Internet

Meh. Chinese internet. It's a mixed bag, really-some is really fast, some is really slow. My real annoyance is more school internet than Chinese internet, if I'm honest. The internet at school in the USA sometimes had these issues too, and my high school internet was almost always horrible. Besides, the internet was totally fine at my host family two years ago. Well, not totally fine. The great firewall is obnoxious, and whoever said Facebook got unblocked was sadly mistaken. So was the person who said that you could get to blogger.com but not blogspot blogs. Both are blocked. I'm only still blogging here because I know ways to get around the firewall, and even those are occasionally iffy. Freegate has been pretty good, and it's free, but I've only gotten it to work with Internet Explorer, which I hate. My other proxy, which I like, randomly decided that working with blogger was going to stop being a thing, which is frustrating. Add that to school internet that doesn't always work at all, and yeah, sometimes the internet annoys me.

I'm a college student. My homework for my daily Chinese classes is posted online. If I do not have internet, I can't even find out what my homework is, let alone download it and finish it. [Depending on the homework in question, I may also need internet to do the homework itself, like when they want us to search for news about something on the internet or watch a news recording on the internet.] So I really do need internet. People can talk about how technology is doing all kinds of bad things all they want, not that I agree with them much of ever, but the fact remains: For my current position in life, I need internet access.

But the school internet has a tendency to stop working without warning. They didn't tell us when they took the modem and router for upgrades and there was no internet at all for a week. That made for a fun week of getting homework done. [This was about a month ago. I have fairly consistent internet now.] The internet in my room occasionally disconnects me randomly. After the upgrade, I don't think it's really any worse than the internet at my school in the USA, but the internet in the classroom is actually pretty bad. Sometimes it works, but slowly. I can work with that, since all I really need in the classroom is for nciku to work. Nciku is important. That's my dictionary for when I forget words. Google translate is nice too, for getting a vague idea of grammar structures that we're learning. No, don't try to translate a long paper using just Google translate because you will be sad, but if you read two languages, one quite a bit better than the other, Google can be a good starting point. That's what I use it for. Heck, even translating stuff I wrote, I'll sometimes grab Google and nciku. They're way quicker than paper dictionaries, plus they've got more colloquial words and update faster.

Other times, the internet will load so slowly that not even nciku will load, and turning instant translate off for Google translate isn't enough to get it to work. By the time a page loads, I don't even need that word anymore. That's a problem.

At worst, the internet won't even pretend that it's working. Can't connect to any networks. Just. Nothing. That's no good for language stuff. It's just not. Some of my classmates have cellular internet, so they're not quite as doomed as I am when this happens, but I don't have cellular internet. I have it in the USA, since I finally got a smartphone and have mixed feelings about it. [It's a phone. Mixed feelings is a step up. Why are you calling my texting device?] Here in China, I have the most basic phone ever. I only have it because my teachers practically ordered me to get it. Not a fan of phones. Never was, probably never will be. I'm cool with this. I like typing stuff. Point is, I don't have mobile web here, so if the wireless is down, I do not have internet in the classroom. Simple as that.

Wooo, internet. Love internet, hate when it doesn't work.