Just to change the subject, I finally watched the second of the new series of the Star Wars movies last night on DVD, and it wasn't half bad (unlike the first one). As people probably know, DVD prices in China are quite low, about the cost of a cheap rental in the U.S. Given how much it costs to stamp a DVD, I wonder if U.S. studios will ever decide that they could manage with a system where they mailed DVDs out to users at a cheap price and never asked for them back. I suspect that that could be a good business model for them, although it would cut Blockbuster off at the knees.

This also allows me to point out how much this building (a new building in Bei Sha Tao'r, on Datun road, near the Academy of Sciences buildings) looks like Darth Vader.

I've given up on Radio Userland's balky TCP/IP system for handling pictures. Either it's broken again or they have time-outs set too low to handle traffic over slow networks. So the pictures are somewhere else, but hopefully you'll still be able to see them.

Sorry for not posting for a couple of days. I've been trying to fix some computer problems; always an interesting thing when far from home. The hard disk in my Toshiba laptop crashed about 6 weeks ago. Because it was large, they had to order one from outside of China, which took about a month to arrive. Thanks to Microsoft's stupid, cursed Windows XP activation, I can't simply restore it from my backups, and figuring out ways around that have wasted a lot of time. Right now I'm back to using the interim hard disk I bought in the meantime, but I hope to be back to the status quo ante within a week or so.

My wife's Chinese class continues to resemble the TV show "Survivor," as more and more students flee and they recombine the remaining classes. Apparently some of the male Korean students are in a bind, because they're in China in part to avoid the draft back home. Also, anyone who returns from Beijing is likely to be shunned for quite a while. One more reason for us not to return until this dies down.

Every evening they announce the daily SARS cases, almost like the weather report, and like the weather report it has a big impact on our mood. There apparently was a SARS case in the apartment block near where my wife takes her Chinese classes, because there is police tape around that whole long block. That includes the main campus food store, although the police tape there has been helpfully put up high enough that you can bike through. I really don't know what that means.

Every day I receive email from students here reporting that the next day we'll all be confined to campus. That hasn't happened yet, although the security guards are getting stricter about keeping outsiders off campus. Students are all wearing lanyards around their neck containing their id cards, and now we are being asked to show our id when we come into campus.

Yesterday I went into a bookstore (The People's University Press outlet in Zhongguancun) and the guard at the door handed me a pair of thin disposable plastic gloves to put on.

I watched a press conference that the new mayor of Beijing held yesterday, and I thought he acquitted himself well. I'm still deeply skeptical about this hospital that they built in a week, as were the reporters.

If this ever hits the United States, I wonder how well we'll handle it? I think that sanitation conditions are better enough that it may not be too big a problem, but I also wonder if we have the public health resources to deal with quarantining people or the hospital beds to put a large batch of seriously sick people. At least in my community, hospitals are continuing to close beds as quickly as they can, and I wonder how fast they'd be able to put them back into service.

Happy May Day to all. If upstreaming pictures to Radio starts working again, I'll have some more images to show you.