[Leftcoast]

I spent most of this week in Shenzhen visiting some factories in China including Foxconn Longhua which has a certain notoriety in Silicon Valley.  Visiting China is a must for anyone who worries that nothing in the world will change.  My natural optimism about post-Iron Curtain history was surging .... Until I tried to check up on the Cardboard.

On Tuesday I was drinking German beer in a casual restaurant in the courtyard of a modern Shenzhen shopping mall.  Across from me was a full-size ad for luxury condominums and my table was surrounded by 20-something young Chinese professionals.  This definitely wasn't my father's Communist China.  Most my fellow barflys were dressed in casual chic, T-shirts and denim jeans without a dark suit among them.  The bar scene wouldn't have been out of place in Hong Kong or .... Mountain View.  I watched China's new urban office workers flirt, use their smart phones to contact friends, gossip freely like 20 somethings everywhere do while I thought about how far the world has come since I watched President Nixon drive through the Mao suit filled streets of Beijing 40 years ago.    Heck, forget 40 years ago  - the street scenes even a short ten years back were more stodgy, businessy, reserved and definitely a generation older.

The evening and my Bitburger fogged mind was headed for a soft edged glow that East and West were being drawn together and that the speed of the convergence was quickening.  Or it was until I tried to call up the Cardboard from my hotel room before turning in for the evening.

I couldn't get this board from my hotel - and started to wonder about that Chinese firewall.  I got the same result from the local sales office and from the factories I visited.  Sometimes I would get to our front page but when I clicked through to the discussion board the internet would just hang, timeout and return error messages.  But why might that be?  An evil Beijing/Berkeley conspiracy?  Some minor Bureaucrat took Garvin's screed on the People's Collective of the upper east bay too literally?  Or maybe they just don't like our shade of red? Whatever, until this is resolved I've put a permanent hold on singing Kumbaya at the Hong Kong/China border.

Has anyone had better luck at bringing up the Cardboard in China than I had this week?

(By the way Yvonne, my not terribly informed theory about the hold-up is that our Twitter links are the culprit.  Usually the last status line I see before my computer hangs is a call our board makes to Twitter as it is loading the board index page.)

By, By the way Foxconn Longhua is brobdingnagian.  Imagine a factory town with stores, government ran (well, now they are) dormitories and row after row of five story factory buildings.  At their peak this place employed close to 500,000.  Now they employ somewhere around 250,000.  Now think of the pain involved in getting from the first number to the second.

[Leftcoast]

I spent most of this week in Shenzhen visiting some factories in China including Foxconn Longhua which has a certain notoriety in Silicon Valley.  Visiting China is a must for anyone who worries that nothing in the world will change.  My natural optimism about post-Iron Curtain history was surging .... Until I tried to check up on the Cardboard.

On Tuesday I was drinking German beer in a casual restaurant in the courtyard of a modern Shenzhen shopping mall.  Across from me was a full-size ad for luxury condominums and my table was surrounded by 20-something young Chinese professionals.  This definitely wasn't my father's Communist China.  Most my fellow barflys were dressed in casual chic, T-shirts and denim jeans without a dark suit among them.  The bar scene wouldn't have been out of place in Hong Kong or .... Mountain View.  I watched China's new urban office workers flirt, use their smart phones to contact friends, gossip freely like 20 somethings everywhere do while I thought about how far the world has come since I watched President Nixon drive through the Mao suit filled streets of Beijing 40 years ago.    Heck, forget 40 years ago  - the street scenes even a short ten years back were more stodgy, businessy, reserved and definitely a generation older.

The evening and my Bitburger fogged mind was headed for a soft edged glow that East and West were being drawn together and that the speed of the convergence was quickening.  Or it was until I tried to call up the Cardboard from my hotel room before turning in for the evening.

I couldn't get this board from my hotel - and started to wonder about that Chinese firewall.  I got the same result from the local sales office and from the factories I visited.  Sometimes I would get to our front page but when I clicked through to the discussion board the internet would just hang, timeout and return error messages.  But why might that be?  An evil Beijing/Berkeley conspiracy?  Some minor Bureaucrat took Garvin's screed on the People's Collective of the upper east bay too literally?  Or maybe they just don't like our shade of red? Whatever, until this is resolved I've put a permanent hold on singing Kumbaya at the Hong Kong/China border.

Has anyone had better luck at bringing up the Cardboard in China than I had this week?

(By the way Yvonne, my not terribly informed theory about the hold-up is that our Twitter links are the culprit.  Usually the last status line I see before my computer hangs is a call our board makes to Twitter as it is loading the board index page.)

By, By the way Foxconn Longhua is brobdingnagian.  Imagine a factory town with stores, government ran (well, now they are) dormitories and row after row of five story factory buildings.  At their peak this place employed close to 500,000.  Now they employ somewhere around 250,000.  Now think of the pain involved in getting from the first number to the second.