Around 2005, I was still a nerd fanatic about gaming and involved in a couple of important local  gaming tournaments. Of course,some photos were taken during that period of time. Initially I stored those photos in my desktop PC hard disks, which I lost last year. No doubt that those pictures are of great importance to me. They are the evidence of the dream I chased as well as the precious memory I once had.

So I can’t let them vanish just like that. Years ago, the pictures were uploaded onto the MSN space. Then the MSN space service merged with WordPress and eventually was shut down by MS. I transferred my data to WP. But for somewhat reason, it didn’t succeeded. I couldn’t even log onto the account.I was down and depressed.

And today an idea came to my mind that those images might still be kept by some MS service. So I signed in my account and yes, they are still there in my skydrive gallery.

Days ago, I read something on the web as once data was uploaded online, it will be there forever. There have been so many people lost their fame for their secret information uncovered by others. However, sometimes it also works in another way we expected.

2002 Jun  China moves to block internet portals. Without warning or explaination, Google.com became inaccessable in China temporarily.

*2003 Nov  A internet censoring system called the Great Firewall has been launched by Chinese government. Even though some sites on the blacklist of Chinese governmet still display in the result of google, but access to these sites were disabled.

2004 Jun  Google invested $499 million in Baidu, the Chinese search engine, which shows Google’s interest in this emerging market.

2004 Sep  The content against Chinese government were moved off its Chinese searching result by Google for the first time. Google explained this as by technical reasons.

2004 Sep  The first office in Greater China region was established in Hongkong.

2005 Jul  Kaifu Lee left Microsoft and joined Google to help founding of Google China. A legal dispute between the two tech giants was caused due to his personal move.

2006 Jan  Google.cn was launched in Mainland China. Here is the offical blog post. Google.cn filters sensitive information off its searching result according to Chinese regulations.

*2006 Feb  A Congressional hearing for four companies including Cisco, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, was held for their cooperation in net censorship with Chinese government .

2007 Jan  In one year, Google gained 19% of the Chinese market share and became the second on the rank, while 63% for its main competitior Baidu. Since then Google China started cooperation with several Chinese companies to expand its service and products.

2007 Apr Google admits its sites pinyin input method was not solely built by Google after Chinese company Sohu claims it pirated its software code.

2009 Mar  Because of the video files displaying the situation of the 2008 Tibetan Unrest , Youtube was blocked.

2009 Jun  The CCTV program Focus Interview reported that Google.cn carried large amounts of pornographic and vulgar information. Google was accused of spreading obscene content by a Chinese official one day after difficulties for Chinese users to access Google.com and gmail.

2009 Sep  The news of resignation of Kaifu Lee was released surprisingly. Under his leadership, Google.cn reached 30% of the Chinese market from zero.

2009 Oct  China author set to sue Google over web book scan.

2010 Jan  SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond gave a statement that Google would no longer censor its Chinese search results and might pull out of China via a blog post. Also revealed the cyber attacks towards Google and other American companies.

2010 Mar  Li Yizhong, Chinese Minister of Industry and Information Technology insisted that Google must obey its laws or “pay the consequences,”

2010 Mar  Google redirected its CN domain to Google.com.hk, which means Google halted its self-censoring in China.

a wish of a young female freshman

A young female 1st year college student had a post on a wishing wall saying:

My name is 张萌芊(Zhang men qian), a freshwoman. I feel good about myself, but I‘ve been in distress that I can find a boyfriend.
I believe in fate. If you are willing to get to know me, please shout my name downstairs of Building 5#  at 12:30-12:50 of Mar 11th. I will watch through the window secretly. And I will meet you up if we match.

Finally it ended up to a rush towards this freshwoman’s request. The picture under was the scene of that day.

a rush towards a girl

The dollar is the official unit of currency of United States. Each dollar consists of 100 cents. Even though dimes are also used as a subunit, it is used solely as the name of the coin with the value of 10 cents. So only cents are in everyday use as divisions of the dollar.

In China, yuan is the official unit for the RMB. One yuan is divided into 10 角(jiao)or colloquially called 毛 (mao). One 角 (jiao) equals to 10分 (fen).

五毛 = half yuan =5 角(jiao)=50分(fen)

五毛党 refers to paid astroturfing internet commentators operating working for the People’s Republic of China, whose role is posting comments favorable towards the government policies to skew the public opinion on various Internet message boards. They are named after the 50 Chinese cents, or 5 mao, they are paid per such post, other names are red vests, red vanguard and the Five Mao Party. (Wikipedia)

In Jan of this year, there was once a news report on gscn.com.cn saying that When I am writing this post, I try to be objective but I am afraid I can’t. The content blew is my personal view of 50 Cent Party.

Gansu Province was going to recruit a team of 650 commentators to skew the public opinion to the correct direction. The report was quoted by many other websites, but none of the links was available soon. This is considered to be the proof of the existence of the so-called 50 Cent Party.

While Google was going to pull out of China, there seemed to be a very fierce debate about whether it was a good thing to Chinese people in China. No wonder why patritism was used against Google by many.

Trace back to an earlier time, after Facebook got blocked in China, the People’s Daily, which is a daily newspaper of the Chinese official press agency, released that 80 pct of netizens agree China should punish Facebook.
I think it should be as 100 pct of the 50 Cent Party agree China should punish the websites contains materials against Chinese gov.

The word 杯具（pronounced as beiju, means cups originally）is used by Chinese netizens quite often last year, especially when something bad happens.

The origin of the saying comes from a scene in a lectural programme of CCTV10, a professor said 悲剧 with an exaggerating facial expression. Soon, a picture with this facial expression and the subtitle 悲剧 on it has been widely spread among the netizens.

tragedy

Initially, it is very likely that someone on the web typed 悲剧 into 杯具 by mistake. The word 悲剧 truly means tragedy and it has the same pronunciation as 杯具.

For unknown reason, the misspelling is loved by Chinese netizens and becomes more popular to say when the correct word is expected. Finally the word 杯具 has been endowed with the meaning of tragedy, and mixed with its original meaning of cups, turned into a phenomenon.

Now when something bad happens, Chinese netizens will say 杯具。

Tips:
The pinyin input method is widely accepted in China. If you want to type some Chinese charactor by pinyin, the first step is to input its pinyin( its pronunciation), then to select among the options that match it. So a mistake such as 杯具 is able to get its soil to grow and bloom.