WordPress.com banned in Thailand.. not totally.. not all the time

Yes it is banned in Thailand and the reason I didn’t post anything new for almost a year is not because of the WordPress ban. This blog has been live in Thailand just fine. I’m just lazy.

Politically motivated or not, some blogs on WordPress.com are banned and I don’t know why because I’ve never read them, though I came across links to them which are now redirected to a web page of my ISP in Thailand.

Recently (maybe since about 10 days ago) I noticed the entire WordPress.com, with the exception of the front page, were redirected to my ISP page. But it happened only during daytime working hours up until around 10 pm in Thailand. Other than that, I can read most WordPress blogs.

This is not related to this post but can we have the tags search capability back on WordPress.com front page?

Slowly fixing the telco connections in Taiwan

My internet is being fixed. International connections (connecting to WordPress.com, for example) will be slow at least for a good while (according to CCTV news):

Telecommunication operators and Internet users need to sit tight a little longer before service returns to normal. Authorities say damage to undersea cables caused by an earthquake off Taiwan is more serious than previously thought. And repairs are still ongoing

I’m hopeful I’ll be fast browsing international porn websites again by the next quarter.

Firefox quitting on me but not Opera

I’m tired of Firefox freezing on me and lose all I was typing on my wordpress blog.

Firefox has this nice feature that if you close your browser while opening a bunch of web pages, the pages will be back the next time you open firefox. So when something happens and the browser needs to say bye bye because of some reasons it just can’t take you any more (which happens to me very often), you will get to continue whereever (web pages) you were looking at.

But if you were writing on your WordPress blog and Firefox crashed and you hadn’t hit a save button yet, you lose all you just typed.

Opera (web browser) does the automatic restore the browsing experince the same Firefox does, but that piece of writing on WordPress post page you didn’t save will be restored as well. Now this is cool.

Unplugged in Thailand (The Asia-Wide Internet Down Time)

There was an earthquake in Taiwan yesterday. Internet here in Thailand was almost disconnected from the rest of the world. Google was unreachable (except a few sub domains like image.google.com, news.google.com). Technorati and a whole horde of sites were also unreachable. CNN has an update on the news:

Nearly all Asia’s earthquake-disrupted Internet service and 80 percent of its phone service should be restored by noon (0400 GMT) Thursday, a Taiwanese official said following one of the largest telecommunications outages in years to hit Asia.

…

The 6.7-magnitude earthquake and aftershocks on Tuesday night and Wednesday caused disruptions for major telecommunications operators from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, China, Singapore and South Korea — with ripple effects spreading beyond Asia.

Add that tiny litle Kngdom of Thailand in that list too. No time to check news on what happened in neighbour countries like Vietnam, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar .. (List goes on.. sorry friends if I forgot to mention your country. Doesn’t mean we aren’t friends