Blog Reactivated

Today's weather: High = 14 Low = 8
Sunny and chilly

Hello world again!

After numerous email requests from readers, I've decided to get this blog back and running again. I've reached a bit of a compromise in that I'll keep the blog going, but stay off facebook for quite some time yet. Besides, facebook access from within mainland China is very difficult -- reinstating my account wouldn't be an option even if I wanted to.

Privacy concerns are what prompted me to disappear off facebook and pull this blog. But after some encouragement from some friends who are in favor of free speech .... well needless to say, I'm back.

Having thought about it some more, there isn't as much of a privacy concern with this blog as with facebook. As I see it, there are only two ways to come across a blog site like this. One, you do a search for a topic of interest, such as "life in Shanghai" or "blogs about Shanghai" or something like that. The other way is if you already have this blog address.

For the most part, I'm writing to a general audience here, which may or may not include specific friends and family members. In looking at the patterns of how I've written these blogs in the past, I habitually stick to general terms and avoid giving out specific names of people, addresses, personal details, and information that could affect others' privacy unless they've consented first.

When I do write in specific terms, it tends to be neutral information that others can use if they want, or just skip over if not interested. For example, the schedule of a train, how much an airplane ticket costs, how to cross a land border, the traffic patterns in a city, or some details about how to teach mathematics. In other words, it's the kind of information could already be found on the internet or from other sources.

However, and this becomes the whole point of why I write these blogs -- I try to bring out information that is both useful and extremely difficult to find from other sources. It's not that the information is confidential, but it's because few people have taken to posting it.

For example, the details of how the traffic patterns work in a city like Wuhan (where I used to live) are almost nonexistent online, yet that city suffers from chronic traffic congestion on par with Sao Paulo and other cities that make the top 10 list of the worst traffic in the world. If you do a search on the internet for "cities with the worst traffic" you will invariably find Sao Paulo and Los Angeles, but Wuhan won't even make the list.

But if you're stuck in horrible jams on the way back from the airport that last for more than 3 hours on a Sunday night like I was repeatedly last year, then you begin to wonder why the traffic is so bad and why this city isn't on any top 10 list. The next step is to start researching the details for Wuhan traffic and looking for creative ways to beat the jams.

Eventually you say screw it, the traffic is so bad, the city isn't worth living in, let's pack up and move to Shanghai.

With all that in mind, this blog is mainly designed to inform and to share stories.

Facebook, on the other hand -- I'm not such a big fan of it anymore. Even if there are so-called privacy filters and your account is really limited to friends and family members, you tend to forget who's reading. This is especially true if you have 500+ friends on your profile like I once had. So you might drop your guard, let a personal comment slip the net, and someone inadvertently gets offended.

The irony here is that you think you are secure or have privacy with your "personal" account and selected friends on facebook but you are really not. Meanwhile, a public blog like this has the ironic effect of being more private because of the very nature of your being selective of what you choose to post -- after all, anyone could be reading!