Although these efforts may have had an effect on getting CBC's radio program unblocked, Wikipedia and the BBC have been unblocked here for weeks now, and so it's a bit of a stretch to imply that somehow their unblocking is related. As #5 mentioned, these things come and go, it might be unblocked today but it's just as likely to get re-blocked tomorrow. In any event, it's trivial to bypass the blocks with a VPN or a proxy.

Last year, in the week leading up to the "1 year before the Olympics" mark, there was incredibly bizarre weather in Beijing. Short thunder storms with strong lightning, heavy rains and a whole host of other phenomenon. Then on August 8, 1 year to the day before the opening ceremony it was blue skies and sunshine that lasted for several days. Whether it was just a coincidence I don't know, but it sure got a lot of people talking and wondering.

As for the poster wanting to know about why there are people stranded due to snowstorms, those snowstorms are happening in the south of China where it almost never snows and at this time of year you can normally get away with wearing a t-shirt! Now they are knee deep in snow. If you mess around with the weather in one place it's not too great a leap to realise that its going to manifest in other places (butterflies flapping their wings and all that).

A year or two ago I decided to learn Dvorak to see what people were going on about.

Normally, on a qwerty keyboard I type at around 75-80wpm. After a month of Dvorak I was typing at 60wpm in both layouts. The decrease in speed, compounded by the fact that no-one else's computer had the Dvorak layout installed, were killer factors, and so I switched back.

Quite a few posters have mentioned they got a speed increase after switching to Dvorak, I'd be interested in knowing your before/after speeds. My guess is that the % increase is significantly smaller for people who can already type at fast speeds (> 75wpm) using qwerty.

A minor correction regarding Chinese place names, on page two of your article, Shenzen and Guanjhou should be Shenzhen and Guangzhou.