j a m e s f o r s y t h ✡ n e t

The Honda HRV. I love them. Too bad they stopped making them in 2001.

I’m writing this using my Pocket PC - and loving it!

Asher has been going to Chinese school once a week for the last few Saturdays. We’re gradually helping him through the separation anxiety and the idea of sitting in a classroom.

The main purposes of this are that he gets used to school for when he goes to “normal” school, and also that he keeps up with the Chinese.

Please pray for us that Asher continues to grow in these areas.

Imported books are too expensive in Australia.

There’s a debate going on between the politicians about whether making them less expensive will drown out the Australian book market. If you know more about the debate than I do (which is quite likely), please drop me a line and fill me in about it.

I bought an imported book the other day I need for my work - it cost about $65. I guess I’d always be willing to purchase a book if I really needed it. Ebay has been pretty good for buying books. I should say not Ebay themselves, but the people on there.

Hi all,

Really, not much to report. Hence, I’m not reporting. As you probably know, on returning from China a few months ago I was able to visit Japan and Singapore. Hopefully in a few months we’ll be going away again soon. So here I am in the middle. Working. Enjoying weekends. Etc. I’ve also been playing computer games with Asher. We use a logitech precision gamepad:

Asher’s getting very used to using it. I’ve used some freeware to map the keyboard to its buttons for those games which only have keyboard input.

Did you know there will be a new Astroboy movie? See the site, complete with 2 trailers here. Looking forward to it. Hopefully there’ll be a Chinese version coming out around the same time for us to show Asher.

I’m writing this more or less as a memo to myself:

It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price. - Warren Buffett

Hi all. I’m back in Melbourne getting back into the coffee habit.

Instead of the mad scramble of “queueing” and guessing as experienced in many other countries, this McDonald’s in Nagoya has a true first come first served arrangement. Because when you want to get fed, you don’t want to get fed up.

先来先给

I just wrote the following here:

Lao Zhong (15) says: 老X is a neutral word, as in 老李, 老师, 老毛, 老蒋, 老鼠, …

It’s not the 老 that gets to me, it’s the 外. I’m in China, but from Melbourne, Australia, and in both places I’m called a 老外 by the Chinese. Chinese people are welcomed to Melbourne and treated like locals pretty much as soon as they arrive. If I was to live in China for 20 years, however, I’ll still be referred to as 老外 in totally irrelevant situations, such as buying something to eat.

It’s not up to the person using the term to distinguish whether a term is 贬义词 or 褒义词, it’s the audience.

Some Chinese have recently expressed shock at my objection to the term 老外 saying that, if they don’t say it, they’ll have no way to actually refer to me. It’s almost as if 老外 is one of the pronouns of the Chinese language. With such thinking it is difficult to argue.

Instead of parents in China telling their children “看，那边有老外，说’hello’“, they should teach them that outside China there are a wide range of nationalities, of many different languages and colours. Otherwise, it’s akin to Westerners in Western countries saying “Look, there’s an Asian, say こんにちは”. The latter is actually less ignorant than 老外, because at least some attempt has been made at identifying the person. 老外 simply means “outside China”, which inherently carries no meaning whatsoever.

I applaud Nick’s (8) comments, but feel that 老外 is also a term that should be phased out (i.e. given a wide berth) if China is to truly develop, not only in technology, but also in mindset.