It's March again, and that means that M-on-the-Bund is hosting the annual <a href="http://www.m-restaurantgroup.com/mbund/literary-festival.html" title="Shanghai International Literary Festival 2011: Three weeks. 85 writers. 17 countries.">Shanghai International Literary Festival</a>. In the past, SILF has been a chance to see some of my favorite authors up close—Qiu Xiaolong, Chen Danyan, James Fallows—and make connections with friends in the audience so I always look forward to it.

This year the star guest is Peter Hessler. His talk sold out before I could buy tickets. Luckily there are plenty of other worthwhile sessions; I've posted <a href="http://wiki.wubi.org/SILF2011" title="Wubi Wiki: Micah's picks for SILF 2011">my personal picks</a> on the wiki, and bought tickets for Tess Johnston's session, Qiu Xiaolong's walk, and will take Jodi to hear Leslie Chang (hoping for a Hessler cameo, hah!). Also, since I use Google Calendar for scheduling I created an <a href="https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=pir926cbsmokijn2vsc0f3cvb8@group.calendar.google.com" title="Shanghai International Literary Festival 2011 (unofficial)">unofficial calendar for SILF 2011</a>.

Speaking of the calendar, it was a real challenge to create. I've gotten used to mass-loading events through maintaining a calendar for the SMIC middle/high-school and the Sports calendar for Shanghaiist, but this one presented some unique problems. My usual MO is to copy an HTML table into Excel, move data around in spreadsheet cells, copy into a text file for cleaning up and search-replace work, then copy back into Excel for adding to Google Calendar through the Quick Add box. In this case though, M-on-the-Bund only linked to a locked PDF of the first schedule page and a JPG image(!) of the second page. Luckily Google had cached an unlocked version of the PDF somewhere else on M's site, which pasted well enough into Excel, and the second page only had a few events which I copied over by hand.