Wow- I am back!

Hi there,
I can't say that I really think you all are eagerly waiting for my next blog post -- I mean, I am sure you have busy lives to lead -- but I have to say that from my end, I am extremely happy to be back on my blog again.

A few posts ago I already reported that we had to install a "VPN" service to be able to access the sites that are blocked here by the Chinese government. Well, finally, in between Paul arriving back from Brazil, some teacher-parent conferences, and some miscellaneous busy-ness, we (meaning Paul of course) finally got around to it. So with this VPN service from WiTopia, we can now again access all the sites under the sun.

What is also so amazingly cool about this service -- and we are wondering why we did not buy it before -- is that now we can go on the Internet seemingly from anywhere in the world. When we open our VPN -- our own secure, special connection -- we can choose if we want to access the Internet through a server in Washington DC, in Amsterdam, or in any of the 30 or so cities on the list. You might wonder why this matters, but even in the U.S. we had noticed that you can't always access all the content on websites in another country. Especially with video clips of TV content, that clip might be blocked so that people won’t be able to access that video for free if (in their own country) the rights for that T.V. product were sold to someone else. (For example, if in the U.S. the television company NBC is paying a lot of money for the rights to show a certain swimming competition on T.V. they certainly don't want you to be watching that same competition for free on the Internet somewhere else.)

Oh well, this is just a long and elaborate way of saying that I am back. Hurrah!