See, I told you I didn’t think I could get broadband! Actually, the cable installer came out this morning but broke one of his tools while doing the installation. So now I have to wait another week before they can send another guy out. I’ve waited for more than two years now; waiting an additional week is nothing.
Speaking of restaurants, we took the in-laws to a Chinese restaurant last night (yes, a local one). When the check came with the fortune cookies, bà (dad) started to eat it and almost ate the paper inside. They’ve never seen a fortune cookie in their lives; it’s strictly an American thing.
[Continuing the weblog entry reference-and-comment chain,]
Mark echoes some of my sentiments regarding strip malls and chain restaurants. In the past, Hong and I have tried to stick to patronizing local restaurants whenever possible. Oh sure, we’d grab fast-food every once in a while, but when it came to sitting down and being served, we tried to opt for local fare. There’s more variety to be found, and by and large the chains look pretty similar. (They must all get their junk they put on the walls from the same supplier.)
But after two years in the suburbs of Indianapolis, and with 2 out of 3 restaurants out here being chains, we’re running low on local restaurants to visit. So we’ve started trying some of the chains we’ve never visited before. Here’s what we’ve learned so far.
Do you remember the “leg lamp” from A Christmas Story? Of course you do. Well, now you can buy it. I’m not really sure why Toys ‘R Us is the one selling it, but what the hey.
I’m finally getting broadband Internet next week. I’ve been living off of a 56K modem connection for two years now, and it’s been agony at times, tying up the phone line for hours while downloading the latest programs. I was searching in earnest for a company which serviced our area, but most of them just didn’t extend out to our area; the only options I thought I had were satellite (expensive) and ISDN (expensive AND slow). It’s crazy: I have a friend who lives a mile away who can get DSL, and the Roadrunner cable service map shows that their coverage ends half a mile from our house. So I’ve been setting up my computer to download security updates overnight, and gotten complaints that our friends can’t call us because our phone is often busy for several hours at a time.
Well, no more. Last week, I got an advert in the mail about another local cable company to provide service. Ideally I’d like DSL, but beggars can’t be choosers, eh? They should be coming out next week for the installation. Yay!
I’m still afraid they’re going to come out to my house only to tell me that, oops, they made a mistake, the service doesn’t extend to my area.
We picked up my in-laws from the Chicago airport on Sunday afternoon for their seven-week stay. We stayed in Chicago overnight, since we didn’t think a four-hour drive at night after their 14-hour plane flight from China was such a good idea, and arrived home yesterday afternoon.
We’re still not sure what they’ll find to do in the house while we’re at work, and we both feel a little guilty about leaving them alone. Hopefully they’ll make good use of the ping-pong table we bought for them; I played a couple of rounds with the old man last night and he’s quite good for his age (approaching 80 years old!). Then again, he does usually play for several hours a day at the local club in Taiyuan.
Last night, they were calling their family and friends back home to let them know they arrived safely, and the one thing they loved to talk about was how I put ice in my beverages even in winter! But hey, they drink hot water in the summertime, which seems strange to me. (For the uninitiated, until recently in China, you had to boil your water before drinking it. Even though the water is probably safe today, not many people trust it, so they keep boiling it anyway.)
If you ever wanted to see what news censorship in China amounts to, the following is an excellent example.
BBC News: China’s Long March falls short
“We always thought it would be well short of the 25,000 li (12,500 kilometres) Mao mentioned in his speech at Wuqi in Shaanxi province in October 1935, but we were pleasantly surprised to find it was only about half of that distance.”
China Daily: British pair finish new Long March
The two young men, who said they admired the courage and spirit of China’s Red Army, walked the entire 12,500-kilometre route the army travelled in the 1920s.
Ah yes, it’s all starting to make sense. Apple’s iTunes music store has been a hit since the day it launched, selling 1.5 million 99 cent song downloads last week alone. The company has always said that the record companies get 70 cents from each song, leaving Apple to pocket 29 cents per song, minus operating expenses. How much are their operating expenses? Apparently, more than 29 cents per song.
That’s right, iTunes loses money, or at best, a break-even venture. Where Apple stands to win, they reason, is through sales of their iPod, which not surprisingly, is the only digital music player that works with iTunes. This is consistent with Steve Jobs saying that there are no plans to make iTunes work with any other portable music player.
Jobs rebuffed the idea that the iTunes music store should work with MP3 players other than the iPod, or conversely, that Apple’s iPod should work with other music download services.
So the profit is in the hardware, and to sell the hardware, they create iTunes. Make sense?