http://www.hesspoint.com

I just found a great site that helps everyone who needs to fly a lot. Seatguru lets you see which seats in a plane are good and which will give you the guarantee for no sleep. Just select the airline, the plane and you see a map of all seats with comments. Now you can avoid accidently booking a seat next to a horde of crying babies.

When an old friend from university visited me in Shanghai last week we ended up looking up some other old friend’s blog and found this unbelievably cool website. Let’s just say we spend the next couple of hours (until 1h at night!) on this site. No, not that kind of site you are probably thinking of now, much much better: flightmemory.com.

In a nutshell, the site lets you enter all your flights you have ever done in your life. You can enter about anything from airline to seat number and if you sat aisle, middle or window (in case you still remember, damn where did I sit again on that flight in ‘03 from Toronto to Ottawa?). The beauty is that the site then creates you a statistic and some nice maps of all your flights. For me currently looks like this:

So as we are both flying a lot and on top of this I am a total travel nut (as you know when you read my blog) we sat there both hacking in our flights and wrecking our brains with questions like “What plane did I fly last time from Shanghai to Narita?” or “Which of the two Shanghai airports did I come in last time from Xiamen?” So we still have to see who leads in terms of distance and hours. Lets put it this way: 4.6 times around the world. Let me know if you beat that.

This is my first non-China related post in some time. However I thought I have to blog this one. When reading an article on Spiegel Online about asteroids I found this link to a asteroid impact calculator.

It is quite advanced. You can input how far you are from the impact location, how big the object, how fast and so on. As a result you can see if you would get incinerated, vaporized, blown all over the place or crushed. By the way you also see what happens to the rest of humanity and our planet.

So let the Armageddon begin and just to be sure, give Bruce Willis a call in case you get scared

Recently a friend pointed me to a service in Shanghai that is very helpful. When you are not at home and you need an address you can send a text message to a service number in Shanghai with the name of the place and it will send you the address in English and also in Chinese characters if your phone is so inclined.

One service is Shanghai Callcenter and the other one is Guanxi.

Both websites do not really work but you can look up the basics.