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...

I'm back. I'd better make the most of it. I don't honestly know what's going on, but this morning I found that YouTube widgets were not only visible, but there now seems to be partial access to material on the site. More than that, I thought I'd try blogspot. I was able to access the blog, although when I tried to go to blogger.com via some Chinese interface, the site got blocked. When I checked what Google services were available via iGoogle, I got a very limited list, blogger not being among them. But I then switched to Google UK, checked the service list, and got a great many more options than the first page I looked at. Not only that, but I was also able to access blogger and post this entry. I hope. However, I don't know whether my discoveries are a happy coincidence, or whether YouTube and blogspot are truly accessible again. Sad to say, I suspect that this may all be temporary and may be nothing more than a hole in the Great Firewall while Nanny installs ...

Where, Oh where can it be? As you can see, though not that it matters because I only post here occasionally, I’ve changed my template. But for some reason, I can’t see the blog. I’m hoping that a post will bring it out of hiding. However, I notice that some blogspot blogs aren’t appearing, which I’ll attribute to the volume of traffic resulting from the presidential elections in the US. Seems that Obama will probably be the next encumbent in the Big Chair. I don’t know about the Americans, but the rest of us won’t miss Ayatollah Dubya. I haven’t really paid much attention to the whole business because The Guardian has been bashing us over the head with the whole thing. It was foreign news and deserved a corresponding level of attention. But I get the impression that Obama is a bit humourless, a little robotic, but isn’t likely to stick his cigars in inappropriate places.

I thought it was unblocked, but… I'm just passing through. I can't actually view the blog. Odd. I thought that blogspot was currently meant to be unblocked. Perhaps I'm going to have to wait for blogspot to be blocked again before I can view it again. This is ridiculous. Of course, it's possible that while blogspot is officially unblocked, the filters are busy blocking anything deemed disagreeable. You know the sort of thing – thinking for yourself; disagreeing with the idiotic policies of your government; telling the truth. And there's my answer. When the block is off, it appears the proxy file messes things up. I renamed it, and blogspot reappeared. Still bloody ridiculous.

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...

It's blogspot. Chris discovered that blogspot might be back on the menu again. Let's see whether I can say Tibet. I can. That suggests that Chris ran into one of those holes in the GFW you occasionally find. If blogspot really was back on the menu, then I'd run into some error message if I tried to publish a post with words like Tibet, Taiwan, Tiananmen, democracy etc.

Oh thou contrary old bat. The news from Danwei this morning is that blogspot is out to lunch again now that the Party Congress is over. But that's not why I'm posting. I just want to say, "Tibet". And indeed I can without all the fuss and bother that I had a couple of days ago. I bet I can say stuff about Taiwan, too.

For the moment. The news is that blogspot has been unblocked again. However, I note that the RSS feed from petite anglaise has been dead this morning, thus joining the inert feeds for Japundit and Tokyo Times . I suppose it's nice to have blogspot back if you haven't been using the effective Firefox work round, but it'd also be nice to have LJ and various others back as well. This on-again-off-again thing seems and is so arbitrary. Just because blogspot has been blocked, it doesn't mean that posts critical of the Chinese government or references to Taiwan, Tibet and Tiananmen Square will've gone away or will've stopped coming. On this occasion, my guess is that the block has been removed during the Party Congress so that the delegates can blog without the nuisance of going through a proxy.

Make your mind up, you deranged old crank. My second port of call this morning was Danwei, where I'm greeted by the story Blogspot blocked again – ongoing saga . Fortunately, as I've just discovered, the proxy I've been going through is still working its magic. Of course, as I know from the previous occasion, it's possible to post here whether you use a proxy service to view blogspot or not. And so the mad old bat continues to be unable to make her mind up.

Spaces out, blogspot in. As you might've seen from Chris's comment to the previous post, blogspot is viewable. And there it is. Green Bamboo (that which you're reading); Iain Dale's Diary ; and all the rest. Is this compensation for the hammering that MSN Spaces is taking? I'm still hoping that Spaces will be back on Sunday or Monday, but given the quirky behaviour of Spaces, I think Chris has a point about making this my main blog. When Spaces is behaving (which was, until last month, most of the time), it's all right for my modest needs. The thing about blogspot is that so long as the proxy works, it doesn't matter either way. If Nanny blocks it again, I can carry on without the sort of disruption I face on Spaces.

Getting around that pernicious block. For anyone who's stuck behind the Great Firewall, Nanny and her antics regarding blogspot, wordpress, and Live Journal are a sodding great nuisance. Fortunately, if you're using Firefox, there's a fix available at Lost Laowai which allows you to view blogspot and wordpress blogs. And BTW, obviously, I'm back, but see the full story of my adventures (including the parts about which I forgot) over at Green Bamboo . Actually, one thing I failed to mention was the amount of Chinese that I saw in Auckland. There were a lot more signs in Chinese than I was expecting to see, although the one which amused me the most was for a Vietnamese restaurant called 漢山 hàn shān which means "Han (as in 'Han Chinese') Mountain". There was a Chinese takeaway near the motel where I was staying called The Great Tong (大唐 dà táng ), the second character referring to the Tang Dynasty.

I forgot to mention that... Green Bamboo (Spaces edition) is back. On Friday afternoon, I was messing around with Messenger and happened to click on the menu option for posting to my blog. There, to my surprise, was the editing screen. I thought it might be like blogspot – you can post it, but you can't view it afterwards, but that wasn't the case. I could post and view. I have no idea when access was restored or why it was lost in the first place. I didn't think Nanny was inclined to rescind blocks on individual blogs. "Why was Green Bamboo blocked in the first place?" My suspicion was that it was because I'd said that if China wanted other countries to be a little more trusting, then it should be quiet about Taiwan and Japan. "That was dangerous. Is the post still there?" As far as I'm aware. There was about two days between posting and Green Bamboo being blocked. "And when was it unblocked?" Exactly when, I don't know. "Any...

I can say it, but I can't see it. Blogspot has been blocked again from China, although as I learnt from my friend Chris, I can still post here. That means that I can probably be rude as I like about the government; say whatever I like about Taiwan, Tibet and Tiananmen; and apparently use phrases such as "freedom of speech" and "peaceful democratic transition" without concerning myself about this blog getting blocked as my original Spaces blog has been. I guess people beyond the Great Firewall can comment, and I assume that I can moderate the comments and do just about everything else here. I just can't view the resulting mess. Anyway, in case, somehow, you've got here from Green Bamboo, I've now set up another Spaces blog, Xin Phoenix, which is now my main blog. Yeah, I'm a narcissist. I like to post and then look at myself afterwards. 25th Mar. 2019. Removed long-dead URLs to blogs that no longer exist.

Perhaps I've been overdoing it. I'm taking a chance by starting a blog on blogspot. All right, if you've followed the link here from Green Bamboo [Defunct link deleted.], it's because once again I'm unable to post anything. I don't know why exactly, just as I don't know why I was suddenly able to post again this afternoon. I may learn the answer to at least one of these questions in due course. My current theory is that there's a limit on the number of entries you can post in a specific period on Spaces. I don't know whether there's also a limit on the number of RSS feeds you can have at any one time, but when I checked my stats, I'd had a whole bunch of 'em, and my hit count had reached 3214. Anyway, I suspect that it's the number of posts that's done for me. And why is starting a blog here taking a chance? Because Nanny in her infinite hysteria might block blogspot yet again [There was much on-off blocking of blogspot bef...