Jammie Thomas agreed to let me put this website together to help her accept paypal donations.

She’s the lady that was sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for alleged music pirating and illegal sharing of songs. She was fined $220,000. She is a 30-year-old single mom from Brainerd, MN with an annual income of $36,000. The internet got her into this, the internet can get her out!

freejammie.com

Fundraising via the internet is being touted as the future of charity. At realitycharity.com, you can share your ailment online and see who feels sympathetic.
…
Not all appeals are successful: McCann-Swanson, a 30-year-old from Wisconsin, has more than met her target in just four weeks, but countless others – such as Sarah Jenkins from Chesham in Buckinghamshire, looking for $60,000 (£30,000) to clear her student loans – have yet to raise a penny.

“Hey brother, can you spare a few grand?” (Mike Peake, _The Guardian_ – July 9, 2007)

Oh, it’s so sad. If you would like to donate to help her out: go here.

http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4286

Thanks to John at Sinosplice for pointing me to the fix!

Discussion about the disappearing photos on flickr forum.

(Confused? “What is Firefox?,” you ask. It’s a web browser! If you don’t know what browser you’re using you might be using Internet Explorer — the one with the big blue “e”. Firefox is a safer browser, download it here.)

I can confirm that I was able to access Wikipedia on Thursday night (from Kunming, Yunnan Province in China), and then Friday afternoon it was blocked. (“Host not accessible” error.) Bummer.

Also… all blogs at blogspot.com are inaccessible. However, you can log-in to blogger.com and update your blogspot blog. Weird.

And… the number of google searches is limited. After a dozen or so, it just returns an error.

Sigh.

Of course, Wikipedia has the fully annotated story about the miracle of access from the mainland:

Beginning from October 10, 2006, conflicting reports came in from different parts of China about a possible lifting of the block. The first report of a change was by a blogger in Liuzhou, Guangxi, who posted his finding to an online forum at about 6 pm on October 10, 2006, Beijing Time. However, access appears to differ depending on location and internet service provider as a result of more fine-grained blocking. [...] Posters to the Slashdot online forum who stated that they were in Beijing further noted that while they could access the English language version of the article on Tiananmen Square, which includes a brief description of the 1989 protests, the article Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 remained blocked. There was a similar report that the article democracy is available on English Wikipedia, while Falun Gong is unavailable. In contrast, Reporters Without Borders stated on 12 October that English Wikipedia appeared entirely unblocked, including the article on the 1989 protests, but that the Chinese language version was unaccessible for most Chinese. The advocacy organization criticized the government shift as meant “to appease its critics abroad while continuing to censor the information available to its own population,” while congratulating “those in charge of Wikipedia, especially Jimmy Wales”. Wikipedia users state that other language editions, including German, Japanese, and Korean are available at this time.

Yes, it’s crazy that it took almost a month before I finally heard about this. Check out Andrew Lih’s blog on the topic.

Speaking of limited internet access, however, I still seem to have a limit on the number of google searches I’m allowed. It just shuts down on me (“host not found”) after a dozen or so searches. Also, I was having problems accessing blogs hosted on blogger.com/blogspot.com recently. Anyone else notice this?

I’ve been working for the “Give Missourians a Raise” coalition doing their web design. I’m so pleased that I can still be a part of things back home. Makes me feel useful.

“Give Missourians a Raise” was just featured in a headline story on PBS’s Newshour with Jim Lehrer. Very exciting to see that kind of nation coverage on this issue:

• Link to transcript.
• Link to audio file (MP3).

It would be nice to find some way to be useful in Kunming.

Kunming?gwp=11&ver=2.0.0.453&method=3