Huawei, the lads...
Hello, I must be going...
Back from a week on the Black Isle, twenty miles or so north of Inverness, where I've been enjoying a family event, a lot of zooming around chasing Pictish carved stones, holy wells and RAF Kinloss's excellent choice of flying entertainment (often at the same time) - and a complete lack of broadband. My only contact with the online world was via a GPRS phone, which only worked with my Vista laptop, and the rather feeble data link was always swamped by Vista doing whatever it is Vista does when it thinks it's got a connection back to base. If there's a way to tell the OS that I really, really don't want it to download stuff in the background, I don't know where it is. And I don't want to think about the bill.
We'll gloss over my discoveries regarding diesel hire cars, tractors on the A9, and overtaking.
And now I'm off again - catching a late flight from Heathrow this evening to Hong Kong, thence to Shenzhen and three days talking to Huawei, the network infrastructure company. Lots to do there - future wireless, broadband infrastructure, political and economic aspects of being an aggressive, internationally minded Chinese high tech company, and much more besides. I've heard amazing things of the Huawei campus.
Of the business of getting a Chinese journalist visa when you're at the other end of the country from the embassy, i shall say nothing, except that my passport finally turned up in the bottom of a packing crate in an empty office at the last possible minute...
More, as they say, later.