On Friday January 6 from 8 PM onwards Toodou.com will organize it’s first annual New Year Party. This year’s theme will be “Gluehwein & Gaming”. Bloggers and podcasters from Shanghai (or who happen to be in Shanghai) who want to join, please leave a comment or send me an email at marcvanderchijs (at) gmail dot com. We have limited space, so if you wait too long you might miss out on this one!

During the party we will have traditional German Gluehwein and you can bring your favourite video games to play against the Toodou crew on a huge screen. If you prefer beer, whiskey, wodka or just a coke or water, no problem – we have that as well. The party will take place in our office in the Si Hang Creativity Warehouse, 1 Guang Fu Lu, Room 518

Just came back from a business dinner for China Bay at Hooters Shanghai. I knew the place existed, but had never been there. It is a fun place for a burger and a beer, but of course the waitresses are a bit different from the ladies that serve you in Hooters bars in the US or Amsterdam. But the fun is certainly not less, the girls dance and sing around (they even perform Christmas songs!) and are extremely friendly. A bit like a decent Maoming Lu bar with more light and much better food. Lots of Chinese and Japanese men, not many Westerners.

Hooters is located on Zunyi Lu, close to Xianxia Lu, in Hongqiao. That’s probably why I had never been there: the only reason I go out to Hongqiao is either to fly (Hongqiao airport), to visit the Dutch consulate (walking distance to Hooters) or to go to Carrefour (but I have not been there in many months because I refuse to wait in line for an hour to get a taxi). I don’t think I have ever been in the area at night. It’s not bad actually, some nice shops along Xianxia Lu, a pretty big good shopping mall (the Shanghai City Center) and not too far from my home in Xujiahui.

I met up with Sean, a Chinese American who finished a 3-year stint in the US Army and is now a full-time eBay seller in China. He took his girlfriend with him who works in advertising in Shanghai. Interesting conversations with him about the possibilities to earn money on eBay, especially when you have direct contact to suppliers in China. If I had time… (that seems to be the story of my life, I cannot imagine that other people can be bored living in China).

Pacific Epoch reports about an innovative idea from the Hangzhou police. They will start a police station service on Chinese leading instant messenger (IM) service QQ. Internet users will be able to report crimes, provide information for investigations and ask questions related to security issues.

However, a police officer will only be online between 8 and 9 PM. This is a bit strange in my opinion, if something happens you should be able to report it right away and not have to wait until 8 PM at night. But it’s a good start, and I think the idea should be followed in other countries. IM is one of the best ways to reach young people. This also shows how important IM has become, at least in China. This country already has more IM users than email users, especially young kids do not bother to set up an email account but only connect to friends through QQ.

During lunch I decided to buy some software for my computer (I needed to reinstall Office 2003) and went to my favourite software place close to Xiangyang market. While crossing Huaihai Road I noticed that people were all looking up at the sky. I wondered why and also looked up. There was a huge amount of smoke coming out of the new building next to Xiangyang market. It looked more spectacular than it really was though: according to a comment on Shanghaiist it was just an A/C unit on a lower roof that was on fire.

From the ground you could not see the cause, and a huge crowd soon gathered. A traffic jam formed immediately because drivers slowed down in order not to miss any part of the action. Most car drivers looked up instead of keeping their eyes on the road, and so within a few minutes an accident happened on the corner of Huaihai Lu and Donghu Lu. The chaos was now complete, so I decided it was time to walk back to the office.
(some more pictures on www.flickr.com/photos/chijs)

Lately I seem not to have a lot of luck with computers. After all the trouble with my Apple Powerbook last month I bought a BenQ that had to be exchanged for a new one after two weeks because of defects. The new one worked fine for a while, but suddenly got extremley slow. First I thought of a virus, but that was not the case. The harddisk was also not almost full, and a restart did not make much of a difference. Starting up took 10 minutes, and Outlook did not work at all anymore. I wasn’t sure if it was hardware or software problem, and decided to give it to one of the IT guys at Toodou. He quickly found that the store had forgotten to install two files that are quite important for Microsoft Office, and that caused everything. It also turned out that the store had installed an illegal version of both Windows and Office (but I guess that is standard in China). So now I need to buy a new Microsoft Office – not difficult I thought, except for the fact that most places only have the Chinese version.

So I started using my Apple again. Sunday morning I did a automatic software upgrade, and was asked to do a restart. I did so and what happened? The laptop got itself into a loop and did not want to start up anymore. I tried a start-up from my recovery CD’s, but that did not work either, because I only had 1 GB of hard disk space left for a new installation. Copying files to my external hard drive was impossible because the OS did not load. So I was stuck. I called the Apple repair guy, and he was there within an hour (that’s great about China, even on Sunday people come right away – try that in Europe!). He managed to get the laptop working again, but found many problems with the hard drive. I was surprised, because I got a new hard drive just a month ago, because the old one failed. Well, the end of the story is that he took my laptop away, and that I am once again without a computer – and without many files that I did not back-up over the last week. So I am using Qi’s old Vaio now to get my work done (my old Vaio’s battery collapsed), luckily we have so many laptops at home.

I wanted to post about this earlier already, but did not find the time yet. Xinhua News Agency reported on Tuesday that the speed of trains between Beijing and Shanghai will be increased from 160 km/h to 200 km/h, leading to a travel time of only 7 hours. According to the article the current travel time is 13.5 hours (although I think the fastest train – the overnight express- takes actually only 12 hours). If you think about it – something Xinhua never does – , it is a bit strange that by increasing the speed by 25% the total travelling time reduces by almost 50%.

It actually comes close to being an alternative to travelling by plane, especially if you travel from city center to city center. On average it takes me more than 5 hours from beginning to end destination when I travel by plane between these two cites, and on occasions much more than that. If the train has good seats, free wifi and electricty for my laptop I will give it a try.

It was a busy week again this week, both at Toodou and China Bay. At Toodou we had several visitors, among other Christine de Baan (see post from Monday), Moody Glasgow and Dennis Tse. Moody flew in for the second time in two weeks, and we had good meetings with him. Afterwards we had dinner at Paulaner Brauhaus (Moody had never had German food before!) and then drinks at Zapata’s and Bourbon Street. Moody used to be a commercial producer, so we had lots of common topics. I mentioned that I started to watch Lost, and that I think it is one of the best series I have ever seen. Moody had not watched the series himself, but he told me that his brother is co-producer of the series (I noticed last night that he is the first name that appears on the credit list after each episode).

Dennis we met this morning in our office. He works for the private equity and venture capital arm of HSBC. Gary knew him from INSEAD and it is great to hear his ideas on what we are doing (or not doing). We told him about our Lhasa – Kathmandu bike trip of course. He does not want to join, but it turns out that he is on the board of an orphanage in Lhasa. That got me thinking, maybe we can also do something charity-related with our bike ride.

Tonight I will meet Sierk from SVP Film for dinner. We plan to go for sushi, sashimi and teppanyaki at a RMB 150 (=EUR 15) Japanese all-you-can-eat-and-drink place at Dongping Lu. I haven’t seen Sierk in a while, so it will be nice to catch up and hear his stories. He was in Beijing in November for the shooting of several episodes of BabyCare with CCTV, and then he spent some time in Holland working on a huge project. He came back to China two days ago, and because he will probably go back to Holland for Christmas next week this is a good time to meet.