Nice Weather, isn't it?

If you would look on a globe, put your finger on Chendu and follow the globe around to the west you would end up in Cairo. When I first did that before we came here I was wondering if the weather here would be the similar to North Africa, but of course we don't have the Sahara in our back garden so the weather here is quite different. When you look up Sichuan on a relief map, you know one of those plastic things that has all the mountains actually raised, you will notice that there is a bowl shaped hollow, with Chengdu in the west and Chongqing in the east, that is surrounded on all sides by high mountains. You can imagine that this traps some clouds, add to that the fact that Yunnan (the province to the south of Sichuan) means 'South of the Clouds' and you start to get the general idea: Welcome to CloudCity.
There is a saying here that translates something like : "When the sun shines in Sichuan the dogs bark." And honestly blue sky is a real treat, it does happen, but I don't think more than a dozen times a year. The weather here is nice in the beginning of spring and the end of autumn, but that doesn't last much more than a month , for the rest it can be characterised by one word: 'humid'.
The summer is hot and sticky, over 30 oC and 100% relative humidity is quite normal. Even in June my forecastfox plugin showed realfeel temperatures of 43 oC and more. Now some people like hot weather I know, but the other day it was only 26 oC and everyone was absolutely dripping with sweat, I promise you 100% humidity is not nice.
The winter here is cold and damp. Even though the actual temperature doesn't seem to drop much below 10 oC most of the time, everyone here wears thermal underwear, because 10 oC and 93% humidity is not nice, especially as the houses here are not really build for that and it is almost impossible to get them warm. And if you do manage to get them a little warmer, the walls start streaming with condensation and go mouldy all the time.
Now it is hot and sticky I probably prefer the winter, but in winter I was seriously wondering if I preferred the summer. Oh well, you need something to complain about, don't you. Anyway I thought I share this with you. I hope you find it interesting and otherwise just dismiss it a me rambling on again.

Back it up!

It has been quite on this blog for quite a while now. In the beginning of May I suffered a harddisk crash, that took out my system partition. That in it self was not a problem, as all my data was sitting on a separate partition, however what I soon realised was that there was one bit of data that I had foolishly put on the system partition and not backed up properly: my filesystem keys!!! You see, my data sits on a number of encrypted partitions, which are encrypted with a string of random characters (called a key). The key itself is encrypted with a password. So even though I still know the password to my keys, I have lost the actual keys and that means I cannot access my data anymore. The biggest problem was that this included all my e-mails and e-mail addresses, I have slowly managed to get a lot of the address back from memory and from other people, but I am still about 50 addresses short. So if you read this and know someone who knows me, please can I have their email address.

The moral of this story:

Back your data up and make sure you back everything up!

However I have my computer back up and running (minus the lost data) and my exams are finished, so I have some blog postings in the draft folder and hope to soon get around to publishing them. If you can think of anything interesting for me to write about, please let me know I am always looking for ideas.