After one of many close calls during our tour buses’ overtaking manoeuvres, one of the other tourists joked that it was just like playing Grand Theft Auto. He has a point.

• No apparent speed limit.
• Right of way isn’t enforced.
• Nobody indicates.
• Police only get involved if they witness an actual collision.
• Even if the police do bust you, a donation can set you on your way again.

Seems to me like Asia is the natural setting for GTA. Why do Rockstar keep setting Grand Theft Auto in New York, Miami and LA lookalikes?

Think of the possibilities:

• Denser, more chaotic traffic, to keep things interesting. Perhaps it’d be best suited if it were a final level of the game?
• More varied interesting vehicles. I kept seeing tuktuks, rickshaws, huge tricycles with a big carrying tray between the back wheels (pickup tricycle? ute trike?), motorbikes converted into minibuses, tractors converted into minibuses, and so on. I even saw one guy cycling through the hutongs on a ute trike with its tray removed and a charcoal grill welded in its place. He was a mobile shish kebab stand!
• Pedestrians whose courage and stoicisim is matched only by their keen senses and finely tuned reaction times. Not to mention their sophisticated flocking behavour which allows them to make impromptu pedestrian crossings, much like a column of army ants will form a bridge out of their comrades.

Beijing Railway Station is intense. It feels like an airport with all the gigantic architecture, but the thing is when a train arrives, it turns mosh-pit. In China, rail is serious business. They even X-Ray your baggage.

The departure boards probably had around 50 trains listed, and over how many platforms I have no idea. I do know that when we went to the departure lounge-like waiting room on the way to the platform, it was waiting room #13.

Back when I was leafing through the tour notes, a sleeper train didn’t seem like a bad idea at all. After all, my only notion of sleeper trains had come from 1950’s films.

My preconceptions of a sleeper carriage:

Our actual sleeper carriage:

Around 60 people to a carriage, triple decker bunks, and just about the only door on the carriage is the one on the heinous squat toilet. It’s a barracks with wheels.

The top bunks are roughly 8 feet in the air. I was in a middle bunk, and an elderly couple had the top bunks. Before I could figure out how to offer to swap bunk assignments, they had scrambled up top with surprising nimbleness. Good on them.

As impressive as the Terracotta Warriors are (8,000 life-size statues with unique faces, sculpted in 210BC), you do have to wonder about the guy who commissioned them, the first Chinese emperor.

You know, I’m no Qin Shi Huang, but I’d like to think that I would’ve realised that the Terracotta Army was a silly idea at some point during the estimated 38 years it took to complete them. I’d like to think I’d realise it before I’d go and commission a bronze handkerchief for my bronze charioteer to wipe away his (bronze?) sweat with.

But then again, it’s just that kind of unimaginative thinking that’s stopped me from unifying any Chinas lately.

Or thinking up any awesome stunts like this:

A German art student briefly fooled police by posing as one of China’s terracotta warriors at the heritage site in the ancient capital, Xian. Pablo Wendel, made up like an ancient warrior, jumped into a pit showcasing the 2,200-year-old pottery soldiers and stood motionless for several minutes.

Chairman Mao Alarm Clock

A little mechanical alarm clock with a smiling Mao on the face, surrounded by adoring workers. It even had his salute arm attached to the pendulum, so he waves back and forth (ala an Elvis pendulum clock). As hilarious as it is creepy.

“It’s Mao-o’clock! Time to rise! Rise up, people, rise up!”

Tabby Scarf

“Hey, look at these furs in this stall! I didn’t know you could get marmalade, gingery coloured ferrets or mink.” I paused. “Wait… there’s something familiar about those tails…”

“Craig, those are cat skins.”

I really should’ve got one for my sister, she’d scream with delight.

And the same stall had German Shepard floor rugs too!

Culture shock. I thought it wouldn’t happen to me. Oh no, not me, calm and collected citizen of the world. Hah, yeah right.

Oddly it wasn’t the squat toilets (nasty, but relatives had warned me in advance) or even the lack of English, it was a mall in Beijing.

The place is called Silk Road Market (“One Market! One Dream!”), and it’s a combination of a mall and a market. It’s a large building - six stories high along with four sub-basements - yet the shops inside are open stalls, packed into a grid, spaced little more than an armspan apart from one another. Each stall has a couple of back walls lined with shelves, a small area to stand in, and a shop assistant or two.

Every shop assistant is trying to get your attention through yelling, waving and occasionally grabbing you by the arm. The crowds are shoulder-to-shoulder, and even if you could see where you’re going, there are precious few landmarks in the featureless expanse of stalls.

I’m the kind of guy that gets uncomfortable if a kiwi shop assistant asks “Can I help you?” twice. So for me, getting lost inside that place was kind of like a perfect storm of awful.

As soon as I could get back to the exit, I retreated to a neighbouring sandwich shop, where the crowds had thinned out to merely busy. I got my head back together while I watched the world’s slowest sandwich get made. (Unfamiliar with the strange foreign process of making a sandwich, the guy had to stop and ask his supervisor about several aspects)

Later in the trip we went to visit Buddha Water Cave, which was fantastic. At one point we had to wriggle our way through a very narrow, windy tunnel, headfirst and on our bellies. I found the cave crawl far less claustrophobic than Silk Road Market. At least wedged in a limestone crevice I could hear myself think.

China is the land of the hard sell. It was pretty common to have hawkers trailing around behind you, relentlessly trying to sell things.

On day #1 we went to see a section of the Great Wall called Simatai. It’s a truly spectacular hike. The wall runs atop the crest of Yanshan mountain, with the highest watchtowers at the kilometre-high peak. We didn’t get that far, the highest four watchtowers are closed because the wall there is in unrestored condition (only 40cm wide in places), leading to a spate of tourist deaths.

At Simatai, the hawkers there were particularly memorable because it’s one thing to have a saleswoman follow you out of a shop, but it’s quite another to have one pursue you over two-hours worth of steep watchtower stairs just to sell postcards.

It works though. I overheard a conversation between a couple of Aussie tourists (not in our group), after one had bought a glossy panorama of the view.

#1: “It’s nice quality” (thumbing the shiny paper) #2: “Oh yeah, how much did’ja pay?” #1: “Uh, a hundred. The local bucks, umm, yuan.” “Reckon it’d look nice at the office, might have it framed.” #2: “Not bad. You could sell something like that for a lot more after that.” #1: “Yeah, yeah!”

The 100 yuan he was talking about is a striking red banknote worth about NZ$20. Whenever you use one, the eyes of the locals widen, and they start acting quite strangely around you. This is because 100 yuan represents around a day’s income in a city, or almost a week’s income in a poor rural area. I’m sure 100 yuan makes up for the many trips up the wall following tightwads like me.

I’ll have some proper updates soon, but in the meantime, I’ve plonked a bunch of photos on Flikr:

Probably just as well it was only an 11 day trip - tourism is exhausting!

One of the symptoms of working as a coder for too long is that you get overly organised. My daily life is all too often a list of lists.

You spend your time at work going through the list of bugs assigned to you, following lists of steps to reproduce the bug, jotting down a timeline - a list of occurances. Then you get home and follow a TO-DO list or a shopping list.

Do that for a while and pretty soon you’ll feel like a human s-expression interpreter. I suspect that time management and spontaneity are natural enemies.

So - time for a holiday. At first I was thinking Hong Kong, because it’s like a concentrated portion China, except well run. Heading off into the 3rd world for a first overseas trip seemed a little daunting, so I figured I’d pick something fairly affluent and Western for starters.

I’m having second thoughts though. It’s starting to become apparent that after I’m finished up with the Jackass project, it’ll be Hong Kong’s hot and humid rainy season. Any recommendations folks?

Update! I’m gonna take a tour through Hong Kong and China.

Bug #19452 - Game crashes on main menu!

Found by:	Larry Tester
Assigned to:	J. Random Hacker
Priority:	Super Urgent
Description:	When I pick 1-player from the main menu, the game crashes!

Reproduction steps:

1. Play an 8-player multiplayer game for half an hour on the ‘Cliffs of Precipity’ map.
2. Quit via the pause menu.
3. Reboot the console.
4. Go to lunch, eat a meat pie.
5. Come back, press X until the splash screens are gone.
6. Pick 1-player item from the main menu

Actual Result:	Game crashes.
Expected Result:	Game does not crash.

Comment #1 by Larry Tester:

Oh my god! It happened again, but this time I ate a curry chicken pie. Filling is not a factor. It’s the PASTRY that’s disrupting the game.

Comment #2 by J. Random Hacker

Can’t reproduce this. My software wouldn’t crash on a mere menu selection. Please stop reopening this, I’m busy enough without having to sort through these fever-addled ravings.

Status changed: Open → Closed: Testers Smoking Crack

Comment #3 by Larry Tester:

Why are you so mean to us?

Attached: VideoEvidence.avi

Status changed: Reopened

Comment #4 by J. Random Hacker

Recommending that management reduce the crack rations of the test team.

Status changed: Open → Closed: Testers Smoking Crack

Comment #5 by J. Random Hacker

Uh, I think I’ve found a fix.

I was stepping through the menu selection code and accidentally happened to step into the C runtime. Luckily Magic Kev was walking past. He caught a glimpse of the disassembly window. Something in that asm freaked him right out - he came to an abrupt stop, pointed at the listing and was shrieking “NO! NO! NO!” over and over until we managed to force-feed him his epilepsy pills.

When I took a closer look I realised I was looking at malloc, the non-threadsafe version. Turns out there was a mix-up in the project settings a couple of weeks ago. Magic Kev was right again. How does he do it??

Status changed: Fixed

I’m terribly sorry and obviously I’m rescinding my recommendation to management about crack. Test team crack rations should be maintained at their current levels, if not greatly increased.

Interesting news, three of the old hands at Sidhe have left to found their own firm called Wandering Monster. The game they’re developing is a PC-based MMO. Eek! The gods haven’t struck them down for hubris yet, so I’d say it’s off to a good start. ;-) Very few details are available just yet.

The brass at Sidhe seemed to take it gracefully. After all, damn near everybody in the games industry has some sort of ambition toward starting their own studio.

Much like Origin Systems practically created the game development scene in Austin, Texas, this could be the start of a cluster of Wellington games companies. Origin’s gone now, but its ex-employees have founded Digital Anvil, ION Storm Austin, Destination Games, Titanic, Asylumsoft, Loose Cannon, and the exodus also was heavily involved in Looking Glass and Sony Online Entertainment.