Not only is Gmail being blocked right now, Google (including even google.com.cn) is also completely blocked for some reason. I wonder what Google did to get the government angry? Or is this just one of those temporary blockages that no one can explain and mysteriously goes away after a few days?

I’ve had good success with Gmail over the past year since moving to China. Until now even when Google.com or Gmail.com have been blocked I have always been able to download my email using a regular email client like Thunderbird. This time – no dice. No access at all and no idea when the situation might improve.

>>> UPDATE: It seems this was a problem with OpenDNS. I turned it off and now both Gmail and Google work. I can’t believe OpenDNS would block Google (that would be suicidal) so I am guessing it was actually due to a conflict between my provider here in China and OpenDNS. China Telecom probably doesn’t like people using DNS other than their own. Who knows.

Click here to read up on Twitter. Click on this and discover Jaiku. Simply, it’s all about answering the question, “What are you doing?” and bringing together your online presence.

It might just be a trend that dies out in a couple of months, but for now you can find my presence on Jaiku here.

If you haven’t used it before just go to the Skype page and read up on it. Simply put it is free voice, video and instant messaging between Skype users. You can also pay to “Skype Out” and use it to call at very low rates from your computer to any normal phone number. Just be sure to get a headset otherwise the person on the other end might have difficulty hearing you unless the built-in mic on your pc is particularly sensitive.

I started using OpenDNS yesterday. What is DNS?

DNS, the Domain Name System, translates the human addresses of websites and servers (like wikipedia.org) to the numerical address used by computers (207.142.131.203).

What does OpenDNS do?

OpenDNS is a better DNS, free to all. OpenDNS uses its distributed network of DNS servers to speed up your Internet experience, increase reliability, improve security and make DNS smarter for users all over the world.

Before switching to open DNS, when I would occasionally mistype a domain name it would sometimes resolve to a strange Chinese search page instead of just giving an error like “that page can’t be found.” Phishing is also a particular worry in China.

OpenDNS can identify and stop sites trying to phish (steal) your personal information or money. The OpenDNS phishing protection works with all operating systems and browsers, and complements any other security measures already in use, such as a firewall and anti-virus software.

Besides giving some piece of mind (I trust OpenDNS more than I trust my internet provider China Telecom) it also seems to be a little faster at resolving addresses. This is just based on surfing over the past day and I can’t say that it is amazingly faster or anything like that. Just feels faster and is certainly not any slower. It doesn’t help with the great Chinese firewall (which has once again been blocking access to blogs on Blogger.com on and off), but still I would recommend readers in China to at least give it a try.

I gave my mother a digital camera about a year and a half ago. I set up a Flickr account for her back in October of last year. She finally got around to uploading some pics today. This one is of her two cats.

Congratulations mother!!

I knew I should have picked up that domain when I was fooling around and picking up justin-blog.com and jamesjustin.com. I guess I missed my chance to pick up a million dollars selling them their domain name. Yeah right! I suppose if it hadn’t been justin.tv they would have gone for emmett.tv or michael.tv or kyle.tv – the other guys involved in this project.

Here’s a look at the site.

As the site itself says, “Waste your life watching other people waste their lives.” What fun!

Of course Justin.tv has no affiliation to me except that we share the same name. Right now I think that is a good thing.

A site related to Twitter has just come to my attention called TwitterVision. What is TwitterVision? Well, it links messages posted on Twitter (usually about what people are doing or thinking at that moment in time) with a Google Map so you can see where these people are…and if you watch long enough you see what people are doing all over the world. Which is actually quite amazing if you are someone who grew up in the pre-Internet era.

China, U.S.A, Japan, Australia, France, Hong Kong, Philippines, Great Britain, Canada, South Korea, Switzerland, Spain, Brazil, Israel, Morocco, Turkey, Finland, Taiwan, India, Indonesia, Thailand, Germany, Slovak Republic, Russian Federation, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Malaysia, Antigua and Barbuda, Czech Republic, Iran, Belgium, Puerto Rico, Burkina Faso (where is this??), Italy, Poland, South Africa, U.A.E., Venezuela and The Netherlands.

How many actually took the time to read anything, much less find it interesting, is of course hard to say. But I can guess it is actually a pretty small figure.