Every so often something comes along and changes the face of what we know. A few years ago we had the OK Dance Video, before that “All Your Base”, and now we have something so amazing that it simply escapes words. I love people that don’t have lives…
The LeBron James nWo video…the greatest thing ever achieved in the Internet bar none.
Until next time,
G
While this blog has been dedicated to The Nerdy Things in Life, I feel that I haven’t really used this space to honestly and truly geek out. That changes here and now.
A little while ago I touched base with an old friend, Brian. He recently started a blog called The City State of Balic (which you can see a link from to you right if you look for it) which is primarily dedicated to the nerdiest of nerdy endeavors, Dungeons & Dragons. He sent me an e-mail a little over a week ago with an idea. He and I would join together and make a D&D setting, each taking part time responsibility for things. So far it has been really fun reconnected with that nerdy side of my life, and an old friend. While we are still in the draft stages, the setting got off to a good start. We both included some “creative” sections to lay a bit of the land for our planet which I’ll include here…
I’ve been a terrible blogger this past year, really I have. No need to go through the motions by telling me that I’m not that bad while I just cry, eat ice cream, before eventually accepting my own failures. We are well past that.
Back in my glory days (circa 2007-2008) I was a lean, mean, blogging machine. Looking at my archives, it’s easy to see that it wouldn’t be uncommon to write 10-20 posts a month, whereas now I’m lucky to get 4 done in that span.
The easy thing to say is that I don’t have any time for it. I mean, I live in a foreign country, work full time, and try to have a social life where I talk to *real* people now, so obviously time is a bit short. But the truth is, like everything else, I just don’t make time for it anymore.
Blogging is a very egotistical hobby to have. Obviously I feel that my opinions on life matter enough to write them down, and that you all care enough to want to read them. I think in the last few years I have gotten more humble with my old age. While this is inherently a good thing, an unfortunate side effect seems to be less and less blogging here. I mean, if I am just another cog in the machine, why would my opinions on politics, music, or sports really be worth reading?
Well I’m posting here to tell you that is no more. I’m going to get my ego back.
I’m on summer vacation right now, and in the past few years I have taken a break from blogging, this year it’s going to be different. I have 17 days left until I go back to China and I plan on writing a post for every one of those days. I have a lot in mind, and a few started. They may not all be actually posted on each day, due to internet access issues, but I will have them published on each day.
I don’t have plans for every post, but I have a few in mind on living in China, LeBron James, New York City, homecomings, and a lot more. No matter what I end up typing, I hope that you all enjoy the ride.
Until next time,
G
After 46 rounds of sheer awesomeness it is time for things to get real. With the help of my favourite website in the history of the universe (for this week), WhatIfSports.com it is time for a showdown.
For those of you unfamiliar with this site let me fill you in on a few things. First off, it is AWESOME. Secondly, it is a fantasy sports simulator where you can choose any two sports teams of all time and have them have a showdown. Naturally, I spent a lot of time simulating various hockey games (note: the ‘76 Habs win the most). Thirdly, you can draft your own dream team, which naturally we did to simulate our NOlympic teams. Fourthly, this site is AWESOME.
We have officially moved!
Well after exactly three years at Getting Glenergized and a few short, neglected months at Backpackers Soul, the time has come to bid adieu. As of this post both sites are officially closed. Before you start to plan their respective eulogies, know that their hearts will go on in a new cyber-location. As of right now I’d like to officially announce the formation of my new on-line opinion platform, the easy to remember Glen Thoughts.
This is certainly an interesting time to be in this country right here, and right now. What with the 20th Anniversary of a certain incident at a certain square that may or may not have involved a lot of tanks coming up. Couple that with sabre-rattling in North Korea, rapid development all over the place, and of course those pesky people in the Himalayas that always want human rights, Asia seems to be the place to be right now, and the bloggosphere is keeping it well documented. While I may have been slack at posting on this (and my other) blog, there is no shortage of information out there about Asia. Here are some of my recent favourites that I have read:
Someone I know quite well in real life, Elvina, makes a great post Identity Crisis, which talks all about the challenges of being a Chinese-American while living in China. Needless to say, it’s full of all sorts of problems that we may not have expected to begin with.
In that post, Elvina mentions friends complex’s having over-zealous guards. Well if you read that friend, Don’s, post you will see just how intense the guards can be there. He talks of having a church gathering at his place, and havint the guards come it to see if there were any Chinese people there. This may seem like a strange question, but it has some deep seeded questions about freedom and “foreigner rules” in China. Check out Just Checking Who is Home… on The Arizona Anachronism for more info on that one.
Keeping with people I know, my friend Ryan, also known as thehumanaught, a B-List celebrity in the English language China blogging community, makes a great post about Living Without Trust, where he talks about how difficult it is to find trust in this country. A few months ago, his dog was killed as a result of dog food that went bad, and his new dog got sick, only to have the doctor run a series of expensive tests, when a simple internet search showed that it was nothing to worry about. A frightening read that makes you appreciate some of the wonders of the West.
As I have mentioned a few times, I am also writing for a blog (ran by the same Ryan as above), called Lost Lao Wai. Earlier this week, I read a fanatastic post about a Chinese family and their dirty little secret, liking Japanese food. This is very topical, given the outcry that has came out surrounding the new fim, Nanjing, Nanjing! Read Itadakimasu! by Quincy on Lost Lao Wai.
Now of course, not everythign great is writen by myself, or my friends, there is a lot of other stuff out there. Michael Rines, at the New York Times, did an excellent article called “To Protect an Ancient City, China Moves to Raze It“, about the destruction of Kashgar’s ancient city. China is starting the demolition of 2/3 of the ancient city, in order to improve it for tourists. As a recent tourist of the region, I am a little torn on that one. On one hand, I hate to see something with so much character destroyed, but on the other hand, I would hate for people to continue living in such sub-standard living. Also, I deeply dislike the thought of having a culture and region get turned into an attraction, but yet I just went there and loved every minute of it…
In an equally debatable post on a vastly different topic, John Pomfret of the Washington Post, makes a great blog entry about the PRC and their strange relationship with everyone’s favourite Hermit Kingdom titled “Why China Won’t Do More With North Korea“. It raises some very interesting perspectives that I certainly had not thought about. It examines China’s economic, cultural, and geo-political interests in keeping the Korean Penninsula divided, and it really is a fascinating read that could serve to explain some of the complexities of the Korean issue.
Lastly, I should mention that I have continued to post on Lost Lao Wai, which you can see all of here. Some of these may end up reposted here, but I would encourage people to read them where they are, as the comments are part of the fun (especially for The Bargaining Debate).
Anyway, with that I should be off. I hope that you take the time to enjoy the posts I have highlighted for you, since this is certainly an interesting time to be in this strange, strange continent.
Safe Journeys,
My apologies for not being the best, and certainly not the most diverse blogger of late. But it turns out that running a second blog, posting for another one, the Great Firewall of China, and you know, real life, are rather large drains on a person.
Another reason for my detachment from this bit of space has been my newest distraction, a wonderful website called Wolfram Alpha. This website if part of a very ambitious project to make the sum of human knowledge immediately computable. Sort of like Wikipedia for the math geek, which makes it very clearly in my territory.
This site has dozens of features, all you have to do is type in any of their many types of inputs, including (but certainly not limited to) measurements, musical notes, geography, colours, anagrams, dietary reference, and of course good old fashion mathematical functions.
After putting in some different inputs I learned the following things about myself:
-My height, 5′10″, is approximately equal to 0.97 fathoms, the length of DNA strands of the human genome, and the distance that light can travel in 5.9 nanoseconds.
-My birthday, December 30, 1982, is day number 2 455 334 on the Julian Calendar, it had 9 hours and 18 minutes of daylight in New York, and is 9643 days ago…I know, I don’t look a day over 8000, but that’s besides the point.
- Currently AIG has a stock value of $1.70 while Freddie Mac has one of $0.79. In the past five years they have had a return of -97.64% and -98.64%, respectively. Economic, what now?
- Swine Flu has 12 107 cases with 87 deaths worldwide
-My first name is ranked 502nd in the United States, with most people who share my name in their 40s and 50s, also there are an estimated 93 538 people who share the name in the US. Making my name 1 out of 2502. Not quite making me the 1 in a million that I had hoped.
-My last name, by contrast, would be ranked 191st if used as a first name, with 267 546 people in the US expected to have that as a first name. That’s right my last name is almost three times more common as a first name than my own first name. Can’t say that I’m the slightest bit surprised by that fact.
- In world rankings, Canada is ranked 2nd in land mass, 36th in population, 224th in population density, 136th in population growth, 8th in life expentancy, 23rd in median age, 9th in GDP, and the top three languages are English, French, and Plautdietsch. I have no idea what that third one is.
-Toronto (the closest major city to my hometown) and Suzhou (where I’m living now) are 11 460 km apart, with Toronto having an elevation of 85m higher.
-The title of this blog, is sadly not a recognized word, when I entered glen_______ into the crossword feature, I got no recognizable words.
- When asked “How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a man?”, it said “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind (according to Bob Dylan)”. Hard to argue with that one.
- However, it does not know the answer to “How do they get the caramel in the Caramilk bar?” or “Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?”. I guess the developers need to word on that one.
While they need to get to work on answering those last two questions, there is still a lot of fun to be had, and a lot of useless junk to learn. Go ahead and give it a try!
Until next time,
G
Greetings all,
A little over a month ago, I made a post notifying people about YouTube being blocked (note: it still is). Well it turns out, as of this morning blogger and blogspot have been blocked as well.
You may be asking yourself, “How are you posting then?”, and if you weren’t, then, surely you need to do a bit of thinking. Well after ranting about it on twitter my friend Ryan (aka thehumanaught) turned me onto a service called Hotspot Shield. For those of you who don’t know what it is, it is a VPN (Virtual Private Network) which are designed to both keep your network secure, but also to circumvent any firewalls, including the most comprehensive in the world, The Great Firewall of China, which periodically bans like (like YouTube and blogger, and all sorts of other fun stuff).
Hotspot Shield is a free service, and so far, so good. I can access my blog (obviously) and other sites which were previously blocked. It is a free service, so it occasionally throws up ads as either pop-ups or at the top of a window, but it is far from disruptive. If that bothers you too much, there are several more that you can find and pay for.
Either way, I would highly recommend you make use of one of these services….which I realize, that if you are in China then you can’t access such a thing, but it could be coming back on later. This is especially important given that a few weeks from now is a certain anniversary of a certain event at a certain square, where nothing important happened…
So expect further delays for anyone trying to access any amount of truth within this interesting nation.
Safe journeys,
G
For further info on The Great Firewall, check out Wired magazine excellent article on the subject.
Well it seems like they are at it again!!!
As of yesterday, the incredibly popular site, YouTube, has been banned here in the PRC. This comes just over a year after it was last banned during the protests leading up to the Olympics. The statement from the government is: “China’s internet is open enough, but also needs to be regulated by law in order to prevent the spread of harmful information and for national security”.
This adds to the many popular sites that I am currently unable to access. Apparently the iTunes music store (which I don’t use anyway) doesn’t work over here, neither does Daily Motion (a competitor to YouTube), and any blogs on wordpress, as well as many other sites somehow related to the two naughty “T” words (T1bet and Ta1wan…if you didn’t get it those 1s are supposed to be “i”s). Also, the Chinese version of Skype (called Tom-Skype) filters out the use of a certain four letter “f” word, and reportedly tracks any mention of certain “hot words”.
Somehow though, blogger accounts (like this one), pirated music sites, and Chinese video sharing sites (like Youku and Tudou) work just fine.
Apparently one of my friends tried to make a status update on Facebook relating to YouTube not working and it was erased…I highly doubt that is a coincidence. While Facebook is not officially blocked, it can sometimes be “down” or slow for no apparent reason.
While I am not going to comment on the moral grounds for such decisions, I will say this. They sure are frustrating for people like me. I depend on the internet for contact with the outside world as best I can, but situations like this can be more than aggravating.
So if any of you out there my apologies if I haven’t kept up-to-date with your blog, or watched the latest Diet Coke and Mentos video, hopefully you’ll understand.
Safe Journeys,
G
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