Occasional Tales

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.

What an anticlimax. As the Heathrow Express emerged into the dusk as it departed from the airport, I felt happy to be home for the first time in three years. And then on the Monday, things turned bad. I had ordered a new Switch card and had included the information when I'd be collecting it because I knew there was going to be a delay between the request and my arrival. When I got to the bank, I found that the card had been destroyed, although I learnt today that it perhaps should've been left alone because it seems that the date I'd be collecting it was passed on. I'm not sure of the facts, though. I ordered a new card, but want of it left me in a difficult position because I was limited to withdrawing £50 a day. My plans to buy things like a new laptop, some games and various other items went up in smoke. I was told that a replacement card would take three to five days to arrive, but when I went into the bank yesterday, the card had yet to arrive. It turned up today a...

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...

Loadsa 老外. My sources inform me that the programme's foreign backers have pulled out because they weren't getting kids from the programme, replete with the contents of mummy and daddy's capacious wallet, going to their fourth-rate institution. There's a surprise. Actually, the foreign backers were only in the programme because the institute in question was in financial difficulty a few years ago. They also never promoted themselves in the schools and since we no longer had anything to do with them, we weren't about to be doing that ourselves. In place of them, the school is getting some Cambridge-based programme (A-levels?) which is possibly like the one that they were getting at my school in Beijing just before I left. I assume that the teachers on this programme have to be accredited so that I couldn't switch from our programme to that one. Besides, if the salary I'm hearing is right, they're only being paid ¥20K (c. £1450) for the (academic) year whi...

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...