New to Mac World

I'm a newly converted and in General find Mac's far superior to PC's
I am still learning and hope someone can help with these questions:

1. Where is there a good site for Smiley's?
I currently use planet smilies: free smilies, also known as emoticons. for my Emails which is somewhat basic and not very expansive.

2. I live in China and have tried downloading the Chinese Public Holiday Calendar 1.0 into my iCal and always get rejected saying
"Error subscribing to the calendar.
Request to ical.mac.com failed after trying for 30 seconds."

where am i going wrong? do i need to subscribe to anything?

Hope someone can point me in the right direction

I'm a newly converted and in General find Mac's far superior to PC's
I am still learning and hope someone can help with these questions:

1. Where is there a good site for Smiley's?
I currently use planet smilies: free smilies, also known as emoticons. for my Emails which is somewhat basic and not very expansive.

2. I live in China and have tried downloading the Chinese Public Holiday Calendar 1.0 into my iCal and always get rejected saying
"Error subscribing to the calendar.
Request to ical.mac.com failed after trying for 30 seconds."

where am i going wrong? do i need to subscribe to anything?

Hope someone can point me in the right direction;D

Welcome, and I'm glad to hear your pleased with your mac.
1)Found this website not sure if it works or is what your looking for
FREE Emoticons

2) Try opening up iCal and going to Calender in the menu bar>Subscribe and then copy and paste this url
webcal://ical.mac.com/ical/China32Public32Holidays.ics

Hope this helps.

Thanks a lot dbnoise the emoticons was just what i wanted.

Tried loading the Calender as you suggested by copying and pasting but it always seem to 30 sec time out

solution for ical from china

Hey Jay,

I was having the same problem as you with not being able to download the China Holidays calendar (or other Apple published iCal calendars) here in China since March of last year (well, that's when it says it last updated... hadn't used iCal much last year so didn't really pay attention to it, but it definitely worked ok here in China in previous years). I searched all over Apple discussions for info on it (and Googled it, which is how I came up with your post here), but no one seemed to be having the same type of problem, so I figured like so many other things it was being blocked by the GFWC (Great Firewall of China). So I figured like so many other things since the subscription to the iCal uses a URL just like webpages, maybe they could use a proxy server also. I had to try a number of different ones and toy around with the URLs a bit, but finally found one that works. Try this:

1) Go to Calendar -> Subscribe in iCal menu
2) Copy and paste the following URL: http://1000megs.co.cc/proxy/browse.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fical.mac.com/ical/China32Holidays.ics
3) Repeat for any other Apple iCal calendars you want (I also use US and Japan Holidays calendars), just click on them on the Apple site (you can go to Calendars -> Find Shared Calendars in iCal to take you to the listing of calendars on the Apple site) and it will open the URL in iCal before trying to download them... then just copy the first part of the above URL up to the ical.mac.com part and past that over the new URL up to that same point, and it should work fine).
4) If you ever need a good list of proxy servers to access blocked sites in China (and pretty much ANY foreigner living here does), check out proxyDOTorg

Hope that works!