A Tea Addict's Journal

Earthquake means no internet

December 29, 2006 · 2 Comments

As many of you might have heard, there was a fairly serious earthquake in Taiwan a few days ago. Among the damages it did was the severing of the underwater fibre-optic cable that carries much of the internet (as well as voice) data traffic between Asia and North America. For the past few days, there was no internet access here (for all intents and purposes) between here and the United States or Europe. Much of the net is still extremely slow or simply times out for me here, so updates will be a little more sporadic (and definitely picture-less) until things get back to normal.

Among the tea things that happened recently was a triple tasting of three different kinds of loose puerh…. which was rather interesting with varying levels of black liquor and aged taste. I also met a new tea friend, KL, who is quite nice and has interesting things to share. We might meet up again in a few days to try more tea.

Anyway, hope you all had a nice Christmas break, and are drinking lots of tea :). I think the internet will get faster as the repairs get underway, but at the same time, I am logging on at 2:30am on the Friday night before New Year’s, not exactly a time when net traffic is high (and even then it took minutes for me to get to this page). I think during much of the day it will simply be impossible to do anything on the net, still, until they replaced the damaged sections of the cables, which can take 2-3 weeks….

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2 responses so far ↓

  • lewperin // December 30, 2006 at 11:17 am | Reply

    I’m so glad you’re back!

    This week, I’ve been checking your blog every day and wondering what was happening. I knew about the cable breach, and I knew that it fnugled Internet access for lots of East Asia, but – duh – somehow never made the connection. So I wavered between worrying that something bad had happened to you and relief that you’d given yourself some time off.

  • MarshalN // December 30, 2006 at 1:19 pm | Reply

    Thanks for the concern, Lew 🙂

    The first day of the internet-knockout was pretty chaotic. Nobody knew why initially, and even phones to the US didn’t work. Apparently, calls to Taiwan had a 98% failure rate. I tried calling the States… and none of them went through. Imagine that…

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