THE FIRST hacks have started to tip up in Old Shanghai, ready for the Intel Developer Forum kicking off this coming week.

And at first sight Shanghai looks kind of more interesting than Ole Beijing did - a 250 year old section of the town has been preserved and yeah though there's at least two Starbucks, a KFC and a MacDonalds in there, there are other quainter places.

What happened to my bog? Is it behind the Great Firewall of China? madmikemagee.wordpress.com is inaccessible from this machine. Not as if there's anything very seditious in there, but a lot of bogs seem to not want to say hello from here in Old Shanghai. Maybe it's just this machine.

As I can't bung this into my bog, I must note that Shanghai airport and the immigration staff were top notch. The immigration officers have a little electronic gadget on their desks that asks you to rate them on whether they were bad, good, or simply excellent. If I was 40 years younger, I'm sure I would have asked mine for a date, instead, she was so charming.

Rupert Goodwins and myself wandered into the Old Town earlier in the day where he stumbled upon an exceedingly quaint establishment which sold cigarettes. Each pack of the many different varieties was lovingly labelled with its qualities and the prices - the cheap ones were about twopence a packet but Rupes plumped for the higher end ones at about 70 pence a packet. Memphis Blues seemed an interesting brand, no not band.

New Labour would not like this shop - it wants Blighty to ban the display of cigarette packets, but here people were browsing through the vast number on display, much as others might browse through books at Waterstones.

Rupes was also intrigued at lunch by a dish called Squirrel Nuts - this turned out to be a dish of a fish - its severed head gazed balefully at us as we quaffed an Olympic branded Tsingtao each, at 80 pence for a 600ml bottle. There are two Olympic 2008 shops in the Old Town, selling all manner of kit for the upcoming shindig in Beijing.

Now here are some pictures. No, we've no idea what that bright blue thing on the right is.

Rupert asked me who the kindly intelligent plain clothes well spoken man was who chatted to me at length about where I was from. I said that was him, but he's obviously got a more paranoid streak than me - hard to believe, I know.

Intel, later on in the week will brief us at length but having glimpsed the agenda, it seems to want us to know all about the Atom and about PIDs. We were hoping for more information about the man from Larrabee...