"Don't hate the media, become the media" – Jello Biafra, Green Party activist, notorious San Francisco anarchist, and former lead singer and songwriter for the punk rock group Dead Kennedys.
There's always room for Jello.
Category: Internet & Blogging
Caveat: The View From Your Window
Andrew Sullivan has a feature on his blog (at The Atlantic magazine’s website) called “The View From Your Window,” where he invites people to send unstaged photos of views from their windows, and he publishes them in his blog. He’s even compiled these photos and put them into a book.
A few months back, I emailed a photo I had taken from the window in my classroom at Hongnong. I had posted the photo on my blog, on June 17. I didn’t really expect the photo to be published in Sullivan’s blog. But he did. Now I can say that my photography has been published on The Atlantic‘s website.
[UPDATE 2024-04-18: Of course, in the fullness of time, The Atlantic’s link rotted. Mine did too, actually, but I was able to fix mine. Anyway, you can’t see that view from my window on Sullyblog, anymore. Sully long moved on and became right-wingier and irrelevant.]
Caveat: A twinge of tweegret
tweegret. N. the feeling that one gets that one might be missing out, by not participating in what seems to be a largely vacuous fad called Twitter.
I felt a twinge of tweegret, this morning, for the first time, when I learned that Kim Jeong-il is tweeting. For those who are interested, he's at @uriminzok. It's apparently in Korean.
Caveat: This Is The Logo
Here is a new logo for this bog, posted the day when this was taken. [Added 2011-06-13].
Caveat: Chrome. Caveat: Vaio.
Unlike most of my "caveat"'s, these are "real" and not just a convention of this blog. Which is to say, I am developing some disgruntlement with respect to Google's Chrome browser. And I've got one last chapter to provide to the long saga of my disgruntlement with Sony Vaio.
I have been a major user of Google Docs – it's where I do most of my writing, these days. I like that my writing is out there in the cloud, because it feels safer than having my writing confined to a local harddrive. You see, I lost well over 300 pages of writing, including two novels-in-progress that I was actually rather happy with, in 1998, to a harddrive crisis. Since then, I have been meticulous about back-ups, but I also like to put my active works out in the cloud, since that way I can work on them and get to them whenever I have internet access, and regardless of from what computer I happen to be on (for e.g. when that laptops dies – see a few paragraphs below).
And as time has gone by, I've been using Chrome more and more, on the assumption that it would be the easiest and best environment to work with Google Docs – same company making both, and all that. This was a bad assumption. For the third time in less than a month, this morning, I had Google Docs "hang" and lose written material for me. I've NEVER had this happen in either Firefox or Internet Explorer. So I guess Google Chrome can't handle Google Docs. Which is downright weird. But… whatever. Fortunately there are lots of choices in the browser market, these days.
In other, related, Jared-rants-about-tech news, my old laptop died last night. It had been a long, slow, dying. That's why I had bought a new laptop (netbook, actually) before coming back to Korea in January – I knew the thing was sickly, with random crashes, and occasional boot failures.
It's been suffering from a decaying harddrive problem of some kind – corrupt and inaccessible sectors on the C: drive. I can still get it to boot into the Windows Server 2003 that I hacked onto it, and although that will be useful if I find there's any data I need to recover, it won't be very practical, as I never was able to find a Win Server 2003 driver set for the video card on that laptop, which means I get a very crappy, lo-res screen when I'm using Win Server, on that box. I only ever booted to the server if I was doing programming, which I basically don't do anymore. And the Ubuntu Linux OS I'd installed seems unbootable, too, although I may be able to rescue that by re-installing.
As an end-of-life review, I only have this to say: I will never buy another Sony Vaio. It was a universe of problems and issues during its entire life, from the memorable August day 3 years ago when I bought it. That one laptop destroyed almost a decade of built-up brand loyalty I'd had toward Sony. So… good riddance.
Still… I'll miss the high-speed video card (even though it sometimes would crash the box by overheating) – this netbook can't come close to competing, with its slow video card and small screen. I suppose I was playing too many games on that box, anyway.
Caveat: I hate the new google news
Google recently revamped the way that their news website is organized. As an admitted news junkie, this is something I've had to deal with, as I go there several times a day to see "what's happening." And let me be very clear.
I hate the new google news format. What's funny is that I found I'm not alone in this feeling, because I went to google and typed into the search engine "i hate the new…" and the little suggestions popped up, and right at the top was "i hate the new google news." So other people went and did the same thing I did.
Actually, some things about the new design are good ideas. One thing that I really like is the way it grabs my IP address and offers a section with "local" news – finding interesting news about southwest Korea in English is challenging, and that really helps.
But overall, the new design is a problem, and it boils down to one issue: real estate. By this, I don't mean anything about buying and selling land; I'm referring to how it uses screen space. At home, I mostly use my little netbook computer to surf online, and the screen is small. As a consequence, because the center column of entries is now "fleshed out" with more info about each story, only 1 and 1/2 story fits "above the fold" on my screen – I have to scroll to see more stories. And the convenient little index thing on the left now is two or even three screens long, whereas before it fit easily "above the fold." Using the nasty track-pad for scrolling on my netbook isn't fun – there's no handy scrolling wheel like on most newer mice.
And as always when programmers make changes, the keyboard shortcuts receive short shrift, are inconsistent from version to version (both of browsers and/or of specific websites, that also like to override default browser behavior, which itself is brutally annoying, by the way) and zero documentation support.
The expansions in real estate usage are even noticeable on the large screens of the computers at work.
Relatedly, I don't like the "fast flip" in the right hand column, either. Not that it's a bad idea, but it takes up way too much space relative to the possible benefit offered – it's still too small to read the content shown "right there" and so, like most thumbnailing features, I'd be inclined to turn it off, if I could. I've never found thumbnails to be particularly useful as a feature in any computer desktop context, as the images are too small to see directly and therefore serve no purpose except as a memory prompt for the semi-literate – but why would someone only semi-literate want to surf the google news site? I'd be perfectly happy to have no images at all, to be honest.
I would guess that there are ways to get back to more closely approximating the old format, using the news customization features – but because I don't allow google to store cookies or do site customization on my computer or in association with my login ID, that's ruled out. I don't allow the google customization not just due to privacy concerns, but also because it seems to make which of the news articles that get prioritized kind of strange – they become incomprehensibly driven by recent searches (which given my line of work and wide ranging imagination, aren't exactly current-events-driven) – these "recent search" driven news items are exactly what I don't want when surfing for general recent world news.
Caveat: Steampunkish (Punk Optional)
Pretty awesome:
Caveat: Yahoo fails some more
I have felt that Yahoo is a doomed company for a long time. I’ve had problems with obfuscating and bureaucratic approaches to problems with my yahoo email account before … in fact, I’ve been annoyed with Yahoo since at least 2003.
So I don’t use my Yahoo email account very much. This evening, I tried to log on and got the following page.
Take a look – can you tell me what is wrong with this picture? The fact is that it’s giving me two choices, neither of which is true. Nothing is worse than a computer program that gives you only a limited number of choices that fail to cover all the possibilities, thus allowing a user like me to “fall through the cracks.”
The first option: I’m a resident of the U.S. Not true. The second option: I’m a resident of Australia. Also not true. And why does yahoo keep thinking I’m Australian, anyway? That’s not the first time I’ve had that experience. Admittedly, I’ve been in Australia while happening to use Yahoo. But I’ve never lived there. And currently, I live in South Korea. That wasn’t a choice on the web page. Why not? At first, I thought… are they inspecting my IP address? I guess their software isn’t that smart. Because, what’s even funnier? When I gave up and lied, and told them I was a U.S resident, and was able to check my email, well, subsequently, when I logged out of my email, they threw me onto Yahoo.co.kr! That means… they CAN, in fact, tell by my IP address that I’m Korea. So what idiot came up with the software that only offered the two choices shown on that web page?
The header on that page said, “help us make your Yahoo mail more relevant.” Earth to Carol Bartz: maybe you should ask yourself, “how can YOU make my Yahoo mail more relevant?” Right now, it can’t even figure out what country I’m in, and it’s too poorly designed to even give me the option to let me tell it what country I’m in. A LESS relevant internet mail program would be difficult to invent.
If you haven’t already… sell your stock in this company.
Caveat: Hacking
I'm in a bad mood. I'll give more info about that later, but meanwhile, I'm trying an experiment. I'm trying to hack my way around the fact that I'm being blocked from updating my blog host at work. This is a test-post. We'll see if it goes through.
Caveat: Weird, weird music
So, my chinese-tea-making acquaintance in Suwon has 2 children. The older child, Bong-jun, is 13 years old. There was a picture of the two siblings, along with two history-re-enactors (who are not acquaintances) and me, in one of my blog posts from about 2 weeks ago.
Anyway, Bong-jun has a blog. And he’s got a very weird video on it [UPDATE 2022-10-04: sadly the link rotted away long ago, there’s no video there], which I can’t figure out how to embed directly, here, but I suggest you go have a look. I’m not sure the video will work for you, if you’re looking outside of Korea, since it’s hosted on a Korean website, but it’s pretty interesting. The video shows some computer-generated / computer-played music, which is strangely fascinating to me – because it’s so evidently something that would never have been composed, I suppose, without computers.
If I can figure out how to embed it, later on, I’ll drop a copy of it here.
Caveat: 1000th post
According to my blog host’s administration page (on typepad.com), this is my 1000th blog post.
So it’s a kind of a little anniversary – of a serial, enumerative sort. I started this blog in August of 2004, when I was still working for ARAMARK corporation in Burbank (which I used to call, pseudonymously, Paradise Corporation, to avoid offending anyone, but I don’t think I need to worry about that much, anymore).
Actually, this blog has worked out almost exactly the way I intended and hoped.
It got a slow start – I missed many months at a time, more than once, and even a whole year (in the 2005-2006 range). But once I came to Korea, in September, 2007, I began posting quite regularly, and starting last year, I began a commitment to post at least once a day, which I’ve kept, although a few times I’ve had to “cheat” and do a “back-post” from a later time.
Once I accepted that I might do “back-posts,” I began to consider the possibility that I could “back-post” my entire life – I have huge quantities of journal-type writing that I contemplate eventually adding here – but to date, I’ve only made exactly 2 “historical” posts, both for my birth year of 1965.
I had envisioned this blog as means to achieve three primary goals:
1) I wanted a means to overcome my perpetual writer’s block
2) I wanted a way to more easily communicate with my far-flung family and friends, since I’ve always been so negligent in writing letters or email
3) I felt that my expressing myself in so public a forum, I could in essence use the blog as a tool to look at myself more realistically, with a lesser degree of self-deceptiveness – it’s hard to continue deceiving yourself when you’ve decided to live “live” in front of others
I have achieved all of these goals far beyond my original expectations. I know that this blog is often banal, frequently self-indulgent, mostly chaotic. But for all that, it’s serving its purposes excellently. I had no interest in making something that would get lots of “hits” or become popular – I’m writing this, first and foremost, for myself, with the added benefit that those who are interested can “watch me,” too.
If I study who’s looking at this blog (using the administrative tools provided by typepad or by feedjit), I know that I rarely get more than one or two page views per day from “strangers” – but I’ve discovered that, for example, that the single most common way that strangers “discover” my blog is by googling: “뭥미 meaning english”.
To me, this is funny, but it also points up a 4th possible goal, to add to the above 3: I can use this blog provide some unique or useful information to random people in the world – in the case mentioned, I seem to be the major online resource for people who are trying to figure out what the Korean slang term “뭥미” means in English (it seems to mean “what the…!”, normally said in a kind of tone of disgust or annoyance). I feel so proud.
Now that I’ve got the blog consistently (mostly) cross-posting to facebook, that’s added some to its functionality. To those who find it annoying to have to come “outside” of facebook to “visit” me, I apologize – but I have too many friends or family who are not interested in adopting facebook, and so I need to stay outside of that convenient but tightly-walled garden.
If I follow my intention, I think the “next 1000” will come more quickly, as I genuinely intend to pursue my plan to “back-post” at least some of my pre-blog writing – I’ve even brought along some major chunks of it (electronically and in the form of paper journals) to Korea, with this plan in mind.
Anyway, to my few but beloved readers – friends and family – thank you. Thank you for tolerating this rather droll effort to stay in touch. Thank you for being my friends, too! I have been so very lucky in my life, to have the kinds of friends and family that I have. Take care…
~jared
Caveat: Hermit Kingdom 2.0
I've commented before about South Korea's stunning loyalty to Microsoft – that company's 90-something-% market-share is the highest of anywhere in the world, I believe. And I think I've noted before that it's driven been by one major thing: early adoption of internet-banking and online secure-transaction tools, under the aegis of extensive government mandates regarding middleware and security features, that coincidently relied on Microsoft's proprietary ActiveX technology.
Mozilla has recently taken the time to post an excellent blog entry on the subject of South Korea's "Monoculture" vis-a-vis browsers and operating systems (and no wonder, being Microsoft's most successful competitor in the browser market). They provide a good summary of the issues, and implicitly explain why iPhone and Android will fail in South Korea, despite their huge cachet and positive brand images.
Given that Samsung recently announced they were going to try joining the crowded field of smartphone OS design, with their "Bada" product (I think that's what it's called – I'm writing from memory on this), I wonder if this will change? Or will Samsung go ahead and pay some kind of royalty to MS in order to license and use ActiveX and/or internet explorer, in exchange for being able to exploit the current monoculture to protect and enhance their potential for suceess in their home market and suppress their most innovative potential competitors (e.g. Google, Apple, RIM)? Hmm… I bet there's some kind of dealing going on, there. I wonder how many shares in tech chaebol Bill Gates owns? He should own a lot.
Caveat: Trade Secrets
Apparently, five Silicon Valley giants (Google, Apple, Oracle, Applied Materials, Yahoo) have managed to convince a judge that being required to release statistics about the race and gender of their employees would reveal too much of their business strategy to competitors. I saw this in an article inthe Mercury News. In other words, the race and gender breakdown of their employees is some kind of trade secret. This seems creepy, to me.
What would such statistics reveal? That their employees include a preponderance of immigrants from Russia and India? That they're whiter than the general population? That there are almost no Mexicans? That they are mostly male? These are my personal speculations, based on experience in the IT industry. But how could this kind of information reveal business strategy? What weird facts would studying the statistics reveal?
These companies (well, except for Applied Materials, which I know nothing about) kind of creep me out even on good days – kind of the tech equivalents of the "banks too big to fail," perhaps. But this is disturbing, especially in light of the fact that some other large Silicon Valley companies (including Intel, Cisco, and Sun [which has now been swallowed up by Oracle]) had no problem disclosing the same sorts of statistics.
Caveat: The New Me
Per the advice of several people I have been interacting with during my job search, I have been implementing a new website dedicated to presenting myself professionally. I went "live" with it today. It's still missing some pieces, but I'm fairly happy with it so far. It's quite spare and simple, but I think that's best for a professional presentation. https://www.raggedsign.net/jared
I would welcome any feedback or observations. I'm not always good at following advice, so I won't necessarily follow yours, but I still would gladly hear anything anyone might have to say.
Caveat: Sleepless in St Paul
I woke up at 4:30 this morning, and was completely wide-awake. Jet-lag, and all that.
So, I got on my computer and finally got around to trying to build a "cafe" (which is what Koreans call user-generated web-forum-blog-type-thingies: "카페") on naver.com. It's a bit challenging for me, since the interface for signing up and doing the configuration and settings is only in Korean. But after looking up lots of Korean words on the various links and buttons and instructions, I succeeded! I have decided that I'm really bad at keeping my own ASP.NET-based website updated, and my students are very comfortable with the Korean internet's cafe concept, that the best way to set up something internet-based for interacting with students and staying in touch would be to make my own cafe.
So, here it is. I even posted something there. I've redirected "jaredway.com" to that location, now, too [update – this "redirect" is no longer true, but the cafe is still there. neglected]. We'll see if it works out for keeping in touch with my former students (and, presumeably, over time, future ones as well?).
Warning — there's a lot of Korean on the site. Not because I put it there, but because the "frame" is part of the naver.com internet portal, which is one of the big 3 Korean internet portals. Of the 3, I like naver.com best because it's the only one that works seemlessly with firefox. The other two seem to be more Microsoft dependent. If your computer doesn't have the Korean character set, you might see a lot of gobblygook.
Caveat: DRM and antifandom
So, I made a video and tried to post it, with a song that I really like. I didn't really think about copyright issues… I've seen so many homemade videos to preexisting songs on places like youtube, that I really thought the issue was resolved as a sort of "fair use." Obviously not. Youtube disabled the video I uploaded because it detected "copyrighted material" – ie the soundtrack to the video I made.
My reaction: 1) I have to find a different song. 2) I'll have to rethink adding songs to my videos, in general – but, my life has always had a soundtrack, and I was thinking how totally cool it was to be able to "share" that life-soundtrack with others, and now I can't always do that, which leads to 3) some weird, residual anger at the artist in question – why can't I use her song to show the feeling or mood I have associated with my homemade video? Do I have to go through the rigmarole of getting permission? It's not even a matter of money – I'm sure the money is insubstantial. It's the inconvenience. Do I want to remain a fan of an artist that makes my life annoying and inconvenient? Maybe not. Now, when I hear that song, instead of thinking the reflective, deep, philosophical thoughts I previously associated with it, I'll be getting grumpy thinking about DRM and why she wouldn't let me use her song on my amateur video, in what I thought was a thoughtful, respectful way, including crediting the song at the end (as I've been doing). So I doubt that song will remain on my mp3, either. Maybe that artist just lost a fan. Is that what DRM (in all its manifestations) is supposed to do?
Youtube offered me the option of replacing my audio track. But the whole point of the exercise was that I thought I'd come up with a video that matched the song in question in mood and atmosphere. What are the chances I'd find such a song in their weird random library of "licensed" tracks? Further, as youtube notes, "Note that advertisements may be displayed on videos that contain soundtracks from the AudioSwap library." Oh, goody. Not that I have anything against advertising… it's what makes most of the internet free, after all. But, I just don't feel like attaching random advertising to this video.
Outcome: the video won't be posted. Sorry.
Caveat: What about Gitmo
The Obama administration has proven disappointing in lots of ways, so far, although it's early to pass judgement. But one thing I'm surprised about is how stymied they seem over the Guantanamo issue. There was a proposal by someone named GUÉNAËL METTRAUX in a recent New York Times that seemed like a plausible and workable solution to the dilemma created by Bush et al.
In a side note… I may have to stop reading the New York Times online… more and more, I'm getting "you have to pay for this section" or "you have to be registered for this section" notifications. It's annoying. I quit reading the Washington Post for a similar reason. Everyone says… well, papers have to support themselves. True. But sitting in South Korea, it's not necessarily convenient to have some kind of online subscription to a website, given unreliable access issues (due to being inside Korea's weird, unpredictable national firewall, and having a crappy DSL provider, among other things). So I just shop around for what's convenient, I guess.
Caveat: Each Day…
I've been trying to decide if I will continue my monomaniac effort to post to this diary each and every day, after I cut myself adrift. It will be less convenient to continue doing so — I imagine a search each evening for a PC방 (Korean internet game room) or the local equivalent wherever I am. I've never been good at keeping up habits in the face of inconvenience. One of the favorite creative bits of language I've ever run across in any of my EFL students' writing was Ella's "inconvenience is the mother of invention." So what would I invent? No need, here. I can always "post date" / "pre date" my blog entries. But that kind of feels like cheating. Well, it's of no major consequence, actually.
Yesterday I had a student giving me a long, drawn-out excuse for unfinished homework, involving diarrhea and visits to the doctor, apparently. I would have preferred the abridged version, to be honest. But it did expose me to some unexpected vocabulary in Korean, and thus, as tends to be the case, I made it into a "teaching moment." I don't know it it was appreciated. But whatever.
Not-so-random notes for trying (still trying, only trying) to learn Korean
자신 = self-confidence, confidence -하다 to have self-confidence
할아범 = old man (according to dictionary)
할아범탱이 = not in dictionary, my students tell me it means senile old man
전염 = infection
변비 = constipation
설사 = diarrhea
모든 = each, every, all, whole
Caveat: The Revolution Will Be Twittered, Apparently
"The revolution will not be televised, but you can damn well believe it will be Twittered, and then promptly forgotten as it scrolls off the screen." — Ted Dziuba (in his column "Fail and you" at theregister.co.uk)
Caveat: How much does the internet weigh?
Sun Microsystems, working with Internet Archive (the people who host the "wayback machine" which is basically a historically aware copy of the entire internet all the way back to 1996), has packed the whole thing into a single shipping container full of servers. According to the article at the Reg, that means that there's a copy of the entire internet in that box. That's pretty cool. And that means you could put the entire internet (well, a copy of it) on the back of a truck. Or store it somewhere safe. Or launch it into space for some future alien civilization to try to make sense of.
Caveat: Vowels are a scarce resource
There are not many jounalistic spaces on the web that I would consider personal "destinations," in the sense that I save bookmarks to them and return to them regularly because I enjoy the content and find it reliably entertaining. This is doubly true for blogs and news sites related to technology. I'm much more likely to simply find myself surfing to locations because of some specific interest being pursued via one of the big aggregators of news and opinion, e.g. Google News or Wikipedia, etc.
One place I have found myself returning to regularly is The Register, a UK-based news and blog site about technology. The writing is reliably high-quality for the most part. And I especially enjoy the dry, sarcastic humor of blogger Ted Dziuba, from whom I borrowed the observation that I used as the title of this blog. It's not really relevant to anything in particular, it's simply funny. It reminds me of the Onion headline from a decade or so ago, that said something along the lines of "Clinton deploys vowels to grateful Bosnia."
Then again, it depends where you are. In Korea, if anything, they suffer more of a vowel surfeit than a shortage. I think the language would be a lot more manageable if they would dispense with a few of their more challenging vowels and diphthongs. Ah well.
Notes for Korean (while trying to use a computer)
검사 = inspection, test, examination
무료치료 = "no charge cure" (in context of antivirus ware.. seemed weird)
취소 = cancel
종료 = end / close
Caveat: Bing? uhhhh… Boogle.
I have been trying to use alternatives to Google, when searching things online. Why? It's not that I dislike Google. It's that I always tend to favor the underdog. It's some kind of instinct, almost. I try to be anti-follow-the-crowd.
So, although I despise Microsoft in some respects, especially their Windows consumer franchise (can someone please repair Vista? why does my computer crash several times a week under Vista, but never crashes when I boot under Windows Server 2003, and only crashes rarely under Ubuntu?), lately I've been making an actual effort to try using their newly branded search engine, Bing.
What a joke. Today I was doing some searching on something Bing is supposed to be good at, according to the reviewers: shopping. I've been thinking of buying some "gadgets" before leaving Korea, to best take advantage of my hoard of Korean cash. So I was trying to research camcorders and netbook and small notebook computers. Hahaha. The entire first page of results when I typed in "camcorder comparison shopping" were links to Google directory pages! Which, in my personal experience, are useless for actually finding anything out.
Well, at least we know that Microsoft isn't skewing results to proprietary sites. But, still… how could they allow this to happen?
Anyway, back at Google, I had much better luck finding some comparison buying guides, etc.
Caveat: Curses, ActiveX!
While surfing around looking for something else, I finally have figured out why I have to use MS Internet Explorer when visiting most Korean-based or Korean-designed websites: ActiveX. That's an internet technology that's not web-standard, and that only works in the Microsoft universe (microverse?), but which is apparently nearly universal in Korean website design.
Despite being at least a little bit computer savvy (although my expertise was mostly in "back end" stuff relating to databases), I confess I never knew that ActiveX was restricted to Microsoftland. So… well… you learn something every day, right?
Here's the blog where I found it described fairly well, although it's also rather depressing, since it claims Google's Chrome browser will support ActiveX, which I have not found to be the case. Maybe they're still working on it.
I like Kang's observation that Google is having a tougher time working with the Korean government than with the Chinese government. I've speculated, before, that supposedly democratic and highly westernized South Korea may in fact be more protectionist and xenophobic in some respects than China, but without having spent time in China, I won't make any assertions. It seems there's evidence out there to support the idea, though. And the way the government here "runs" the internet is one of them.
Caveat: Browser Skirmishes
I keep hoping I can find an alternative to Internet Explorer that allows me to navigate my work-based websites (which are Korean designed and based). I'm not sure why… I don't necessarily have anything against Microsoft, at least with respect to their browser, in particular. I guess I just like to keep my options open.
But the Korean-based websites are stunningly Microsoft-dependent. Last night, I had a moment of elation when, messing around with my laptop at home, I downloaded and installed the latest Opera browser. I went to my work website, successfully logged in, and saw normal-looking Korean hangeul writing instead of gobbledygook, which is what I get in both Google Chrome and Firefox. Nevertheless, the work website was useless because the ActiveX embedded site-navigation widget that appears on the left hand side (which, in fact, loads in Firefox successfully) failed to load in Opera. Net result: a gain in one area (flash-based rendering of Korean characters) was offset by a loss in another (navigation widget broken). Ultimately, I'm still married to Internet Explorer.
I like the Opera interface, though. I may end up spending some time with it.
Caveat: Proxymate Cause
I have been obsessing over trying to solve my connectivity problem. It annoys me that it only seems to apply to one specific type of internet connection: Home-to-typepad (where typepad is my blog hosting service, where you're reading this). All other connections I've tried work just fine, with zero problems. I can do: work-to-typepad; home-to-anything-else; work-to-anything-else.
I got a prompt answer from the typepad helpdesk, today. Basically, there is not nor has there been any kind of outage at typepad. And, since I'm able to connect from work, it's not a Korea-wide problem. Although… I got a bit of a hint of what might be going on, when, as an experiment, I tried connecting to my blog using the raw IP address rather than the name: I got a notice from the Korean Police State that they prohibited that particular connection.
I reckon there may be something involving Korea's "national firewall" – just like China (and, in fact, like most countries outside of North America), Korea monitors and surreptitiously manipulates the contents of the DNS's (Domain Name Servers) in-country. These are the devices that tell the internet how to find things for you. The result is that if they don't want you going somewhere, they can "block" it in some way.
Still, I don't think my blog host (typepad, blogs.com, sixapart.com, etc.) is being intentionally blocked, because I was still able to go there from work. I think there may be problems with my particular at-home DSL provider's commitment to correctly maintained DNS's. Regardless, I successfully solved the problem, at least for now. I found a list of inside-Korea proxy servers, and configured firefox to connect to the internet using one of them. That way I can piggyback on that other Korean service's DNS, and still get fairly speedy connectivity.
Why not use a proxy outside Korea? Because doing such is impossibly slow. Most connections will time out long before you get anything back, because the browser has to handshake with its proxy through undersea cables, I guess. I'm speculating… I don't really understand this stuff. Just enough to hack around a bit, to try to solve my problem.
And here it is, solved, I guess. I'm posting to my blog, using firefox connected to a Korean proxy, thus bypassing my apparently imcompetent DSL provider's DNS. Now, back to your regularly scheduled narcissistic caveatdumptruck.
Caveat: Crashage
Last night when I got home, I went to try to write a little post to this blog, and it simply didn't load. And didn't load, and didn't load. The effort to load "typepad.com", "sixapart.com" and "blogs.com" all would time out.
I've been having some bandwidth issues with respect to outside-of-Korea websites, but that didn't seem to be the problem, as everything else I tried worked fine, including my U.S.-based bank and several other blog services I surfed to, out of curiosity. So, typepad was "down" in some way.
I've manged to post a blog entry of some kind EVERY SINGLE DAY this year. I'm weirdly proud of that, although it's kind of an artificial constraint, and I could easily cheat, since I can manually change the "post date" if I wanted to. But so far, I've actually met that "every day" criterion with no cheating of any kind, this year. So, I felt horrible that I would miss a post because of technical difficulties. Finally, I sent a scream of annoyance from my cellphone (which is the "No Title" post just previous), having figured out it was just barely possible to do that a few weeks back.
Right. Except now, this morning, when I went back in to check, typepad was still down. And only now, sitting at work around noon, is it available. Yet the typepad support area and status area mentions absolutely ZERO about any kind outage or crash, although there's a vague "4:15 PM ET: The TypePad application should now be working without any problems for all users."
What gives? Was it only because I was sitting in Korea that I was unable to access the site? Was it only because I was sitting at home? I will have to keep poking around, but, I'm annoyed.
I'm not so much annoyed that there was an outage… that's not a big deal, these things happen, after all. I'm annoyed that I can't figure out why there was an outage, or what kind of outage it was. Was it a general outage? A total outage? An only-because-I'm-trying-to-access-from-Korea outage? An only-because-my-home-DSL-provider-sucks outage? I want answers!
Interestingly, the "scream-from-cellphone" post appears to have worked. Which strikes me as odd, if typepad were truly completely down. It lends to credence to the possibility that it was a "because-I'm-in-Korea" type problem.
Sigh. Whatever. Hopefully, it will work tonight when I get home, and I can post normally again. And I'll probably forget how annoyed I feel and move on. But it does get me thinking… perhaps I should "snapshot" my blog (capture all the posts) and back it up somewhere, just in case there is a real, truly horrible loss of data or service.
If I had to end my relationship with typepad at some point, either due to a failure on their part or because I just became too annoyed with them, I'd need all my old posts to migrate to a different location. In theory, I'm sufficiently competent with HTML etc. that I could in essence "manually" host my blog, at least for a short term, on my own underutilized server. But only if I have good backups, right? Uh oh… this is starting to sound like a weekend-eating project. Jeez, and I never finished killing Ubuntu, two weekends ago. That was my last project. Sigh.
No Title
argh… the typepad website is unreachable
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[this was posted via an email-based “back-door” to my blog from my cell phone. Hence the incomprehensible advertachment and the lack of title.]
Caveat: The Gas Demands of Costumers
You’d think a concept such as the gas demands of costumers would be the kind of mistake I’d find in my students’ writing, but no… it was on the Wall Street Journal website. Here’s a screencap (since linking to it will eventually show a corrected version, no doubt).
Caveat: 저는 위키백과 ♥
Which is to say, ”I♥Wikipedia” (roughly… seems to me, the heart should go at the end in Korean, since that’s the verb, right? And… what about endings? Should it end in “-♥요”? “-♥해요”?) What exactly does the heart stand for – the whole verb, including endings? Or just the semantic root. These are harder to resolve in Korean, than in English, maybe. Then again, basically, the heart works like Chinese.
Anyway, back to 위키백과 (wikipaekgwa = wiki encyclopedia i.e. wikipedia). There was an awesome review of it by Noam Cohen in the New York Times.
Caveat: Goodbye, Ubuntu
If you look back to around 15 months ago in my blog entries, you'd conclude that Linux triumphed on my desktop, and I never looked back. Yet, last night I logged onto my Linux partition and noted it had been 60 days since my last use of my Linux install. I've been living in a Windows-only world (Vista on my laptop, XP-Korean at work).
Does that mean I love Windows? I've always felt OK about XP (which is basically a desktop version of Server 2000/2003), but not a day goes by when I don't mutter "F@##$% Vista" to myself under my breath. Vista’s Windows Explorer (File Manager app) still crashes sometimes for no apparent reason, on an almost weekly basis, for example. So why am I not only tolerating Vista on my laptop, but basically committing to it exclusively, now? I have three main reasons.
First, there is the problem of language support. Once I started taking my efforts to learn Korean seriously, I found myself having to use Ubuntu Linux's clunky CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean) support. It's an add-on. There are several choices of add-on, but all are terribly integrated to the desktop, and all are completely incompatible with several of the applications I wanted to use. I couldn't figure out how to name files in Korean unicode, and switching between western (US), western (Spanish) and Korean keyboards seemed unreliable and inconsistent, if not downright difficult. With at least one application (the game Second Life, Linux version), when I would run the CJK Input engine alongside it, it would lead to a full-blown system crash. No forum seemed to offer a more reliable alternative to the input engines I found and tried. In comparison, Microsoft's CJK language support is well-integrated to the operating system, and once I discovered that my right-hand ALT key could function as my Hangeul/Roman switch (since my laptop has a made-for-US keyboard that doesn't have that special Hangeul switch key to the right of the SPACE bar, the way that Korean keyboards do), I was very happy. Of course, even Microsoft's language support is sometimes weird: despite now being in service pack who-knows-what, every time Vista pops up that little "please authorize me to scratch my butt" warning, the language bar unlocks from the toolbar, parks itself somewhere near the top of the screen and floats out to foreground for half a second. That's buggy-looking, the sort of thing you'd think some developer at MS would have noticed before it even got into beta, not to mention two years after going live. I doubt it impacts functionality, but it's downright unprofessional-looking from a design/aesthetics standpoint. Overall, though, at least language support is fully integrated and relatively painless, if not always aesthetically pleasing.
Second, there is the issue of media files and media players. I could never find a media player and media organizer in Ubuntu that worked seemlessly with the materials I had: my Samsung MP3 player, my 35GB of music files, my downloaded Korean TV shows and movies. Each media player I tried would end up doing something strange. Once, one of the players (I forget which) placed all the music files onto my MP3 player with gobbledygook names (probably some freaky interaction with a few of my Korean unicode-named music files). Another time, I swear another player corrupted a set of 16 episodes of a TV show I'd spent weeks downloading. I also frequently got frustrated with visiting internet radio sites, where I would allegedly lack the proper codec, etc., to be able to play the stream I was trying to play. Many online streams are optimized for Windows and Mac environments, and seem to forget the Linux user out there. In any event, I now alternate between Realplayer and Windows Media Player when using Vista, with zero problems. Both work fine in the Vista environment.
Lastly, there has been the problem of the fact that Korean internet websites are often incompatible with Firefox (and Opera, to the extent I experimented with that). This is not, strictly speaking, Ubuntu or Firefox's fault, obviously. South Korea, more than any other nation on Planet Earth, is married to Microsoft at the hip. Microsoft has a 98% market share here, which is by far the highest in the world. Most Korean-national websites are written in non-ISO-compliant extensions to HTML (especially Flash and Silverlight) that seem to work only in Internet Explorer. I didn't ask for this type of environment, but I must accept the reality of it: that if I want to spend time on Korean websites (and in some cases, such as work-related tasks, I MUST spend time on Korean websites), I have no choice but to be using IE. And that pushes me into Vista, too.
Some people have said, for these compatibility issues, why don’t I use WINE (a Windows emulator for Linux) to encapsulate the problematic programs so that I can continue to run a Linux desktop? This is possible, although it doesn’t solve problem number one: lack of integrated language support. But furthermore, at least in my limited experimentation, WINE encapsulation is slow. And clunky. Ultimately, it seemed more trouble that it was worth, relative to possible benefits. It leads to a pyrrhic victory over Microsoft, at best.
So, sadly, the vista from here is murky. Ubuntu has a lot to accomplish before I can feel comfortable adopting it as my primary OS, as much as I would like to. My plan for this weekend is to delete my Linux partition, so as to be able to use the extra gigabytes this will free up. Ubuntu, it's been good to know ya.
Caveat: Internet no respeta ni a su padre
Resulta, leyendo en El Periódico de Catalunya, que Tim Berners-Lee, "padre" del World Wide Web, ha perdido dinero en dicha Web por algun fraude. Que irónico, si sea verdad. De todos modos, me gustó la frase sobrecitada.
No Title
this blog post is directly from my cellphone. note ad£¬below. aint technology wonderful?
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[below, added Monday night 2009-03-09]
I posted this as a test of the possibilities. I like that it’s possible. I’m disappointed that, since the Korean character-encoding is non-Unicode, it shows up as gobbledygook – but that’s my Korean cell-carrier’s fault, not my bloghost’s.
I wonder if posting html would work? I might experiment with that…
Other features that my bloghost could provide, in the “nice-to-have” category:
* turn the first line of the email into the title
* some indication that it was posted using SMS/email rather than from the website (e.g., that could show up instead of the uninformative “no title”)
* alternately, the ability to configure the above sorts of functionalities on the preferences page
x
Caveat: [응덥 없음]
The browser says: “응덥 없음” which means “no response.” You know, the standard computer crashing thing, right?
Argh.