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Showing posts from June, 2008

They p0wnd my internets!

I saw the craziest thing the other day. I was checking email from home, when all of a sudden I got stuck on the "Loading..." message, and then "Can not connect to gmail.com", etc. I thought that was kind of strange, so I tried a nytimes article as well as google.com, and both hung a really long time before landing on the same page. It was a photograph of the earthquake in Sichuan, with a whole bunch of Chinese text! Think about this for a second. The Great Firewall hijacked everyone's internet connection in China at the DNS level and redirected all websites to an earthquake commemoration page or something (I couldn't understand it). I wanted to capture a screenshot, but forgot how to do it on Mac, and couldn't search for it since the whole internet was redirected. Crazy.

Don't drink the water

Sometimes (like every day) I feel naive, having grown up in an overly sterile environment compared to the, shall we say, "laissez-faire hygiene" of China. Case in point: Over the weekend, cutting some vegetables, a friend opened a nice gash on her finger. She asked for a bandaid, and I said, "Have you washed the cut? You need to wash the cut first." She said no, just a bandaid. I told her it could get infected if she didn't wash it. She said if you wash it with this water, you could get sick and die. Oh. Point taken. On the other hand, people living in Shanghai believe the water has enough chemicals that it's okay to drink. Nice to know that you won't get bacterial dysentery, but your kids might have 14 fingers and a tail.