June 2004 - Posts
I arrived at the Narita Airport about 2 hours ago after a 2 hour flight from Shanghai. We then took a train (the “Narita Express”) to downtown Tokyo, about 1 mile from the hotel. The train took about 90 minutes.
However, the REAL train story happened yesterday! In Shanghai they have the world’s only MagLev train (Magnetic Levitation). It goes from the Shanghai airport for about kilometers. The best part is that this train goes 430 kilometers an hour! I’ll leave it up to you to compute how many miles an hour this is. Suffice to say this is the fastest train in the world.
Maglev works with magnets. The train has no wheels. Instead it “floats” above the track using magnets! You know how if you take two magnets and put them next to each other they will repel? Same idea, but they use electricity to charge the magnets.
The ride was very smooth and the train just kept accelerating, and accelerating. Each direction we passed another train going the other way. One train was decelerating and the other accelerating at the time, so they were both going about 350km/hr...for a combined closing speed of 700km/hr! You felt a “whump!” when this happened and just saw a flash of the other train as it passed.
The scenery just blew by as well. I tried to take a picture of a parking lot out the window, but it's completely blurry.
Here are some links for more information about this train:
http://www.gluckman.com/Maglev.html
http://home.wangjianshuo.com/archives/20030809_pudong_airport_maglev_in_depth.htm
http://travel.howstuffworks.com/maglev-train.htm
Oh yea, in Shanghai we stayed at the tallest hotel in the world (http://shanghai.grand.hyatt.com/). It was unbelievably nice and a beautiful structure.
Last night our hosts took us out to dinner at a Peking Duck restraunt here in Beijing where we had some amazing Chinese fare, including Peking duck. I sampled duck tongue (yuk), duck liver pâté (yum), an amazing orange peel cod dish, and more.
The first picture is the disgusting duck tongue. Makes me ill just looking at the picture! :-) I will pretty much try anything. Once. And there are not many foods I do not enjoy. This was an exception.
The second picture is the delicious orange peel cod. I had eaten orange peel chicken many times in the States, but never a fish dish. It was a beautiful presentation and was yummy.
The last picture is me helping our server slice up the Peking Duck. Not sure why the server was wearing a mask.
After dinner we went to a bar. There was a live band playing American rock & roll. All I wanted was a Chinese Beer (Tseng Tao). They were out of it. All they had was Carona. I could not believe that I was all the way over in China and the only beer I could get was the worst Mexican beer ever brewed. But we had a great time:-).
Last night at about 10pm local time I arrived in Beijing China. We flew from Seattle to Narita/Tokyo and then to Beijing. This morning I woke up at about 6am, walked 3 mintues out the front door of my hotel (the Kerry Centre) and got a triple-grande-latte from Starbucks. Tastes just like home!
I'll be in Asia for about 10 days. We start here in Beijing, then go to Shanghai, and then a few days in Tokyo. This is my first trip to China (I've been to Japan before).
I'll try and keep the blog going with pics and posts...
My 802.11b wireless network drives me nuts.
I bought a new Linksys G AP because I was experiencing drop-outs with my 4 (that's right 4) other APs. I set the new AP up (in B mode only) is less than 10’ from my notebook, with no other access points or wireless devices enabled (except my neighbor who gives me a single bar on the XP signal strength thing).
Using the built-in adapter in my Acer C110 Tablet PC (Intel Centrino chipset) I get a dropped connection roughly every 5-10 mintues. I discovered through the Acer website that turning off 802.1x authentication for the wireless profile fixes the actual connection drops, but I still see the signal strength drop regularly.
Using a Cisco 340 adapter, the Link Status Meter bounces between Excellent and Good (staying mostly in Excellent). It never gets above 84% signal quality and 94% signal strength. Using the site survey, every once and a while I will see a black-gap in the green bars. But the connection never seems to drop like it does with the Intel part.
Using a Lucent Orinco card I get similar results to the Cisco. Reasonable signal strength with an occasional dropout, but no loss of connectivity.
I’ve tried different channels on the AP with no real difference in behavior.
What is interfering? How can I further diagnose it? Shouldn't I be getting rock-solid “Excellent” signal strength while I'm only 10' from my AP?
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