Occasional Tales

Oh, bugger! 4am again. I do not sleep well. It takes me ages to get to sleep and if I’m being woken by an alarm clock, I tend to wake up early in anticipation of the alarm going off. Sometimes that can be a little too early. This week things have got worse. I'm guessing I’ve waking up at about 4am every day this week, and I cannot for the life of me get to sleep again – not properly. I might drift off a little, but the damage has been done. It has become a pernicious habit over which I have no control. Normally, there’s one night, often a Thursday, it seems, when the pattern is broken, but not this week. I hoped I might get through the whole night without waking up too early. No such luck. It’s no good going to bed sooner, and I don’t want to go to bed later either because of the lead-in time before I actually fall asleep. I’m also not good at leaping out of bed, either. I need time to make the transition between being half-awake and actually awake. I need to feel t...

Robots and their automated responses. All the writing which I have seen out of this year’s PAL classes so far has been a veritable fest of clichés. Their answers to the first writing task in the monthly test were almost all identical as they wheeled out the same dull stuff about not having seen some nameless relative for a long time. The response to the second writing task was a little less uniform. Anyway, because of all the marking, I’ve only just looked at some of the practice writing I had them do before the test. That, too, is larded with clichés, almost all delivered in the same order, and yet there’s no conspiracy here. One student didn’t do all the writing while the rest copied. As anyone who’s taught Chinese students knows, they are completely lacking in imagination. As far as I’m aware, Chinese class doesn’t occasionally involve the teacher saying, “Write me a story.” When I’ve asked students why they’re not writing anything, a typical answer is that they don’t kno...

Unless you’re using Firefox. Sort of. At school I was able to append material to existing entries on my Live Journal blog, but I was unable to post anything new. At home, I still can’t access Live Journal at all via Firefox, even via mail messages advising me of unwelcome comments. That has been the means by which I’ve been visiting LJ from school. For want of any solution to the problem at home, I switched to Chrome and – make surprised face now – everything worked. I could log in to LJ, see my blog, and post a new entry. I double checked with IE9 and met with the same success. What is it about my version of Firefox at home that’s preventing me from getting near Live Journal? I thought it might be noscript, but disabling that made no difference. I wondered whether some cookie was affecting access, but deleting ones with .ru in them didn’t help. But… but… Doh! I should’ve deleted the LJ cookies. Done. And? There’s my blog… No, I can’t log in. Nor can I get to th...

The new version. After several days of reasonable good service, the forces of ignorance seem to have been trying their hardest to strangle my Internet assistant. However, this afternoon, I managed to get the latest version, and things seem to be fairly steady at the moment. Once again, I’m able to see the real Internet as I ought to be able to see it. If the Chinese want to stick their heads in the sand and their government want them to stick their heads in the sand, they’re welcome to wallow in their ignorance. In fact, there’s something disturbingly wrong with countries whose governments are so obsessed with keeping their citizens so ignorant. In China it’s because the government is obsessed with keeping power at all costs; though because the population is so zombie-like already, they could unblock most of the Internet, and it wouldn’t, I believe, make any real difference. The number of people who hate blocks on Facebook, YouTube and other non-porn sites is, I suspect, tiny. I...

And only another couple of kilometres to go. It’s been a slow business escaping from the choking tendrils of unwarranted censorship today. After working so well, my little helper has been choking badly today, and if I can post this entry, I’ll be very lucky. The connection to reality keeps coming and going, which makes me wonder whether the hysterical reactionaries are fighting back in their ongoing campaign to keep the benighted populace of the inGlorious Motherland in witless ignorance. I finished marking the PAL tests at the weekend and have started on AS, which is always painful. The PAL classes did quite well for the level at which they were being assessed, but that tells me that they’re good at this level and would, on average, get a C, which is the maximum mark they can attain in the Core exam. As I noted on my WordPress blog, their writing was boringly identical, and the range of marks was typically 7 to 9 with a few 10s. But it’s also worth noting that if their writing...

A lunchtime update. I’m using lunch as an excuse to add some further information about the current state of Live Journal, but I should really be ploughing through lunch and getting on with marking some tests while at the same time enjoying a horrible little headache. There’s a story about Live Journal on Global Voices which offers some hints about the current cranky state of the service. I don’t know whether everyone is banging their head against a brick wall trying to access their blogs or anyone else’s. The Information Policy site has this post from early August about the mis­treatment of Live Journal. It looks like the Russian authorities (though which authorities is another matter) are probably to blame for the current state of affairs and that Live Journal is about to become Dead Journal. 17.10.11. The latest update is that I was able to update an LJ post and access most of the site, but I was unable to post anything new. 18.10.11. Still unable to post new entries o...

Let’s say stupid things. I’ve just been reading Meeting signals pressure on microblogs from the China Media Project. It’s about the new State Internet Information Office and its antics. This paragraph is classic Doublespeak At yesterday’s meeting, Wang Chen emphasized that “[we] must thoroughly apply a series of guiding spirits of the central Party in regards to internet construction, development and management, keeping to the guiding principle of ‘positive use, scientific development, management by rule of law and ensuring safety’ …” Wang said the government must “thoroughly give play to the positive role of microblogs in serving society, taking concrete steps to develop and manage [them], working together to preserve a healthy and orderly online communication order, serving the overall work of the government and the Party, and serving the masses.” Which is basically saying, “We must utterly control everything to the sub-atomic level as usual”. Don’t even get ...

Grow up, Nanny. Last night Internet access kept cutting out and some time just before 11pm, Google got blocked and I lost access again. This morning, things weren’t much better. At first access was all right. I could see Google again, but when I went to The Guardian, I couldn’t get past the main page, and I then lost Internet access again. The message claimed that my username and password weren’t being recognised. Just before I came to school, I did manage to get online again, but Google was blocked once more. It looks like we’re in for a few days of disruption because the hypocritical Chinese government is having another infantile tantrum at Google.

Dose of the flu? I did a little experiment last night, posting to WordPress using IE9, Firefox and Chrome. Apart from the WP toolbar being quirky with Firefox and Chrome, there were no further problems. Live Journal has remained quirky today. From home I still can’t access LJ or if I can, it’s temporary. I can see some parts of the site, but not others, and then the former join the latter. From school I was able to edit an entry, but when I tried to post a new entry, I hit a brick wall. The odd thing is, it doesn’t matter whether I’m using Freegate or not: I can’t post new entries on my LJ blog. When I did manage to see the LJ status page, it claimed all was well. Mind you, that may be like Windows saying, “This device is working properly” when you rather suspect it’s probably doing no such thing. I’m hoping the current situation is temporary although I don’t know where the problem lies. Of the various blog hosts, what’s still accessible from this darkest of dark holes o...

Server maintenance. This morning things have gone from bad to server maintenance. I was able to see my WordPress blog, but when I tried to go to the dashboard, there was a lot of wheel spin before a message popped up saying that some work was being done on the server. Over on Live Journal, I cannot still see the blog at all and get an unhelpful error message. In fact, the entire site is now inaccessible; unlike last night, I can’t even access the page for deleting unwelcome comments. So as usual, I’m left scratching my head wondering whether it’s coincidence that the only two accessible blog hosts have been buggered (one blocked, the other apparently malfunctioning). I was able to post an entry on WordPress a little later this morning, but after some initial success from school with Live Journal, the service is inaccessible. I can see my LJ blog, I can’t do any­thing else. Later. Now trying Chrome. Access to LJ possible but painful without my little helper. Access to Wor...

Another victim falls to self-delusional paranoia. I was at school this afternoon when Linda told me that she’d been unable to access my WordPress blog ( Green Bamboo ) all day. I checked and yes, sure enough, without that little program to help me get past the big, bad wolf, WP had been blocked. I’m surprised that the service has been accessible for so long because in the past it’s been one of the victims. If blogspot has been buggered, then WP has probably also been buggered. What’s the deal this time? Well, it might be mainly because of the spat about a Mr D. Lama of Tibet trying to visit South Africa for his friend’s birthday only to be prevented from going for the most doubtful reasons. That’s top of my list, but I have also seen stories about the imperial government getting even more paranoid about social media. Although that might specifically refer to Weibo and other Twitter rip-offs, I wouldn’t be surprised if Nanny was skimming through the list of blog hosts and found ...

English is a multifarious subject. I’ve suddenly realised something. I was having a look at PAL 2’s Learner Diaries today. Last week before the holiday, we started a unit with a food theme while, unknown to me, the little darlings were also doing a unit about chocolate in their Chinese English class. What have I suddenly realised? They mistook the theme of the unit for the subject of study. The pupils in my classes for the past ten years have probably thought that English class was actually a kind of pot pourri of subjects. I may be trying to teach them English, which is likely to be thematised, but I suspect that they don’t understand the object of the exercise. The food vocabulary at the start of Unit 3 is just vocabulary per se , but I wouldn’t be surprised if students expected to be tested on it specifically whereas the actual focus of Unit 3 is the writing of an informal letter about a trip to a restaurant. ( 09.10.11 Lo and behold! in one of the Learner Diaries I saw thi...

Fire! I was in one of those tacky little market shops in Chengdu yesterday where I saw a card which said “Thinking for you”. Must be the one the imperial government sends out at Christmas. Yeah, I know. Too easy to take a swipe at this one. I had no idea Steve Jobs had died. Millions in the Empire will be mourning his passing as the purveyor of modern-day shiny beads, which distracted so many of the nation’s youths. The government is probably more upset than anyone else. Why think about how rotten the system is when you can have a nice, shiny iPad? The other news item which I missed because I was away was the quashing of the convictions of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito for the murder of Meredith Kerchner. I’ve been sceptical about the pair’s claims of innocence, but I’m also not missing the point that there does seem to have been sufficient uncertainty to undermine the certainty of the original conviction. I don’t like the sound of Knox’s reception back in the ...

Party time! Yes, it’s that day again when the Empire celebrates the occasion when the new emperor stepped up to the microphone in Tiananmen Square in 1949, took a deep breath and said, “Would the owner of the Audi A6 who’s left his car outside Zhongshan Park please move it as it’s blocking the entrance.” There was a pause. This was not the announcement the crowd was expecting. “Oh, shit! That’s my car. Sorry about this.” (The headline in The Daily Propagandist the next day was ‘Grateful nation gives emperor Audi A6’.) And when he got back to the mic, he spent three and half dull hours reminding everyone who wasn’t a.) the new emperor of the Chinese Empire or b.) rich and important that they should obey the law. “Coming up next, the Hundred Flowers Campaign in which I’ll trick everyone into revealing what they really think about the new regime and how it’s the same as the old one, and then I’ll destroy their lives. And if you think that’s fun, wait till you see what I have ...