This Chinese proverb means that sometimes things can't be prevented. Much like my recent experience of having a broken laptop could not have been prevented. This allows thought to be taken away from the incident and how to deal with it instead. If it could not have been prevented, now look to how to deal with it.

Just a quick note to say I am back, with my new laptop after my old one broke a while ago. It is very beautiful (windows 7 seems to be working well), much faster than the old laptop and has loud inbuilt speakers.

All very impressive I'm sure, but I have been busy in my absense. I started Heisig's Remembering the Simplified Hanzi as anticipated when the book came. Although I haven't been testing myself much, past asking my girlfriend to casually quiz me on them every now and then. I have learnt the first 170 fairly confidently, though not quite sticking to the 15 a day anticpated, it seems to be going well. (I think she is accidently picking some characters up too.) There are a couple of blog posts waiting to be written about this experience. They will come soon, I will also by downloading ANKI soon.

I would like to thank all of you who dropped by in my absense. I guess I will have missed out on many a blog post. I hope to get back round to you all and read some of what I have missed out on. Here is to continuing Mandarin and blogging about it.

The interenet regulator ICANN has now allowed web addresses to be in non-Latin characters – such as Chinese, Arabic, Hindi or Russian Cyrillic script. The first of these Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) is thought to be up and running by the middle of next year.

This is quite exciting and interesting although all web addresses will still need "http://" at the beggining. It is being billed as one of the biggest changes to the interenet in the last 15 years.

The Internet had its 40th Birthday yesterday.

"Of the 1.6 billion users today worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not Latin-based," Beckstrom said at the opening of Icann's conference in Seoul, South Korea, this week. The conference approved the change today, its last day, following more than nine years of work and two years of testing.

"It's more incremental [than previous changes] but it's the single biggest change in 10 or 15 years," Beckstrom said. "It's about making the internet more global and more accessible. One world, one internet."