JISHOU, HUNAN — I am happy to report that I can once again post to my Picasaweb photo site, as long as I use the Ultrasurf proxy client I downloaded a couple of months ago.

It’s slow, but at least I can use the 80 GB of Picasaweb storage space that I paid for. It also means my photos will automatically get posted to Facebook through the Picasa Facebook app.

So, as I wait for my photos to trickle slowly into my Picasaweb space, I can write some posts. Here’s the first one.

August 15th, 2010 | Tags: censorship, China, Great Firewall of China, Internet, picasa, proxy, Ultrasurf | Category: China, Civil liberties, General stuff | Leave a comment

JISHOU, HUNAN — Whilst traveling last week, I tried sending posts from my phone to the blog, with less than wonderful results.

Don’t get me wrong, the wp-mail.php script is a great feature of WordPress. You set up a secret email account, point WP to check the account, and it will take plaintext messages and post them on your blog. It didn’t work so smoothly for me, though.

First, my account with China Mobile doesn’t seem to have email services, but I can send multimedia messages. When I tried that with WordPress, it just took the MIME portion of the message and printed it as ASCII gobbledegook. So, I took the same message and sent it first to Gmail, which did display the text. But forwarding that message without the MIME attachment to WP just resulted in a blank post. In the end, I had to use a browser to post the blogs.

Clearly, I need to enable email services on my mobile account. It will make blogging while traveling a little more spontaneous.

August 13th, 2010 | Tags: blogging, wordpress, WP-mail | Category: General stuff | Leave a comment

This morning I visited my friend’s English class at Jishou National Experimental Primary School. While she spoke to some prospective parents, I wandered down the passageway and found this impressive looking spider waiting for his/her next meal. The leg span was easily 5 to 6 inches. Biggest spider I’ve ever seen in real life.

August 1st, 2010 | Tags: China, spider, wildlife | Category: China, General stuff | Leave a comment

UPDATE 28/7/2010 11:25 am: And now everything is back to “normal.” But Firefox went south on me, Winamp got trapped in a loop somehow, and even taskmgr couldn’t kill it. After I shut down the computer, and restarted, the “blocked” sites listed below were accessible again. So I laid blame on the Great Firewall, but maybe it was my laptop or Vista Home edition.

JISHOU, HUNAN — Yesterday, I could access a whole slew of my favorite websites. Today, I can’t. I blame the Great Firewall of China.

In fact, my own website (this one) is now blocked. I am using the Ultrasurf proxy to climb the Great Firewall just to post this.

And to aggravate me even more, Wikipedia seems also to be blocked, just as I was beginning the last phase of a long term project to edit Wiki entries about locations in Hunan, using my students’ research papers as the sources. I managed to edit the Jishou entry two days ago. Now, I’ll have to use the proxy to continue.

Here’s a partial list of what I could access yesterday, but cannot today.

• www.nytimes.com
• my.yahoo.com
• www.liitlegreenfootballs.com
• wheatdogg.computernewbie.info — MINE! and thereby cpanel access
• en.wikipedia.org
• www.sadlyno.com
• questionablecontent.net — a webcomic I kinda enjoy
• www.rightwingwatch.org

And here’s what seems so far to be unaffected.

• www.cnn.com
• scienceblogs.com
• www.washingtonpost.com
• www.bbc.co.uk – but some media blocked
• www.gmail.com
• dailykos.com

July 27th, 2010 | Tags: censorship, China, Great Firewall, Internet, proxy | Category: China, Civil liberties, General stuff, Media | Leave a comment

JISHOU, HUNAN — There should be a special circle in Hell for people that purport to stop spam while creating it themselves. Witness, Boxbe.

Boxbe supposedly is a service that filters and prioritizes your email, which sounds really good to someone who gets a lot of email. So, some people have signed up for the service. A pox on them, too!

Last night, I got two very puzzling emails from the gmail addy of a fellow Picasa Web user, someone I don’t know at all and have never communicated with.

The first subject line said, “XXXXXX sent you a message from Picasa Web Albums.” The message included a thumbnail of this photo I took last May,

and this text:

Hi John

 
I would like to make the following request regarding this photo.

 
Please don't share this with anyone

 
Please contact me if you would like any additional information. Thank you for your consideration.

 
XXXXXX

 
- This email was sent by Picasa Web Albums on behalf of XXXXXX

 
Note: You may change your notification settings regarding these emails by clicking on the Settings link on Picasa Web Albums

Of course, I went to XXXXXX’s Picasa Web album, to see who the hell he is. Nope, don’t know him at all. And, more importantly, unless he’s disguised as an elephant statue with a broken trunk, he is not in the photo I took. Besides that, he apparently lives in Detroit. The photo was taken near Jishou, Hunan, at August Moon Lake.

July 19th, 2010 | Tags: Boxbe, email, Picasa Web, spam | Category: Commentary, General stuff | Comments (3)

JISHOU, HUNAN — You know the old saw, “If you don’t like the weather, just wait an hour?” Well, it’s true here, too.

At 3 pm, there was a light cloud cover and 86 degrees F. At dinner, one of my friends got a call from her boyfriend in Changsha, who told her the temperature had plummeted to the 60′s, it was raining, and a northerly wind was blowing hard. (The gusty wind also locked him out of his home: the wind slammed the door against the wall, pushing in the lock button, then slammed it shut … while he was outside and his keys inside.)

Sure enough, by the time we finished dinner at Will Long Cake (they do serve more than cake there; it’s like a Dairy Queen Brazier, but not as greasy), it was cold, gusty and starting to rain. Right now (10:30) it is pouring outside, and I just turned on the heater.

Of course, I shouldn’t complain. The Philippines just got clobbered again by another typhoon, the third in the last five weeks.

October 31st, 2009 | Tags: changeable, China, jishou, weather | Category: China, General stuff | Leave a comment