Oh, the Internet

How else can you live in Taiwan, have regular conversations with friends in the United States, and watch British television shows (mostly) at will? The shrinking world is truly a wonderful place.

With that in mind, and given that that's ALL that's in my mind at the moment, a few tidbits.

It's wonderful that many American sites, like Amazon and Facebook and Google, can be accessed here as well as anywhere else. I check Facebook and Google daily; I recently received a lovely package from Amazon containing my new e-reader, which I named Johannes (other options notwithstanding). Skype is a necessity in my life, though I loathe the 15-hour time difference these days.

What's not quite so wonderful, for me, at least, is the inability of sites like NBC, Fox, and Hulu to broadcast to Taiwan. It leads me to other video sources, ones with less-than-savory features like a time-based watching system which, for whatever reason, does not work here. There are at least 3 separate such sites that I can think of which have a 72 minute daily limit--which is reasonable, in theory, and works as such in the United States. Here, however, it doesn't. Rather, I've been stopped multiple times about 28 minutes into an hour-long show, and once 15 minutes into my second half hour-show of the day, with the message announcing I've watched my 72 minutes for the day. Except for the fact that it is impossible to watch 72 minutes in 28 minutes. Also worth noting is that I clear my cookies off my browser whenever I finish watching--so how are they keeping track of how much time I spend on their sites?

And then there's my computer's constant inability to figure out where I am and my language preferences. Despite the fact that I check my Gmail account daily, and Google almost as often, always in English, about 30% of the time, typing in "www.google.com" will yield me "www.google.com.tw". The statistics are worse on sites like MSN, which prompts me to specify my preferred country, Taiwan or the US, every time I go to it. And then there's Amazon, which, even after I changed my location in their system and entered a Taiwanese shipping address, still shows me Kindle results for America which may or may not be available in Taiwan.

So again, I say oh, the Internet. So much wonderfulness and so much annoyance, all packaged together.