I am having a totally confusing day. Google is the cause. I am finding it difficult to believe the numbers that they quote. For example if you search Feng Shui Web Design they will tell you that there are about 947000 results. A big number. Now I know that they will not return any results over 1000 but you never seem to be able to get even that far. The results peter out at 755. So what is the true number 755 or 947000?? It is a big difference. I am searching for explanations as I cannot find the answers anywhere, so please comment if you know the answer.
Google Results
March 11th, 2009It Puts It In Perspective
February 28th, 2009I’ve just finished writing an in-line Chinese Population Counter for the china.html page on our web-site. I had a look at what was available and re-wrote using the most accurate assessment of population from the UN - 1,335,962,132 on 13 January 2009 as a start point and the latest birth and mortality rates. So when I get the script working I find that the population has increased in 6 weeks by 11 million (the approximate population of Belgium, Portugal, Greece, the Czech Republic or Cuba). I really understand why the one child per family rule is needed, having seen this, otherwise the six week growth would have been about equal to the population of Australia or more! If you annualise the actual figure it is about equivalent to the population of Germany, Vietnam or the Philippines.
I must admit that I had not understood the scale of population increase here until I did this, even though I have been accompanying my better half to one of the Maternity Hospitals for the last eight weeks or so. The scale of the Maternity Hospital is scary enough. It’s difficult to comprehend the enormity of providing services for so many people. I have visited three different hospitals since arriving here and the NHS in Britain could learn a lot from the efficiency of Chinese hospitals. Health care is not free here, but it is not expensive. It costs less than 1€, $1 or £1 for a consultation with a specialist. An ultrasound scan is less than 10€, $10, £10.
A lot of the medicines that are in use are herbal. There is a lot of use of patches, which I guess are the modern day equivalent of poultices, which used to be a much used method of administering medicine in the pre-pharmaceutical days. Very effective in curing my case of a sore foot. It is difficult to obtain some Western medicines, but there are always equivalents available.
China to Buy More from EU
February 24th, 2009In these troubled times it’s good to see that China is trying to stimulate world demand without resorting to the sort of protectionist policies included in the US stimulus plan. It was announced today in the Shenzhen Daily that a high level business delegation has left for Europe to buy goods and services worth around 2 billion euros. It may even be more. The delegation is visiting Switzerland, Germany, Spain and the UK following in the footsteps of Wen Jiabao who visited the countries in early February.
It is partly why we are doing what we are doing here, as the opportunities for European and American companies to sell their products to the Chinese market has never been greater. How many European and American companies have a well produced, well written Chinese version of their web site which is produced to reflect Chinese tastes. The answer is - not many. I have discovered since I have been here that this is a discerning market where foreign companies need their appearance to be professionally crafted if they wish to be successful.
Another article in the paper today shows a group of wealthy Chinese business people off to look for investment property in the USA. The trip has been organised by soufun.com, a leading real estate web site in China and was postponed from January because the demand for places on the trip was so high.
Thank Heavens for the Euro
February 21st, 2009A strange title, I know, but I have been working on a multi-currency solution for our web hosting packages, this week. It probably would have been easier to have given all the hosting away free rather than just some of it. I’d never really considered all the aspects of a multi-currency solution before. Sure I had done some work and have a web site that downloads the overnight euro rates from the ECB every day, but most of the fun came in the formatting.
My first step was to compile the list of currency signs and work out which one to use. Some countries have two, like China, where I am at the moment. They use both the ¥ Japanese yen sign and the 元 Chinese yuan (RMB) sign. So having done the programming work, it was time to show the results to my better half, who is Chinese. I had picked the yuan sign, which was correct, but she quickly pointed out that unlike the $ and the £ it is positioned after the monetary amount rather than in front. I said does it matter and she said yes.
So back to the drawing board! I had to go through my mammoth list of currencies and find out which ones go in front and which ones go after. Despite lots of searching, I could not find a definitive list, but in the end I completed the task. In the process, I found out that the French Franc and the Potuguese Escudo signs used to go where the decimal point goes…. Thus, thank heavens for the euro. Then I had to consider whether the decimal separator was a . or a , and also what the 000 separator was, either a space a , a ‘ or a . By this time I was close to screaming point.
Mission accomplished though and if anyone reads this and wants it, I can package the whole thing up and provide an XML interface with no real problem. Or if you just want the currency list, just ask.
Let the show begin!
February 15th, 2009Almost five years to the day that we sold Inatos to the big, bad Erinaceous Group, we are back in business. A different continent, where the population is almost as vast as the opportunities, but we are back. We are still working on our own web site as I write. Progress on it has been held up by our first customer web site. Our SEO software suite is in the final stages of testing and the results look very very promising.
It’s very different, working in China. The working week is a bit like we used to do in England, which was unlike anyone else in the UK, so perhaps we have always been Chinese at heart. Here, I guess because there is no religion, there is no formal weekend and the working day stretches from 07:30 to 19:30. Shops and restaurants never seem to close.
Even though it’s February, it’s very warm in Shenzhen - around 25°C at the moment. The climate here is sub-tropical, so high humidity a lot of the time. The city is only 30 years old and home to 13 million people who, in the main, have migrated here from all over China over those 30 years. We are right next to Hong Kong, which we can see from the office windows, it is only 3km away.
Read more as we progress, about programming, design and life in China.
