Category: Internet & Blogging

Caveat: A piracy of convenience

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling / Internet & Blogging

I have evolved a pattern as far as acquiring new music. I follow leads of things I'm interested in to youtube. Most anything can be found there, uploaded by somebody. 

There are free online web services that quickly "grab" the soundtrack of any youtube video and will give you an mp3 file. So I grab the file, and I save it to my computer, and then I use FTP to put it on my private server (my secret cloud). With my new Linux system, this is almost trivial, since FTP is integrated with the file manager – my cloud is just another folder on my desktop.

On my Samsung Android phone, I open my FTP app and grab the mp3 file into my Music folder on my phone. 

In about 3 minutes, I have acquired a new song or piece of music and can listen using my phone, which is also my main mp3 player. The one drawback is if the youtube version I've captured is of poor quality… but generally some google-fu can find a better version.

In fact, I believe artists should be remunerated for their work. But I can't get Amazon to work smoothly with my system – it doesn't play nicely with the Korean internet (at least, not for someone who wants to pay with a US-based identity), for one thing, nor with Linux, for another thing. Other online music vendors create the same kinds of problems. Further, the hoops they make you jump through and the crap they put on your computer, as part of their efforts to monetize customer buying interests and follow online behavior are off-putting.

So what I do is that I go into Amazon and "buy" the music I like, but I never download it – because I already have the file using my – for me – easier system. The artists get their money, and I get my music in the most convenient way. 

What I'm listening to right now.

Brian Eno and John Cale, "Spinning Away."

Lyrics.

Up on a hill, as the day dissolves
With my pencil turning moments into line
High above in the violet sky
A silent silver plane – it draws a golden chain
One by one, all the stars appear
As the great winds of the planet spiral in
Spinning away, like the night sky at Arles
In the million insect storm, the constellations form
On a hill, under a raven sky
I have no idea exactly what I've drawn
Some kind of change, some kind of spinning away
With every single line moving further out in time
And now as the pale moon rides (in the stars)
Her form in my pale blue lines (in the stars)
And there, as the world rolls round (in the stars)
I draw, but the lines move round (in the stars)
There, as the great wheels blaze (in the stars)
I draw, but my drawing fades (in the stars)
And now, as the old sun dies (in the stars)
I draw, and the four winds sigh (in the stars)

[daily log: walking, 7km]

Caveat: depanoramification

Banalities & Journaling / Internet & Blogging / My Photos

There once was an online photo-hosting service called Panoramio. I never used it much, but I liked it because it had the ability to link one's photos directly to googlemaps – the photos could be geolocated, and seen by others.

I only ever had a total of 19 photos hosted on Panoramio, but I liked that they were there. I considered them among my best photos, and each photo was "viewed" by Panoramio users 20,000-30,000 times.

Well, Panoramio is closing down. It was long ago acquired by google, and finally google got tired of it. They've got some other thing they would rather users use that presumably offers similar functionality, but it's part of their social network dumpster fire, which I have no interest in. 

Here, for posterity, are the 19 photos I had on Panoramio – now saved on my server, but of course the active geolocation is turned off. I have had to remove the Panoramio slideshow widget from my blog's sidebar, since it no longer works.

200708xx_casadelosamigosac

Casa de los Amigos, Mexico City (where I lived and worked, 1986-87), taken 2007

200708xx_piramidedelsolteotihuacan

Pirámide de la Luna, desde Pirámide del Sol, Teotihuacán, taken 2007

200708xx_collisionwithbutterfly

My truck's front license plate, Sentinal, North Dakota, taken 2007

20070810_madriverbeach

Mad River Beach, Arcata, California, taken 2007

20080111_munhwachodeunghakgyo

문화초등학교, Goyang, Gyeonggi, taken 2008

20080111_ringguaporeomeohakwon

링구아포럼어학원, Goyang, Gyeonggi, taken 2008

20080307_jeongbalsanyeok_ipgu1beon

정발산역 입구1번, Goyang, Gyeonggi, taken 2008

20090501_pajugeumchon

Geumchon, Paju, Gyeonggi, taken 2008

20090501_welcometogoyang

Welcome to Goyang, Gyeonggi, taken 2008

20090602_hosugongwon

밤에 호수공원, Goyang, Gyeonggi, taken 2009

20091027_portsaintnicholasroad

Port Saint Nicholas Road, Craig, Alaska, taken 2009

20091117_heavenmanitoba

Emerson, Manitoba, taken 2009

20100215_yeonjudae

연주대, Gwanak, Gyeonggi, taken 2010

20100220_geumsansa

금산사, Jeonju, Jeollabuk, taken 2010

20100402_sakurajimakagoshima

Sakurajima, Kagoshima, taken 2010

20100918_mudeungsandeungsan

무등산으로 등산, Gwangju, Jeollanam, taken 2010

20110128_nearmillaamillaa

Millaa Millaa, Queensland, taken 2011

20120915_namsantowerseoul

Namsan Sunset, Itaewon, Seoul, taken 2012

20121013_hugokgoyanggyeonggi

Hugok, Goyang, Gyeonggi, taken 2012

[daily log: walking, 6.5km]

Caveat: Multimap Test Page

Banalities & Journaling / Geofiction / Internet & Blogging

I’m not exactly in the closet about my geofiction hobby – I’ve blogged about it once or twice before, and in fact I link to it in my blog’s left sidebar, too – so alert blog-readers will have known it is something I do.

Nevertheless, I’ve always felt oddly reticent about broadcasting this hobby too actively. It’s a “strange” hobby in many people’s minds, and many aren’t sure what to make of it. Many who hear of it percieve it to be perhaps a bit childish, or at the least unserious. It’s not a “real” hobby, neither artistic, like writing or drawing, nor technical, like coding or building databases. Yet geofiction, as a hobby, involves some of all of those skills: writing, drawing, coding and database-building.

Shortly after my cancer surgery, I discovered the website called OpenGeofiction (“OGF”). It uses open source tools related to the OpenStreetmap project to allow users to pursue their geofiction hobby in a community of similar people, and “publish” their geofictions (both maps and encyclopedic compositions) online.

Early last year, I became one of the volunteer administrators for the website. In fact, much of what you see on the “wiki” side of the OGF website is my work (including the wiki’s main page, where the current “featured article” is also mine), or at the least, my collaboration with other “power users” at the site. I guess I enjoy this work, even though my online people skills are not always great. Certainly, I have appreciated the way that some of my skills related to my last career, in database design and business systems analysis, have proven useful in the context of a hobby. It means that if I ever need to return to that former career, I now have additional skills in the areas of GIS (geographic information systems) and wiki deployment.

Given how much time I’ve been spending on this hobby, lately, I have been feeling like my silence about it on my blog was becoming inappropriate, if my blog is meant to reflect “who I am.”

So here is a snapshot of what I’ve been working on. It’s a small island city-state, at high latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere, with both “real-world” hispanic and fully fictional cultural elements. Its name is Tárrases, on the OGF world map here.

Here is a “zoomable and slidable” map window, linked to the area I’ve been creating, made using the leaflet tool.

There were some interesting technical challenges to get this to display correctly on my blog, involving several hours of research and coding trial and error. If anyone is interested in how to get the javascript-based leaflet map extension to work on a webpage (with either real or imaginary map links), including blogs such as typepad that don’t support it with a native plugin, I’m happy to help. [UPDATE 20210605: The old leaflet map insert was broken. I replaced it (with more technical difficulties) with a new one.]

I have made a topo layer, too. I am one of only 2-3 users on the OGF website to attempt this – But the result is quite pleasing. [UPDATE 20210605: The OGF “Topo Layer” is currently out of commission. So the leaflet map insert has been removed.]
picture

Caveat: Facing Your Listeners When You Speak

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Internet & Blogging

Sometimes people ask me why I quit being an active user on the facebook. Sometimes I even think to myself about returning, because there definitely are benefits to the platform, and I know I miss some important interactions with friends, family and former students. 

Then I run across an article such as this one.

And I renew my commitment to be a "passive-only" user of the facebook.

[daily log: walking, 6.5km]

Caveat: the internet let me down

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling / Internet & Blogging

I had one of my "low tech" Sundays, I guess. I was tired of looking at the internet and tried to avoid it today.

What I'm listening to right now.

This morning, anyway, when I started to prepare this blog-post, the internet let me down. I was listening to this song, and was going to post it. But the song is completely missing from the normal places where such things can be found – e.g. youtube, vimeo. Not even the pirate-riddled Chinese site I've used a few times. So. No online track available. I guess they want you to buy it. How antiquated.

Epsilon Minus, "Lost."

Lyrics.

My sadness seeks out comfort
Where are you now
I just had to express these feelings
My regret overwhelms me
I feel you now
I just had to show you what remains

You said that I would never change
Just a frozen thought in your mind
I'm destined to remain
You embody everything I am
And I thought I would tell you all this
As I watch you slip away
And the hope built up inside
Told me this would be the time
I would cry no more goodbyes
You gave the world to me

My loneliness astounds me
I've lost you now
I have no one to blame for these things

You fought to keep them all away
But desire overcomes me
And that's something new to me
I've known longing
I've lost something

And the hope built up inside
Lied to me a thousand times
I've cried one more goodbye
The world I had destroyed
And these feelings I won't hide
When the tears slowly subside
I've lost everything today
When you took the world from me

 

[daily log: walking, not much]

Caveat: like God’s own Mentos and Diet Coke

Found Online / Internet & Blogging / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs / Quotable

A blogger who blogs under the pseudonym Patrick Non-White recently channeled William S. Burroughs pretending to be Donald Trump. He writes as if Trump had hit upon the idea of running for president while doing bong hits with his friends. This alternate-universe Trump meditates on his plan, thinking of himself, of course, in the third person:

"There is nothing so crazed as a politician in rut, screeching whatever thoughts burst into his coke-addled brain like a radioactive weasel before thousands of ignorant nimrods, on total auto-pilot, completely in the now, popping off like God's own Mentos and Diet Coke."

This fine picture appeared in another spot online. You may wish to connect it, at your own mental risk, to the above.

Donald-hillary-bill-melania

[daily log: walking, 6]

Caveat: <html>37 years of markup</html>

Banalities & Journaling / Databases, Smartphones & Computers / Internet & Blogging

I had this weird realization, over the weekend, as I did some little thing on my computer, that I have been hacking around with HTML for more than 20 years, now. I was first exposed to HTML in maybe 1994, when I was taking grad-level courses at the University of Minnesota in preparation for my formal application to grad school, and was messing around on the U of M's intranet, which was in its infancy but was well ahead of the technology adoption curve, since the WWW was only about 3 years old at that point – note that the U of M was one of the innovators in the WWW realm, having been the original home of "gopher," a hyperlinked, markup-driven proto-internet that was one of the coneptual predecessors to Tim Berners-Lee's creation of the WWW at CERN in 1991).

Less than 2 years later, as a grad student at the University of Pennsylvania, I "published" my first web page – several webpages, actually, a simple website that provided me with a means to communicate homework assignments and ideas with my students (I was a TA, teaching lower-level Spanish language classes). My website included a little compilation of interesting bits of Spanish language culture such as could be found online in that early period of the internet, and when I was no longer teaching, I moved the site over to a geocities site where it lasted a year or two more, but it eventually died (along with geocities, of course).

DotMatrix Regular.ttfHTML (hyper-text markup language) was not that hard for me pick up. I was already familiar with the concept of "markup," since even in 1995 I had already been dealing with some other types of markup for almost two decades.

I was exposed to the concept of "markup" in middle school in the late 1970's, thanks to my computer-literate uncle, who had an Apple II that he'd kludged together with an IBM Selectric typewriter (well, not brand-name, I think it was a Japanese clone of an IBM Selectric). This unholy marriage allowed him to produce letter-quality printer output in what was still a predominantly low-resolution, dot-matrix age (picture at right, for those too young to remember). I wrote my middle-school English essays (and later high school essays) using this arrangement. To send the unformatted text files to this printer required the use a fairly arcane set of markup commands (possibly these commands were ancestral to what later became LaTeX? I'm not sure). 

Later, as an undergraduate in 1983-1985, I had a work-study job in the department of Mathematics, and they discovered my mastery of the principles of markup and they made use of me for some departmentally published mathematics textbooks – even today, mathematical printing requires a great deal of markup to come out looking good – just look at the "source" view, sometime, on a math-intensive wikipedia page. 

So, as I said, markup was already an "old" concept to me when I met HTML in grad school. And HTML is a conceptually quite simple implementation of markup principles.

20 years later, I've realized that despite all my shifts in profession and location and lifestyle, not a week has gone by, probably, when I haven't hacked a bit of HTML. Of course, having this blog exposes me to opportunities – but most people with blogs avoid the markup, sticking to the user-friendly tools provided by blog-hosts. I, however, somehow manage to decide to do some HTML tweak or another with nearly every blog post. Ever since I started keeping a separate work-blog to communicate with students, I have made even greater use of my HTML hacking skills, since it allows me a convenient way to bypass the Korean-language user interface on the naver.com blog-publishing website.

So … enjoy the fruits of markup – happy web surfing.

[daily log: walking, 6km]

Caveat: Here and There, A Bloggablog

Banalities & Journaling / Internet & Blogging / Teaching & Methodology / The Wonders of Work

Last week, because of my little surgical event, I missed a few days of posts to my "work blog." As I was catching up on these posts, yesterday at work, I noticed I had reached 1000 posts on my work blog. 

Compared to this blog, I think for most people my work blog wouldn't be very interesting. Then again, this blog isn't that interesting, either.

The "work blog" is not really a blog, at all – I'm just using the blog format (which I'm comfortable with) as a way to post a sort of "diary" about each class that I teach. My students, their parents, or my fellow teachers can consult it to find out answers to burning questions like, "what's my homework?" or watch the kids doing one of my videographed speech tasks. Indeed, although it's a minority, I have many students who use the blog to find out their homework or to watch their classmates embarrassing themselves for my camera. The Korean web portal I use as a platform makes the blog accessible to the students even from their ubiquitous smartphones.

Since sometime in the Spring, I've been diligent and faithful about posting an entry for each class I teach – if only to minimally write, "We had class. No homework." Normally, there is at least a sentence about homework. On about 20% of posts, there is some collateral, i.e. a video embedded or a scanned image of some student work – although sometimes I get a little bit behind (as I am now), so the most recent blog entries sometimes contain little place-holders "" where I will insert video when I get around to posting them (which is not that hard but is a bit time-consuming, so it has to happen during "free time" at work, currently hard to come by).

So 1000 blog entries means, roughly, 1000 class sessions taught.

I wish we had a platform, at work, that was in some way like this but was being maintained by ALL the teachers. I think it would go a long way toward solving Karma's perennial marketing problem and allow us to establish our own "web presence" – which it's really hard to conceive of a business not having in 2016. Yet… such as it is. We don't have an IT department. I'm not personally able or willing to take on that role, in a context where every interaction with a computer or Korean website must be tackled with a dictionary (because these computers, here, they speak Korean, y'know).

Jared's Karma Blog

[daily log: walking, 6km]

Caveat: 90 Year Old Prophesy

Internet & Blogging / Quotable / Science & SciFi

"When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket." — Nikola Tesla, in 1926.

[daily log: walking, 6km]

Caveat: Vulpix vs Hadoop

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Internet & Blogging

The way modern companies are named, especially (but not limited to) tech companies, is quite bizarre. It's just random made-up words, mostly.

This was brought home to me by this weird online quiz which puts up a single, apparently made-up word, and asks you to choose: Pokemon (an imaginary universe of cartoon characters) or Big Data (i.e. technology companies specializing in data management, a realm once near-and-dear to my heart). 

I got a very bad score on this quiz. Just goes to show.

[daily log: walking, 6km]

Caveat: Content Thieves

Banalities & Journaling / Internet & Blogging

Well this is interesting. I just discovered that some website is using my RSS feed and aggregating my blog posts. I’m not sure what benefit they are hoping to derive – I suspect the idea is to get eyeballs on their site, to drive up pageviews and thus payout from advertisers or a larger number of marks to sign up for their site. To get eyeballs on their site, they’re using content of other bloggers, without those other bloggers’ permissions.
In fact, I don’t really care that much. I’m going to post this blog post, however, because I like the “meta” idea that this post will appear on that site.
To make this work, I will have to name and link to the site. However, I want to explicitly state to my normal readers the following CAVEAT: follow the link and visit that site at your own risk. 
The name is “BlogsInKorea” but the site domain is studyinkorea.or.kr. You can see my blog post from earlier today here:https://www.studyinkorea.or.kr/cast/910026.
It looks pretty sketchy – it has some features in common with the kinds of websites one finds being run, all too often, by Russians and Nigerians, including many spelling mistakes and a lot of empty links. On the other hand, if I was more fluent in Korean, I’d be tempted to call the phone number listed at the bottom. But that’s a potential linguistic minefield I have no interest in trying to navigate.
In fact, I’m not particularly upset – it might end up just driving more traffic to my blog, where, since I have never had any intention of attempting to monetarize my own content, it will serve no purpose except the general enlightenment of the public at large.
As a point of general interest, however, I have a question for my regular readers: is anyone using RSS from my site? I don’t think so. I may turn it off.
Update: It worked – the loop is closed. Here is this blog post, shown as a screenshot from their website.
Contentthieves

Caveat: The Joseon Dynasty’s Online Mapping Utility

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Internet & Blogging

JoseonmapThere is a very cool online zoomable map of Korea, pieced together from images from an atlas made in 1861. I put an image of the overview of the area covered by this old atlas, at right.

The detail and accuracy of this map is quite amazing, considering it was made not just pre-satellite but essentially pre-Westernization, although I suspect it was made in response to Western contact, if that makes any sense.

Matching place names to modern place names is rather difficult, because the names are in handwritten hanja (Chinese characters). Nevertheless, I managed to locate the town of Juyeop-ri (주엽리, hanja 注葉里), which is an area I walk through every day on the way to work. There is now a subway station there.

I zoomed in and did a screencap of from the map, and then put a red star on it, below. On the scale of the map, for my daily commute to work, I walk from the lower right of the red circle I made to near the top of the red circle I made.

Juyeop

I have a few days off from work, for the provincially mandated summer break. Per my usual custom, these days, I'm doing very little with my free time, except thinking of it in terms of undoing my incipient burnout.

[daily log: 1 km]

Caveat: Another iteration, this time, a naverly blog

Banalities & Journaling / Internet & Blogging / The Wonders of Work

I have attempted to set up and maintain a "work" blog before – as something separate from this personal blog, that would accessible to coworkers, students and parents as a way to keep records as well as a way to let students know what to do.

Previous attempts failed for multiple reasons. Not least, I wasn't ever very good at sticking to it. Yet I stick to this here personal blog pretty well. One issue is that most Koreans – who would be ALL of my audience at a work blog, basically – aren't that comfortable navigating out into the non-Korean internet. So I decided that this time, I would put the blog inside the Korean web. I am using a free blog platform provided by Naver (pronounced by Koreans to match "neighbor", hence my pun in my title). Naver is a sort of Korean Yahoo-meets-Google, a dominant internet portal with its fingers everywhere. 

I worked hard, over the last 2 weeks, to transfer the existing content from the previous two iterations of my "work" blog into this new platform. It's hard to use – not least because everything is in Korean. My blog entries, of course, are in English – so you can look at it if you want. From those previous incarnations, there are actually almost 200 blog posts stretching back, inconsistently, for years. So it might be interesting to look at: a lot of minimally edited video of students practicing speeches and roleplays, etc.

Anyway, here it is: blog.naver.com/jaredway.

I will try very hard to update it every day with a "Class Blog" for each class I teach that day. I keep thinking – if I do it with my personal blog, surely I can do it with a work blog, right?

[daily log: walking, 6 km]

Caveat: Clouds as Landmarks

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Internet & Blogging

I am a bit of a cartography nerd – this is known by some people. I have been spending some of my vacation time playing around with some pretty elaborate map-drawing software. The tools I'm using are JOSM on OSM files (OSM is from openstreetmap.org, but you can create offline map files using that format, which is transparently xml and open source). They have created a completely open-source world map that rivals google maps in quality, and being open-source, the data-sets are queryable and downloadable, which is fun for cartography nerds. OSM is a pretty elaborate scheme – there are whole websites dedicated to explicating the intricacies, including the official OSM wiki.

Most of what's on the  wiki is strictly informational, and dry, reference-style prose, often evidently written by non-native-speakers of English (OSM's user-base seems to be in continental Europe and former Soviet bloc, as is true for many successful open-source platforms).

All of the preceeding, however, is merely by way of introduction. I ran across a very excellent bit of humor today in surfing the OSM wiki: a guy proposing a data standard for mapping clouds ("tagging" is the term of art for this type of data standard). His proposal begins as I quote below:

Tag:natural=cloud

Used to tag an area of clouds. Clouds are very prominent landmarks which can obscure the sky for people living underneath them. They also cause a loss of precision in the mapping of the area they cover, because they hide the surface of the earth on aerial imagery.

Under "related tags," he mentions: 

rainy=yes/no – is used to indicate if the cloud can cause rainfalls.

My understanding, in perusing the comment threads attached to this entry, is that the author intended an April Fool's joke. In any event, it appealed to my sense of humor, especially to find it so well-done in such a normally dry and unhumorous context as a software reference website.

I guess I spent the day vegetating in front of the internet. Not really a way to feel I was using my time positively. I'm need to stick to my "no internet rule for Sundays" tomorrow, I think. 

[daily log: walking, 13 m]

Caveat: WWW via Teletypewriter

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Internet & Blogging / Science & SciFi

Here is a deliberately anachronistic approach to the World Wide Web, in celebration of its 25th anniversary. The WWW dates to 1990 and the work of Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. However, in this video, a rather deadpan presenter uses much older equipment, including a 1960s vintage teletype terminal, a rotary dial phone and an acoustic-coupling modem.

I will date myself by saying that even this older equipment is not entirely unfamiliar to me, for which I credit the fact that my uncle, enrolled in computer science classes in the early 1970s at the local university, took me along with him to learn about computers. Thus I have actually operated terminals quite similar to the ones shown, including doing some BASIC programming when I was 8 or 9 years old. I think it was on the DEC "mini computer" at the university ("mini" being a relative concept – it occupied a largish, excessively air-conditioned room in the computer science department, and had blinking lights on the front, just like in the movies. Its computing capacity was probably about the same as a modern "dumb" cell phone – not a smartphone, which exceeds the computing capacity of even supercomputers of that era.

I remember making a text-based "slot machine game" where it said "PRESS ANY KEY" and it would give an apparently random assortment of slot-machinish results, e.g. "BAR CHERRY LEMON" or "BAR BAR BAR". But I made it so that I could manipulate the results to increase my chances of winning depending on which "ANY KEY" I chose to PRESS, in an utterly undocumented way. It was a kind of rudimentary "easter egg" (a term of art among programmers and hackers) wrapped in a pointless game. I would press the various keys for hours, watching the statistical variations in the output. I suppose it gave me a good intuitive grounding in statistics, although it wasn't until university that I realized that's what I had been doing.

I also enjoyed playing a text-based "Star Trek" game that was wildly popular in the 1970s on mainframes (many javascript "ports" of the game are available, for example here), in the pre-home-computer era. Later, when my uncle acquired an Apple ][, I believe it had some version of that Star Trek  game, too, but I moved on to Hamurabi, and later Space Invaders when he shelled out for a graphics card for the Apple.

[daily log: walking, km]

 

Caveat: Post-4000

Banalities & Journaling / Internet & Blogging

According to my blog host, this is my 4000th blog posting.

My [broken link! FIXME] 2000th post was 2012/02/17, and my [broken link! FIXME] 3000th post was 2013/05/12 – a span of 450 days, or 2.2 posts per day – while this post is on 2015/01/13, a span, from Post-3000, of 611 days, or 1.6 posts per day.

Evidently, my rate of posting has slowed down. I suppose the cause of such a slowdown is in part utterly obvious: it's the fact of having experienced cancer (or more specifically, its aftermath) for the last two years.

But… I think it is also a bit of a disillusionment with social media in general. Most strongly, I became substantially unhappy with the facebook: its echo-chamber and epistemic closure aspects, and also the feeling that they "owned" me in some way, viz. the commodification of my online persona. So despite some gratitude to the way it enabled me to stay in touch with far-flung friends and family so easily during the worst of my illness, I have essentially quit the book-of-faces, leaving it only as an abandoned "stub" to enable people to "find" me. Nevertheless, my disillusionment with web-based social media extends up to and includes This Here Blog Thingy™, too, which I obviously haven't quit but for which I feel some reduced enthusiasm.

What's it all for? The blog has introduced a sort of discipline into my previously utterly-undisciplined writerly life, but it's also become one of the chief ways I avoid what I might charitably characterize as my more "authorial" ambitions (novels, poetry, short stories). It's become a means of self-discipline with respect to writing, sometimes, but just as often it's evolved into a means of willful procrastination that fails to actually lead to any kind of writing or even to any intelligent or critical reading. I'm not proposing to drop the blog – merely expressing my disappointment with my own failure to "leverage the medium," as a businessperson might phrase it.

Caveat: No Weather

Banalities & Journaling / Internet & Blogging

picture

Sometimes the little "weather widget" I've got on the left-hand column of This Here Blog Thingy™ behaves strangely. This morning it told me there was "no weather" (see screenshot at right).

I checked outside, and sure enough, the sky was slate gray and the temperature was 0 C. That strikes me as pretty close to "no weather," actually.

But you have to admit, it's kind of weird.

[daily log: walking, 5 km]

 

Caveat: University of malware… expected to do a rampant

Banalities & Journaling / Internet & Blogging / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

Google translate is truly horrible, for Korean->English. I admit that at least for most major European languages, I am nevertheless impressed, and it does a great job. With those languages, there is a sufficiently large body of precisely parallel texts (mostly due to EU integration and language policies) that a statistical translation such as the google attempts can yield decent results. But Korean… the results can be truly weird.

Sometimes, I get text messages from my phone service (LG+). In case they are important, I will copy-paste them directly into google translate in an effort to decide if I can freely disregard the message or if I have to take some action on it. A message received earlier today was a great example where the google-translate version is hilarious and weird but nevertheless allows me to know that I can comfortably ignore the message.

The paragraph I laughed at came out in google as:

To celebrate the 24-year civil life cohesive, Courier, New Year greetings, New Year's gift quarterlies, University of malware, including entrance fees (SMS phishing) are expected to do a rampant.

The original was:

새해를 맞이하여 생활 밀착형 민원24, 택배, 새해 인사, 새해선물 연말정산, 대학 입학금 등 악성코드(스미싱)가 기승을 부릴 것으로 예상이 됩니다.

The gist is that I should watch out for spam SMS (which is definitely a problem in Korea – I delete 3 or 4 such messages each day from my phone), and maybe subscribe to their extra spam-fighting service … which I won't. I only pay attention to messages that are from a known source (e.g. a person I know or officially from my provider, like this one). It's hard to fall for phishing attacks in a language you don't know well. Speaking of which, when and how did some Russians decide I wanted to read vast quanties of Russian-language spam? Does anyone else have this problem with email spam in Russian?

And speaking of Universities of malware… maybe North Korea has one. Maybe there's a university of malware, doing a rampant, up the road in Kaeseong, 30 km from my home here in Ilsan. Somehow it's pretty easy to visualize.

 [daily log: walking, 6 km]

Caveat: Detour-de-force

Background Noise / Internet & Blogging / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

I ran across this on another blog I look at sometimes. If you don't know about toxoplasma, you might want to read up on it to understand better – it's so bizarre that it seems like something in science fiction. Slatestarcodex writes a blogpost about memes, starting off with PETA, riffing on Ferguson and police brutality, and concludes discussing what it means to write about controversial topics on blogs. But meanwhile, he takes a little speculative detour that strikes me as tour-de-force of memetics:

Toxoplasma is a neat little parasite that is implicated in a couple of human diseases including schizophrenia. Its life cycle goes like this: it starts in a cat. The cat poops it out. The poop and the toxoplasma get in the water supply, where they are consumed by some other animal, often a rat. The toxoplasma morphs into a rat-compatible form and starts reproducing. Once it has strength in numbers, it hijacks the rat’s brain, convincing the rat to hang out conspicuously in areas where cats can eat it. After a cat eats the rat, the toxoplasma morphs back into its cat compatible form and reproduces some more. Finally, it gets pooped back out by the cat, completing the cycle.

What would it mean for a meme to have a life cycle as complicated as toxoplasma?

Consider the war on terror. It’s a truism that each time the United States bombs Pakistan or Afghanistan or somewhere, all we’re doing is radicalizing the young people there and making more terrorists. Those terrorists then go on to kill Americans, which makes Americans get very angry and call for more bombing of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Taken as a meme, it is a single parasite with two hosts and two forms. In an Afghan host, it appears in a form called ‘jihad’, and hijacks its host into killing himself in order to spread it to its second, American host. In the American host it morphs in a form called ‘the war on terror’, and it hijacks the Americans into giving their own lives (and several bajillion of their tax dollars) to spread it back to its Afghan host in the form of bombs.

From the human point of view, jihad and the War on Terror are opposing forces. From the memetic point of view, they’re as complementary as caterpillars and butterflies. Instead of judging, we just note that somehow we accidentally created a replicator, and replicators are going to replicate until something makes them stop.

Replicators are also going to evolve. Some Afghan who thinks up a particularly effective terrorist strategy helps the meme spread to more Americans as the resulting outrage fuels the War on Terror. When the American bombing heats up, all of the Afghan villagers radicalized in by the attack will remember the really effective new tactic that Khalid thought up and do that one instead of the boring old tactic that barely killed any Americans at all. Some American TV commentator who comes up with a particularly stirring call to retaliation will find her words adopted into party platforms and repeated by pro-war newspapers. While pacifists on both sides work to defuse the tension, the meme is engaging in a counter-effort to become as virulent as possible, until people start suggesting putting pork fat in American bombs just to make Muslims even madder.

What I'm listening to right now.

Hooverphonic, "Eden."

Lyrics.

Did you ever think of me
As your best friend

Did I ever think of you
I'm not complaining

I never tried to feel
I never tried to feel this vibration
I never tried to reach
I never tried to reach your eden

Did I ever think of you
As my enemy

Did you ever think of me
I'm complaining

I never tried to feel
I never tried to feel this vibration
I never tried to reach
I never tried to reach your eden

[daily log: walking, 1.5 km]

Caveat: The End Result

Banalities & Journaling / Internet & Blogging / The Wonders of Work

… by which I mean, the end result of the interview with me last week. Below is a screen-cap of part of the interview posted on KarmaPlus’s “blog” – I use quote marks because “blog” in Korean internet context isn’t quite the same as “blog” in  the sense that this here blog thingy is a blog thingy. It’s a sort of “advertorial website” – some of the material is produced by the advertising agency that Curt hires to do publicity for our hagwon, and some of the material is things we have said. It’s all mixed together. If you click the picture it will take you to KarmaPlus’s website – it’s all in Korean, which makes perfect sense for an English hagwon, right? Nevertheless I urge you to visit it – it will give you a very different window on my world and life and work, I think. [Update 20200316: I guess the “blog” linked has disappeared. But the screenshot is preserved.]
picture
picture[daily log: walking, 5.5 km]

Caveat: placeholder

Banalities & Journaling / Cancer / Internet & Blogging

I guess my problem with infinitely delayed posts from my phone continues: I posted from my phone while I was at the hospital, and it never showed up. Rather than post it again and  then have it show up 36 hours later and thus have a duplicate, this post serves as a placeholder to show I am still alive until such time as that post from my phone actually shows up. Oh… and by the way… argh.
Update: I guess that email-based post will never happen. Or, perhaps by posting it here, that guarantees it will show up immediately. I’m deeply annoyed with my blog-hosting company now, but I’m frankly too lazy to bother opening a help ticket, since they’ve never been helpful in the past. I’ll just deal with it.
Meanwhile, here is the gist of my original post from yesterday at the hospital – it wasn’t really that interesting:

Caveat: Been there done that

It becomes almost routine after so many times: a return visit to good ol’ room 12. Later I will have a consult with reassuring Dr Cho and his disconcerting German accent.

picture

The conclusion was: “nothing there to see.” Which is to say, no evidence of any kind of metastasis. So I get to stay alive for some more time.

picture[daily log: walking, 7.5 km]

Caveat: Technical Blahblah

Banalities & Journaling / Internet & Blogging

I've been having some annoying technical issues with the ability to post via email to my blog, which I use fairly often as a short-cut when I want to post pictures I've taken on my phone directly to the blog, as the process of copying the files from phone to computer is more laborious than just composing a blog entry on the phone and sending the whole package as an email.

So on Sunday I took a picture of my lego monkey and emailed it, and it didn't appear and it didn't appear and it didn't appear. So Monday morning I realized it was missing and posted it the hard way, copying the picture from my phone and uploading it. Then, lo and behold, the emailed version appeared today, at 7 AM. I have opened a help-ticket with my blog host, and I'm leaving the duplicate blog posts for now while they (maybe) troubleshoot the issue. I'll clean up that and the test-post later, I guess. Meanwhile, that's what's going on, and why my blog is looking a bit scattered. 

[daily log: walking, 5.5 km]

Caveat: Stalked by the Goog for my Birthday

Banalities & Journaling / Internet & Blogging

I received a number of birthday greetings from friends and family – mostly via email. I was pleased by that. However, one birthday greeting I received came from an unexpected quarter, and it struck me as creepy.

When I got to work and opened my chrome browser, the google-doodle was a birthday cake. "That's odd," I thought – I wondered why the google-doodle was a birthday cake. I hovered over the doodle, and lo and behold, it said "Happy Birthday, Jared!" 

829px_creepy

This was a personalized google-doodle – which means the goog used information in my profile, linked to the fact that at least at work I'm pretty lackadaisical about my privacy settings (it's work, after all, and I use google a lot to store my documents online and pre-write for my blog, etc.

Frankly, I don't understand why anyone would appreciate this. It's just a robot (essentially), saying "happy birthday" because it has that info in its database. I guess it serves as a useful reminder that the goog knows everything, now.

[daily log: walking, 5.5 km]

Caveat: 10

Banalities & Journaling / Internet & Blogging

Ten years ago today, I made my [broken link! FIXME] first blog post to this blog.

The first few years, it wasn't very consistent. After a burst of frequent posting during my trip to Europe in February, 2005, I missed almost an entire year in 2005-06 as I became absorbed by that difficult job in Long Beach / Newport Beach. My total number of posts for the first 3 years was something around 50.

Once I realized I was going to be changing careers and coming to Korea to teach English, however, I became more focused, and I've averaged at least a post a day for the last 7 years (since late 2007). My blog administration tool tells me I currently have 3841 posts – this includes a small number of posts that I've "backdated," – transcriptions from my pre-blog journaling. 

Overall, I'm pretty happy with it. It's not always interesting, I'm sure – I'm not interested in being interesting. I don't want to become a "popular" blog or perform any kind of broader, journalistic function. This blog is nothing more than an exhibtionistic kind of journaling.

[daily log: walking, 5 km]

Caveat: please stand by

Banalities & Journaling / Internet & Blogging

this is a place holder sent from my phone. i guess i did something stupid and now not only do i have problems with my phone but with my comp too. so my ability to post to my blog is limited. im fine – maybe its just a message from fate to keep my life low tech for the holiday. see you later and merry buddhamas.

Caveat: 3729 – 3719 = 10

Banalities & Journaling / Internet & Blogging

My blog appears to no longer be down, and the admin site which became unavailable shortly after access to the "front end" was restored is now accessible again too.

Well. That was a lot of hassle, and I'm still trying to figure out some alternatives so that I don't get caught blogless in the future – as if anyone is really paying attention. Heh – I know there are four of you who are. Huge audience, eh?

But I have a bit of a puzzle. My post-count prior to the downtime was 3729. My post-count after the downtime was 3719. Ten blog entries disappeared. My back-up blog kept the 10, and listed 3729 after the import process.

The question is – which 10 blog entries are missing? Where did they go? How do I even figure out which ones are missing? Does it matter?

I think it's a scripting problem, given I have access to the unformatted text files of the before and after – but I was never a scripter. What would be nice would access to the back-end database. I could slap together some SQL in a few minutes to find the missing articles.

Which is another reason to continue looking into alternatives to my blog host. My nearly 10 year nearly flawless relationship with typepad is forever sundered. Ah well. Nothing lasts forever.

[daily log: walking, 6 km]

Caveat: Talking into Nothingness

Banalities & Journaling / Internet & Blogging / My Drawings & Paintings

My blog has been utterly down for more than 24 hours now, as far as I can figure out. At least it's accessible on the "back end" – meaning I am able to write this post. But it's like talking into nothingness – I'm writing a blog post that no one can see.

I've been putting a lot of energy into trying to extract the content of this blog from the host and configure a new, back-up location for my nearly 4000 blog entries. I've got something that is up-and-working, but getting all the pictures posted with my new back-up blog turns out to be more difficult. I may have to manually download all the pictures (one by one?!).

I'm looking into longer term alternatives for changing my blog host – the down time is pretty annoying but what's more annoying is the lack of clear communication from the host provider to me, the customer, about the situation.

Meanwhile, here is a picture of some doodles I did while taking notes in a meeting a while back. I'm posting it to test a new picture-posting method (which is much more laborious but ensures I have copies of each picture posted in multiple locations).

  Marketdaydoodles

[daily log: walking, 5 km]

Caveat: About Face (book)

Banalities & Journaling / Internet & Blogging

I have always been only a half-hearted user of facebook. I've been really bad about staying in touch with it lately (and other social media too, like Korea's kakao, etc.). Nevertheless I view it as a valuable tool for staying in touch with people, and I was very grateful to have it as a means of staying in touch during my illness last summer. Lately I have neglected it, feeling both strongly anti-social and specifically anti-facebook.

I have decided to end the "feed" between my blog and facebook. I have two reasons. First, I feel it gives people a false impression of my level of participation in facebook when they see posts from my blog – people don't seem to realize that my blog "cross-posts" to facebook without my having to log into facebook. I think it's more "honest" for me to only post in facebook when I'm actually in facebook – then people can see how rarely I actually go  there (hmm, maybe once a month, these days?). Second, the cross-posting function is unreliable and there are formatting issues that are hard to manage, sometimes. So rather than having to monitor it, I'll just go back to the old way: if people want to see what I'm up to, they can visit my blog directly.

Anyway, thank you to all my friends and acquaintances who have followed my blog because of these cross-postings to facebook.

[daily log: walking, 5 km]

Caveat: A tweegret so unbearable… I have become a twit

Banalities & Journaling / Internet & Blogging / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

My feelings of tweegret have overcome me, despite my long, strong efforts to resist it.

So I have become a twit – which is by far the best noun coined for those who tweet, using twitter.

But rather than give in to a phenomenon that seems so banal and narcissistic as to render even facebookland a veritable utopia of social altruism, I have decided to “double down.” 

Here is my twitter manifesto, #sayitin14 – dedicated to minimalizing further the already minimalist tendencies in twitter:

I will only post tweets 14 characters in length or fewer. Note that this does not include links or hashtags.

Originally, I thought to make my rule a limit of posts to one word. But I decided that to better double down on the original 140 character limit, a 14 character limit was more elegant.

I would like to observe that in a unicoded, character-per-syllable language with essentially optional spacing between words, like Korean, 14 characters is still quite sufficient to post entire sentences.

English, with its relatively low information density (on a per character basis), is more limited, and the restriction will lead to a certain absurdism. I hope.

picture

My username is @waejeorae (which is based on my joke “Korean Name” 왜저래 [waejeorae = what the…? , what’s up?] – because the pronunciation resembles that of my true name in Korean order: Way Jared). If you follow me, I promise to be disappointing.

As this late adoption of the now ubiquitous twitter platform shows, I am not really an “early adopter.” I certainly have been an early adopter in some realms: I wrote all my papers in high school on computer (1979~1983), I programmed my first spreadsheet app in 1986, I bought my first laptop PC in 1992, I published my first website (that people – namely, my students – actually visited) in 1995 (on geocities – remember that?), and this here blog thingy was started well ahead of the technology adoption curve in 2004. But I’ve been quite late in other areas: I only bought my first cell phone in 2004, and only got my first smartphone last year. And here I am joining twitter only past their IPO (which is a well-established signal of outright decline in the technology world). So whether I adopt some technology or not is largely connected with my perception of its usefulness, rather than some desire or interest in adopting new technologies for the sheer sake of being at the vanguard.

Caveat: 35-year-old Blog

Found Online / Internet & Blogging

Some guy is posting his journal entries from the 1970s when he was a kid. That seems like something I would do… if I had had a coherent journal when I was a kid. I mostly just drew things on loose-leaf paper. I still have all those drawings – or most of them – but they are undated and disorganized and in boxes in Eagan right now.

Retro_html_m58fe173a

 

[daily log: walking, 4.5 km]

Caveat: Cheap Flights to Auckland

Found Online / Internet & Blogging

Anyone who has a blog has had the experience of "spam" comments showing up in the comments section. I recently ran across a piece of spam commentary that seemed almost like poetry. It's not often that spam speaks to one so personally as this passage seems to do.

In a vacuum all photons travel at the same speed. They slow down when travelling through air or water or glass. Photons of different energies are slowed down at different rates. If Tolstoy had known this, would he have recognised the terrible untruth at the beginning of Anna Karenina? 'All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own particular way.' In fact it's the other way around. Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalisation. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable. Cheap Flights to Auckland

I always wonder about the origin of texts like this – computer generation? non-native-speaker authorship? some kind of burroughsian cut-up of wikipedia?

Caveat: Hey, Let’s Drive to Portugal…

Found Online / Internet & Blogging

… from Korea.

According to an article in the Korea Herald, a Korean family (mom, dad, 3 kids) took the family mini van to Portugal, via a ferry to Vladivostok and long drive across Siberia, Russia, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, etc.

They have been photo-blogging about it. Now they plan to drive back.

This is awesome. It's hard to explain all the ways that this is so fascinating to me. I think on the one hand I love the idea of that kind of trans-Russian adventure, and have fantasized about it for years. But the idea of doing it as a family, like as a sort of "family outing," it cool too, and makes it into the stuff of a kind of unconventional novel – not to mention my own childhood trekking across the Cascades or the Rockies or British Columbia with my sister, parents, Peggy, and a dog in a Model A Ford. Finally, it's interesting to see Koreans, specifically, doing things like this because they have a bit of a cultural reputation for being so, um, (pen-)insular… this is a nice antidote.

Here is a screencap of a picture of them setting out, at the Sokcho ferry terminal where you catch the boat to Russia (because North Korea – if it weren't for that, one could just drive all the way to Portugal directly). I like it because I was just in Sokcho last week.

Settingout_html_m4dbc9e4e

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