Well, it was a glorious 16 days, but all good vacations must come to an end. After a couple of weeks in the US recharging my own sorely depleted batteries, I am back in China.

What did I discover in two weeks in the US?

1) Cable television has grown beyond all recognition since I left the country. My mother has 999 channels of digital cable, of which we could actually access something like 200.

2) Unfortunately, there is exactly the same amount of good programming as there was when I was kid and there were only five channels. They're just spread more thinly.

3) You can apparently never have too many home shopping channels.

4) American television news is in dire shape, unless you like talkshows, breezy hairstyles and news about celebrities and gang shootouts. But, then, I used to work in local television news in the early 1990s and it was pretty much in dire shape then, too.

5) Winter is a great time to visit Yosemite because there just aren't that many people there.

6) An iPod and noise-reducing headphones are key to surviving long-haul flights with your sanity intact.

7) Surprisingly, United Airlines' service has gotten much better since I last went to the US 15 months ago. Either coming out of bankruptcy has put everyone in a better mood, I got lucky, or was mellowed by my adherence to point six, above.

8) However, American airport security remains a disaster area. For the last time, there is nothing in my shoes except for orthotics. To the best of my knowledge, no recorded hijacking of a commercial aircraft has been perpetrated with orthotics.

What does this have to do with technology in China? Nothing. But then, I haven't been in China the last couple of weeks. However, there have been some interesting developments in the past couple of weeks and I will post about them over the next few days.

In the meantime, if you want an immediate China tech fix I highly recommend this post from Danwei's translation demon Joel Martinsen on the regulatory confusion surrounding blogs in the Mainland. Take a guess on how many regulatory agencies share responsibility for online media in China. Write the number down. Then read Martinesen's post and see how close you were. Hint: Think double digits.

Hope you had a great holiday.