On the dial up

Tovina was given a toy kitchen by one of our neighbors. Included on this deluxe set is some sort of obsolete rotary device... which T recognizes as a phone. The kicker is, while she will rotate the dial, she also tries to push 'buttons' on the mouthpiece of the phone - clearly a holdout from her days of cell phone usage.

What Type is this blog?

Just took a quiz called Typealyzer. It tells you about the personality of a blog.
"The writing style reflects the persona used by the blogger."

My persona:

ESFP - The Performers

The entertaining and friendly type. They are especially attuned to pleasure and beauty and like to fill their surroundings with soft fabrics, bright colors and sweet smells. They live in the present moment and don´t like to plan ahead - they are always in risk of exhausting themselves.

The enjoy work that makes them able to help other people in a concrete and visible way. They tend to avoid conflicts and rarely initiate confrontation - qualities that can make it hard for them in management positions.


(It picked a female image all by itself)

Enjoying Hanukkah

One of the things that Tovina received for Hanukkah was this personal fan that spells out different messages as it spins. This one spells out a few different messages including 'Happy Hanukkah' as seen here.

Tovina's favorite part of this toy was sticking her finger into the fan blades to make them stop spinning. Then removing her finger and watching them start up again. Not to worry though, the fans blades are very soft plastic and the motor is weak so no fears here. I tested it as soon as we realized what she was going to be doing... repeatedly.

Today (actuallyThursday and Friday)

If you live in the US, or really most of North America, you may have heard of this TV station called NBC and further, you may know that it has a program called the Today show. As it turns out, this particular show will be broadcasting live from the Olympic village Thursday night our time - or Thursday morning for you North Americans.
It further happens that we will likely be in its very select and small audience and if all goes well, we will have a very adorable baby with us and may be able to get some screen time. It that works, then we should also be part of the crowd for the Friday morning broadcast of the Today show (EST).

Just in case you were interested in seeing us on TV. (Anyone got some recording space to spare?)

Zaida and Tovina working together

One of the fun things about grandparents is that they are able to give Tovina opportunities she would not otherwise get.
For example: Here is Zaida showing Tovina how to edit an article.

Or is that Tovina showing Zaida?

Clearly it is a big hit either way!

It turns out that Tovina enjoyed herself so much, that now, when she notices Zaida working, she motors herself over to him so that she can help him.

We thought long and hard about how she could be most effective and then realized that Tovina could work much faster if she was networked from her own laptop. Here she explaining to Zaida how to implement her concept.

'You got all of that?'

Reading blogs in China

You have heard me complain before about how our blog is often blocked from China. Well I now have a work around!
Google Reader

(For those of you who know about Google reader and other RSS type things- a warning: this post is about to get very boring)

While I can't go to blogspot and see my blog, I can enter my blog address into Google Reader and see a copy of my blog there.
Very convenient.
In addition, I can enter the names of all the of my friend's blogs and picture websites whether on blogger, LiveJournal, Fliker, or whatever and Google Reader tells me when they have been updated and then lets me see the updates! I can hardly tell you how exciting this is what with the randomness of the Great Firewall of China where webpages mysteriously disappear from day to day, servers may be "temporarily unavailable", and generally keeping up with friends is painful.

Just wanted to share this awesome free program. And if you like following our blog and our friends listed at the side of our page, let me know and I would be happy to send you the Google Reader file that will add all of those names to your very own special version.

cool link... almost

i had a really cool post all ready to go about Wikimapia and how amazingly!!! useful it is here in Beijing where a searchable, up-to-date, legible map is so hard to come by. And postings are in Chinese and English. But since writing the post Wikimapia has been blocked so all the nice things I was trying to say are now worth.. well, at the moment they are not worth posting.

urgh

sometimes the censorship here is almost unnoticeable, and some days are like this

One of those parents

I was going to edit some video for the blog today but it turns out that my entire C drive, all 100 GB, is full. I do still have some room on our backup drive of 289GB which is only 3/4 full, so not all is lost.

I suppose this is my computer's way of telling me that perhaps I may be a little camera happy when it comes to the little one.

ps. have you ever noticed how time consuming it is to edit video? or delete unnecessary photos? sheesh

Who changed the locks?

Actually, our apartment locks got changed before Tovina and I left for Shanghai and I know full well who changed them. Apparently our apartment building decided that the old fashion metal keys were just not cool enough for their image so they switched the entire building over to key cards. You know, the kind that you get in hotels where you slide the card in and out of the slot on the door and the light turns green and you get to go inside. And as you might also know from your hotel experiences, these cards have a tendency to become demagnetized and stop working randomly. When they gave us the new keys, the manager warned us to not put them near our cell phones - which is easy considering all the room I have in my pocket or purse (this should be read with heavy sarcasm.)

Tonight we experienced our first lock out after just 1 month with these new keys. It is easy enough to fix by going back to the lobby and waiting for them to get a new key and load all the appropriate information. But now I am imaging coming home with a load of groceries and a cranky baby and finding that the key has stopped working. It is not a happy mental image.

On one hand, I suppose that 1 failure in about 30 days is not so terrible, but I can fondly recall the number of times that old metal key randomly and unexpectedly stopped working. Let me tell you, it was a lot less than 1 in 30.

So this TV thing...

We are still working on the monthly collage, so as a stopgap we present you with this. I call it, 'Tovina discovers the remote control'.

Notice the one raised eyebrow in the first pic.

New tricks

Early on we brought home a swing for Tovina. At times she has been amused by it although she has never been the huge fan like some kids we know. Well the other day she seemed to have developed a new opinion.


I guess we should just be thankful that the swing motor isn't stronger.

ps. i had heard that some people were having trouble viewing the videos I was embedding so I'm going back to using youtube. Please let me know if this works better or worse for you.

Yahoo is back!

Whatever unmentionable transgression that Yahoo may have made, it has apparently been forgiven and is once again accessible here in China.

Just to give you a sense of the confusedness of such occurrences:
While most of Yahoo became blocked on Wednesday, Flickr was actually blocked 2 weeks ago and Wikipedia, which I haven't been able to look at since I arrived in Beijing, is accessible. Hmmm... still can't view blogger - we can post, but not view.

Flickr was blocked because of some pictures of Tiananmen square that someone uploaded 2 weeks ago. It is possible that Flickr's disgrace is what affected the rest of Yahoo, but it is hard to tell. However, Flickr is also accessible once again... unless you actually want to see pictures, in which case you are out of luck. Right now I can go to their web page and do searches, but all that comes up are boxes with names in them and the actual images won't load.

Interesting solution

Yahoo blocked - Arghhhh!

China has apparently decided that everything Yahoo is incredibly dangerous so www.yahoo.com as well as yahoo mail is blocked. Flickr, which yahoo owns, is also totally off limits. Well, the sign-in page is still available, but all the content past that page has vanished.

I've kind of gotten use to general useful search engines being blocked, but my mail? Come on! That is just not nice. And to add insult to injury, the anonymous proxies can't even be used to check mail because you have to sign in as an individual which the proxies don't allow. So, if you want to get a hold of me, it would be best to email Michael who uses gmail or send my emails to my same username but to gmail.

Hopefully Yahoo will get back on China's good side again soon and then all will be right in my world, or at least my email world. Until then, we are sorry for this interruption in our services.

Oh whatever shall we do?

Its been over a week now, and while some internet connectivity is back (we have email! unreliable email but it is still very very exciting!) this web thing is still pretty slow and unpredictable. The prediction is that it will take at least another two weeks before we are back up to pre-earthquake levels.
We have heard that a new line was already in process of being laid from Verizon but it will probably take at least another few weeks to complete (or another few months or years. If we had internet we could check.) In the mean time we are struggling on with the rest of China in this cold dark age of slow internet.

The Cable is Down

There was an earthquake in Taiwan today. Luckily few people were killed and there was no associated tidal wave. Now for one of the more amusing results of this particular natural disaster - it knocked out all non-China internet to mainland China.
What?
Well apparently all non-Chinese based website information comes across one - count 'em, one - cable that comes into mainland China via Taiwan. And the earthquake took the cable out. This means that sites like blogger and Google, which have China servers apparently, are still accessible, but yahoo as well as all news servers in North American and Europe are inaccessible. Of course Chinese sites can also be reached, but as these mostly written in Chinese, they are of somewhat limited use. (Michael asked the status of other Asian sites but we have not checked if we can get onto them. We also do not understand why Europe sites are hard to reach as we would expect these to come across the mainland.)

One of the funny things was the initial aggravation with the internet while ex-pat users across China thought, 'Why is China blocking this site, gosh darn it!' After all, what on earth could Babys-R-Us possibly have that is sooo controversial? It was actually comforting to know that this was not a government decision (this time).

That was odd

Turns out that Blogger thought that since the new computer was set up in China, I would want all the pages showing Chinese text. It was a little disconcerting especially as Chinese text recognition was not loaded yet onto this machine so just a bunch of blank boxes were showing up instead of words. I couldn't even figure out what was going on until I happen to add "Chinese" to the text options. Then, ah yes, then it all came clear and after many deep discussions and much clicking of random Chinese characters I accidentally managed to convince Blogger that I would really prefer English.
And I though arguing with Chinese taxi drivers was rough..

baby cam works

Just did a first check of the cam - and the good news it works. Yay!
This is pretty exciting stuff.

New Computer

Cara's new laptop arrived today. This means we now have twice the capability to produce (very few) blogs. One of the many cool things about this new gizmo is that it comes with a built in webcam which we think we might find a use for in the coming year.