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.