Question

How can there be a smoking room at the gate at an airport? Everyone is supposed to have been security-screened and not allowed to take lighters beyond that point. Yet the smoking room is too full and people are overflowing into the corridor.

China Southern Hilarity

This was just a rolling commentary:

Preflight
Old people keep getting up and walking - screws around with the flight attendants' counting.
There's only shared monitors. I suppose this reduces the computational load and then they don't have to license as many films. I think it's just cheap - not really related to politics. haha
Lots of other passengers attempting to flaunt status symbols. it doesn't work if everyone has an LV patterned accessory of some sort.
China Southern were nice enough to provide a small bag with earplugs, folding comb, toothbrush, toothpaste, eyemask and socks. The earplugs were very useful.

Underway

• 2232 - push off
• 2245 - people using toilets during taxi. Flight attendants telling them to hurry. Is this part of the Chinese way of expressing freedom - through petty acts potentially resulting in chaos?
• 2246 - too late: the plane is on the runway and taking its time getting airborne. It's an A330. The flight attendants told them to stay inside the toilet.
• 2250 - it turned out to be an old man
• 2303 - An old lady came back having refilled her bottle. WTH. How did she get that past security screening? What if you took a coffee mug through? What if it didn't have a lid and had a photo on the side? hmm
• 2308 - Communal monitors are rolling advertisements. This is the new China with glorified motor vehicle ownership.
• 2312 - Flight attendants struggled a bit with moving the cart. One spilled juice.

Interestingly, the beverages were mostly Chinese. Just Juice was the only Australian brand I could see. Coca Cola and Sprite were Chinese versions. None of the drinks were chilled. Why would anyone want to drink Chinese milk? Odd. Also, there's not enough hot water for tea. That's quite bad.

There was too much film lag so I didn't watch the whole film. Something about a USAAF officer called Robert in China having crashed. He fancies a lass called Yangshuo. There's in some rural area and people ride around on horses with bolt-action rifles. Artificial romance ensues even though there's a bit of a language barrier.

Guangzhou Airport
Now this part really was crazy. The international to domestic transfer security screening had only one frame scanner. Everyone had to be pat down even after going through. There were plenty of queue-jumpers due to the prolonged process. The airport is too big so there were electric vehicles to shuttle us to the terminal. Kind of like oversized golf-buggies.

Domestic Flight
There was way too much plastic packaging on all the food. The food itself was rather ordinary, but expected.

Additional hilarity provided by a lady trying to help herself to food on the card, pissing off the flight attendant who rebuffed her attempts with measured words.


Another good one is the sound tubes. The sound is actually produced in the armrest, where one plugs the contraption in (you can hear it if you put your ear up against the hole). Wasn't much use again as there was really only advertisements and a laggy film running. Seems like a good idea for being cheap and nasty.

TRS Madness

Departing Australia was a bit more chaotic than usual. We had to turn back as mum forgot her address book. This lost us a bit of time. However, the most annoying part was the queue for the Tourist Refund Scheme. It clearly hasn't kept pace with its success. There were many disappointed and angry travellers, mainly Chinese and on our flight, who were told to board as the departure time was nearing and the claims wouldn't be processed in time. The queue was in excess of thirty minutes and there were only three staff processing claims. Perhaps a lack of communications caused the excessive delay [a la "not food; sweets" lady on Border Security].
Anyway, I don't think the scheme is a good use of resources. $300 is probably a bit low, compared to the postal declaration limit of $1000. There must be a better way to encourage spending locally while avoiding such excessive processing. It's a bit like Woolworths Dickson though. There's no incentive to add staff at Dickson since there's no real alternatives to the queues there for inner Canberra. In the same light, you must queue for TRS as it's the only way to get your money back.
Oh, I also managed to lose my phone's battery cover with integrated antenna. Lameness.
Awaiting Sam's comments...

Bike light phase 1

Finding the right combination of price, brightness and battery configuration can be difficult for a bicycle light. I started off with one from here:
http://www.buyincoins.com/details/white-led-head-bike-bicycle-light-flashlight-w-mounting-access-02-product-379.html

It came with a pretty useless reflector and LED.
My next step was to replace the LED with a Cree XM-L. It's a bit excessive but oh well.

I had read about the epoxy layer being too thick on the board so I followed some steps to make the thermal interface more direct. My tubes of Arctic Silver thermal epoxy had gummed up so it was a bit of trouble gluing it down!

Running off three rechargeable AAA cells directly, the LED draws around 350mA. I'd say this is about the minimum I'd go with for now, with about 1W output. I'll take the XM-L module to phase two and swap in an older module for this torch... I think I still have an XR-C somewhere that I haven't blown up yet.

signs of an affluent city

One time, while walking with friend to his car after dinner I was greeted by the nice sight of free money. There were shopping trolleys abandoned on ANU grounds. All I had to do was push the trolley to the other side of the road, to the other cluster of trolleys, and I'd get a dollar out of it. However, I was greeted by the sight of a two-dollar coin in another trolley. The trolley cluster was otherwise pretty messy with trolleys facing opposite directions and chained together. After reversing the order, I managed to get two-dollars out of the endeavour.

Later on there was a dollar in a trolley on Northbourne but no other trolleys nearby. Obviously there's too much money in that city for people to bother - even for students.

follow up image to quality of sleep

Quite a lot of metal peeled back here. Fun times.

quality of sleep

Hmm
Can't sleep. There's a truck outside my house being repaired after taking out most of its load section with the help of a tree. All of the noises, hammering, metal sheets flapping about etc are quite annoying. I will have to try get some photos in the morning and see if I can find somewhere more peaceful in the meantime.
Damn, I had good sleep in Canberra.