therobots.org - select * from robots

It should be patently obvious to all of us that Adam is one of the laziest bloggers on this blog. Not counting those who've jumped ship for Livejournal, anyway. I've tried guilting him into writing more, mostly because my life is boring and I need something to do, but alas, it has not worked. So in lieu of any further efforts, I will now be blogging for him. Blogging by proxy, it could be the next big thing. I would write under his icon, but he wouldn't hand over the password. You'll have to pretend there's a little string man instead of a monkey up there.

Adam has actually left Beijing, and is now staying in a small tent somewhere in the middle of a field in Inner Mongolia. They do not have internet yet in the fields of Inner Mongolia, so the blogging by proxy thing works out perfectly. Thanks to my omniscienceness, I can keep you apprised of his adventures.

You know what you can't buy in China? Index cards. Seriously, I've looked.

But you can get notepads, and they always have special messages in English for you:

The best quality and design is just for you.
You will feel like writing with it all the time.

This is the most comfortable pad you have ever run in to.

Accompany with your growing
Assistant for your success

Thank you, notebook. I feel more successful already.

It's something I never thought I'd see - a memorial service for a bulletin board.

China's cracked down on public discussion sites, as they did before with some of the blogging providers.

Jeremy Goldkorn at Danwei describes the latest update:

Some arm of the sour and corrupt Nanny authority has resticted access to Internet bulletin boards (BBS) hosted on servers at Tsinghua University, Peking University and Nanjing University to students and people with university Internet accounts. These BBS were formerly available to the public.

Furthermore, all students who still have access to the BBS will apparently have to register with their real names if they want to continue posting to the BBS. The above-mentioned BBS were previously sources of lively debate about social, economic and cultural issues.

Way to go Nanny!

This may not seem like much; after all, it's just a BBS, and the students can still post. But by blocking outside IP addresses, it will effectively kill the culture of the BBS. And without any hope of anonymity, there won't be much left for the students.

On Saturday Qinghua students gathered to mourn the BBS. One student took a lot of pictures, and posted them on flickr with the name "smth dying". Check it out.