There's a reference to the work I've been doing in the Guardian Online in an article which highlights some of the online and new media work my company has been doing over the past couple of years. The Guardian is known for its liberal views and its media section is great for journalim jobs. Its the place that the UK's chattering classes tend to hang out.

It's quite a strange feeling to be bigged up as a top commentator in the US and Australia, but made invisible... But it was good that the journalist, Kate, named the sponsor of ICIS radio.

Making steady progress with Snow (which would be more apt if I was in the Blizzard sweeping New York or New England at the moment) and when I get close to a moderately fast internet connection. I'll upload some pictures of a ride I took on a San Francisco trolley. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Heathrow Airport, Terminal One. 11:30 am. I’ve done the impossible to day I managed to get to the airport and check in automatically before British Airways was prepared to take my suitcase off me. “We are only allowed to take your bag within three hours of the flight’s departure, sir”. Still they took it eventually and I enjoyed one of the best communal experiences that there is in the UK: queuing to get through security. Its not that I like leaving the country, who really wants to leave home, but the heightened security means that it takes some time to get through and you inevitably start chatting to the people in the queue. That may sound silly, but the only time that people talk on tube trains here is Friday and Saturday night when they’re going out or going home. Most of the time we go off in our own worlds as we cram into the coaches. The usual where are you going, isn’t it disgraceful and so on but it shows that the people who forced us to take these measures have, if only in a small way, got us slightly closer together, if only on the one subject.
Long flights are good for reading, they are especially good for reading the kind of books that you’d normally find too boring (I got most of the way through the Tin Drum on a flight to Memphis once). However, because WHSmith, the air port bookseller, likes profits over education, I’m on for 10.5 hours of unremitting excitement with Elizabeth George’s with no one as witness. Ohran Pamuk’s Snow and Red also by him. So a Turkish theme lightened with a little upper-class sleuthing.
This should fit in with my overall anit-jet lag strategy for the trip. Which is to try to drink my own weight in water (at lest three litres) (Drinking your own weight in alcohol is not recommended) and to stay awake until at least 7:30 pm San Francisco time. That’s around 24 hours so I should be so exhausted that I get a good night’s sleep. I try not to work out how long awake for possibly 24 hours. Though, I might have my usual Saturday afternoon catnap on the flight. More sometime later

Hi Simon,

Great to hear from you and know something about you. I read your blog, and saw your comic image on top of the front page.

The short video clip above is a tour to our office in Beijing. The people in it are my colleagues. We're all SOHO, and once a week, we go to the office for some brainstorming and share newest ideas with each other, so, there're not many people in the office.

My laptop is the white macbook with a black ipod and a black cellphone beside it. The round-face guy with a bag of 'QQ candies' in his hand is my editor-in-chief. And the guy in red sweater is my colleague in lifestyle sector who's very very funny.

You will see some Chinese characters on the door at the end of the video. It reads, "So cold! Don't forget to close the door!" It's cold in Beijing right now. The temperature here is about -2 degrees Celsius. How about London?

Gotta go. Would you please show me some pictures about your office? It should be great.

All the best.
Steven

Hi there Steven,

I'm Simon I work for ICIS, a speciality information, intelligence and news service for the global chemicals industry.

I've always tried to work for magazines or organisations with global or at least European in the title, the travel is better that way.

I started blogging a couple of years ago after a meeting here at work and did it at the same time as my day job on my magazine, now my role's changed and a good part of my day is spent blogging on the Big Biofuels Blog. Biofuels are very big at the moment, and I try to keep a skeptical eye on the sector. I also podcast, with a group of colleagues, we're exploring the opportunities that these type of new media offer.

But it is quite different from most of the rest of my work history which has been spent on magazines written for people working in the polymer and chemicals sectors.

As I'm sure you know we've had the Christmas and New Year celebrations here in the UK and the year is settling down into its routine. It's winter.

We're expecting the possibility of snow later in the week. About 1cm snow is enough to disrupt the trains, roads etc. 2cm would just about stop London, which is frankly pathetic.

I originally come from Derby, home to Derby County Football Club (hooray!) but I've lived in London for 20 years.

The Chinese New Year is celebrated here well enough for me to know that I'm a snake and this is the year of the pig.

I hope you had a good time at home for the New Year.

Simon

Hi Simon,

This post is written by Steven Lin in Beijing. It's about 8:36pm now here, 8 hours ahead of London. How are you?

Gia Gia sent me the invitation to start this blog with you. Maybe the best way to start it is to introduce myself. I work for a business newspaper titled The Economic Observer (经济观察报), which is printed on orange papers and keeps trying to be a Chinese echo to Financial Times.

I have a Chinese blog on some interesting tech stuffs, an English blog where I share my daily life with some foreign friends, and a Chinese podcast maintained by my partner and me. If you want to know something about this podcast called Antiwave (反波), please click on this video clip on YouTube. I'm the young guy nicknamed Flypig in black top.

Feb. 18th is the traditional Chinese new year, aka Spring Festival (春节). It keeps me busy buying the flight ticket back to Fuzhou, my hometown two-hour flight away from Beijing. There will be a huge traffic during Spring Festival, and the shortage of tickets made the price very very high. :|

The picture above was taken outside a bar in Shanghai around Christmas Day. Hope you will like it. BTW, my email address is Flypig [at] Gmail.com, please send a message to me when you read this post.

Cheers,
Steven