Hey Emma - our apartment block was visited by a contingent of very grim-faced PLA folks a few weeks back, and the resulting queue at the local police station was very impressive.

('Aliens' need to register their whereabouts within 24 or 48 hours of arriving - nobody used to bother, but it suddenly seems more important).

As the Beijing screws tighten up, its the gradual disappearance of the DVD shops that's starting to bug me. The local CNN bloke did a story about the copy DVD trade a couple of months ago, doing his final piece to camera standing in front of the Sanliturn Friendship Store which had a pretty good movie collection - and is also Government owned. The DVD section of the store has now disappeared, and so has another good one close by. Beijing is going to look so squeaky clean by the time August rolls around.

Local consensus is if the CNN guy does a story on the fake handbag trade here, he may get lynched.

MagnumMac in Wellington has the single worst service of just about any store I've ever walked into my life.

Tim - did you find anyone else in Wellington who was any good? Rolled into MagnumMac with my cheque book out a week or so ago, and was so put off by the disinterested staff who didn't seem to know anything about the hardware (except, perhaps, an iPod) that I gave up.

And on the browser-compatibility thing, having awful problems with Firefox 2 on a Mac - it keeps chopping off letters, and typing this has taken about 10 minutes of weirdness. Seems fine in Safari, and on Firefox on a PC, so maybe it is me...