I’ve been playing with a friend’s iPhone, and today was seriously considering getting one. Then I was forced to deal with another problem with my MacBook Pro which once again makes me bitter about Apple.

On my last day in Beijing I was surfing the web in a Starbucks. I didn’t have an outlet handy, so I was running off battery power.

When I got down to 30 minutes of battery life remaining, my laptop abruptly died. Didn’t shut down gracefully, just died. Funny thing is, this has happened before…with my two defective batteries. They started by failing when they should’ve had plenty of life left, and as the problems continued they started to swell up. This is pretty terrifying, since the lithium polymer is capable of spontaneously igniting. So there was a chance I could leave for work and come home to find that my battery burned down my home.

Great, I thought to myself, another battery replacement. Fortunately the two previous batteries I’d gotten were recalled, and Apple had made the replacement convenient. Not this time. I just got off the phone with Apple support. They cheerfully informed me that with recalls, the warranty is only 90 days instead of the customary year. It’s like they knew that they were replacing the defective batteries with more defective batteries, so they made sure to end the warranty before they failed (in all the other defective batteries the problems didn’t start until after 90 days).

So yeah, I think I would have to be an idiot to give Apple any more money at this point.

Just like Burning Man, Beijing was a blast. I am very fortunate to have great friends, meet interesting and fun people, and have adventures.

I had to write this down. It was too hilarious. Similarities between Burning Man and my vacation in China:
1. Sense of impending anarchy
2. Wheeled vehicles of all shapes and sizes, fleets of crusty bikes
3. Safety third
4. Scary bathrooms
5. Nightmare traffic
6. Love-hate relationship with Capitalism
7. Rampant abuse of megaphones
8. Fire dancers (for real)
9. Raves (I’m serious!)
10. Rivers of beer

It was less than a month after Burning Man and I still hadn’t completely gotten over it. The fun, dangerous, completely alien surroundings made the whole top-of-the-rollercoaster feeling come back with a vengeance, and everyone got pretty sick of me talking about it.

I got the complete Pimsleur Mandarin courses, along with the Rosetta Stone Mandarin and I’ve been playing with a free site called Mango. All are pretty good in their own ways. I wish I could add more disk space to my brain. My goal is to go back sometime soon and not be as helpless as an infant. It’s breathtaking to enter a place where suddenly, thanks to the language barrier, your functioning IQ drops by about 100 points.

See the pictures for yourself.