Dammit Jim!

They’re not orange.

This was a ripe (and pretty tasty) orange. I would have thought it needed a few weeks to ripen (or was actually a lime) but it turns out that oranges in China are often green. I guess that’s why the Chinese word for the fruit orange (橘) is different than for the color orange (æ©™) although I just noticed that the two characters are pretty similar and both pronounced ju.

It keeps taking me days to put together posts so I’m going to try to get used to writing quicker by firing off a few quick ones of random odd things I see while I’m travelling in China. In that vein, the first subject is toilets. I ran into these in Japan and Korea so I guess they’re not exclusive to China but this time I actually got around to taking a picture. So the Asian toilet:

As you can see someone seems to have decided to cut all “unnecessary” parts and reduce the toilet to it’s essence, a hole in the ground. I guess it makes sense since you don’t really want to touch anything in a public toilet. It (and perhaps the lower average weight) also explains why I see a lot more people over here squatting during normal circumstances. I guess it would make you ready for camping too although there doesn’t seem to be much of that here.

Another interesting point is the garbage can next to the toilet. I had never ran into this before and had no idea it meant you were supposed to throw your toilet paper in there until I mentioned to my fiancee that they sure expected people to have a lot of garbage in the bathroom. I may have left a string of clogged toilets behind me before that. Anyway, it’s surprisingly easy to get used to although I still forget once in a while (no I don’t go fishing. it seems a couple misplaced sheets don’t hurt). I don’t think it’s a habit I’ll carry back to the US though.

After a few days touring Beijing and seeing the normal Great, Forbidden and Heavenly sights, I noticed the guidebook mentioned the Peking Man Site in Zhoukoudian as being reasonably nearby. After several days of temples and castles and with the Chinese National Holiday promising to swamp every tourist location in Beijing, I thought it might be nice to take a trip out to see Peking Man’s cave.

I finally finished up my masters (on migration and tagging effects in leatherback sea turtles). Once I get a little free time (and I feel like looking at it again), I’ll have to write up a few posts about it. Anyway, it sure is good to be done. It took a bit too long but it was a really good experience.

In other news, I got engaged. I found it pretty funny that the day after xkcd came out with this cartoon:

So I’m off to China to visit the future in-laws and do some touring. Apparently almost all Western sites are blocked by default on the residential network where I’m going. So any responses may be a bit slow.

For a while, I’ve been a bit annoyed with WordPress losing pings (those automatic links on your blog when someone links to you) that should be coming to my posts. I noticed that when I or an external blog link to more than one of my posts only one ping would register in my comments. For example, if someone writes that:

Scott has written WordPress plugins to make it easier to write about code, generate monster avatars and generate unique geometric shapes for each commentor.

I would want a ping to appear on each of those linked posts, both to thank the linking blog for writing about me and to provide useful information to the reader (and to increase my comment counts). Yet WordPress only puts a ping on the first linked page.

It took me a little while to figure out why WordPress kept losing my pings since I wasn’t even sure if it was a problem on the sending or receiving end but it turns out WordPress is filtering pings because it thinks the comments are coming too fast. I’ll put the details below but if you just want to make sure all the pings intended for your blog actually reach it then here is the plugin for you.