Wednesday, September 1, 2010

2010 Asia Trip, Chengdu Day #3 Evening

I saw an ad on Chinasmack for a paid VPN service. You can subscribe for a month a time so I spent $5 to try it out. It's working pretty good on my netbook (connected right now from behind GFW). I actually wanted to try it on my Samsung phone... it's supposed to work with Android OS but I haven't got it to work yet. This way, I don't have to keep using the VPN from work just to update Blogger or Facebook.

I've been feeling slightly nauseous since yesterday's hot pot dinner so I skipped the noodle breakfast at the factory and only had a bit of food for lunch. Everyone was going out for dinner again tonight but I decided to come back to the hotel and sleep. Leon came back with some KFC; hopefully that won't make me any worse. Actually, I can't remember the last time I had KFC back in the US.

Sam sent me a link to a NPR segment about Chinese language and culture. I was able to access NPR here even without a VPN. It was basically a story about an American linguist and her experience with learning Chinese. It was somewhat informative but I was a bit irritated with the tone of the interview, as if she was the first Westerner to discover the nuances of the Chinese language. Sheesh... there are millions of Chinese people that are bilingual, couldn't NPR find someone that knows what they're talking about? I know that laowais are sometimes still a novelty in China but is the same true of the Chinese language in America?

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I finally got speedtest.net to load using the new VPN. It shows that I'm connected to somewhere near Los Angeles. The latency and bandwidth is pretty slow.



If I disconnect from the VPN, then I'm "back" in China. The problem with speedtest.net is that there are no hosts inside China, with the closest one being in Hanoi. I also tried Hong Kong and both are really slow. However, the non-VPN connection at the hotel feels a lot faster than the VPN, when you're surfing the unblocked portion of the web of course. Must be the GFW causing problems with the speedtest.net website.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

disappointed that the girl in red at CTU didn't make it on to your blog.