Home From China
It was a long and amazing trip, but I am glad to be back home in the US. I managed to avoid getting sick or having food poisoning during the bulk of the trip, but had to deal with the latter during my flight home yesterday and have yet to fully get over it. Additionally, I can’t tell if I am dealing with jet lag yet (it’s 3am in Beijing) or simply the side effects of traveling with stomach/digestive discomfort, so I probably will not begin posting regularly for a day or two.
In the meantime, I’ve posted two photos to tide you over. The first is a shot I took in the streets of Shanghai. I was walking around a pretty depressed market district with a friend (Chris Riffel) and saw the scene across the street. Behind the wall laundry hangs to dry on a scaffolding surrounding construction for a new building. In the second image, a friend (Mike McSweeney) took a photograph of me standing on the Great Wall. I’m holding a small photo book of my son that my wife made for me as a Father’s Day gift.
[Update]: I forgot to mention that my assumption about being unable to post from China was correct. My blog as well as several sites I normally visit on a daily basis were completely blocked. The censorship was quite frustrating from an ‘access to information’ standpoint, but also noticeably affected internet performance.
TAGS: This entry was posted on Monday, July 3rd, 2006 at 11:09 am and is filed under CalPoly MBA, China, On Being A Father.... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
July 4th, 2006 at 4:37 am
Amazing that your blog was blocked, considering there is nothing in it that I would consider inflammatory to the Politburo in Beijing. It shows that the bans can be rather sweeping.
July 4th, 2006 at 7:55 am
I found it interesting as well, though I can understand if the blocking was based simply on the appearance of choice keywords. What was confusing, however, was that it appeared that google.cn (not “.com”) successfully indexed this site, yet I was unable to click through, or view Google’s cached version. Checking google.cn this morning from California indeed shows that this site is indexed, and I was easily able to view the cached version of the site.
At times, it seemed that some of the filtration may have been occurring at the hotels we were staying at. For example, in Shenzhen, I was able to use iChat (Apple) to do a video conference with my wife and son, though the audio didn’t work. In Shanghai, we were unable to use iChat for anything but text messaging, but were able to do a choppy video feed via Yahoo! Messenger. At all of our other destinations, we were only able to communicate through text messaging.
I would chalk our difficulties up to connection speed but we supposedly had high-speed access at all of our hotels (and the performance of various sites seemed consistent at each). The more reasonable (though perhaps technically naïve) explanation is that our hotels, or their ISPs, were filtering content and certain data feeds. Regardless, not only was I unable to access this site (front and back-end) but all of the sites hosted on this server were blocked. I was also unable to access technorati.com or nytimes.com.
On the upside, jackyan.com was accessible in every city!