The Great Firewall of China

I’ve just stumbled across this very interesting website that tells you if a site is viewable in China or not.

The resistance to freedom of speech in China has extended to the internet, and the blocking of websites for Chinese internet users is known as the “great firewall of China” – see this BBC news article and pages here and here from good old Wikipedia.

I tested my website and blog and both were blocked.

I can’t think of anything I’ve ever written that offends the Chinese government, but I suppose it would be a poorer refection on me if my sites were acceptable to their censors…

Meeting people off the internet 2

It’s been a week of meeting fellow bloggers, and both occasions have been all thanks to the Shed.

I can’t honestly remember how I first stumbled across David Shedden’s blog, but other readers include his friends Jenny and Danny, and we’ve all ended up following each others’ ramblings and musings over time.

Jenny is studying with David in Princeton and is over from the USA for a week. We met up on Sunday to be tourists for a bit and to attend the St Silas evening service (where she met some of the many St Silas bloggers.

Danny, meanwhile, was one of the Shed’s cohorts at Glasgow Uni last year, and we have been aware through our blogs of our mutual enthusiasm for Lost. We met up yesterday so I could hand over my copies of episodes 1 to 8 of series 3.

It was a pleasure to meet both. The blogosphere really does make a small world even smaller.

And talking of Lost, I had last night set aside for an evening of writing, but episodes 9 and 10 had arrived in the post from Justin, so plans went straight out of the window. No spoilers, but both episodes were excellent, with some unexpected comic moments in episode 10 which provided some light relief to the tension of other ongoing stories.

Spirited performance

“Pound a minute for your thoughts” came a point off third in the pub quiz at the Basement Bar last night.  Yet again the music round was our Achilles’ heel.

But it was still an impressive performance given that our combined general knowledge (such as knowing that the Amazon is the largest rainforest in the world) and complete guesswork (we guessed that William Bonney was better known as Billy the Kid) was the result of only two of our squad being able to make it.  So a valiant effort by an understrength side.

One day we’ll win.  One day…

Underground, overground

Justin’s latest post points to a suggested list of the top underground transit systems in the world. Though why it’s a top eleven rather than a top ten, I don’t know.

I’ve only been on three of the eleven, but it seems right that London is at the top. Though it often gets a slagging, it really is excellent – simple to follow, relatively comfortable, and it covers just about all the important bits of the city. And best of all, it’s fully integrated in terms of fares and tickets with all other public transport in the city, so you don’t need two tickets to travel on two modes of transport.

It made me think about other urban transport systems I’ve experienced:

Sydney’s CityRail – I was well impressed with the CityRail when in Sydney in 2005. The routes and lines were dead easy to follow, trains were relatively spartan but regular, clean and perfectly comfortable, and the network was comprehensive in its coverage. The week pass I bought was very reasonably priced too.

Zagreb’s trams – a brilliant tram network that combines efficiency, value for money, and easy to follow routes and timetables (even in a foreign language) with the overground benefit of a nice view and the quaintness of trams. Trams rock.

Glasgow’s subway and rail - I’ve used the trains and subway in Glasgow a lot since moving here. While both are efficient, clean and reasonable in price, it’s still very annoying that you can’t tube into town and train out again on the same ticket (except for a roundabout which is a bit pricey and doesn’t cover buses). Oh yes and the subway stops at 6pm on a Sunday – what’s that all about!?

German bus networks – quite unnecessarily complicated. The ticket machines require a PhD to figure out and even German speakers have admitted to me that they’re difficult to use. As you’d expect, though, they run on time.

The Cairo airport bus – the 356, if I remember rightly (though my keyboard can’t do the Arabic numbers). It leaves (or at least it did in 2001) from underneath a noisy motorway underpass that can only be reached by crossing lots of dangerously busy roads. It’s a fairly long journey to the airport, but an exhilirating one due to the maniacal traffic and fascinating views of markets, mosques, crowds and the generally hectic city life of Egypt’s capital.

The Kirkwall airport bus – every time I took this (over the course of three and a half years) it was always the same driver. Rather like Groundhog Day, but in Orkney.

Moving

The move went smoothly, thanks to a friend and his big car, and also not having that much stuff in the first place.

I’m tired enough after a weekend of packing and moving, but this was exacerbated by a ceilidh in church on Saturday night for someone’s leaving do. The ceilidh was great fun and we were kept going by the entertaining and very talented band The Jiggers, which is one of the numerous musical pies in which fellow St Silasite Greg de Blieck has fingers.

Partly through throwing myself into the dances, and partly through my monumentally rubbish state of fitness, I was shattered by the end of the night. The walk home was slow and painful, and my legs are still somewhat jellylike today, two days later.

Someone suggested to me during the ceilidh that my state of exhaustion was a sign that my body was telling me to do more exercise.

Of course I think it was telling me in no uncertain terms to do less.

Day 10: Communion quandry

It’s communion on Sunday morning. Should I take it, despite giving up sliced bread for Lent?

In St Silas we use bread. It’s not slices, obviously, but wee cubes. But what if, as I suspect, the bread is sliced and then cubed after? Does that still make it sliced? Or to put it another way, does the slicing refer to the end product (sliced bread) or a part of the process?

If slicing is the process, then that means I can’t take communion because it was, and therefore is still, sliced bread. If slicing is the product, then I’m fine, because it stops being sliced bread when cubed.

But let’s say it really counted as sliced. Which action should take precedence – my observance of Lent (and thus not taking communion), or my observance of communion (and thus taking it)? Which was the more important act in Jesus’s life – him spending forty days fasting and facing Satan’s temptation, or him dying on the cross for my sins? His death would seem the obvious one… but then… would he have been the saviour he was if he hadn’t spent forty days beating temptation in the desert?

There’s probably a thesis in that, and I’m the last person you’d want to write it.

Of course, there’d be no dilemma if I became a believer in transubstantiation – the idea that the bread and wine literally transforms into the body and blood of Christ. That would mean I wouldn’t be risking sliced bread at all, but munching on 2,000 year old raw human flesh instead. Nice.

Thankfully, however, there’s no need to resort to cannibalism – as posters have pointed out here and here, Lent doesn’t take place on Sundays.

Now that seems a bit weird. Jesus didn’t get a meals on wheels every Friday night when spending forty days in the desert – so why should I take a break when trying to observe his fasting? Is it right to deprive ourselves of something in order to focus on Jesus… for only six days a week?

Well, rules are rules – after all, I am trying to observe and understand Lent fully, so may as well go the whole hog and give Jesus the full six-sevenths of my life. Forward for bread and wine I go…

Getting married in Costa Rica

This weekend I am moving flats. The place I am moving to is in a different part of Glasgow, and has a lovely view over the West End and is closer to work and church. So I am looking forward to settling in and having an extra ten minutes in bed each morning.

Because of my change of address and the fact that I am probably going travelling in September, I sent a big circular email to about a million people in my address book, to give a quick update (incidentally if you didn’t get it and feel you should, email me).

I use Gmail as my email thingy, and when you get messages in your inbox there are adverts on the right-hand side, which claim to be relevant to the content of your message.

Justin emailed me back, however, to say that when reading my message in Gmail his adverts included ones for retro wedding invites and moving to Costa Rica. He included an image of the adverts which you can see on the right.

So, that’s my life plan, then – get married and move to Costa Rica.

I know nothing about Costa Rica other than they beat Scotland in the 1990 World Cup, and have no armed forces (according to one of my first year international relations lecturers at uni, the government realised years back that such was the frequency of coups in central America the main threat to the country’s security wasn’t from their neighbours’ military but their own).

But seriously, it got me thinking: how about making life decisions purely according to what adverts in Gmail suggest?

A project for another day, perhaps…