Life Lessons With Brian: In Which I Teach China About The Internet

Alright China, we need to talk. No, not that talk. Judging by your population, you already know plenty about the birds and the bees. We need to have the internet talk.

You’ve been restricting my access to the internet since I got here on February 23rd. WordPress was blocked, for starters. Then a few weeks later, YouTube is inexplicably unavailable. It’s been that way for four months, China. How am I supposed to watch videos of ninja kitties or waterskiing squirrels if I can’t use YouTube? Then there was Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail, and briefly, Google. Then the most recent batch was unblocked, only for you to block Twitter again yesterday, and Facebook today. What gives? ***Update: The recent Twitter and Facebook blocks are due to riots in the Xinjiang region; current counts indicate at least 156 killed, 800 injured, and over 1,400 arrested.***

Facebook is currently blocked...

...and so is Twitter

Portraiture

Kind of a cryptic title, right? Give or take, that’s what I was going for. The subject matter is equally unclear, yet incredibly fitting for my blog, perhaps more so than any of my past writing here. Mostly I write about tech and PC gaming, with the occasional music review, political rant, or automotive coverage. Overall, I’ve got the Tech side of things pretty well covered. What about the + Lifestyle stuff? It’s my goal to create an ongoing discussion and analysis how how technology increasingly becomes part of everyday life – not just for the nerds out there, the fan-boys and the early adopters and the computer geeks, but for everyone else. How does technology affect the luddites – people who have largely avoided technological advances? Some even go out of their way to remain “offline,” as it were.

Despite their best efforts, technology is an intrinsic part of our world. It advances inexorably, permeating every part of life until eventually you cannot have one without the other. Technology is, at times, invasive; it is dispassionate, it doesn’t care if it helps or hurts you, whether it has given you a job or taken one away. It just is. The closest biological approximation to technology might be a virus – its sole purpose is propagation (from a certain, anthropomorphized point of view). It advances slowly in some areas, and with blinding speed in others; regardless, it continues to spread and evolve.

One of the more recent examples of technology’s pervasiveness is Google Street View.

Ask the Internets, Part One

***Update*** This post has actually turned into a separate blog. It’s kinda like asexual reproduction, really. This budded and split off into another blog! Check it out here. I’ve wittily and oh-so-originally changed the title of this into Ask Teh Internets for the new blog. I figured I might as well shamelessly milk memes for all they’re worth.

I can’t resist doing this. I happened across someone’s post (don’t recall who) that contained a screen shot of the Google homepage. You know how it suggests topics when you start a search term? In case you hadn’t already discovered, the results can be hilarious. Below are some of the better ones I came across. Note: starting a question (why do, what if… etc) is the best way to get unexpected results.

Part One has something of a relationship/baby-making theme, mostly because that’s what the results tended to skew toward. Read the highlighted result first.

I don't know, do you?

Apparently this is a toughie for all the ladies out there (or dudes, as the case may be). Figuring out your own feelings is pretty hard, yep. *end sarcasm*

Google Chrome (it’s shiny)

Google has finally done it! They went and created a web browser, borrowing various elements from Opera, Safari, and Firefox to get there. It might sound like a bit of a frankenstein (or frankenstein’s monster, if you want to get technical), but I assure you, Google’s new browser, named Chrome, is anything but clunky.

Google Chrome