Is it safe to drink Beijing tap water?

The water in our Beijing apartment looks, smells, and (yes I risked it) tastes just fine. But is it safe to drink?  Nearly everyone I know -- foreigners as well as locals -- refuse to drink water straight out of the tap, and some of the more paranoid types use bottled water for virtually everything except bathing. It’s pretty common among ex-pat households to keep a bottle of mineral water in the bathroom for brushing teeth.  Even though the water appears to be just fine, “you can’t be too careful”, they say, and you never know what the city government lets into that water, or the pipes that carry it to my tap:  lead?  pesticides? heavy metals?  We know one family that makes their Ayi (housekeeper) painstakingly wash and dry every leaf of lettuce before eating it.

I’m not that paranoid, but I am curious, so on my last trip to Japan I bought a water testing kit from Kyoritsu Labs, a small company that sells low-cost test packs for people like me.

The kit, which I bought in Tokyo at Tokyu Hands for 1,365 yen (less than $20), comes with 5 test tubes, each containing a small amount of reagent. You pop a pin on the tube, insert a small amount of the water to be tested, and after a few minutes compare the color of the mixture to a color chart in the instruction manual.

They give you two copies of the pH test tube, so for practice I tried it on a sample of distilled water:

The result looks pretty close to the 7.0 that means neutral pH, what you would expect.  Looks like the test works, at least on this.

Next I ran the same test on the tap water:

A pH level of 8.0 means the water is fairly alkaline.  Since the human body keeps blood at a range of 7.35 to 7.45, some people (including the Singularity champion who I respect, Ray Kurzweil) think drinking alkaline water is healthy.  In fact, some health nuts buy expensive machines ($1000+) so they can drink it all the time.  Anyway, the point here is that probably the pH levels in my tap water aren’t bad.

Next, I tested iron (Fe) and found nothing, which is good.

What about water hardness?

The water is slightly hard: between 100 and 200 total calcium plus magnesium. This is obvious from taking a shower: it feels like the shampoo won’t come out of your hair, and it’s not easy to get a good lather going with a bar of soap.  But, at least according to the World Health Organization, this doesn’t seem to have an effect on health.

Another test, for Chemical Oxygen Demand, doesn’t check for any chemicals per se, but just the level at which oxygen is absorbed in the water, considered a proxy for the amount of organic compounds (i.e. living things).  The closer you can get to zero the better, but our level is under 5 and considered fine.  To give you some perspective, Switzerland apparently has a law prohibiting the dumping of water that is over 200.  As you can see, that’s not us:

The final test measures nitrite ion concentration, which is associated with sewage and/or fertilizer.  Ideally, this would be zero, but ours tests at just under 0.5 parts per million (ppm).  The US Environmental Protection Agency sets the limit at 1 ppm, so we are okay, though of course I wish the number were lower.

This kit is intended for testing well water, which is the closest I could find to what I wanted, so these are the only tests included.  I’ve asked around and can’t find a test kit for lead or other heavy metals that seem to bother people the most, at least for long-term exposure.  If you know of any low-cost, portable tests for this, please tell me in the comments.

The bottom line is that I wasn’t able to find anything that proves we shouldn’t drink the tap water.  This means nothing, because of course those who are paranoid careful will fear something I wasn’t able to test. On the other hand, I didn’t test the bottled water at all, so it’s not like you’re really safe that way either. As always moderation and common sense seem to be the best policy, but I’m reassured that at least on a few basic measures, the tap water here is not obviously dangerous.

I’m still here

If you’re trying to find me, and you looked at this blog hoping for some updates, you’ve been disappointed. 

I’m still updating, even more frequently than before, but on Twitter. I’ve found the 140-char limitation there to be liberating, more in tune with the short snippets of attention that I typically can afford most updates.

That said, I have a lot to say, and Twitter is beginning to feel too short. I’m not sure exactly how to replace it, and I suspect this blog may be part of it, if I can figure out how to organize my thoughts in a way that make sense to have on a single web site.

It’s complicated, though, because of the many faces of me. If you’re looking for personal updates, Facebook’s a better medium.  If you want professional information, see me on LinkedIn. But where do I put the rest of me, the hodgepodge of interests I have in technology, Hayek, China, Mercer Island, and more?

I’m still waiting to figure that out. But meanwhile don’t go away.

The Cloakbox Catch

The verdict is in: I’m pretty happy with my Cloakbox VPN router.  I love being able to surf as though I’m on a computer in San Francisco or the UK.  I’ve used it in two places, a temporary residential hotel and now (finally) in my permanent apartment. In both cases I literally just plugged it into the internet tap and it worked.  I love to tinker with settings, so later I adjusted things for higher security (e.g. WPA Personal) and a fixed location (rather than letting Witopia decide).  I also fiddled with the built-in WDS settings to get it to work with another Linksys router.  Everything was easy.

But it’s not entirely free.

Here’s my internet speed without the Cloakbox:

Here’s my speed with the Cloakbox:

My internet connection is much slower.  I assume some of this is due to the overhead of VPN, with extra encryption information being sent with packet. But the biggest problem is that every single communication gets sent across the ocean and back (sometimes multiple times), producing a much higher latency (upwards of 400+ ms).  That’s painful, although I find communication services like Skype are still completely usable.  But still, that’s quite a speed and latency drop.

Fortunately, you can turn off the VPN functionality at any time, and I do, so on longer uploads/downloads when I don’t need to get around any firewalls or when security is less of a concern, I switch it off.  Unfortunately you need to reboot the router each time, which can take a minute or two.

Bottom line: Cloakbox does what I need it to do and I have been recommending it to all my friends. For $199, it’s an easy way to eliminate one of the biggest hassles of living in a regulated internet.

Testing the Cloakbox VPN router from Witopia

The internet is a chaotic place, where packets of information swim all over the world, ready to be scooped up, peered at, or blocked by anyone (or any government).  To be truly secure, and to own your own channel in that ocean of data, you need a Virtual Private Network (VPN) that encrypts everything and ensures that the rest of the internet will see only what you want them to see.  Companies operate VPNs all the time, but consumers have the same ability thanks to a plethora of services from companies like Witopia, who I chose for the VPN I set up this week at home.

The Witopia Cloakbox costs $199, a lot more than the $50 or so you’ll pay for a Linksys, but it includes one year of VPN service. On the outside it looks just like a regular Cisco Linksys router. In fact, the model number (WRT54GL) is the same as the Wireless-G router I’ve been using at home for years. Everything is so similar that at first I wondered if there’d been a mistake. The photos on the web site made me think the box would look distinctive somehow—maybe bright orange—but it’s not.

Setting up was trivial. I plugged it in and it just worked. I just substituted the plugs and cables from my previous router, and everything swapped over without change. Then I turned it on and it all worked.  The wireless features are disabled by default, but Witopia operates a Wiki site with easy-to-understand instructions for how to get that going, and I had my household wireless network running minutes after opening the box.

Upon starting up, I checked my IP address and (cool!) it thought I was in Kansas!  This is convenient because (1) it means I can access web sites (like iTunes) that restrict non-US users, and (2) any government-run site-blocking service won’t work because as far as the internet is concerned, I’m located in the United States.

Next, I checked my access speed. This was a little disappointing.  All that hopping around causes an exceptionally long ping time.  Here’s what my speed test shows when I run my computer using my regular (non-VPN) router from my home near Seattle:

And here’s what it looks like with the Cloakbox:

The results change slightly each time I run the test, but these were the best times I was able to get for each version.  As you can see, the Clockbox VPN gives me about 1Mbps slower download speed, and a much longer ping time (160-300ms versus 40-70).

Overall I’m very pleased at how easy it was to set up.  Although the speeds are slower, I think it will be manageable, and of course nothing can beat the convenience of being able to surf the internet securely and without restrictions.

But how well does it really work?  For that you’ll have to wait for future posts from this blog.  In a few days, I’ll be living in China, but if the internet thinks I’m in Kansas, you’ll know it’s working.

Break my back

Long ago, I used to make fun of people who complain of back or muscle problems. Lazy complainers I said. Then about seven or eight years ago I suffered the same thing and it was sooo awful that I swore I’d be much more careful with my musculo-skeletal system, and I became very sympathetic toward others who have similar problems.  When the pain hits, you can’t think about anything else and you really become handicapped.  Not fun.

Fortunately somehow I escaped further problems until now. While picking up my laptop the other day, I felt a sharp pain in my lower back and it basically has been there ever since.  It was bad enough that I’ve now gone back for several treatments with a chiropractor, Dr. Jeff Pardon from Mercer Island Chiropractic.

Jeff is extremely friendly and articulate, patiently explaining the ins and outs of the spinal system and its affect on health but I’m  never sure how much to trust the whole field of chiropractics.   Is it an art or a science?  I’m moving to China in a few weeks, so I can’t get on a treatment protocol for long-term relief anyway, and I’m not sure if anything will eliminate the risk of this pain happening again.  

Meanwhile I just have to be extra careful.

A Switcher with second thoughts

I'm a veerrry long-time Mac user.  I had one of the first 128K Macs.  I dropped out of college for a while with some friends to develop one of the first Mac applications.  I  worked at Apple for 6 years.  So I am pretty excited about getting back to Macintosh, after having gone to Windows for the past ten years (after my company was bought by Microsoft).  But now that I'm in my second week as a Switcher, I'm frustrated.  The Mac just isn't as great (compared to Windows) as I had hoped it would be.

I'm using an old Macbook Pro with 2GB, so you can probably start by laying the blame on an older machine.  But here are some of my initial frustrations:

• Macbook Pro keyboard and trackpad placement are poorly designed: my thumb has to travel very far to get to the mouse click.
• The mouse seems more critical than on a PC, where nearly everything is easily available with keyboard shortcuts, which I miss. Where's the ALT key?
• Video capture doesn't work out of the box. I plugged my camcorder into the firewire port but nothing happened. What's this about Final Cut?  Is it not standard on a MacBook Pro?
• The battery is super hot.  I mean, I can't have it on my lap while I'm wearing shorts.  Ouch!
• So many things are slooooww.  Safari seems to take forever to load pages, for example.  Maybe this is caused by the lack of RAM, but my Windows laptop is also 2GB.  Is the hard drive speed slow?

I should write up the list of things I like, because there are many of those things too.  I like the built-in video camera, and the super-cool geek factor of having a full-blown Unix machine at my fingertips.  I also love being able to set up my HP printer with absolutely no extra steps -- it just worked! There are no doubt many more things I'll prefer after having a few more weeks at this.  But in spite of a few nice things, I'm sorry that so far I haven't been blown away.  I guess you need to give me a few more weeks to play and ask me again which I prefer.

Summer Hail

It’s the Summer Solstice, longest day of the year, first day of summer and all that…and what do we get?

A hailstorm! The kids and I went for a leisurely bike ride to the new Mercer Island Farmers Market and this is what greeted us on the way home.