Benita sent me a hialrious bit from an old e-mail she got a couple of years ago. Ahh China. How I love thee…

1. The Chinese managed to put corn flavor into the strangest things, such as ice cream, yogurt and gum. But if corn ice cream isn’t your favorite, you can always eat blueberries-and-swiss-cheese ice cream.
2. Speaking of flavors, Chinese chips come in flavors like Beijing roast duck, beef, fried chicken and cucumber.
3. The topics of our lessons in Chinese class revolved around why homeless people and peasants are a big ass problem and why women deserve to be second in society. Also, i’ve learned that if i don’t marry by the time i’m 30 and am a successful woman then I’m scorned to a life of celibacy…for no man in his rightful mind would ever be attracted to me.
4. Teachers have no problem with using your physical appearance and your clothing to demonstrate the meanings of words that mean boorish and uncouth.
5. In china, milk is unrefrigerated in comes in little bags. If you want to drink it, you just cut a corner of the bag and drink it all warm. That goes for the same with the beer (sans the bag). Also, beer is much cheaper than milk, soda, juice, or any other liquid.
   Not that i would know, mom
6. If you want to make a long distance phone call in china, first you must go buy a card. The card will say it costs 100 yuan, but it really doesn’t. The real price of the card depends on your bargaining skills. If you can bargain it down to 20 or 30 yuan you did a good job, thus only paying about 12 cents a minute to call home.
7. You can buy turtles virtually anywhere in China. grocery stores, street corners, bridges, underpasses. I don’t think they are for pets.
8. In Beijing, the price a cab costs varies between 1.20 yuan and 1.60 yuan a km. You can tell which cab charges what by where the antenna is placed on the top of the car. Tricky stuff at night time.
9. So the other day i was sitting on a bus and there was this fat guy sitting in the corner. he was wear camo print shoes, three shades of pink leg warmers, a beat up ripped red poncho, than he was wearing an old rice patty hat which only had 30 percent of its straw left on it which was secured onto the hat by electrical alligator clips. Finally, to top off the fashion statement, a big communist red star up top. Nobody on the bus stared at him besides me yet people stare at me uncontrollably all the time in china, as if i’m a circus freak or something.
10. Finally, speaking of China being weird. Yesterday in a rather peaceful part of Shanghai, my friend Benita and i heard some techno music and a large crowd so we wanted to see what it was all about. when we got there what we found was rather disturbing. A woman in her 60s wearing floral print tights and a cheetah print sweatshirt and a small girl of 7 years old in her pajamas dancing wildly to a song which was unmistakably all about sex, sex, sex. Later a middle aged man joined the threesome and did a sort of epileptic jelly fish dance. Nobody laughed..they all looked intriged and interested while Benita and I almost pissed ourselves laughing.

China is weird.

“Hey, have you heard about the new dollar coin? They’re putting presidents on the faces.”

“Oh yeah? Who’s on it now?”

“Washington. He’s on the quarter and the dollar.”

“Huh. Well, only ten more years or so until they put W on there.”

“Oh great. Melt the coins and make something productive out of them instead.”

“Yeah, instead of the Looney we’ll have the Dumbass.”

Snowshoeing to Heather Lake on turned out to be a pure hiking excursion. Myself and four others from my church all left our snowshoes in the car and headed up on foot. Though there was a little bit of snow on the ground in the last half mile of the hike, the rest of the hike was devoid of the white stuff and was saidly no more than damp.

It’s been warm lately and though the snow in November was epic, I fear that it’s completely tapered off for the rest of the season. A trip to Whistler three weeks ago was lackluster and the weather has been largely dry and warm, even in the mountains. Having purchased skis, snowboard, and snowshoes for this season, I’m beginning to wonder if this was a bad idea and if I’m witnessing the waning days of one of my favorite pastimes. This global warming is rough stuff. Although phenominal last year, Europe has been nearly bone dry for snow this year, forcing the cancelling of skiing competitions. Colorado wasn’t anything spectacular this year and even the typically rainy and cloudy Washington state has been marked with warm days and bright sunny skies.

Perhaps I’m being a little oversentitive to the idea. I’ve been reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Science in the Capital” series, which speaks both directly and deeply about possible futures due to global warming. As is typical with the KSR’s writing, it is both intricately detailed and amazingly well developed. The novels talk about major climatic events such as the stalling of the jet stream due changes in the salination of the Earth’s oceans, which in turn has altered due to rising sea temperatures in previously cool spots. Drastic cyclical weather shifts are observed, where temperatures fluctuate widely in the span of a day and the increasing occurance of freak weather events–tornadoes, hailstorms, etc. Reading these books make me draw parallels to recent news–Hurricane Katrina and the increasing volume of Cat 5 hurricanes, freezing midwestern US temperatures, eight feet of snow in New Jersey, etc.

My snowshoeing group was talking about the things that we look back with in hindsight and think, “wow, that was really really dumb of us to do.” Things like, DEET, aspestos, nuclear weapons, mullets…the list goes on. Will we one day look back at the result of global warming and think that it should have been a complete no-brainer to tackle? I hope not.

The end of this week marked the end of my busy season. As some of you know, I’ve been heads down for the last three weeks or so, working days, nights, and weekends to deliver my specs for the next development milestone of the product I work on, Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

The core part of development software at Microsoft is typically a combination of three disciplines–testing, development, and program management. I’m a Program Manager, which is a schnazzy and lofty title, but doesn’t mean I have anyone working for me (yet). What I manage is an area of the CRM product, driving the designs of new features in my area, interacting with customers, and bringing their requirements back to the drawing board.

My quintessential example goes something like this. Somewhere out there, there’s a Program Manager that’s responsible for the composition experience in Microsoft Word. And sometime in the ancient history of computing, this Program Manager realized that people mis-spelled words all the time and that Word should help them out with that. So he went off and thought about it for awhile, talking to users, developers, testers, and designers. And over the course of some time, a design pans out, where a misspelled word immediately gets highlighted in red squiggly lines that you can right-click on to correct. These designs get documented in a spec, short for specification, which is the crux of the PM role. This specification is handed off to development, who will actually implement it in code and is eventually consumed by testing, who verify that what the developer wrote actually works like what the spec says.

What I’ve been working hard on in the last three weeks is figuring out the designs, validating ideas, and getting them all documented on paper. It’s an intensive process–writing a spec requires input from a number of parties, balancing ideas against what is possible to code and fits into project. With my days consumed with meetings, driving several feature specs to closure, I’ve been spending my evenings and weekends writing everything down and coming up with or revising designs.

Finally, I nailed down the last big spec I have to write. There’s some cleanup that will last through the next two weeks to three weeks, but I’m back to a normal work-life balance.

And I’m going snowshoeing to Heather Lake tomorrow.

I’ve apparently been living in a cave (or perhaps just stuck at Whistler), but I heard today that the final Harry Potter installment is coming on July 21.

Better mark that calendar now–if the past two books were any indication, this means I’ll be completely useless to the world for the 36 hours following the release. I’ll be a binge bookworm until the last page has been flipped.

Amazon has it at a nice discount of $18.89, but you’re more likely to find me at Costco where it’s usually less.