Sorry! But now that I have finally managed to defeat the Great Firewall of China and have regained access to blocked sites like facebook and the google blogger site that I had always meant to use for this blog, I really had to move it here. It will be better for all concerned, since you'll have better options for following the blog, you won’t have to register and log in just to comment on posts, and the whole blog will be here, in one place, in one piece.
If you really want to go back to the old posts, you can still get them here.
So how did I defeat the firewall?
There were several elements that went into this. (If you don't speak geekish, though, you might want to retract your ears until you have safely glided past the following section. I'll let you know when it's safe to tune in again.)
- set up a socks5 proxy on localhost using openssh's -D option: The command line to use is ssh -D 1080 {some-host}. This sets up a socks5 proxy on localhost, using the standard socks5 port of 1080. You can substitute some other port if you need to, perhaps to avoid conflicting with some service already running locally on 1080. The host you use for some-host should be a host on which you have log in privileges (i.e. you have to have an account there), it has to be somewhere you can get to from China, and it has to be somewhere that isn't trapped behind China's firewall.
- configure your browser to use your proxy: This is different for each browser, but you want to configure the browser to use socks5 protocol, with proxy host of 127.0.0.1, and proxy port of 1080 (or whatever port you used instead). With Firefox, you do this through the Preferences screen that controls "how you connect to the internet."
- configure your browser to make DNS requests using your proxy: Again, this is different for each browser. For Firefox, you need to browse to the internal configuration URL about:config. Once you are there, set a filter for network.proxy.socks_remote_dns and toggle the setting from false to true. (To toggle the setting, select the line for the setting, click with the right mouse button, and choose Toggle from the popup context menu.)
{End of geek-speak.}
Now, on to the real subject of today's post.
I met a nice fellow expat yesterday who is a violinist. Score one for my campaign to do chamber music while I am here! If we find a cellist, we can do piano trios, and with a violist, we can do quartets! For now, just duets, starting next week.
Now I'm off to the local music store (Parson's music) to see if I can find some interesting violin/piano sonatas. Hope they have the Grieg C minor. I've always wanted to play that with someone.
Postscript: Friday afternoon
I had a lovely walk over to the neighborhood of the Shanghai Music Conservatory, which produced a handful of pictures you can see here.
I'm afraid Parson's music was a disappointment for sheet music. Some shops adjacent were somewhat better, but selection was ultimately quite limited. I did manage to score a volume of transcriptions by Jascha Heifetz for violin and piano.
Closing thought for today.
Shanghai seems to have a very great number of institutions of higher learning and specialized research institutes of all kinds. Below you will find a visual aid which may help you to "calibrate" your sense of just how specialized and downright ahead of the curve some of these are:
(Ignore the scooter. I waited five minutes to get an unobstructed view of the portal to this important research institute, but alas, no one came to remove it, I grew impatient, and in the end I snapped the very best picture I could.) You may not have known that there was a research institute devoted to "Real Estate Science" anywhere in the world. Well, there is one in Shanghai, and I've seen it!
We should not mock this.
A little over 25 years ago, when I was teaching in the Mathematics Department at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, three of us wanted to secede and form a new department of Computer Science. At the time, this was regarded with utter derision by a few of the more "conservative" members of the faculty. They had fresh in their minds how they had recently managed to quash a long-standing department they felt didn't have sufficient academic merit -- namely, the department of Typewriting. I'm afraid those faculty must have felt that we were trying to revive that department by some sort of subterfuge. The dedicated real estate scientists of this institute may well feel just as ahead of their time as we sadly misunderstood computer scientists did at Tufts back in 1983.
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