Since Andy Ihnatko mentioned me on his blog, I do need to get his pics from Beijing up as well.

First Kevin Rose and his tea tour group and now Andy Ihnatko. Well it was a long day (especially with a not yet quite right broken ankle on the mend) but well worth it to be able to both meet Andy, give him the insiders tour and satisfy any man’s most basic, bestial and testosterone fuelled primal desires of the flesh………..look at rows of knock off iPhones (and ipones and ifawns) and help bargain them down to the lowest price!

Andy – hope you had fun – I knew that years of Chinese study at university here and IT entrepreneurship would prove to be useful one day.

So 2 out of 3 this week. Really wish we got Leo Laporte as well (not for lack of trying!) and it would have been a trifecta, a six, a home run or a converted try under the posts…….just pick your favourite sport.

Leo our hearts are broken – so please come back one day and let us mark you off the list?

I kept telling Kevin that I was trying hard not to blow smoke up his rear, but he really is a down to earth, friendly and an interesting guy. He has a real passion for tech (and tea) and the experiences that we could show him of our beloved Beijing. Of course with more time and more notice you can really roll out the red carpet.

On the way back to Kevin’s hotel for a drink before he turned in, the topic of food came up, he hadn’t eaten, and neither had I, since I went straight to the tweetup from work. As I ran through my mental list of places that would be open after midnight that were near where we were going and had good food, I met a total mental road block. Then I saw out the window a typical scene in China – a bunch of people with tables and chairs lined up outside many adjacent “holes in the wall”, eating, drinking beer and being merry. I told the taxi to stop right here…….. So we all sat down and had a real local Beijing meal and I introduced our guests to meat sticks or “Yang Rou Chuanr”. A lamb skewer made popular by the Xinjiang natives in China. For me it was a little poetic as I hadn’t planned on Chuanr, though it is what our Beijing Linux Users Group lives on!

Anyway I hope Kevin, Tim and Glenn enjoyed their culture lessons relating to alcohol and again wish to thank them for making themselves available to us fans and allowing us to show them a good time, it meant a lot to me and I am sure it did to the others as well.

Go read www.beijinglug.org for more.

Now if only IDG could put on a half decent Linux World instead of the token crap they excrete out like a constipated hippo.

Out the front I saw all these boxes being unloaded by the truckload. I asked what they were all for and was told that this is for the Wimax deployment. Wimax which is pronounce “Tian Xian” in Chinese or literally “Sky Line”, sky as in that sometimes blue thing above us and line as in cable. Our data centre has already been running trials for the past 2 years and I have peeked at their equipment with much excitement.

It turns out that the trials were a success and the stuff is being fully deployed now!

And yes, the mice were quite well behaved.

This week, via the trickle down effect in the echelons of the China network, we got informed that a couple of our clients are not compliant and they need to become so, or remove their website.

We have had to remove some clients sites before because they did not have the correct ICP. They could not get one because they did not have the correct business licences for the type of work they did.

Anyway, while having an ICP is a delicate balance between business licences, residential permits, correct content, correctly licenced IDC and what not, it is a good thing to get done and host in China. To be official, legit and free to get on with doing business.

For the most part getting an ICP, or the existence of an ICP is not a barrier to hosting or a problem to comply with. It sounds a whole lot more draconian than it really is. However it is a hassle. For you China hands, “mafan si le”!

Well, we came, we championed, we explained, we lobbied and we taught. We laughed, we gathered, we swapped tales and we helped clear up some misconceptions.

The sun was out, the sky was blue(ish – not bad by Beijing’s standards) and the students were happy and eager to learn what was going on and to quench their tech/FOSS thirsts. Tsing Hua got rained on by a heap of tech loving goodness!

Photo gallery after the jump….

Anyway, thanks to Google, RedHat, Red Flag, Mozilla and OpenMoko. They paid up cold hard cash to make it all happen. The rest of us did it FOSS style and donated servers, bandwidth, time and eagerness. But at the end of the day, cold hard currency talks!

Click HERE for more info from my previous post.