There are now 2 "telcos" in Iowa that are taking advantage of a tax loophole to allow free international calls to anyone who calls an access number first.

FuturePhone

AllFreeCalls

My mobile number in China is 13520405549, country code is 86.

There's a +16 hour time difference from PST, so you need to either call me before 7 am Seattle time (which is 11 pm here), or around 4 pm (which is 8 am here).

Labels: free, phone

I just noticed this today, but until the end of February, endless.com is offering a -$5 overnight shipping, meaning that every time you pick overnight shipping when you buy a pair of shoes, they will take $5 OFF your price, a pretty good deal I think.

Another thing I noticed is that the wishlists on Amazon.com have RSS feeds (mine is here). If you look up someone's wishlist, there's a little rss icon on the top right of the page. Just in case you're really interested in keeping track of someone's wishlist.

Labels: amazon, endless, wishlist

I just spent 28 RMB on a tall latte. That's about $4 USD, on par with Starbucks in the West. But to people who make a "normal" wage in China, that's like walking into a coffee shop and spending 2 hours pay on a cup of joe.

Labels: Beijing, coffee, travel

After a long day, I'm in Beijing. This whole trip came up very fast. I was talking to manager about it, then a week later it was approved, then a week later I was booking my plane ticket and applying for the visa, then a week later I'm on a crappy United flight over the Pacific.

A bit of a digression here, but United seriously has the worst inter-continental flight I've ever been on. The plane looks like it was the first 747 ever built (no upgrades, no behind the seat monitors, no leg room, early 90's upholstery), and the Mandarin-speaking announcer didn't speak very good Mandarin. The flight felt like it was never going to end (but I did watch a badly tracked "Gridiron Gang" - are they still seriously using VCRs for their entertainment system? - and half of a movie with Ashton Kutcher in the coast guard).

But now I'm on the 21st floor of the Ascott, in a 2 bedroom suite, even though I only reserved a 1 bedroom. So if anyone wants to make an impromptu trip to Beijing, there's a bedroom with your name on it.

Labels: Bejijing, travel

They recently built an $85 million sculpture park in Seattle, just north of Belltown (which actually required the cleanup of over 100 000 tons of contaminated soil, and millions of gallons of contaminated water). The grand opening was this weekend, so I dropped by and snapped some pictures, include one of a sculpture you can't take a picture of.

It snowed again in Seattle last night. We had about 1-2 inches of accumulation this morning. On the work emailing lists, there's all these stories about people taking 4-5 hours getting home (when it's normally a 45 min - 1 hour commute), the side of the freeways lined with abandoned cars (and some bikes), people with tire chains on the wrong set of tires, I even saw a car running into a telephone pole while at dinner.

Today the office is half empty, and I couldn't bring my car in to get an oil change because my regular place didn't have any mechanics (all stayed home).

Two years ago, Cingular bought the wireless branch of AT&T (creatively called AT&T Wireless) for a large sum of money. Several months later, all AT&T Wireless stores were rebranded as Cingular stores, and if you wanted to upgrade phones, you became a Cingular customer (which was not always so good, since AT&T Wireless had a better Canada plan).

Now, the FCC has approved the merger of BellSouth (which owns Cingular) and AT&T, and now Cingular will be rebranded as AT&T (but probably not AT&T Wireless). I wonder how much all this rebranding is costing the customers.

This graphic from wikipedia is interesting, since it shows the first split from the 1984 break-up of the original AT&T, and then the eventual mergers that forms today's AT&T. Now we just need AT&T to purchase both Qwest and Verizon, and we'll be back to where we were in 1984.

For more background, see the wikipedia article.