I was in Shanghai last weekend for the tail end of a business trip to Wuxi and finally got a chance to ride the experimental high-speed Maglev train from the downtown Longyang Road station to Pudong International Airport.
Over the past few years I’ve been lucky enough to travel around quite a number of places in East Asia and a few other places besides. Along the way I’ve recorded my adventures in both words, pictures and videos including a few travel tips so for what it’s worth I decided to index them here in case it’s of any help to anyone else (for my most recent adventures check out the blog) – Travelling Light Combating Jet Lag Avoiding Internet Censors China Beijing Forbidden City Temple of Heaven Yiheyuan (Summer Palace) Badaling Great Wall Mutianyu Great Wall Ming Tombs Beihai Park Yonghegong (Lama Temple) Confucian Temple White Cloud Temple (Bai Yun Guan) Fragrant Hills (Xiangshan Park) Yuyuantan Park (Old Summer Palace) National Centre…
Sometimes you come across an idea which is so mad that it might just have a chance of success. This was the case when I first heard about proposals to dig a 200km+ undersea train tunnel between Korea and Japan in a similar fashion to the Channel Tunnel which connects Britain and France (albeit 4 times longer). The tunnel has a number of proposed routes, a couple of which would see it also pass through the territorially disputed islands of Tsushima and Iki on it’s path. It’s estimated that it would cost around 100 trillion Won (£1=W2000) and 15 to 20 years to build the so-called “peace tunnel” which would be a joint venture between the two countries if it ever comes to fruition.…
Why is it that the Japanese have had bullet trains (Shinkansen) for decades which can travel at over 300 km/h (186 mph) and experimental Maglev trains which have set a world record of 581 km/h (361 mph) while here in Britain our ageing trains rarely reach 130 km/h (80 mph)… are overpriced… unreliable… and overcrowded… you get my point! Considering we invented the railways it’s a pretty depressing situation. Sometimes I wonder if we just gave up after the Industrial Revolution and decided to leave it to the rest of the world to invent the future! This is how it should be done! Interestingly a group called UK Ultraspeed are proposing a network of high speed Maglev trains based on the German Transrapid technology,…
I’ve been running an alpha build of Dropline Gnome 2.10 for the last couple of days and must say I’m impressed. Everything seems a bit snappier & there have been some nice UI enhancements. My desktop looks even better now! I was pointed in the direction of a cool little visualisation applet today which graphically represents the hyperlinks for any given web address in a literal tree. While this is nothing really new it’s neat to play with and see the tree’s growing on screen. My own site looks particularly brocolie-like to me! Have a go yourself with the texone::tree here. I was intrigued today by an article about a new maglev train which has just recently opened to the public in Shanghai. With…