I let myself indulge in reading blogs tonight when I was planning to do some work. In order to make myself feel a bit less guilty, I read blogs in three languages – Japanese, Chinese and English. Japanese blogs take me the longest time to read, and I need my electronic dictionary as well. English ones still ok and Chinese ones still the fastest.

Afterwards, I want to write something down of what I just read, but the language in my mind get me a bit confused. I found that if read an article in Japanese, then it’s difficult to explain and even write it down in English or Chinese. The language structures are different. I suppose the grammar of Chinese and English are more similar than to Japanese. Also the ways of saying something sometimes make no senses if is translated directly into another language. I can understand the meanings, but translate them into another language is another stories.

As you may have realised, what I wrote above doesn’t make too much senses. I guess I need to off to bed now. Let’s see which languages will appear in my dream.

After trying a few like Zoundry and Ecto, I finally choose Performancing as my local blogging software. Acutally it just a plugin of Firefox not really a software, but this is also one of the reason I like it.

It’s got whatever basic but necessary functions that I need, such as multi-blog support, WYSIWYG-editor and HTML editor. Morover, whenever I want to start blog a content from a page, it appears as easy as just a click. But it will be perfect if it could have a spell-check function for a poor spelling person like me.

This one is written in performancing as a test and demo.

When I woke up this morning and opened my curtain, the world outside my window became totally white - white Durham finally arrived. I was so excited. After have a quick breakfast and took a shower, I took my camera and then ran out of my door.

A city like Durham can never be less beautiful to me, not to mention when it’s covered by snow. I walked around most of the city today even to Hild and Bede College, it’s actually my college but I’ve only been there once since I came back this year. There were a few kids already out there enjoying snowball fighting. Many families also came out for a walk in this beautiful scenery, it good for them after having Christmas turkey I think :). The city seems became bigger to me as for a distance that normally takes 10 minutes to walk took me twice long today. I guessed it was the whiteness that stopped me and made myself can’t stop pressing shutter. I took about 50 photos today, well, more than that I think. They are all taged under “Snow Durham 2005” in Flickr.

My friends told me stay in Durham for holiday will be very bored, but if Durham is going to be like that for the whole holiday, I think I rather prefer staying here. Haha!

After travelling around last week, I am back today. How was your Christmas? I had a good one. Anyway, when I clicked on Bloglines and started put myself into blogosphere today, there were a few posts about domain, hosting and moving hosting. Surprisingly, most of them are from those popular blogger in China.

Keso, widely recognised as the top blogger in Chinese IT blogs, said he got a notice from his domain company said his domain (keso.cn) will temporarily stopped until further notices. Wang Jianshuo’s blog had experienced 8 days of nightmare, finally it’s back to the net now. But Jianshuo is more concerning strengthened ICP requirement. Herock Post also adopted a new foreign hosting Dream Host, he claimed that after giving up using a Chinese blog system and started a foreign one, it’s not very happy to use a foreign hosting and gave up a Chinese one again this time. My friend Sinid also changed his hosting to a foreign one.

Back to mine, I am still using the one from 512j.com. To be honest it has been a quite good hosting company since I started using their services about one year and a half ago. With such a low price (100 RMB/year, about 12 USD/year), I am surprised with their stable and fast hosting. But now they rejected being mapping by my domain because they were told that mine was not yet registered in MII (Ministry of Information Industry). I’ve been thinking move my blog to a non-China hosting company, but the only thing I am worrying about is that whether it will be blocked in China in future? I want my families and friends in China to read my blog, so once it’s blocked I have to spend a lot of efforts moving around again.

As I said, I have submitted my application for registering in MII. They said it’s going to take about 20 days. I submitted on 13th December, which means by 2nd of January I should be able to let my blog work properly under richardhong.com. But now, what can I do now apart from crossing fingers. What annoying me most is that all the traffics to my site have been declining since richardhong.com is stopped.

Let’s see how it is going to be by 2nd of January.