Give me access to random info or give me death!

It is very odd coming from America which despite what people say and what may or may not be true is still one of if not the most free country on earth, at least in terms of speech and the like to come to China. There are of course many many things to come to terms with in China and on the whole it has been a ver painless switch, except in terms of not being able to have the choices at the grocery store and the speed of the internet. However, a particular vexing problem and one that is not going to go away is the censoring of the internet. I don't know about you but I have many random thoughts throughout the day, and I had become used to simply logging on to wikipedia to answer the questions that these thoughts raised. now i realize that wikipedia is not always a reliable source blah blah blah BUT as compared to the published tomes of information na dtheir web counterparts it is always nice to get more than a small paragraph. While in Beijing wikipedia worked fine but now it never works, the "server never responds". AND nw youtube has followed suit. I find this particularly amusing since the largest problem that I have read about youtube having is the copyright issues and we all know how seriously China takes those. The odd news article is laso off limits such as the gold medal awarded to some Tibetan or other, though a few days after it came out i was able to read those articles. The youtube thing happened so suddel that I am inclined to blame the meeting of the party congress and maybe they don't want people to publish video blogs or the like but even that doesn't make that much sense. Anyways, I use it to download music videos to show to my class and I have enough in reserve to last a good while but I might be forced to switch to simple mp3s. Eh.