art taylor

I checked into the hotel (Shangri La Chengdu) today and, despite all other kinds of wonderfulness [1] there is no wireless access in the room. Ironically, up until recently, I vastly preferred wired hotel broadband, but when you travel with an iPhone and an iPad, there isn't anyplace to plug in the cable.

Since I had some time to kill and wanted to look around the city anyway, I headed towards the "Computer City" [2] to find a wireless router that had the distinguishing characteristic of being plug-and-play, requiring no temporarily tethered computer to configure security, etc.

I pulled out my handy dandy notebook and started writing for the saleskid. "802.11b/g/n". He scratched his head. "WiFi". Confused puppy. I drew a picture of an antenna, and he went and brought me a USB WiFi adapter. Progress! He was really trying to help (everyone here has been extremely helpful) and I was trying to use my tourist Chinese (all learned since Thursday night, mostly on the flight here) to cobble together fragments to describe it. Finally, I ask if I can look around, miming half and mangling Mandarin for the other half.

I found a "Netcore 150Mbps AP-ROUTER" from "a company with classic professional datacom system." They started the whole "calculator negotiation" thing and entered "180". 180 RMB is about USD 26. I wasn't about to negotiate for a $26 router.

Anyway, the manual was in Chinese, and it goes to my extreme confidence that I believed I could make it work. Everything was fine until I attempted to connect to my secure VPN back to the US. I dug through menus until I found the following:

(Once this was working, I turned off the ruinous China GSM roaming)

I had deduced from some of the other screens that the first glyphs meant something along the lines of "enable" and the second meant "disable". Probably more idiomatic than that, but I did recognize the second glyph of "disable" from watching Chinese-subtitled movies on the flight over to Hong Kong. [3]

Anyway, the thing is working, so I can send and receive email. With the VPN, I can hit Facebook, Twitter, and all those other sites (wink wink nudge nudge) so I think I can bear a couple days in inner China.

[1] One of a) TSA, b) Cathay Pacific, c) Air China, d) Chinese customs screening tore the pulls off one of the zippers on my bag. When I asked if the hotel could fix it, one of the bellboys offered to hop in a taxi and take it to a repair shop. He brought it back tonight (a few hours later) and apologized for the zippers being a different style!

[2] One really weird thing about China is that all the competitors seem to set up shop next to each other. I guess the Japanese do this as well, cramming Akihibara full of the same sort of stalls. You'd think someone would get the great idea to open a computer store on Mobile Street, and a mobile store in Computer City. [3] Yes, this is the secret to my rapid language acquisition. The cat is out of the bag. I watch two kinds of movies: English-language movies with subtitles in my target language, and English-language movies that have been dubbed into my target language, but then with English subtitles. The second is especially helpful if I know the movie really well.