They say that when you’re handed a Chinese fortune cookie with these words — that you’ve got — let’s just say — quite a surprise coming up!

(And probably, more often than not, it might not be what you’d want to be after.)

But yes, we do live in interesting times, and chez moi, it’s not all that bad. As of late I have been optimising China’s railway English. It’s been a funny ride — 17 of 18 China’s rail bureaus so far have adopted the new standard, and I’ve done it all through Weibo, which is Twitter with Chinese characteristics (censors obviously included, but also included are much more localised elements — such as an extra 140 characters for retweets).

The microblogs have changed the way we talk to each other. When I meet station staff in Taiyuan, that would have been the first time we caught up in the real world. And we knew each other “just” from Weibo! Around maybe just a few years back, this would have simply been impossible.

There’s a very personal reason why I got myself a PhD in communications — especially social media — because I’ve been tweeting like mad on Twitter (these years, though, I’ve been much more quiet there — probably to indoctrinate the crew on Weibo, ha ha!). It is indeed quite a ride. I’ll be posting a bit more about new media here on this blog. I’m also consolidating my Mac and tech involvements into one in the future. So whilst there might no longer be a Beijing Mac group, there’ll be something else technically related.

A tech commentary blog for sure.

The newest iPhones too. I’ve been using an iPhone 5 for a fair bit. Somehow, I can’t seem to let go of that thing…