Eric's Beijing Diary

Guaibude. No wonder. I couldn't figure it out yesterday. For some reason, I could not access the web site that houses my online exams. I am used to this happening in the lab from time to time, because the systems inside the school firewall have very limited access to foreign sites. But I couldn't access it from my apartment connection, either. Very strange. I am not used to this. China has the best Internet access in the world, but yesterday it was really bad. I was beginning to think I was back in the States. Actually, that's too general a statement, because broadband access in the States is actually pretty good, and the utilities debate that has held back the development of broadband is pretty much over, I think. AOL doesn't have to like it, but I think they are more or less resigned. Broadband is taking over. But the dialup connections I had in the States were not very reliable. Very different here. Dialup was all I used in my apartment for two years, and I very rarely had any issues. There was never a time that I couldn't get on, except when the Software College forgot to pay my phone bill. Now I have broadband, but I still use dialup as a backup. But yesterday it just wasn't working. I actually had to cancel the online test.

This morning I connected to the BBC to hear Newshour from 20 hours GMT (which is about 5 am here). The program isn't live, but the audio feed is. It crashed. Very strange. I never have trouble getting the BBC, except when I go to the BBC web site. But I never do. I went the first time, then saved a .ram file to my desktop, which I use to take me directly to the audio feed for Newshour without going through the browser. It always works. Not this morning.

When I left my apartment, I stopped to pick up a paper, and that is when I saw the headline. I read the headline in the China Daily. Turns out several Internet trunk lines were severed by the earthquake off the coast of Taiwan. This has to be the worst break in five years. They say it will take several weeks to fix it. I hope it doesn't become several months. Can you imagine? They have to take a ship and follow the line out from the shore, find the break, and repair it. I bet this will heighten the interest in using satellite relay for Internet communications.

This kind of thing is very frustrating, of course, but alleviated considerably by the fact that much of my online listening has switched to podcasting. Of course, I can't download podcasts right now, either--iTunes has not been able to bring down a single file since the break. But the point is that because I have been doing this for some time, I have lots of files that I have not listened to. Not everything is time sensitive. The daily news is, of course, but much of the documentary type stuff has a longer relevance window. For example, I am listening to a BBC documentary right now that is a group of interviews with people who were personal acquaintances of Saddam Hussein. iTunes downloaded it back in November, but it is still quite relevant, especially given the news of the past couple days. These BBC documentaries are not long. Each one is anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes. But I have about 50 of them that I have not had a chance to listen to. And that is just one podcast subscription. I am subscribed to 12 different podcasts, and most of them have dozens of files I have not heard. Way more than I will ever be able to listen to. I do watch one American TV program a week over the Internet. It's a PBS program called, "McLaughlin Group." But they encapsulate all their programs as 65 MB Quick Time videos and put them on their website. I have one sitting on my hard drive right now that I haven't seen. Furthermore, I use a download manager (NetAnts) to download the files. This means that even with a very poor connection, I can start the download, and if it breaks up, I can start it again later, and it will pick up where it left off. So I have more than enough information to keep me busy for a few weeks.

Still, access to daily news is really going to be a struggle, because I get my news from English language sites, and most of them are foreign.