“So… you like music?” When I told yet another matchmaker-date woman — I’ve lost count which number — about the only hobby I can actually bring up, one of them finally gave me a slightly positive response instead of the usual “oh.” “Yeah. Love it.” Saying that, my head was full of the stock eroge line: “はい、大好きです。”

A while back I went to a local Oracle “high-end summit” — yes, the scare quotes are deliberate. “High-end summit” just meant an ad for Oracle’s current push into healthcare IT. The engineer giving the talk was working hard, trying to explain to a room full of pot-bellied “decision makers” who know nothing about databases what “cloud services” are, what “IaaS” is, what “PaaS” is, what “SaaS” is, and so on. He kept insisting that the future is cloud services, that storing your data in the cloud and buying cloud services would be such a great deal, way more convenient than maintaining your own data while constantly shitting bricks. No fucking use, of course.

I’m flat broke lately, so I’ve been surviving on whatever’s cheap enough to keep me full. Military rations, for instance…

For a long time I had no idea who Luo Yonghao was, yet plenty of my classmates were obsessed with him. They all thought he was hot shit, so I went and watched his lectures about idealistic entrepreneurship and such. Guy’s legit, I figured — at least he isn’t the profit-at-all-costs type, and that alone is worth something. Then he announced he was making phones and started running his mouth online every day. It annoyed me, but I could sort of see what he was going for. All he wanted was marketing and eyeballs. He just picked a pretty low way of going about it. I wrote about this a long time ago. I was a little tempted by the Smartisan T1, but no — I hate physical buttons, so I never pulled the trigger. This time it was the Nut. I thought it over… figured worst case I could just replace my old Meizu M1 Note, and went for it.

For the longest time I didn’t like Chinese DAPs. They were ugly, and the battery life was garbage. Eventually the battery life crawled up to at least double digits, but they were still ugly. So now we’ve reached the point where Chinese DAPs finally look not-terrible and have passable battery life — but the software experience is still a hard weak point. And it’s a fundamental gap. While the world-class portable players have you comfortably zipping around, our Chinese DAPs are still way behind on the basic function of “searching for a song.” All they can do is pull out the “but our sound quality is better” card to console themselves. Problem is, very few audiophiles are willing to give up usability, and self-anesthesia inside a tiny circle just keeps you stuck in place. Good thing someone finally decided to break out of that rut: Fiio.

Why has the price of the K314P earbuds climbed to 1000 yuan? When I bought mine, all I heard was a somewhat bass-light, upper-mid-forward, airy little earbud. That said, I didn’t listen very carefully… I just figured: An earbud at this price is basically just something to make noise… Turns out the K314P made a name for itself with that noise. According to assorted audiophile mystics, the K314P’s treble can match or even surpass the K3003. You know the K3003? The big hybrid flagship! And then it got discontinued… and nothing else can reach that treble height. So the price went up.

At some point I started buying everything online. My mom didn’t get it at first, especially when it came to food. “The supermarket downstairs has it. Why the hell are you ordering it online?” “It’s cheaper online!” That was usually my answer, and I figured I had solid theory behind it. Look, opening a shop on Taobao is basically opening a shop nationwide. You’re up against competitors from all over the country. If you don’t sell cheap, someone else will sell cheaper. Competition that fierce has to drive margins down. And for most electronics, the online price really is lower than the official one. So I assumed local brick-and-mortar stores, stuck with worse supply channels than both the official distributors and Shenzhen’s Huaqiangbei, must be more expensive. And then reality slapped me in the face, as it does.

Back when I’d just started college, I bought my first in-ear earphone. I think it was some Edifier model. Once I shoved them in, I discovered a whole new world. Over time, in-ear seemed to become the unwritten rule for what “earphones” even means. After all, if a thing can’t manage basic isolation, it just sounds bad, and the low end and high end are hard to get right. And yet people are just that fussy. Lately I’ve gotten kind of obsessed with earbuds again—the flat-head kind. The reason: I dug out an early Creative Air, and its surprisingly wide soundstage caught me off guard. That was when I realized earbuds can do things in-ears can’t. Problem is, high-end earbuds are rare, and even when they exist, they’re hard to track down. Luckily Beyerdynamic happened to put out an entry-level pair, so I grabbed one to try—and it felt a bit like discovering a new world all over again. How to put it? A slightly wider soundstage, bass that isn’t cramped, and a full midrange—listening to that in the dead of night really gives you something different. Of course, I said the dead of night, because the soft spot of earbuds is that the isolation is garbage.

The first time I learned about Rene Liu wasn’t actually because of her songs. That was probably middle school. Star Chinese Channel was airing April Rhapsody, and she played the rather tragic lead. That role is what stuck with me. I don’t know if I liked the frail woman she played or if I liked Rene Liu herself. Probably the former — at least I took one look at Red Pink Ladies later and ignored it. Fortunately I heard her songs later on. Most of them are cover versions, but her distinctive voice still left that first impression: a frail woman quietly singing those slightly sorrowful stories.

The Surface Pro 3 is Microsoft’s own hardware, and also the handheld gaming platform Microsoft has been pushing, so upgrading it to Windows 10 should obviously be no big deal. I bought the standard Surface Pro 3, then picked up a key on eBay to upgrade it to Windows 8.1 Pro, so the Windows 10 upgrade I got was the Pro version too. The upgrade went smoothly, same as everyone else’s — reserve your Windows 10 copy, download it in advance, upgrade directly. The process itself was fast, and then I ran into a few problems: