The Chinese Bloggercon 2008 is coming up in mid-November, about a month away. This year it is being held in Guangzhou which means that 冯三七 is involved, and I betcha they'll take the rude lessons learned from the last two years and pull off a great conference reminiscent of the first year in Shanghai. Registration is open and your RMB 100 in advance or 150 at the door should get you a t-shirt, a sticker or two, whatever surprises the Guangzhou folks have in store for us, and a weekend with a unique and forward-thinking set of minds from a very special part of the Chinese blogosophere.

Speaking of the bloggercon, it's one of the items on my secret "selfish list". Lately I've been mapping out a budget for Jodi and me every month, and it's been hard to stay within the bounds. Doing so has meant that there's a buncha stuff I'd like to get but have been holding off on until we are in better financial shape. Traveling to Guangzhou would mean spending a bit of cash, so it's something I'll have to talk about with Jodi before I start making definite plans. Anyhow, here's the list:

• CNBloggercon 2008. Deep down, I'm a believer in the open source lifestyle and devotee of Isaac Mao, and this is a rare chance to meet like minds in the flesh. One-way by train RMB ∼200, by plane RMB ∼500, plus one or two days of hotels, meals; maybe a total of RMB 1000.
• A new cellphone. The old Siemens, my first phone and a very amateurish pick, is hanging on for dear life and refuses to die/wander off. At the top of the list of replacement candidates are the Nokia 6108, an old Nokia model with pen input and CN-EN-CN dictionary, and the Gionee V9, a domestic model with a built-in NES emulator. They both go for RMB 200-300 on Taobao.
• A couple new pairs of glasses. My current glasses are 5 years old and showing their age: scratches on the lenses, mold in the nose-pads, and an outdated prescription. I'm jealous of Ani for having two pairs of glasses, which is strange because I'm not sure I'd use two pairs. I hear glasses go for RMB 300-400 a pair, and some shops will cut deals if you buy more than one pair.

I'm no angel, as Dido would say, and there have been a couple things that fell off the selfish-list and onto my lap in the past year. One is the eeePC, which we bought when I was on paternity leave at the hospital and needed to send sub plans to school and upload pictures to Flickr. The other is a pair of Uniqlo jeans, which I gave in and bought in desperation after failing to find a plain, no-frills pair of jeans for less than a <insert nickname for the RMB 100 bill; is there one?>. And when I think about those things, I feel too guilty to dive into the rest of the list. Waiting for birthday/Christmas... (Every time I say that, Jodi jokes that we'll be buying a million things at Christmas.)