai felt so different this time around.  I guess the last time I was there with Robert, we frequented visited Suzhou, got scammed by tea show representatives, bought knock-off ties on the street, and witnessed rats skittering through local hole-in-the-wall restaurants.  But this time, I had to make a special effort to speak Chinese, it seemed like.  Every single restaurant was full of foreigners and most every waitress spoke fine English.  It was good to get back to Shenzhen for this reason.
• Shanghai was also quite expensive this time around, restaurants especially.  Granted, we didn’t do any street food, but even the Chinese restaurants was at least 130 per person (a little over $19 USD).  I guess the cheapest was an Indian restaurant with a lunch special.  That cost us 91 RMB.
• There were tons of foreigners.  Plenty were quite obnoxious.  ‘Nuff said.
• The Chinese were generally more behaved and urbane.  I saw no egregious violations like peeing in the street and only one spitting incident.

My new favorite place to go spend a few hours and crank out some work:  High Tea.  High Tea is located in LuoHu in the building next to the Di Wang tower that is supposed to look like an open book, just across from Shenzhen Book City.  Find it by taking the escalator up between the KFC and McDonald’s (remember, this is China!).  On that floor, turn left and follow the hallway to the end.  You’ll see “Friday’s Cafe” right in front of you and an elevator on the right.  Take the elevator to the 4th floor (the highest floor that this elevator goes to).

The food is priced well since everything on the menu is half-priced.  The best deal however is between 2-5pm where you can order a snack for between 8-15 RMB and, for 1 RMB extra, you can add a drink of your choice.  The drinks to choose from are great:  coffees, teas, milk teas, ice cream and red bean drinks – and all come prepared in with a nice presentation.

Of course, for working, there’s high quality wireless internet that’s just as good as Everybody’s Happy.  The interior looks great, very modern and clean.  The only downside for us foreigners is that the menus, like Everybody’s Happy, are all in Chinese and no one speaks English.  So, take a local along or brush up on some Chinese.

We just finished up our “Call Me in China” January retreat.  My business partner, Peter, who is also a former MS employee was in town for around two weeks.  After leaving Microsoft, Peter moved to Shanghai for the more stimulating social environment and cosmopolitan feel.  Me, I still like Shenzhen.  Peter’s brother, Chris, accompanied him.  Chris, a computer engineering student at Carnegie Mellon, accompanied him and will be spending a semester in Shanghai learning Chinese.  Chris’s capacity with “Call Me in China” was officially intern and his contributions were greatly appreciated.  To learn a little more about the retreat, read more here.

We ate many meals together.  Peter and Chris leaning more towards the Northeastern style cuisine featuring dumplings and me preferring the spicier offerings of the Sichuan and Hunan regions.  Our final meal together was at a fairly small Sichuan restauarant.  Peter heard a suggestion from the waitress of what he though was “sweet chicken”.  The conversation was too fast for me to catch, unfortunately, for I knew what this “sweet chicken” really was.  Actually, it was “field chicken”.  Both “sweet” and “field” have the exact same sounds:  “tian” tone 2.  But, the characters are completely different and thus the meaning is completely different.

“Sweet Chicken”, aka “Qin1 Wa1″,  is another word for “Frog”!  I’ve grown to like frog actually and this was a tasty dish, but it was a bit to realistic for Chris’s liking.  The bodies of the poor frogs were almost intact.  The heads were missing thankfully, but the cute little hands and feet were still intact.  The underside looked otherwordly too; “Alien” was the term that Peter used.  Chris didn’t eat too much of this dish, but at least it made for some good pictures.

Man, I can’t believe this project is finished.  It’s been in the works a long time.  Again, something that sounded very easy turned out to be involved and lengthy.  This time, despite it being a music project, I was completely ignorant of the effort that was going to be involved.

Basically, I wanted to improve my recording of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto on the electric guitar.  I recorded it a long time ago with synthesizer tracks replacing the orchestra.  Although I was happy with the recording, the synth sounds had always been the weakness.  Just a year or year and a half ago, a friend, colleague, and fellow guitarist suggested that I redo the MIDI tracks with real orchestral recordings.

I finally got around to looking into this.  However, I was convinced that all that was involved in converting a MIDI file into orchestral sounds was running the MIDI file through some high end samples and call it good.  Boy, was I wrong.

I started out by posting a job on Elance requesting someone to convert a MIDI file into a WAV file.  I got numerous responses whose prices ran the gamut from $50 to $500.  This seemed weird, but I didn’t really think much of it.  I ended up picking a really nice and knowledgeable guy in Argentina.  He was way on the low end of the price, but I really picked him because he sounded informed and communicated well.  However, when it came time to share the job with him, I got a nice but firm email stating that he’d misunderstood the requirements and that it was way beyond what he had originally had bidded on.  He was nice enough to spend a lot of time with me to explain exactly what would be involved.  About the same time, I met a guy in China, Xiao Xie, through another friend who, having studied music and was working in the music industry here in Shenzhen as a game and advertisement composer, seemed to be a great fit for the job.  So, I hired him.  A great find!

His English was pretty good, better than my Chinese, but at least he had a command of the technical terms in English, so we could get by.  He basically confirmed what the guy in Argentina had stated:  we needed to render each instrument into a wave file, and usually each track would need to be rendered multiple times.  For example, we’d need to render some violin sections with long bow strokes with pronounced vibrato, other times we’d need to use a swift marcato, and then everything in between.  Strings are always the most difficult, but we had to do the same for winds and brass as well.  On top of that, for the challenging full orchestral moments, we rendered multiple versions of the same track to give it a full ensemble sound.  We neede to separate some tracks, like some of the flute tracks, so we could bring out the melody better.  Then, we went back, mixed it all together, reworking sections multiple times so that the balance would be good.  We added equalization, reverb, and so on.

As you can see, this is way more work than simply turning on orchestral samples, pressing “play” on the MIDI file and “record” on the WAV recorder.  We usually spent one day per weekend, for anywhere from two to six hours working through the piece.  It took about three to four months to do the whole thing.  We worked hard on it, got testy with each other from time to time, but remained friends throughout. A celebration is called for!

And, I’m very happy with it!  The CD artwork is already finished, so now, it’s just a matter of uploading the right files to a duplication company in the US and re-releasing on CDBaby.  I’ll send out another announcement once the recording is for sale.

Have a listen of a brief sample from the first movement:

And some pics from the home studio:

One thing I’m not so good at:  Letting go of the reigns and delegating to other people.  One thing that plays into this is money.  If I can do something myself, then I’m often reluctant to spend money on someone else doing it.  Most things I can do, so I think that it’s best that I do them myself.  And so I do.  And then I end up driving myself crazy with too many obligations and deadlines.  That happened last week and I realized I had to take a break and relax.  I’d basically been working from sun up to past sun down and should have had more to show for it.  At least I realize it.  And I’m trying really hard to get better at it.  I think it’s something that’s just going to take concerted effort and practice.  And repeatedly reminding myself that I’ve got to get better at it.

Stuff I was driving myself crazy with this past week:

• Choosing membership software – There are tons of solutions out there, each with pros and cons.  Though I haven’t settled on one, I’m a lot closer.  Getting to this point though was a pain.
• Investigating merchant accounts – Same thing here with tradeoffs and pros and cons.  I use a website for advice, but that’s nothing like trusted advice, and it’s so easy to get contradicting information.  In the end, it comes down to your own investigation which is time-consuming.
• Video technical problems – Actually, there weren’t too many problems, but hunting down the right cables, testing out the green screen, etc. etc. takes time.  I spent a long time looking for a stupid Firewire 800 cable which is surprisingly impossible to find in Shenzhen now.  I had to order one from Shanghai.
• Buying a plane ticket – Once I decided that I needed to come home for Christmas, I spent a lot of time online looking for a ticket.  At first, I wanted to use my miles, but every time I went to purchase a ticket, the Delta site would tell me that “a leg of your trip is sold out.  Please try again.”  Well, thanks for telling me which one.  I had to make at least three phone calls to customer service.  In the end, I realized that since Delta partnered with Northwest (or was the same airline) and that all my flights would be on Northwest, I’d get more accurate information on their site.  One trip to the NWA site and I found a relatively cheap ticket from Hong Kong to Hotlanta.
• WordPress mail problems – A new version of a plugin that I endorse had a weird problem of stripping HTML from mail when generating mail from the “Edit Post” page, though it worked fine from the “New Mail” page.  Numerous back-and-forth with a support group didn’t yield much.
• The Great Firewall of China blocked a client’s URL – Why?  After networking around, I found out that you have to register a site in China if you don’t want it to be blocked.  I then contracted another trusted contact to help out.  In the mean time, I had to console and explain what was going on to my clients.
• Create a test ad campaign – This is just an idea that I had after creating the first website.  As part of the negotiation (due to a misunderstanding that I was forgiving with), I got some free advertising in a Shenzhen magazine.
• The Great Firewall of China blocked one of my sites – Same thing.  At least I’d seen this before.  But, this affects my ad campaign.  I now need to think about revising the ad.
• Health Certificate – As part of my visa requirement, I had to go get a medical examination at a designated hospital.  The first time, I had someone help me.  This time, it was just me.  Got it, and all is well.
• More visa stuff – Trips to police stations, getting the runaround, visiting five places until finding the right one, dealing with officials who don’t know what the process is.  This caused numerous headaches.  At least I had someone helping during key moments otherwise it would have been much longer.
• International Bank Accounts – Learning the ins-and-outs of moving money around.  What a pain.  I’ve been working on this one for weeks, it seems.  I owe my friend in Hong Kong money for purchasing my laptop.  He’s been very nice.
• Business accounting – Related to the above item, I had to contact my accountant and ask some things that have been on my mind.
• Learning RegNow’s fulfillment and affiliate system – It’s huge, complex, and poorly documented.  I often lose patience with the documents and then just settle for an-email-per-day support while I concentrate on other things.
• Finding an appropriate WordPress theme for a new site – This is time consuming and I haven’t found anything I like.  I think the solution is to hire someone to create one.  Create the job, post it, review the dozens of bids, follow-up, establish payment rules, etc. etc.

It’s about a week after I pulled back a bit so I’m wondering what I’m forgetting.  It doesn’t matter, that’s enough.  Well, one day, my head was hurting so much that I decided I needed a head massage, or more accurately a “wash head” or “xi1 tou2″, as they say in Chinese.  The beautiful thing as that there’s a place right outside of my apartment complex, a hair salon actually, that offers this.  I’ve written other posts that talk about haircuts in China.  In these haircut places, you can get these wonderful head massages before you get your haircut.  I thought my last place was pretty good, but this one takes the cake.  Here’s what you get with a “head wash” at the place next door:

• Three washes, each one lasting ten minutes.  And you’re not sitting in some stupid chair wrenching your neck backwards like you do in the US.  You’re supine on a cushioned table with your head balanced on a small padded column above a sink.  The first two washes are with shampoo.  And, once there are enough suds, the girl washing your hair will just rub your temples, forhead, sprinkle water down your closed eyes so it runs off your cheeks (very refreshing), massage your neck and shoulders.  Fantastic.  The last wash is with some sort of cleanser with a menthol sort of feel to it.  The same techniques are used.
• Five minutes to clean your ears with Q-tips.
• Five minutes of arm massage.  This is very comfortable if done well.  A lot of it is focused on massaging your hands and fingers.
• Ten minutes of back massage – great way to round out the whole experience.

After fifty minutes of that, I always end up staggering home.  A hot shower and I’m ready to hit the sack and feel revived in the morning.

Total cost:  10RMB ,or, $1.46

I forgot to announce on this site last week that my upgrade to my Cascade climbing site is now complete (I did announce on Facebook).  I used the same technique as I did for the Gore Range Site.  There are also newer movies available on various reports.  I decided to use Vimeo.  I prefer their interface to youtube’s.  Of course, youtube gets way more traffic.  You can click on the “Movies” category to see all reports with movies, by the way.  I still have several to add, including some HD ones…whenever I get around to making them.

Well, I’ve got another release ready.  You can download it here.

Of course, there’s always a heaping amount of nonsense when you’re dealing with software.  I foolishly thought I might get by this one with very little effort.  I was so close.  And yet again, at the finish line, something lassoed me an violently jerked me off my feet and put me on another part of the course to make my way through.

Here’s the good, both items have to do with how I changed my software:

• I added code to better support affiliates.  Regnow has an SDK, which is (surprisingly) designed very well, which is used to certify that your application ensures proper payment to affiliates who sell your product.  I was able to implement this in a matter of hours.  All I did was read the two page overview doc, looked at an examples, and implemented it.  Thanks, Regnow!  If only the rest of your system was this well-planned.
• I changed my install program from a crappy old copy of InstallShield (I stay as far away as possible from the new versions which are awful) to Advanced Installer, which is fantastic.  I can’t say enough about how good it is.  Nowadays, finding something good makes me happy because I’ve been burned by so many bad upgrades!  I was up and installing Snatcher and Son 3.1 in about thirty minutes.  The only difficulty was dealing with the registry, but around an hour of learning how it worked fixed all the problems.  I was able to create my installation package using the free version.  I may end up buying a license, just so I can customize the graphics and a few other little things.  At $299, it’s way more affordable than InstallShield.  Oh yes, and my installation program shrunk from 7 megs down to one.

Here’s the bad, these all come from the fulfillment side:

• I went to upload my .msi file on the Regnow.com servers and got an error message that they only support .exe files.  You’ve got to be kidding!  I shot off an email to support right away.  I can’t believe this is true, but I guess it is.  Maybe I’ll have to buy a license to Advanced Installer to get this too.
• On Upload.com, where I have a paying account, I went to modify my product and made all the necessary modifications.  It went smoothly (save for the fact that the icon doesn’t show and I uploaded both .png and .ico files…got a support message out for that).  However, I got asked to upgrade my account from a free account to a basic or premium one.  What?  I already am paying!  I went back to my product page which indeed showed that I had added a new product!  But, I am certain that I clicked on modify.  So, another support message is out.  Bah!  I won’t even go into describing how confusing their help system is.

I’m looking forward to the day when I make an upgrade and it takes a total of thirty minutes to deploy the whole thing.  As of right now, that seems a long way off.

Again, as they say in Chinese:  “Hao Shi Duo Mo”, or, “The road to success is paved with hardship.”  Too bad I don’t know how to say, “and nonsense, and foolishness, and bad designs, etc.”