Monique Van Dusseldorp posting on the Poynter Institute website writes about the Great Firewall of China project.

The site purports to view any URL through a server hosted inside the People’s Republic and to return information regarding whether your site is blocked or not. Interesting. According to the site, Secong Goose is banned, but my family site is not. If so, it is likely due to keywords (like newspapers and media) or the discussion of Drupal and open publishing technologies.

Though I’m not sure why the Goose would lead to Chinese sedition, I suppose that I’m proud to be banned.

See the original item at Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.

Well, this little guy sums it up pretty well.

Who is he? The mascot of Brussels, of course.

We’re still alive. Doing quite well in fact.

We are at a different hotel now, in Redich on the Lux-German border. Across the Moselle River is Germany.

Staying in a very nice hotel in a sleepy, little Hot Springs style resort town (only smaller). Ended up here after our reservations in Luxembourg City fell through. But, Amy wanted to tour the Moselle, and we were able to see Lux City this afternoon, so it worked out pretty well.

Have already been to: Antwerp, Brugge, Brussels, Oostende (a resort town on the North Sea), Liege, Huy, Namur (the capital of Wallonia, or French-speaking Belgium), Durbuy, a tiny hamlet in the Ardennes, Bastogne, Arlon, Luxembourg City, and now Richen.

Tomorrow we tour the Moselle valley, and may go castle hunting. We also plan to stop at the WWII museum in Diekirch before heading to Clerveaux.

Then on Friday, we take the car back to Liege and head to Maastricht, Holland.

Fun note — the official mascot of Bruseels is a statue called the Mannekin Pis, which is a three year old boy taking a whiz. Tourists come from around the world to see it.

Here in Redich, they have a rotating statue of Bacchus on the main walkwaz along the river. Very strange.

Well, after a long day of sitting on airplanes, I’m in Portland for OSCON.

Nothing to report there, since I don’t go to the con until tomorrow. But I am playing around with my new phone.

I found a nice little Japanese restaurant a couple of blocks away — Steve would approve. The Koji Osakaya. I managed to order two things I’d never seen before: sweet bean curd nigiri and pickled daikon sushi roll. The daikon was fine, and the bean curd was a real find. I also had a bowl of nokutori (?) udon — beef and egg with noodles in broth. I love udon.

Stupid me, I forgot that I had a camera phone until I had finished eating. But some pics are attached.

Bernard Moon sent me word of the <a href="http://goingon.com">GoingOn launch</a>.  It’s a social network platform built on Drupal 4.7.  They’ve done some interesting work.

This is a cross-post test to see if this post makes it to my ‘real’ blog.

As of yesterday, I’m off to O’Reilly Open Source Convention held in Portland, OR this July 24-28.

I will not be at the Drupal code sprint, sadly.

I’ll be in town from the 25th through 29th. So if you’re going. Leave a comment here or in the Drupal forum.

Hey — just going to explot the Drupalverse for a minute.

My wife and I are planning our first trip to Europe. We intend to go in late September for two weeks.

And we’re going to the Low Countries: Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, (and maybe Germany).

If any of you have advice, please drop it in the comments.

We’re currently planning to visit Amsterdam, Utrecht, Antwerp, Brussels, Brouge, Liege, The Ardennes and Luxembourg City.

Our interests: Food, Art (viewing and buying), Protestant history, and beer. We dislike ‘tourists’ and prefer to blend in with the locals as much as possible.

True story.

I took the weekend to go to Savannah and celebrate my 6th anniversary. Yesterday, my wife looked over my blog entries.

HER: You were blogging at 7 o’clock on our anniversary?!?

ME: You were in the shower.

I gotta say, there’s nothing like blogging (or writing code) while wearing robe & slippers, lying on 300-thread count sheets and propped on 4 pillows. On Wi-Fi.

I’m getting awfully geeky.

So I added Akismet as part of the WordPress 2.0 upgrade process.

So far, the service has trapped over 200 spam comments.

Very nice.

I finally got around to upgrading to WP 2.0.

I avoided upgrading for awhile, on the grounds that it would take too much time. Hah. If you discount the 2 minutes it took to backup MYSQL, and the 10 minutes it took to download and archive my old installation, the entire upgrade process took about 75 seconds.

Quick likes/dislikes.

+ Eaaaaaaaaasy upgrade. Painless and perfect.

+ Akismet looks good. I even created a dummy WordPress.com blog just so I could get an Akismet key.

+ Nicer default fonts for editing :-)

- Defaults to a WYSIWIG editor. I hate those things. But very easy to turn off.

- Like Drupal 4.7, there’s a lot of unnecessary AJAX-y type interface stuff on the edit panel. Yes, it’s cool to show/hide metadata options. But I prefer to be able to see all options by default. Let me turn things off rather than have to hunt to find features. Use of collapsable forms reminds me of an old, bad trend.

Well, minor gripes aside, color me impressed.