The Great Firewall of China is really killing me today.

I’ve been using HotSpot Shield for the last couple weeks, but a few days before Chinese National Day (Sept 1) things went kaput.

I heard about http://www.ninjacloak.com/ from a buddy here and have use that to look at Facebook a couple times, but it’s kinda of a pain in the ass. I’m using http://dabr.co.uk/ to look at twitter, but, without TweetDeck, what’s the point?

I Googled Hotspot Shield the other day and I swear my Internet went out until I released and renewed my IP. I’ve heard the same thing from other students here. So this time I went right to http://download.com/ and searched Hotspot Shield. When I got to the page I clicked this link to download version 0.942-2 for Mac and… what do you know, “The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.”

After clicking the link about six more times, finally used NinjaCloak.com and pasted the address. (Using a proxy to download a proxy, that’s almost meta.)

The download was successful via NinjaCloak, but Hotspot Shield still doesn’t work (I now think it’s because I was watching too many videos and HotSpot decided I wasn’t worth helping because of all the bandwidth I was taking up.)

Admittedly, I haven’t given much effort to getting connected. I suppose I could do all kinds of stuff to get this working …like setting up my own proxy. Or, I don’t know, asking my cool tech friends about what they do. But, you know, I’m realizing I kinda like not worrying about what the world is doing. I kinda like that I don’t have the ability to Tweet from my iPhone every time something cool happens.

I like to boast about not owning a TV. And, I take pride in having no clue what 24 is about, or MadMen, or any other show like that. But, really, Facebook and Twitter are the same damn thing. Just stories. Things for us to keep up with.

It’s nice being disconnected. Who knew. Everything in moderation.

UPDATE: HotSpot Shield seems to be working fine from China now. You can download it by clicking the link above. If HotSpot still doesn’t work for you, and it did before, they (HotSpot) might have blocked your computer because you’ve been streaming too many videos or some other bandwidth intensive task. You might try uninstalling HotSpot, resetting your browser (google it), and then reinstalling. Or, if you’re there for any length of time, get a VPN, it’s simple and only cost like 50 bucks. I use Witopia. Cheers.