Author: RipperDoc

As you can see, the blog is in a state of change. I switched to the template K2, a kind of Kubrick in the power of two, with som AJAX features and more CSS. I will fine tune the look the coming days to make my variant of the theme a bit more RipperDoc and a bit less cool-template-everybody-uses. Stay tuned, and don’t hesitate to comment the new look.

I have long been a staunch defender of Firefox. It offers a clean interface, is true to standards, offers a wealth of extensions and supposedly offers high performance. But lately, I have gotten all the reason to get tired with this browser, especially it’s performance. And I’m surprised about this. Basically, what I’m experiencing is the dreaded memory leak. After using Firefox for an hour or so of surfing, the memory usage is normally between 400 and 500 MB! And at those levels, Firefox often start using a lot of processor power, for God knows what. It usually ends with a crashing Firefox. And in general, I have experienced a lot of crashes nowadays (a couple each day) – older versions of Firefox was much more stable. Worth noting is that my Firefox installation is clean and I only have a handful of extensions. I’m actually considering going over to another browser, and then it’s bad, because the alternatives are not really promising… the slogan “the browser, reloaded” suddenly has a different meaning to me – having to reload the program daily to clear memory leaks…

After traveling through Malaysia without girlfriend it was time to go somewhere with her. And as my visa for China was soon expiring we concluded that we should go to the second most important place in China after Beijing – Shanghai.

Shirley had some slight reservations though. Apparently her friends didn’t like Shanghai, and the weather in Shanghai in February isn’t the most forgiving… the forecast promised 5 to 10 degrees C. In the same time, my room mate Claes said Shanghai almost was better than HK. So, who was right?

Well, I’ll just start with the simple fact that it was darn cold in Shanghai. Sure, I’m from Sweden, I’m supposed to stand cold for half of the year, but I seem to have lost that nordic attribute. I was always freezing to the bones in the 2 – 4 degrees Celsius, even though I had winter clothes! It was really getting on my nerves and seriously affected my overall judgement of Shanghai. Seriously, how will I ever survive a Swedish winter?

So, what about the city… Shanghai is probably the most futuristic city I’ve seen so far. Hong Kong has much more skyscrapers and a better skyline, but Shanghai has bolder architecture and it’s more spacious which makes the buildings look bigger. It actually has a higher skyscraper than Hong Kong – the Jin Mao Tower is 420.5 m high while HK’s IFC2 is 416 m high… and we went all the way up to the 88th floor…

In the end, Shanghai is about the same as Hong Kong, but without the finesse. It’s about shopping and business rather than history or nature. It has a grandiose cultural museum which got us bored in 15 minutes. The modern art museum is slightly better. But people are more rude and more chinese (which implies a couple of bad and good things). Some things are really cheap, but most prices are actually closer to HK standards.

Our program for the weekend – we had 4 days to spend – was not very original. Visit the skyscraper, the museum, the shopping mall, the riverside and the old town. And that’s what we did, in addition to sleeping a lot – I guess that’s what cold weather do to people… and none of the sights were really worth saying “wow”. I liked the skyscrapers – Shirley did not. Shirley liked the food, I did not…

And now we have been back for a while and Shanghai didn’t have any lasting impression on me. It was too cold and I had too high expectations on what to do there. Although it was very nice traveling with Shirley – the next time we should go to a warm and cosy place though

To me, that is! I’m officially 23 years old. What better way to celebrate this than to blog about it 😉 Anyhow, it has been quiet here for a while, due to a visit to Shanghai and a busy week. My greatest birthday present is still Shirley, but I also wish some other things, which maybe you could help me with?

Basically, I will stay in Hong Kong longer than previously planned, as I have the approval of staying at HKUST until December 2006 (or maybe longer). What I will do here is a research project, that also will function as my finishing thesis (“examensarbete“) for my Swedish degree in software engineering from Chalmers. There are of course a cartload of formalities to go through before this can be 100% sure, but what I need right now is a research topic, in other words, what exactly will I occupy myself with during the whole autumn? I have the possibility of choosing a topic in two research fields, 3D-graphics and computer music. So what cool things should I do? Feel free to suggest anything, because I have to choose topic soon and I’m in bad need of inspiration.

I will now continue my celebrations by doing school work and have a pizza tonight. Soon more posts will arrive here, for example about my visit to Shanghai, my experiences with having a smartphone and some historical revelations…