Winter has arrived. We had a powdering of snow two days ago but I felt the weather centre should have been taken to task by the Trades & Descriptions people. However, the same cannot be said of today’s snowfall. It started in earnest just before lunch and the flakes are now what I call ‘proper’ snow. (more…)

The town’s central heating has been turned on. Finally! We just spent a week in which going outside was the best course of action in order to get warm. Sod’s Law determined that on the day the heating came on the weather improved by 11 degrees C.

This is a difficult transitional period: (more…)

The Bohai Bay is not known for it’s surf but thanks to a shift in wind direction on Friday, I looked out of my window, saw the breakers and knew that it was a beach day.

The weather has cooled (due to the wind direction) and so the beach was almost empty; the water is still very warm. The waves were coming in at between 2 and 3 feet high. Big enough to get knocked about if you don’t dive under them and perfect to body-surf all the way back to the beach. I was having a hoot. Groups of students stopped to watch (more…)

Once again the weather hasn’t been conducive to spending time down at the beach so, I’ve spent time learning more about my computer. I’ve managed to work out how my speech recognition software works and I’m loving it!
I’m not using the keyboard to write this article and at the same time I’m teaching the software to recognise my voice and all the little nuances that go with such software. The noise of passing trucks doesn’t help. My mircophone settings must be too sensitive.
More on that later, back to the beach. (more…)

Coming face to waist with the world’s tallest man is not something one is going to forget in a hurry. We were minding our own in Beijing’s Terminal 3 when all of a sudden the light dimmed as the shadow of the tallest man in the world was cast over us. (more…)