Like The Terminator, I’m back.

You may have noticed that I’ve been MIA from my blog the last few days. No, I wasn’t arrested for spreading malicious rumors about Chairman Mao or writing scurrilous stories about Yao Ming. My absence was caused by a more mundane malady: an uncooperative computer.

After an update to my operating system screwed up my MacBook Air, I had to erase and reinstall the hard drive. And that took a couple of days because of my glacial Internet connection and the difficulty of getting tech support in China. But now that everything’s fixed, I can fill you in on the major events you’ve missed:

* Because of my mastery of Chinese numbers, I finally learned the correct pronunciation of Erqi Square, which commemorates the infamous Feb. 7, 1923 massacre of striking railway workers in Zhengzhou. Erqi is pronounced like “Archie’’ because the Chinese number 2 sounds like the letter R and the number 7 sounds like “chee.’’ So a place named after an event that took place on 2/7 is naturally pronounced like those two numbers combined.

* My TV got hooked up over the weekend with a Rube Goldbergish contraption of wires, cables, boxes and power strips. I get a smorgasbord of Chinese channels, including news, soap operas, reality shows and war movies. All I’m missing is the one station that I could actually understand – an English-language news network run by the state broadcaster CCTV, a 22-channel behemoth that’s like a combination of NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, PBS and CNN. (More on CCTV later.)

* I attended a couple more of those informal English-speaking sessions for Chinese students. At one of them, which was held outdoors and was nearly drowned out by a nearby rock concert, students took so many pictures of me that I felt like Brad & Angie on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival.

* Additions to my list of weird English names adopted by Chinese students: Zero, Seven, Silly, Blunt, Apple, Happy, Pobby and Demo.