Shanghai, 3rd July 2008 – 9.30pm

I bought a memory card Kingston – SD of 2GB for my digital camera, at the big market  - Fenshine TaobaoCity, no. 580, NanjingXiRoad, between ChengduRoad  and TV Station.

It cost me 44¥ (yuans) – 4.4€.

As in every trade in China, one must bargain, prices are variable and the competition is high. The sellers have their businesses side by side, and one hardly understands why, for identical products, prices can be so different.

After walking several floors, with endless corridors, I finally found the products I was looking for, at a very reasonable price. The seller was kind enough in trying to understand what I was looking for. I wanted some earphones for my iphone, original (or at least of good quality), a mini pen drive sony and a memory card.

Only some days later, when I was transferring the memory card images to the computer, did I realize that something was wrong.

Some of the photographs I took showed parallel colored stripes, some had juxtapositions and others had areas covered with pixels.

I was rather surprised with such extraordinary outcome.

The following day, I went to the salesman in order to buy a new memory card. I took my camera and showed him the images that were in the card he sold me. He was really surprised; he gave me a new card and told me that it was a replacement for the card that was not good. I, immediately, told him: no!  I wanted to keep it as a souvenir.

He made a big discount on the new card.

After paying, I tried the new card taking some local photos but, this time, nothing abnormal happened!  This new memory card didn’t come with a Bug[1]  souvenir.

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[1] A software bug is the common term used to describe an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program that prevents it from behaving as intended (e.g., producing an incorrect or unexpected result). Most bugs arise from mistakes and errors made by people in either a program's source code or its design, and a few are caused by compilers producing incorrect code. A program that contains a large number of bugs, and/or bugs that seriously interfere with its functionality, is said to be buggy.
Wikipedia, Bug. [On line] 7 Julho 2008. URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_bug.