Today a total solar eclipse was visible from Shanghai – or at least, it should have been visible because about 15 minutes before the eclipse it started to rain hard! A pity, especially for the many tourists that traveled to Shanghai from all over the world to watch the event.

I had seen one total eclipse before in Stuttgart in August 1999, a few months before I moved from there to China. That time we were more lucky, because the clouds opened up just in time to watch the eclipse. Shanghai was not that fortunate, but it was still amazing to see it getting completely dark within a minute and then bright again a few minutes later. I took some pictures (with time stamps), so you can see how quickly it went.

Right before and during the eclipse lots of police were on the street to make sure the traffic would not come to a total stand still. That only worked partially, because the moment the sky suddenly turned dark people stopped their cars to watch. Only when it was completely black they started to drive again.

Most people were very excited before the eclipse already, and on TV, in newspapers and on the Internet the eclipse was a major topic. However, some people didn’t care about it: the workers in our building kept on painting the building during the eclipse, totally unaware of the natural phenomenon that was happening outside.

Despite the rain I enjoyed seeing the full eclipse. It’s just so weird to go from full daylight to a pitch black middle-of-the-night feeling within minutes. The fact that the sun was not visible because of the clouds during the actual eclipse was a pity, but the fact that it gets totally dark is actually much more interesting to me. Not so interesting as to fly all over the world to see another eclipse, but if I would happen to live in the place where a future eclipse will take place I will certainly watch it again. If you like to travel to see one, next year there will be one in Tahiti and in 2012 you can see one in northern Australia. The next big one in China seems to be in 2035, when Beijing will turn completely dark.

If you want to see some videos of the eclipse, you can go to Tudou where we have a whole channel for the 2009 eclipse: http://www.tudou.com/home/09riquanshi
The pictures I took before, during and after the eclipse are here as a set on Flickr.

Over the years I have had my fair share of turbulence during flights. Probably the worst experience was on a domestic Indonesian flight between Mataram and Denpasar in the mid-1990’s on an old Sempati plane. On that eventful short flight suddenly a flight attendant ran out of the cockpit to the back and not a second later the plane made a dive of what seemed to be at least several hundred meters. I thought my final hour had come, but the pilot got the plane under control again and without saying a word to the passengers landed it on Bali. I vowed never to fly Sempati again, which was an easy one to keep because they went bankrupt in 1998 after having lost several of their planes in crashes.

Yesterday night I had another turbulence experience, which was not as bad as Sempati but certainly not fun. A couple of minutes after taking off from Phuket I decided to go to the toilet. I locked the door behind me and at that very moment the plane unexpectedly hit heavy turbulence. I was thrown off my feet and hit my shoulder on the wall before I could grab the water tap with one hand and the water basin with my other. My legs hit the door and for a moment I thought it would fly out, but that didn’t happen.

At the same time the flight attendants were almost screaming through the intercom to the passengers to put on their seat belts. But that was not necessary anymore, because after 20 seconds or so the plane was totally stable again. When I came out of the wash room 2 flight attendants were waiting for me, they thought I had injured myself (it probably sounded like that when I hit the wall and then the door, they were in the kitchen next to me when it happened), but I assured them I was totally fine. I was glad I had not gone to the toilet a minute earlier though!

This weekend I spent on the island of Phuket in Thailand, where Marcel Ekkel married his girlfriend Siu Shan. I have known Marcel for many years already, and he has become a good friend even though we don’t see each other regularly (Marcel currently lives in Hong Kong). At first we met through the Internet, probably around 5-6 years ago. At that time Marcel was a moderator for some Yahoo Groups or mailing lists that I subscribed to (Do these things still exist? Amazing how quickly the Internet changes). I think I first got to know him there or otherwise through Ecademy (a business social network avant la lettre, that missed out on the boom because they decided to charge their customers. I tried to leave them years ago and they still keep spamming me, but that’s a different story).

I think we first met in real life in Shanghai where Marcel spoke at a project management conference and where we had dinner that night with a Dutch journalist – this was before Tudou and Spil Games, when I was still a consultant. Afterward we mainly met in Hong Kong when I was there for weekend shopping trips or for business reasons. Last year we trained for the Trailwalker together, and because of that we spent many hours together on Hong Kong’s mountain trials.

I probably knew before his wife that he was going to propose because we talked about it during the training for the Trailwalker, and I think he even announced it to me on MSN. So when I received his wedding invitation I immediately decided to go, even though Phuket is quite a long trip from Shanghai. My wife could not join because Elaine at 7 weeks is a bit too young to leave alone at home with the nanny, so I had to go without her.

The wedding took place in the Indigo Pearl Resort, a high-end resort on Phuket’s northwestern Nai Yang Beach. I was quite impressed by the resort, the design is amazing (see some of my pictures of the resort on Flickr) and the service excellent. The location on the quiet Nai Yang Beach is also great, although if you prefer nightlife this is not the right place to go: after 11 PM almost everything closes down.

It was actually my first time to visit Phuket, I have been to Thailand many times but mainly in Bangkok or on the islands on the east coast. Phuket is bigger than I thought, but even though it does not have the small island feeling I liked it. I rented a car and drove all around the island, checking out most of the towns and beaches. The west coast beaches are nice, but the towns were a bit disappointing. Mass tourism from Scandinavia, Australia and Russia ruined them, and I left the towns as soon as possible. Stay away from places like Patong Beach if you like a quiet beach vacation.
Phuket is quite cheap (at least at the moment) and most hotels and resorts seem to be fairly empty. This may have to do with the fact that it is low season on the West coast, but likely the unstable political situation in Thailand may also play a role. Not sure if the 2004 tsunami still has an effect on tourism, but last year’s closure of Bangkok airport for a couple of days by protesters certainly certainly did not help to attract more vacationers. So if you want to check it out, now is a good time. You can get rooms in 5-star resorts for less than EUR 50 per night if you do a bit of research. I had several meals in small restaurants on the beach, where you can get great Thai food almost for free. And an ice cold local Singha beer is not expensive either!

The wedding itself took place in the Indigo Pearl resort and was a very nice event. A lot of family and friends had flown over from England, Holland and Hong Kong (plus several other Asian destintaions) and it was an interesting group. After exchanging the vows and the rings in a traditional Thai house on stilts in a lake in the resort, we all had drinks with the newly wed couple. After taking pictures and writing the wedding guest book it was time for dinner. There were some interesting people on my table and we had discussions for hours while eating and drinking. During the speeches I learned a lot about the couple (for example, I never knew that Marcel met Siu Shan while he was a diving instructor on Boracay), and after the toasts were over we all headed to a bar for drinks and cigars. I think the guests all had a great time, I for sure enjoyed the evening a lot. Thanks Marcel & Siu Shan, I wish you a very happy married life together!

Over the past years China has built a great system of expressways. They are a lot better than most highways in the US and Europe, and they run all over the country. However, because almost all of them are toll roads (the easiest and most fair way to earn the investment back) this leads to problems close to big cities. When I drive from Hangzhou to Shanghai, the drive itself is normally about 1.5 hours. However, I have to add at least 30 minutes if I drive on a Sunday afternoon because of the huge waiting lines at the toll gates (especially the one where you enter Shanghai). I hear from friends that on working days it’s normally even worse, especially when there are accidents (like the bus in the picture that crashed through a toll gate).

For years I have been wondering why nobody would do something about the waiting time. It’s not so difficult, just sell pre-paid electronic cards and the flow of traffic will go a lot faster. It’s not rocket science and it’s been done in many other countries. But China didn’t really seem to care, most people just accepted the waiting time (am I really the only one who feels it’s a total waste of time?) and nothing really changed, except that lines were getting even longer.

But things may finally change. An article in today’s Shanghai Daily writes that on the A9 the situation at the toll stations is now getting out of hand, waiting times at the toll gates are normally more than 1 hour during peak hours! I avoid that road nowadays, and try to take smaller roads if I go to Sheshan on weekends. Maybe some officials living in the area have to endure the daily waiting time as well and decided to complain, because the government is going to do something about it.

They announced three measures to ease traffic congestion at the Xujing toll booth: increase the toll gates from 18 to 24, train toll collectors to collect toll within 8 seconds, and install a toll station with electronic toll equipment. I think this might help a lot and I hope they will implement it at all other toll stations around Shanghai as well. And I also hope they will be smart enough to make the entrance for the ETC at least 1-2 kilometers before the toll gates, otherwise you still have to queue up in a traffic jam with all the other drivers.

For several weeks I was not able to download the NRC newspaper on my iLiad. This has nothing to do with the NRC, but everything with the iLiad: for some reason the wifi button stopped working after a few months already and now also the manual connection to wifi hardly ever works anymore. But on Saturday I tried it once again and suddenly I could connect to one of my home networks (but only one, I have no clue why the others could not connect).

So I was finally able to download and read some newspapers this weekend, and therefore I also came across the last page of Thursday’s paper. On it was a picture of last weekend’s collapsed Shanghai apartment tower. Famous Dutch poet Gerrit Komrij wrote an excellent column about the building that had fallen over, and he argued that it would make for a great piece of art: just put a fence around it and ask an artist to write a good description 🙂

That in itself may have been reason for a short blog post already, but what really caught my eye is how he heard about the collapse: he most likely read it on my blog! In the article he mentions that a friend on Facebook had sent him the picture from “the weblog of a Dutch entrepreneur in Shanghai”. Interesting how news travels over the world these days, and how it eventually gets back to me again. In case you should read this as well Mr. Komrij, thanks for mentioning it and I enjoyed reading your column!

The last week of June I spent in Holland for some meetings at Spil Games in Hilversum, but also to give a couple of talks. In China I give presentations regularly, but in Holland I just give a few per year: I normally do not travel overseas just for one event, except when I am already there for business meetings or the event is related to online games/new media and (at the very least) business class flights and hotels are paid.

The last week of June fit pretty well, because there were two interesting conferences that I could speak at and another event that I had been asked for a couple of times also fell exactly in this week. On Monday I gave a talk at the Industrieele Groote Club in Amsterdam about Internet Entrepreneurship in China. An interesting audience of about 50 business people in a Club’s beautiful old building overlooking Dam Square in the middle of Amsterdam. I had 75 minutes for my talk, which was easy to fill especially because of the constant flow of good questions. I enjoyed the talk and also the discussions during the dinner afterward and in the bar at the end of the evening.

CRTV, a Chinese radio and TV station in Holland, shot some footage during my presentation and also interviewed me after the talk. I am not sure if it’s already been broadcasted or whether it’s available on the Internet, but I noticed they also have a page on Tudou and if they upload it there I’ll put a link here.

On Tuesday I attended the Mediapark Jaarcongres, a yearly conference at the Mediapark in Hilversum – the place where many broadcasters in Holland are located. The conference itself was interesting, because of the fact that it showed me how traditional the media in Holland still is. Somehow I always thought media in Holland would be far ahead in embracing New Media, but this day taught me that is not the case. They even censored the Twitter projection screen when too many new media people were making fun of the old-fashioned thinking of the traditional media people on stage (the official reason was that people were using curse words, but afterward some Twitterers did a search and could not find that or those tweet(s)). At this conference I was interviewed on stage about running Spil Games in Asia (see this picture). The interview was OK, but I felt the interviewer had no idea about my background. Anyway, it was an interesting day and I met a lot of people.

Interestingly, when my interview was over CRTV was there again and they did another TV interview with me. I assume it was a coincidence? And to top it off, after the conference I drove with a friend in his Mini Cooper convertible to dinner, when a Google Streetview camera car passed by. With a bit of luck we will find the picture with us driving with the top down in Google Streetview soon!

Wednesday was a full day of management meetings at Spil Games followed by an excellent sushi dinner in Abcoude, thanks Willem! By the way, note that Abcoude is probably the only place in the world with abcde in that order in its name.

On Thursday I spoke at the Nationale Marketingdag 2009 (National Marketing Day) about success factors for a casual gaming site in China. A standard presentation for me, but probably the first time I had to do it in Dutch. I realize that when I talk about Internet and games I prefer to speak in English, I really have to look for the correct Dutch words sometimes. After my presentation I was interviewed by Ronnie Overgoor for Blueshots.tv (plus several other sites), mainly about entrepreneurship and Spil Games Asia. I have embedded the video below.

If you would like me to speak at an event or give a talk for a delegation that visits China, you can of course contact me directly, but the easiest is to get in touch with the China Speakers Bureau. They can arrange everything for you (and for me).

Picture: Punkmedia.nl (creative commons)
www.punkmedia.nl

On Wednesday I read that a Chinese H1N1 patient had died while in hospital in Hangzhou. However, the strange thing was that her fever had already been gone for 7 days, so it was not very likely that H1N1 had killed her. At first I still suspected that doctors were just trying to hide the fact that H1N1 had now also been fatal for someone in China (she would have been the first Chinese swine fever casualty), but then I read that the female patient died while in the toilet, which made it even more unlikely that swine fever was the reason for her death.

Her relatives also suspected something else had gone wrong and a violent mob of 50 people attacked the hospital, throwing rocks at windows and ambulances . The crowd was right that something was fishy about her death, because today the hospital admitted that they were at fault: the 34-year old woman had been electrocuted while taking a shower! So you survive H1N1 only to be killed before being released by faulty electrical wiring… One more reason to avoid Chinese public hospitals as much as possible (just like public fountains).

Picture: http://www.flickr.com/photos/coolmel/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Every year all Spil Games Asia and Zlong Games employees get a free health check. One part of that is an eye test, which is performed in our company. Because we had some visitors from Spil Games in Holland, they also could do the eye check (both passed, but one unintentionally tried to cheat because he was wearing contacts – which the doctors found out about right away of course :-).

Interesting is that when I left Daimler in 2002 I needed to wear glasses while driving or while watching a movie. Nowadays I don’t need my glasses anymore, and today’s eye test confirmed that my eyes only have a slight deviation from optimal. Kind of strange isn’t it? Could it be because my computer screen at Daimler was not good enough and that when I stopped working and went back to university my eyes recovered? I cannot explain it, but maybe one of my readers can?