Occasional Tales

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...

And I'm pissed off. After a somewhat arduous trip this weekend, I'm in New Zealand where I'm able to get onto blogspot for the first time since that day in August last year when the site was temporarily unblocked. My suspicion is that blogger and YouTube are blocked because of their affiliation with Google rather than their alleged threat to the imperial government's raging desire to ensure the ignorance and stupidity of the Empire's citizens. Have at you, Critical Thinking! Away with you, Independent Thought! Rather annoyingly, after Spaces was transferred to WordPress, that site was partially crippled when the Party boys were having some conference, and then completely blocked long after that at about the time Ai Weiwei was serving crabs. Whether there was some link between that and the disappearance of WordPress, I don't know, but I wasn't surprised. So, now that I'm away from the Dismal Empire, I'm going to try and set up a VPN so that I can bl...

The yin and yang of blocking. I've just been over to Danwei where the news is that at least from Chengdu and Beijing blogspot is unblocked, but blogger is allegedly inaccessible. Previously, you've been able to post to blogspot even if you can't read it afterwards unless you use a proxy. The Internet Paranoia Squad are going to need to sort that because hordes of foreigners are going to want to post on their blogspot blogs while they're here. (Not to mention Live Journal and any other blogging services which are still off the menu.) Although things relaxed a bit immediately after the earthquake, local paranoia is apparently trying to prevent people from discussing the destruction of schools during the earthquake (although I've yet to see whether schools really were disproportionately affected or whether this belief has been coloured by parental hysteria). I was expecting something like this to happen eventually. The pattern is the usual one. The Party lets the peopl...