London Fog Rolling Over Shanghai

Well, after 2 weeks, a lot of business, 24 hours of planes trains and taxi cabs, not to mention a VPN issue we are back in Shanghai.  And what a beautiful time we chose to come back.  Tempratures close to 0 Celcius and humidity getting up near 90% it's hard to go outside for more than 5 minutes even when you are bundled up.  A flucuation in tempartures has made it so foggy that we literally cannot even see the apartment across the way sometimes.  But we are happy to be back.  We have started working with a fabric company that wants to move their sewing to China, and we are working with a paper company that wants to buy their products direct from China, eliminating the middle man (kinda).  We also have some big projects going on with an Italian Gold company and an UV Light air purification machine company.  We have seen many friends already, and will be seeing many more in the coming days.  Simona is soon to be starting her second semester at FuDan University and is eagerly awaiting the beginning of the semester.
We also have some family and friends coming to visit us this semester and we hope that everything works out with that because we would love to show everyone around where we live and this country we live in.
Glad to be back Shanghai, I just don't get the feeling the glee is mutual :D

A comparison between our view on a fairly clear night, and tonight.

A day in Italy

It has been over a month now since Simona and I came to Italy to visit her family and work with our clients, and we are starting to get a little bored.  We have been snowed in recently by a localized storm that seems to want nothing more than to sit off the coast of Italy and berate us with cold air and feed us a healthy diet of snow and ice. Last week we got over 10" (25 cm) of snow that essentially shut down the country, and while the north of Italy is still being ravaged by this storm we in Tuscany have seen little snow since.  On a side note, Rome ("the one and the only") received about 1.5-2.5" (3-6 cm as i have been corrected) and had to shut down the entire city and made an uproar about how they "were not warned", while in the North over 27 people have died because of the METERS upon METERS of snow they have gotten and cannot get out of their house to get food.   Now, over a week later Anghiari (where Simona and her family are from), still has streets shut down because there are very few plows and even fewer that can fit down the old streets.  It was in this spirit that we decided to go out this afternoon when the weather finally let up and the sky was as blue as the ocean staring back at us and take some pictures of the beauty that Italy offers.  All kidding aside, this is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been, and sights like this make it even better.

My Technology

In today's world of Mac Vs PC, Apple Vs Android Vs Sybian Vs Whatever OS Microsoft runs on a phone now; we have a lot of choices in every area of our technological life.  I thought I would start this section off by explaining  what technology I use and why I chose it, and let everyone else ream me a new one for all of the "amazing" choices I've made.

Phone:  A lot can be said about a person by the "phones they keep".  Last fall I had my phone stolen in an area of Shanghai called Wu Jiao Chang (五角场), a shopping center where many westerners, and therefore many poor Chinese thieves, go to get their Burger King/Subway/Western fix.  The details of how are not really important, but as a word of advice, keep your phones and wallets in your front pants pockets boys.  And just like that I was in the market for a new phone.  Almost as a joke I reported my loss to the police in the area where they very politely had me fill out a police report but then told me that the chances of my phone being returned resembled that of a Frosty's chance of vacationing in Hawaii.  I was contacted twice over the next month to say something along the lines of "we are still looking, thank you for your patience" and then the calls stopped.
The stolen phone had been an iPhone 3GS and was well over 2 years old, so the loss was not that great.  Now the real choice came into play....WHAT PHONE DO I GET NOW.  I made the immediate angry decision that the theft of my phone was in fact Apple's fault and focused on an Android based phone as my next logical choice.  As I have mentioned I already have an Android tablet and I am pretty content with it, so I looked into them, and I liked what I saw.  Big screens, strong processors, great new OS (promised) for the new Android Flag Ship "SAMSUNG GALAXY NEXUS", but by the time that I was ready to make a final decision on my phone I was running into a few problems with this phone.  The primary problem being IT WASN'T OUT.  It's announcement had been delayed due to the untimely passing of Steve Job's, whose obsessive hatred of the Android OS, Google and of course Windows bordered on the criminally insane.  I can only assume that Google and Samsung feared that Jobs's ghost would haunt their event if it was held on the same day as the new Apple release phone.  This all added up to a later release date for the Nexus and by the time the new phone came out it was almost Christmas.
On the other end we had Apple (Symbian and Windows Mobile, are simply out of the question for reasons I may discuss in a later post).  As I said before they had a release of their own this past year that everyone was super excited about and was convinced was going to be the reinvention of the wheel (yet again) with the release of the "iPhone 5".  What we received instead was essentially a steroid induced version of the same old iPhone 4, but with a better camera (now 8 MP) and some software that was publicly available to all Apple users until Apple realized that they were not going to give the people what they wanted, so we need to give them some exclusivity.
Having an Android tablet, and discussing the topic with many friends I decided to look to their app stores.  Both have many good apps, and (excluding jailbroken iPhones) Android was preferable based on its ability to download apps from places other than the "Android Market".  My final decision was based on a discussion between Lee, and another with my father, who both made good points.  Lee said "You already have an Android Tablet, why do you want to get everything Android, get some variability", to which I responded that I thought it would be good to have consistency to connect all of my devices easily.  At which point Lee gave me "the face" and I realized that I had lost the argument.  My father on the other hand told me that almost ALL Apple App stores will work ALL the time on ALL Apple phones, where Android, because it is open source and anyone can do whatever they want to with the coding and programming of an app can end up giving you more "maleware" (sort of info stealing viruses) then actual usable Apps.  
So my decision was made, and I stand before you a continued Apple man (despite my best efforts) and with the help of DinoD7, musclenerd, saurik, and Many others I have been able to once again turn the "iPhone" into "myPhone".
More to come... 

Opening Day

My name is John McCandless and this is my first blog.  I am starting it to help motivate myself to provide help for others and work diligently for my new business.  I want to post blogs about things that interest me and things I want help with.  I encourage anyone who is reading this to comment on or critique anything you see.  Most of this information will be based on my opinion, and things I have read or seen.

My main focus in this blog will start as technology that I am interested in or own (primarily cameras and computers); experiences I have had abroad that I find important; and last but not least topics having to do with my recently formed business Golden Gateway Consulting 
(website: www.GoldenGatewayConsulting.com )

I hope everyone who reads this feel comfortable enough to comment and know that I will read and conciser everything that is written.

Please try to be honest in your posts, but also try to remember that this isn't a "Haters" blog.

Thanks to everyone who reads.