I'm in China at the moment currently sitting in a team meeting to discuss all the evengelist activities that we do. It's certainly proving to be a lively discussion!

I arrived on Friday just in time to do two presentations at the Beijing TechDays; one on real-time Java and one on profiling in NetBeans which didn't go so well. The demos did not perform as well as I'd hoped but that was not down to NetBeans but my laptop. Sadly my Acer 3400 (the bright red Ferrari model) expired the day before I left resulting in a rapidly redeployed install on a different machine, hence the problems.

I've been to China several times over the last few years and you can see a real difference in the country, at least Beijing which is where I am. The number of people who speak English is really impressive. Of course, some of the translations in print remain somewhat humorous. I found a smoke hood in the wardrobe to aid my escape in the event of fire (how may hotels bother with that?). I took the time to read the instructions, the last one was "Choose way and flee for your life decidedly".

We're off for Peking Duck this evening at the famous Da Dong restaurant. I'm particularly happy to be going here as Heston Blumenthal fetured this restaurant in his search for the perfect Peking Duck recipe.

I'm leaving early tomorrow morning to fly to Tokyo ready for the TechDays later this week.