Bummer #1
Recently the CD-RW drive on my computer quit reading CDs of any kind. That was annoying, because it’s my only CD-reading drive and I rely on it to play music CDs. Since my computer is still under its one-year warranty, I took the whole thing in, thinking I might also add a regular CD-ROM drive and possibly a hard drive. (I’m not much of a hardware guy.)
I went on a Sunday. I was really hoping they could …
Unicode is great, but so far underused. It’s basically a newer, larger character set designed to make multilingual computing easier, indirectly bringing peace and harmony to all. Maybe one day we’ll be free of the mojibake and luanma (that’s Japanese and Chinese for “garbage characters”) that thwart our otherwise well-intended communications. Unicode is a step in the right direction.
What does implementing Unicode mean? It means you’ll no longer load up a page to find “garbage characters” and have to …
OK, this is off-topic, but I consider it an important public service announcement.
I was recently recommended Messenger Plus! (MSGPlus), a program which modifies and adds new features to MSN Messenger. The software itself is actually pretty cool. The only problem is, it also adds spyware and all kinds of annoying add-ons. The program AdAware helped me get rid of most of these, but I’m still working on the most tenacious one, the Lop.com trojan, even after uninstalling Messenger Plus!…
I think the internet has stolen a piece of my soul. How else can I explain it?
I spend way too much time on the internet, surfing, reading, always feeling there’s something else eluding my discovery, taunting my nescience… but what?
Whatever it is I want back, it’s not coming. There is no White Rabbit. I’ve tried many different tactics.
Ignoring it doesn’t work. Whatever it is I’m ignoring is far better at ignoring me.
Bribes don’t work. I try …
Alien Hominid
OK, I know this has absolutely nothing to do with China, but I can’t resist. I love this game, and I must share it with the world. It’s called Alien Hominid. You’re this alien that crash lands near the FBI headquarters. You know the American government — they immediately get all violent and come out guns blazing. So it’s a fight for survival, you against the FBI dudes.
The animation style is really great, so even though …
A while back I wrote about how China blocked Google and it was driving me crazy. Later, it was unblocked, but it was widely reported that China has some very sophisticated technology in place that causes you to lose connection if you run certain seaches. This morning I was doing a search for a picture of a famous Chinese leader. At first it was fine, but soon the links to the pics stopped working, and then Google itself became inaccessible, …
So the week long “National Day Holiday” is now over. I went on a school trip with some fellow teachers from ZUCC to the Zhoushan International Sand Sculpture Festival and the famous Putuo Shan Island. Fellow China blogger and friend Erin Shutty was supposed to come over from Shaoxing with her Scottish friend Vivienne, but instead she tried to devastate us by getting ridiculously sick and cancelling. But Viv still came. Of course, we missed Erin, but we had …
In case you haven’t heard, China has blocked access to Google. Google, the search engine for the net. Not that I like it or agree with it, but it’s one thing for a government to block specific sites it considers dangerous. It’s another thing to block a frickin’ search engine!!! OK, I’ll try not to rant.
So this has taught me how much I use Google. Lately I’ve been using google.yahoo.com instead. It’s not quite as good, but it works. …
John has lived in China for
11.8
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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