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Hi, Zach-o-philes Photos from Zachary's Christmas trip to California are now online on my Flickr page. Click here for the Christmas set. More may be added later as I get pictures from other cameras. The set includes photos of Jesse, Abby and Zoe also. Samples below.         

Dive nerds: This weekend I went with Steven Schwankert of Sinoscuba to dive in the whaleshark tank at Dalian's Tiger Beach Marine Park. Here's a little video of the weekend's fun. It was shot on an iPhone (I didn't really plan on making a video), so please excuse any crappyness. Updates: Somewhat lower-resolution but China-friendly Youku version ...

Hi, everyone After a long absence, here are some new photos of Zachary, taken during a day trip to the Mutianyu Great Wall, outside Beijing, along with Olivia's brother, Glenn. You can find the new photos on Flickr here. Other photos from that day out (which don't all include family members) can be seen here.  

A few things spotted over the weekend and worth sharing. Comparing Chinese and US surfing habitsSilicon Alley Insider uses Pew and CNNIC data to build a chart showing the differences between the surfing habits of Americans and Chinese. No huge surprises -- more e-commerce for Americans, more games and IM for Chinese-- but interesting nevertheless ...

A funny story from an AP journalist who, along with his wife, was quarantined in China for seven days after a two-hour stopover in Cancun:The Mexican stamps in our passports — my wife is Chilean, I'm American — are enough for authorities to pull us out of line at immigration and send us to a medical room where attendants in white lab coats take ...

First, Imagethief feels he owes his readers an apology. Anyone who has been with me for longer than a few months will have noticed that the last third of 2008 yielded a sparse crop of posts. For this I blame a very heavy workload and an increasingly demanding young son who deserves a certain share of my time lest I have to pay for years of ''daddy ...

Something totally random but very cool from Wired's Autopia blog: A bit off-topic for me, but timely since I'll be spending most of tomorrow on one of those little, yellow dots going across the Pacific. Via the excellent Mr. David Churbuck.

The slightly alarming note waiting for me on the desk of my Shanghai hotel room two days ago:Dear Guest: There will be an underground blasting operation undertaking between 23:00pm-23:30pm on 3rd November. 2008, 23:00pm-23:30pm on 5th Nov. 2008, 30M away from here. There will be a chain of ''firecracker like'' noises and you may feel a little ...

As a video hobbyist it has always rankled me a bit that my blog engine didn't allow me to embed streaming videos into posts. Finally, after tireless Googling and some nerve-wracking edits to the blog engine and script configuration files that problem appears to be resolved. This will spare me the laborious practice of snapping and uploading linked ...

Regular readers will recall that Imagethief recently accompanied Steven Schwankert of Sinoscuba to dive a section of the Great Wall that lies underwater in a reservoir at Panjiakou, near Tangshan. A prior blog post about that trip is here. We had an Associated Press camera crew with us on that trip, and their video ran on various television ...