yeah yeah, I knew it would happen, but I left Hong Kong

Alright ye few listeners.

That's right, like the subject says, I damn well knew it would happen. It did happen. As soon as I tried to pin down a date that I would leave for China (a la the last post), I was promising the fates that the day that such action, should it ever actually happen, would absolutely unequivocally not happen on the date that I mentioned.

(but don't worry, I'm not going to leave you hanging forever in suspense... if you read the last page of the mystery novel right now, you'd find out that I am in writing this to you from in China, so bear with me)

I'm going to split this into a couple of posts, so you can skip ahead if you wish. This one is going to be about the bit from getting out of HK, the other(s - we'll see how motivated I am later) will be about going into the Middle Kingdom. So go read what you want!

I suppose I should start with a disclaimer - this Sony microlaptop is a bad ass piece of hardware engineering. But you know that if I'm going to start with a disclaimer like that, it wasn't all peaches and cream since I got it.

When the thing finally arrive (FedEx left it sitting in Norwalk all that weekend after the 8th, so it didn't go on a plane until the 12th, and showed up at my friend's pad on the 15th), my boss decided to fly in to town. What with what's going on in the VoIP world on his agenda, suffice it to say I ended up crunching an average French workweek for hours into Thursday and Friday. I wasn't exactly jazzed to come home and go deal with another large IT problem, so I did the next best thing I could think of - I buried my head in about as much alcohol as I could find.

After the dreadful alcohol shortage of 2007 in Southern China ended (oddly coinciding with when I put the bottle(s) back down in the no-longer-so-wee-hours-of-Saturday-morning), I wasted basically the whole weekend mucking around with the thing. It's really a terribly boring drama, so the summary is that when you get the machine, you have 4 gigs of space left out of the 32 that you were sold. I wasn't about to go try spending a couple months wandering about the world and bringing 4 gigs with me, so I spent all my time (re)learning about win32 debugging and figuring out where the stupid recovery disc creation utility (since every manufacturer of laptops is too cheap to send you actual CDs/DVDs of install media anymore, came about the time of the revolution in non-metallic twist-ties holding the cables together) kept failing so I could reinstall the thing and have more than a pittance of space available.

This dragged on. And on. And keep going. Don't pass go. Then..

..finally. If you buy the same damn machine and get stuck with the same damn problem, send me a comment / email and I'll be happy to walk you through how to do it. Perhaps I should document that somewhere else, since anyone who's not happy with 4 gigs of space on a fresh machine and can't get out of the catch-22 sony traps you in is probably going to have the same problem sooner or later. (hint tech guys - they write out the DVDs from the hidden recovery partition TWICE - first as a folder collection in %USERHOME%\AppData\Roaming\temp (4.4 gigs) and then AGAIN as an iso in the same directory.. I ultimately got around it using an NTFS junction to an external HD, when I stopped looking in the wrong places for the problem)

bah. I want to send Sony a bill for the part of my life they wasted. Ah well, suppose this is why tech people have jobs in the first place - any sane person wouldn't put up with this sort of shit, or just wait out the tech to get better (a 60 gig HD and this is all academic).

I broke with tradition by not formatting the thing linux, but I did bring with me a whole bag of tricks. KNOPPIX boot CD and USB bootable key, an SSH client that works over AJAX / SSL with no install and one time passwords, the NCK from Sony to unlock the SIM card EDGE / GPRS / GSM cellmodem, and enough memory cards to shuffle a 3 player hand of hold-em with.

Enough geek. Probably for the rest of the trip (assuming all this crap doesn't get lost / stolen / broken / etc) you won't really be hearing about it again.. It's finally the idea I had for telecommuting from Tibet on just about any hardware / internet situation; for now on, it's a deus ex machina, just assume I can be yelled at by my boss from just about anywhere (or however you guys define the Employment Situation).

Despite the foregoing, the rest of my premonition was pretty much accurate. I did stay the weekend. I did rock the Wanch with some music that they just plain weren't prepared. My friend Damian (check him out over at nudz.org, awesome domain name dude) just got back into town from NY, so I stuck around for a reunion and some ranting about wandering. Killed the computer problems Tuesday afternoon and then went for the border Tuesday night.

and then, at last, the wandering began.

...I jumped on the Kowloon-Canton Railway for Lo Wu, HK.
...I "alighted" from the left (as the interesting English announcement told me to get the hell off the train)
...I bolted for the sleek air-conditioned automated turnstile precision of the Hong Kong emigration point.
...I calmly walked across the 100 yards of bridge into mainland China.
...I scribbled furiously through the non-working pens and waited in the endless lines of the Chinese immigration checkpoint (the A/C was temporarily off for reasons I couldn't make out)
...and I entered the middle kingdom.