Ron Mertens’ blog

Technorati (a popular blog search engine) has ranked OLED-Info in the top 1000 blogs. It’s currently at number 928. It’s also on the top 100 gadget blogs (number #76). The blogs are ranked according to their Authority, which measures a site’s standing & influence in the blogosphere. The ranking is updated daily and has a very short window, so the blogs ranking changes quite fast.

It’s nice thinking that at least today there are only 927 blogs that have more authority than OLED-Info in the whole world…

This isn’t surprising, but still sad. When you buy your next cheap gadget, think about this.

It turns out that Apple’s ‘overseas’ suppliers are cutting corners ab it. 54% of these factories have failed to meet Apple’s maximum-hour work week. And this is a 60-hours (!) work week we’re talking about – over half of these factories have longer weeks that that!

The are also paying below-minimum wages, employing people younger than 16 and failing to respect anti-discrimination rules.

Apple are obviously ‘very upset’ – but what can you expect when you want to be cheap and ‘competitive’?

It’s time we started thinking about the true-cost of our consumer goods…

More info over at Engadget

Lately Michal is praising creativity all the time.  It turns out that being creative is good – not just because you invent startups and become rich – it’s also a great way to channel your energy, to overcome emotional and physical problems. In short – it’s really important to be creative. You don’t have to actually be good at it: you just have to practice it, really. Dance, play music, invent silly songs, write, paint, whatever.

There’s an  interesting (and funny) lecture by Sir Ken Robinson, talking about this very subject. His main point – being creative is extremely important, but our school system simply kills our children creative drives. This is rather sad. And most likely he is right. It’s not just that school put a low emphasis on things such as arts and dance – the grade system is also very problematic.  If you’re not good in music – you won’t do music classes. That’s horrible, ain’t it?

As a parent to a girl who’s going to school soon (4 years is not much time, eh?) I thought about it, and I don’t have a quick solution. I don’t want her to not attend school at all. But I want her to remain creative. I guess, as always, that Michal and I will have to support her in this – give her confidence enough to remain creative, even when teachers and fellow students bring her down. I believe that the best way for parents to educate is by example. So I’ll try to be more creative (like, inventing 3 silly startups a day, not just 2).

Here’s Robinson’s lecture, worth 20 minutes – it gets better as he gets along (thanks Edan for posting this on FB):

“We need to radically change our view of intelligence”

Michal has posted about this a few minutes ago, but here’s my chance to write about Avatar, too. We’re back in Israel now, and a couple of days ago we went to see it.  It’s one of those ‘must-see’ movies, and I also wanted to check the 3D, of course.

Anyway, the movie is great! We really enjoyed it. Cool 3D, amazing visuals,  and a pro-nature message that hits the spot (makes you want to go back and live in a cave, really. Although where would you get 3D displays then, eh? those old caves barely have HD-Ready sets). I didn’t enjoy the music too much, and the song at the end was horrible. But other than that it was a great film! Go see it!

A lot of people ask me what’s new about the 3D in that movie. I mean, there was 3D TVs for as long as I remember, so what’s the difference now?.  The whole idea in 3D is stereoscopy: you display two images, one for the left eye, and one for the right – this gives the illusion of depth. In the old days they used color-separation: you had glasses that separated the image using color-filters. It’s cheap and simple, but the image loses color and it makes you feel a bit sick sometimes.

The new 3D uses ‘Active-Shutter’ glasses. They include small LCDs that only allow one eye to view the picture at any time (i.e.  block the right eye and then the left eye…). The TV (or projector) alternates between the images fast, and you get stereoscopy. The problem? You need a TV/Projector that can switch fast (you need at least 60Hz for each eye which means 120Hz altogether) and you need to synchronize the glasses, too (this means that you need a new TV that is 3D enabled). The glasses are also heavier and more expensive. And there are problems of cross-over if the TV can’t switch fast enough… but the whole thing looks great. That’s how they do it in Avatar!

There are also some newer technologies that allow glasses-free 3D displays. This is complicated, so don’t wait for such things to arrive at the home in the coming years.

You can read more about 3D displays in my 3D-Display-Info site.

Here’s a short list of Chengdu’s top attractions (according to us, anyway):

• The Pandas, of course
• There are several nice renovated streets in Chengdu. We loved Jin Li, Qin-Tai and the 3 alleys near our home.
• Parks – there are several great parks in Chengdu. Huan-Hua-Xi (near DuFu), the parks near Qin-Tai, Yongling, Tazishan (with the beautiful birds-cage)
• The arts and curios market
• The giant Buddha of Leshan (about a 2 hours drive from Chengdu, but a beautiful place!)
• Getting a hair-cut and massage
• Visiting computer-street and those crazy huge ‘computer markets’
• Wenshu temple

And here’s a list of our favorite restaurants. Obviously this will mean nothing to you, because we don’t know the names of most of them. But still:

• Our ‘home’ restaurant, on the corner opposite to the TCM University’s back gate. There was even a waiter that knows a bit of english!
• The nice restaurant next to the ‘home’ one, where they had great fried potatoes and Japanese Tofu
• The bookworm – a very pleasant place, with good food and lot’s of things for Abigail to play with
• Tandoor – the best restaurant in town, excellent north-Indian cuisine
• Dodo’s cafe
• Street food – Bao Tze, Xing-Ren Tang, Sweet potatoes, Brown boiled eggs and corn
• The restaurant just across the street from us – nice food (the potatoes were good) and a bowl of living roaches (or crabs, or whatever) that Abigail liked to talk to, and the locals liked to eat
• The new restaurant in Xian-Nan-Lu (just near the piano shop)
• Hotpot at Changshun upper street
• Ramon’s fancy place, across the university
• The yellow ’sterile’ restaurant in Xian-Nan-Lu (where Esti and Lea liked to eat)

Everybody who traveled in Asia (and other places, of course) have seen those funny mistakes these guys make in English. It appears everywhere:  official places (we saw a “polace” sign in a police station), parks, places of business and on products (Michal bought a small notebook, which proudly stated “We only do well”). Here’s some funny signs, all from Chengdu (click on the photo to get a closer look…):

Slip carefully...

I have no idea what they are talking about...

At the TCM University

It's civilized to get close to urinate...

Thinking of making things easy for other before urinating

Someone forgot his spaces...

Give the little grass the right of way

Train Tinckets

Finally, here’s some beautiful poetry written on a package of hair bands:

This band world famous

This post is dedicated to Shay Fodor and the rest of the ol’ TripTouch team…

Tags: chinese, chinglish, english, funny

Avid readers of my blog (hey mom!) know that I usually blog on books I read. The good ones, anyway. Here’s the ones I read in Chengdu. I read all of them in Hebrew, by the way.

• Long Lost, Harlan Coben. OK, it’s a Harlan Coben book, which is pretty lame. But it was a OK read for the flight to Beijing.
• The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck: (thanks Guy for getting us this book!). A wonderful book, about life in China before the communist revolution (probably 1900 or so). A must read!
• Iz’a Mia, Oshrat Kotler: A really nice Israeli book. 3 Generations of women, originally from Bulgaria, making bad choices in men.
• The Jewish dog, Asher Kravitz: Michal says this is ‘holocaust lite’ – and she’s rather right. The hero in this story (and the storyteller) is a dog. Nice.
• Right Ho, Jeeves ,P. G. Wodehouse: Funny British aristocrat humor. I loved it.
• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Mary Ann Shaffer: A very nice book talking about life in Guernsey island (one of the Channel islands) during WWII. My mom says it’s a “woman’s book”  but I liked it anyway.
• Night train to Lisbon, Pascal Mercier: A Swiss schoolteacher heads for Lisbon, trying to find details on a Portuguese philosopher that he reads about in a book. It’s a strange mix of a travel-book (well, almost) and a lot of philosophy. Sounds boring? It was one of the best books I read in years. Go read it!

VPN for youtube and facebook
Clouds and mists
Chang-Fu Xin Xan
Starbucks
Xian-Nan-Lu
Sichaun pepper (yuck!)
Our ‘home’ restaurant, the yellow/sterile one, the green one, the one across the street
Dodo’s cafe
The Metro
The secrets of Free Mori
Tandoor
Endless amount of high rise buildings
The Bookworm
Kabalth-Shabbath at Meirav’s
Abigail starting to walk in the museum
Tai-Chi
Spitting
Blue Massage
Bao-Tze
Shi-Er-Qiao Lu
The butcher-shop dogs
Table tennis at the gym
Road hierarchy: Bus, Taxi, Car, Rickshaw, Motorcycle, Bicycle, Me
The twins from the second floor
Green tea
The Sheraton Lido ‘club’
Kong-Pao Chicken (not for me, for Abbey)
X-mas in Chinese
Herbal-Medicine market (and Abigail’s chicken leg)
Chairman Mao
Badminton
Giant Buddha
Dancing in the parks
Esti and Lea
Hair cut and massage
Sha Mei-Mei, Mei-Mei!
The Narrow-alleys
Ordering food with my notebook
Pleasant sheep and the big bad wolf
Qin-Tai Lu
Ren-Ren Le
Pandas
The Taxi-Master

Tags: chengdu, china, thoughts

As you may know, China has a ‘one-child-policy’. It basically means that you can only have one child (and if you have more, it costs a lot of money). I never realized what this law really means.

It’s not just that you don’t have brothers. Your parents do not have brothers, too. So you don’t have an uncles or aunts. And you also do not have any cousins. In fact, there’s almost no family – certainly nothing in your own age group!

I understand the need for such a law – China’s population is big (1.4B or so) – and if it grows too much, they won’t be able to feed themselves (China does not need to import any food, currently, and it matters a lot to them). But it’s oh-so controversial…

Interestingly, China has a new law now, that if a couple are both from one-child families, they are allowed to have 2 babies. A slight improvement…

Today we went to an Indian restaurant here in Chengdu, called Tandoor. It was really great – they were very friendly (the managers come from Delhi), and impressed with our fluent Hindi. And the food? the best we had so far in Chengdu – great Indian food! Dal Makhani, Palak Paneer, Samosas…

It got me thinking. We’ve spent 2 months in India back in 2005, and here we are 2 months in China already. I have to say that India is simply better: the food, the colors, the nice English-speaking Indians, the non-stop chaos, the weather, the food. The minute we walked into that Indian restaurant, Michal said that she feels “at home”.

It’s not a fair comparison (a trip in northern India vs 2 months in Chengdu, and with Abigail) – but still. I guess I’m more of an India person than a China person.