Today, I’m posting a letter from one of my online male friends. My husband calls them my American-men-with-weird-names. There’s Clay, Chase, and Knox. And there’s Mihael.
Mihael (or Michael as I call him – the invisible “c” is not silent in Canada) is likely the person I’ve been connected with the longest on Twitter. We started tweeting in December 2009, within a month of me joining the network. I was soon introduced to his wife Laura, who became my Twitter-911 person for kitchen disasters (apparently, “stop, drop and roll” does not help you determine how long chicken takes to cook in a crock pot. I’m a work in progress).
Mihael and Laura are the first tweeps I met in real life. When I flew to California to attend Oprah’s After-Oscar Party last year, they picked me up at LAX and took me out for lunch. I may have texted my husband, “All is well. No meat locker, saws or sacks in sight yet.” Men with weird names are notoriously safe.
Mihael is currently in China on a business trip. But as we all know, freedom of information is – at best – tenuous in China. So, in the name of democracy and in honour of all American men with short “weird” names, here is Mihael’s letter.
~
Leanne,
Greetings from China! My first four nights were in a hotel in Suzhou. One of the people I was meeting with this week mentioned that their Facebook was blocked. I didn’t have that problem… until I came to Shanghai.
Before bed I wanted to upload pictures and videos from today to my FB. Turns out, FB as well as twitter are blocked, at least in this hotel. Meredith form http://www.Dailyangst.com suggested I might have luck using a VPN connection and I did… for about a minute, then I lost the VPN connection and access to FB and twitter.
I thought about blogging about this chain of events, but I can’t get to my WordPress site to write about it. I can read your blog and others, but if I try to get to mine, I get a time out error.
I was hoping that you would help a blogger repressed in foreign land by posting this email and the attached picture to your blog, in the land of the free and.. oh wait; I mean Canada, thy home and native land.
Mihael
http://smplefy.wordpress.com
~
Follow Mihael on Twitter and read more of his blog posts at Smplefy. With a dual major in Chemistry and English, he’s a Renaissance man – one who can quote substantially more Shakespeare than me.
~
Any experiences of censorship?
Have you met any online peeps in real life?
How insane is that! Wow…I am amazed at their control.
BTW – An invite to Oprah’s after Oscar party and I am just hearing about that now?????????? I saw her at the Kodak theater along with a few thousand others about 4 years ago after the Oscars. That hardly counts…
Actually, it’s the same thing, Susie. I think because it was Oprah’s last one, she called it her After-Oscar Party. 🙂
I feel so much better about my life now….Hahaha!
Major interesting – and I think I wouldn’t survive without my social media. Thanks for posting this and bringing it to our attentions!
I hear you.
Yikes. That is all.
Indeed.
No FB or Twitter? I think I’d go nuts for about a minute and then bask in the quiet of no internet and then go nuts again because, gasp! I’d be missing something important. Even if nothing important is going on, we must know that nothing important is going on!
Is it just me, or do Laura and I look eerily similar? I thought that was me in the picture. Crazy.
I love that: knowing that nothing is going on. 🙂 And you do look like a relative of Laura’s.
Leanne, Thanks for helping my socially repressed honey stick it to the Man as he puts it. Love it. Here for you any time you need me. Hugs to you.
Tameri, yes we do look alike, you could be a long lost cousin.
LOL. And now my blog is blocked in China. 😉
Seriously, it was my pleasure!
Emailing, blogging, whatevering, is always a challenge for me when I’m travelling ( even in the US) . It’s an uncanny feeling being watched. But I get used to it. The electricity goes on and off. My computer makes funny noises. My power connectors don’t work ( adhesive tape does.) I get that “you have lost connection” signal and then I Iose everything I’ve been working on. I finesse ways to trick the system. Challenges open new doors. Wherever I am I can usually find a lovely IT type person around the hotel to help me out. Presto. We’re magically connected. Even if we don’t speak each others languages.
True. In the Middle East, we were pretty sure our emails were screened because we taught so many members of the royal family.
I feel like a freedom fighter right now. Where’s my sparklers??
Ha. Reminds me of traveling in India. We were in the train station. There was a special line for Freedom Fighters.
I had no idea they were really squelching those forms of communication.
I know that, in my case, a lot of readers would like to censor me, but … I continue to stammer on. hehehe
Thank God we live where we live, my neighbor to the north!
Safe travels to my fellow, Michael, even if he lost the “c” somewhere.
Thanks, Michael with the “c” intact. Love your “readers want to censor me” comment. 🙂
I’ve gotten to meet the lovely Tameri Etherton and the lovely Kristen Lamb – yes, they’re both gorgeous.
Advice from my computer geek hubby (and I mean that in a nice way):
He had me ping Facebook.com (p.s. Ping stands for Packet InterNet Groper *IYKWIM*…there’s a blog for you) and Twitter.com for Miheal. He might be able to get right to the IP addresses, even though the name (DNS) are blocked through the hotel.
Facebook: 66.220.149.11
Twitter: 199.59.149.198
DM me on Twitter and let me know how it goes for him. We’ll see who’s smarter, my IT guy or the Chinese government (and hopefully we won’t get Miheal taken away in handcuffs *IYKWIM*).
Your geeky husband is lovely! Unfortunately, though, I was offline for a bit and M returned to SoCal (which is a good thing, I suspect!).
I wonder how the Good Greatsby does it, blogging from Shanghai and all. Must be, being the Good Greatsby, he’s greater than the great firewall of China.
In seriousness, perhaps Mihael should be put in touch with the illustrious Mr. Johnson?
Expats and international schools would have a way around it, I suspect.
I would need constant censorship to avoid getting weird looks from people, sometimes i just speak out without reasoning. More often than sometimes.
I actually met some people (four?) I started chatting with years before, I even invited one of them to my wedding (and he travelled all italy to be there). It’s weird how someone you meet in person once every two year can become one of your closest friend.
That’s true. You can often just jump into the middle of a conversation with good friends. Love that you invited one to your wedding (and that he came)!
I get censored at work all the time, but that’s because my work computer is a fascist. And hates movies, apparently, because it refuses to let me get into IMBD. Weird.
I have met Thoughtsy. Twice. Plans for #3 tomorrow! Exciting. And she is wonderful and lovely, as you would expect. I plan on meeting many many more of my blogging friends in August at BlogHer. Yay!! 🙂
How fun would that be — to hang out with you and Thoughtsy!
So great to meet Mihael. What a weird name. 😉 He can quote more Shakespeare than you?! He must know a ton!
I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Piper Bayard & Tiffany A White, two of my bestest tweeps. I’d love to meet more, especially one crazy-eyed Canadian who can stop-drop-and-roll at a moments notice.
Aww, EA. You know I’d love to meet you, too. Someday! (Maybe in Thailand!)
Yes, I have expereinced censorship. When in Qatar visiting my husband I could not play a Guy Sebastian music video – and it is pretty harmless by our standards.
By the way, Ms Teach………..
Should this: “quote substantially more Shakespeare than me.” actually be “quote substantially more Shakespeare than I.” given the complete senstence would be “quote substantially more Shakespeare than I can quote.”
My Latin teacher hated me too.
Ha. Actually, even the experts have disputed whether or not “than” functions as a conjunction or a preposition (since the 18th c!), so I think we’re both safe enough! http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/than-I-versus-than-me.aspx
😆 I’ll stick to English English! 😀
Okay, I had to pause before commenting to go read about Oprah’s After-Oscar Party (you can’t just drop that golden nugget on a gal and expect her to focus!). Your Pride and Prejudice comment was perfect!
In January, I met JM Randolph from Accidental Stepmom, which was AWESOME. (We both live in NJ, and met in NYC.) She was even more wonderful -and warm and smart and funny- than I thought she would be. I’m hoping I get to meet more blog buddies this year! I’d love to do a Blogger Summit in some fabulous location. Can you call Oprah and help me set this up?
You met JM? I am SO JEALOUS! I love her work too and have been following her for ages.
I chose to ignoe the Oprah comment! 😆 Made me feel too inferior!
I can only imagine the trouble you and JM got into! I’d love to be a part of that some day!
This is not the time to click the unfollow button in error! Fortunately, clicking the follow button is just as easy 🙂
🙂
The closest I’ve ever come to censorship is an arch nemesis – seriously – I’ve encountered at work who has made it their life’s work to oppose the ongoing publication of You’ve Been Hooked!
Seriously, this yahoo has become the “Red John” to my “Patrick Jane”!
Ha. Keep writing, Hook! You keep us entertained.
I live in China and the censorship is bad.
My business applied for a fast internet line, which tipped off the government that we’d be uploading big super secret info, so our access to our mail servers located in the US was blocked for weeks till we had to apply to the provincial government to get *unblocked*. We export gadgets and promotional items – and not the kind 007 James Bond would use to kill a Communist with, but the kind you’d find in your dentist’s office that fall apart after you touch or breathe on them.
Letters and documents sent via email are checked randomly for key words. A central government server will snake through company servers periodically. You cannot find info about Falun Gong, the Tiamen Massacre via search engines here (even Yahoo or Google search).