Occasional Tales

Unless they're from Google. This country is pathetic. Really pathetic. I thought it was about time I changed the theme on my iGoogle page and started looking through what was available. At first I could see all the themes, and then I could only see the ones from Google. Everything else was getting blocked. I can't believe that every non-Google site from which the themes were coming was somehow offensive to Nanny. I tried one of the offending themes in case they were available in spite of their innate subversiveness, but it completely screwed up my home page and I had to choose one of Google's own themes. I'm largely not bothered about Internet censorship. As I said somewhere long ago, most of the things that really get Nanny having a tantrum aren't things I'm remotely interested in and thus blocks on such sites don't matter. I'm bothered when the block affects some site which is innocuous, and irrelevant to Nanny's petty paranoia. What reason can the

Where's the lovin' gone? I was just getting back home at midday when I had a phone call from Central Command. It turns out that there isn't going to be any Senior 1 intake next term after all, and only three of us will be required – me, Glen and Row. Brian's been offered a place at another school somewhere. It means that the programme here will be coming to an end about a year from now. Moreover, my pay would remain unchanged because there will only be three of us here. Considering how long I've been with the programme, I'm not happy about this. I later heard from sources close to the Dowager Empress Cixi that the school would like to continue the programme because they make money from it. The decision to end it came from Central Command. I don't know why such a decision should've been made because this is one of the better schools in the programme. Possible reasons are politics and money. I also wonder what effect the new foreign partner might've ha

Like Dracula, he keeps coming back to get swatted. I seem to have acquired a little pest over on Green Bamboo (the active one) recently. Someone – and this can't be automated – keeps leaving a comment with a bunch of links to sites which claim to be selling virtual merchandise for various online games. A Google search seems to reveal nothing good about these people. The stupid thing is that unless you happen to be searching for the content of the post (the comment has appeared with several different ones, but only one at a time), you're never going to find the comment. The culprit appears to be Chinese since the comment always starts "Welcome to visit…" which is a piece of typical Chinglish. A search also leads to quite a few Chinese sites, several of which Google marks as harmful. I seldom see such warnings and the whole thing stinks. Apart from that, I'm all right, although I've been suffering from a tension headache for the past couple of days. Green Bambo