Friday, October 17, 2014

Shanghai Surprise

As always- Shanghai is a challenge.

Getting there is a 20 hour nightmare, and once on the ground, the CBD is hell-and-gone from the airport in PuDong.
Count on at least an hour, one-way.

But once you're in your humble abode, things get better.
Or, at least you hope they will.

I was prepared to rise to challenges this year, but there was one big change that caused me a good bit of inconvenience-
Google (and Google products) are strictly forbidden behind the Great Firewall...
There are work-arounds, but every Interweb connection goes through filtering and censorship that was pretty effective.
(VPNs are usable, but being the cheap  bastard I am, I won't spring for paid service, and since I'm on vacation I couldn't (ethically) use the company VPN)

Case in point- any website that was on the whitelist would still load slowly.
and if there was any Google APIs (like AdSense) those segments would stall the page load or just hang the process entirely.
A monumental pain in the ass, really.

This was new for this year and it was really bad. I was for all intents and purposes incommunicado for most of the trip.
I did post a few Instagram photos and did a couple tweets, but as a rule, I was too busy to do much blogging even if connectivity was good.

TBG- ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒE

2 comments:

Old NFO said...

Work will still be there... sigh

Anonymous said...

I did not know that. I'll have to make a note. Most everything I use has at least some google to it.