Twitter Account Suspension

My Twitter account (@CatChen) was suspended for half a month.



I woke up in the morning and found my Tweetie stopped updating. I thought Twitter was down, but it didn't recover after several hours. When I check out my Twitter web page, I saw that Account Suspended message:

This account is currently suspended and is being investigated due to strange activity. If we have suspended your account mistakenly, please let us know. See Suspended Accounts for more information.

What kind of strange activity did I have? I don't know. A lot of Chinese Twitter user got suspended for no reason, and I can only guess that using Tor might lead to strange client IP activity. No matter what was the real reason for my account suspension, I got to get it recovered first.

I tried to request on the web, but I saw nobody actually processing my request. The request stayed open for two weeks, and Twitter support didn't give me any update. When I saw no hope of getting my account back, I saw a tweet from a someone who had successfully rescued his/her account from suspension. He/she said that contacting suspended@twitter.com might help, and I tried. One day after talking to suspended@twitter.com, I got my account back.

This experience is awful, but at least I got some information to share: contact suspended@twitter.com ASAP, if your account got mistakenly suspended.

Graduation & MVP

My commencement was on July 1st, and I receive my second MVP award on the same day!

I was so nervous on June 30th, because I knew that there's an important day coming. I was ready for the ceremony, but I was not sure about the MVP award. I didn't know whether I could get it for a second time. I knew that one certificate from my university was coming, and I was still looking forward to receive another one from Microsoft.

My dad came to my commencement, with a Sony H7 camera, but he didn't manage to take picture of me, because I was too nervous and walking too fast while I was on the stage. After the ceremony, we started taking picture all around the campus. I just kept pulling out my phone from time to time, to check whether I received email from Microsoft.

That email came really on time. It was around 11:00 at night, the same as what happened last year. I was watching TV with my parents, and I told them that I managed to get it twice. They all felt happy and proud.

Atteding the Microsoft MVP Global Summit 2008

I got my first visa last month, and bought my first international airline tickets two weeks ago. And I will be flying to Seattle tomorrow.

Getting a visa seems easy to me. I don't know why. Maybe because I'm in the last year of my university study, and there's no reason for me to give up my degree at this point. During the interview, the visa officer just read my invitation letter and MVP recognition letter, and asked only 5 questions, then said "have a nice trip" to me.

The airline tickets from Beijing to Seattle and then back to Guangzhou cost me about 800 dollars, and that seems cheap enough to me. Since Microsoft will cover accommodation and transportation fees, I just need to spend around 1000 dollars for the whole trip.

Anyway, I got to sleep now, for I need to rush to the airport tomorrow morning. Good night guys.

Unlocking My iPhone

Finally, I have unlocked my iPhone with a pure software approach. Now I can make phone calls, and send out text messages. I can fully experience how good or bad an iPhone is.

I have spent a whole night on unlocking my iPhone. I had my iPhone worked in 1.1.1 as an iPod Touch before unlocking it. So I installed the unlocking software, and wanted to continue using 1.1.1. But then, I found that it had no signal. I read through the unlock tutorial, and found that I must upgrade it to 1.1.2 in order to fix the no signal problem.

I upgraded my iPhone to 1.1.2 for three times. The first time, I forgot to install OktoPrep, so I had to downgrade it again. The second time, jailbreak.jar failed to kick my iPhone out of recovery mode, so I considered that as a failure and downgraded it again. The third time, I used AppTappInstaller.exe to kict my iPhone out of recovery mode, and finally got it done.

Chinese New Year in Beijing

As I will go back home at the end of February after finishing my internship at Baidu.com, I will just stay at Beijing during the Chinese New Year. This let me avoid the horrible Chunyun. I had decided to stay before I came here. It has proven that I made a wise choice, since the storm made all kind of transportation stuck.

Internship at Baidu.com, Inc

My web development engineer internship in Baidu.com officially started last Wednesday. So far, I have been in this city for 12 days. Right! 12 busy days!

I flew to Beijing last Tuesday morning, took a lunch at McDonald's, and visited the company as a guest at the afternoon. Process of checking in was scheduled on Wednesday, and it took the whole morning. And then, I became a member of technical support group of service operation division under technical department. A web development engineer under technical support group sounds weird, right? At least I think so.

That is caused by a so-called historical problem. Before the company has a portal search, which means when it was still a search solution provider to other portals, technical support group wrote web pages for consumers and helped them consuming the core search service. The group played the role as consumer technical support, and ran under service operation division.

Nowadays, technical support group mostly acts as template support, which means writing templates for all kind of products. We also do front-end researches, in fields like web standards and JavaScript programming. There are many talented people in our group, and we share all information and knowledge we have freely via emails, blogs, and internal magazines.

So far, I enjoy working here, as I can take projects that I feel passionate with. I think Baidu.com would be a passionate start of my career.

P.S. My CV has been updated, for my TOEFL score was out and my internship started.

Exactly 300!

I wrote exactly 300 words in my TOEFL writing test second essay! It just reaches the minimum word count of so-called qualified essay.

In fact, I have done little preparation for my TOEFL test. From time to time, I think I need to do something about my TOEFL test, but I just don't want to do anything around it. So, I didn't use any strategy during the test, and spoke and wrote without any so-called pattern. I don't know what kind of score I might get for doing this. Anyway, it will just reflect my true level, I think.

Tired of filling application forms!

I'm applying jobs now. In fact, I hate filling out all those kind of forms online. They look familiar, and I still need to copy information from my profile and paste them into forms. Why they don't apply some open standards and APIs? For example, they can use hResume, which is a microformat.

I really want to implement my own open resume standards, and let those job application sites just crawl my website in order to get my information. Then I might have my resume done once for all.

Joining IfGoGo.com

Ok. I haven't written anything in this blog for a long time, but recently I have joint an English team blog. That is IfGoGo.com, which is an English blog written by Chinese.

I still have no idea about what I should post here and what I should post there. There's no theme for both blogs, so maybe I'll just post English stuffs randomly. Anyway, remember to check out what's on IfGoGo.com, because it has a wonderful team, and great posts will appear soon.

Translation Job

I've started translating Prototype and Scriptaculous in Action into Simplified Chinese since this month. It's a contract with Turing Book Company, Posts and Telecommunications Press. The book is more than 500 pages, and I'm going to finish it in 4 months, with my partner Junyu Wang.

I've finished first two chapters of the book in 2 weeks, and start feeling that the job is quite interesting. At first, I've found some phrases and clauses hard to translate, and asked the translation support group for help, or just try to see what Google Translate might offer me. Then, I started getting used to those phrases and knowing how to break down complex clauses. Google Translate did offer me a lot, more than translation results. It lets you know how to write translated sentences more like natural Chinese sentences.

The side effect of doing translation job is that, after reading every perfect phrase or complex clause in English, I would try to think about how to translate it, totally naturally, even if I have no intention to translate it. When I'm reading a book in English, I'll keep trying analysing what I've read, just like a parser, and this makes me feel weird.

Microsoft MVP Award received

This is the last day of the month, and I have to post something to keep the pace, which means at least 1 post per month. In fact, I received the MVP Award at the first day of the month, but I totally forgot to write it down in this blog.

There are around 200 active MVPs in mainland China, and about 2000 active MVPs all over the world. And I'm so proud to be one of these 2000. As an MVP, I received an Award Pack from Microsoft, which included a laser pen, a USB drive, and a $150 coupon from Microsoft Company Store.

I have chosen a camera, a headset and a keyboard in the Company Store, and had $60 left. Then I picked some gifts for my parents and friends. Sharing the value of the award with people who supported me makes me feel quite happy, as I think their support is also some kind of contribution to the community and they deserve it.

Keep Writing

I think I should keep writing as I'm preparing for the TOEFL iBT. However, I have no idea about what should I write. Keep writing all those TOEFL style topics, like do-you-agree-with-the-following-statement things? I don't think so. Maybe I should read some articles on the topic of American campus life or academic essays everyday, and then write some comments telling that this is something I like and that is something I dislike.

No Junk Food Month is nearly over

This May is my No Junk Food Month, and it's nearly over!

Advanced to Round 2

We got rank 26 with 7 votes in Round 1 of Imagine Cup 2007 Web Development invitational, and advanced to Round 2. Our project is a Q&A system with feature of recommendation. Here is the page of our team: Jovenes.

Blog*Spot or Block*Spot

It has been blocked in mainland again...

I hate Chinese bots!

"We're sorry, but access is denied to that document."

"This might be because you are accessing this site from a machine in China. Because of a massive amount of robot traffic from Chinese machines, we've had to take the unfortunate step of blocking access from those IPs."

Why Chinese programmers always design their program to use up all the resources, and do not consider other people who also need the resources?

I don't know what that bot is. It seems that it's Baidu's spider, but Baidu said not. Many sites have been *attacked* by this bot, including some of my sites.

Back to Blog*Spot

Well, Blog*Spot now can be accessed from China, while Sitesled cannot after the earthquake. I have to change the publishing address back to Blog*Spot. After changing back to Blog*Spot, I upgrade the old template to the new layout which supports widgets, and you may realize that my blog's interface has been changed.

Google Talk is the only survivor after the earthquake!

After the South China Sea earthquake, at least 6 international cable connected with China is damaged. In China, we cannot login with Windows Live Messenger or Yahoo Messenger. We still can use Google Talk and Tencent QQ, but friends in foreign countries cannot login with Tencent QQ for it has no server outside China. So, Google Talk become the only choice, if you want to chat with foreign friends.

How about Skype? It's a P2P client. Yes, I can login with my Skype, with a very unstable connection. It disconnects every few seconds, and connects after another minute. I cannot chat with this unstable connection, so I gave up using Skype.

The Internet is so slow here after the earthquake...

The Internet connection is quite slow in China, because at least 6 of the international cables connected with China were damaged yesterday night, during the earthquake in South China Sea. And it is heard that it needs a few days to repair these cables.

I cannot open almost any of the pages from foreign websites. I cannot login with my Windows Live Messenger. Anyway, Google's services, especially those have Simplified Chinese user interfaces, are accessible here, although they're a little bit slower than normal. Maybe because Google have some mirror servers in China.

I can login with my Google Talk, and I can open my Google Mail, so I'm still connected with my foreign friends.  Some friends outside China start asking me why they cannot visit some Chinese websites, and I just tell them the truth.

I hope those cables could be repair as soon as possible, because this slow connection makes me really frustrated, for "refresh" and "retry" are my "favorite" buttons now.

Mobile Blogging with Opera Mini 3.0

After upgraded to Opera Mini 3.0, I found out that it can upload photos to blog. I registered an Opera Community account instantly, and took a photo to upload. After uploading the photo, I entered some text for title and content and clicked submit, and the post has been published. It's great!

I was dreamming about an easy way for mobile blogging, and I think Opera Mini 3.0 would be just the right way. It's easy enough to use, and just take a little time to publish a post with one photo. In one day, I can publish 2 or 3 posts without interrupting my jobs or wasting a lot of time.

Oh, I nearly forgot to tell you the name and address of my mobile blog. It's called Cat in Mobile. And you can subscibe to its RSS feed.