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.
Category: Internet & Blogging
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.
Caveat: Reflections on (of) Glass Houses. And the Future.
Here are some disorganized reflections of mine on the subjects of facebook, the internet, the panopticon, and the glass houses. An extension to some initial thoughts I posted on February 6th, in reaction to an article in the guardian.
The web’s “transparency” has two aspects. There is the “taken” or “stolen” transparency (meaning that it grants organizations or individuals a power to spy – cf. a concept such as Foucault’s panopticon prison, which is carrying the problem to a philosophical extreme). This is something that people fear. But there is also a “granted” or “given” transparency, which is fundamentally empowering, in my opinion – especially when viewed as an opportunity for those who hold power of any kind to “come clean” vis-a-vis those over whom they exercise power. Or, at a more personal level, it is the power recognized from time immemorial in the liberating nature of confession.
In terms of potential, this power of revelation/confession trumps the power to monitor (panopticon). Governments and organizations are in glass houses, now. They try to throw up barriers and blinds, but it’s a losing battle, at best. There is a man in China who is in prison because some exec at Yahoo! (or group of execs, more likely – corporate ethical lapses are so often the consequence of groupthink) had an ethical lapse vis-a-vis the Chinese government, but, the truth remains… we KNOW about that man in prison. In past times, a similar man, in a similar prison, would have disappeared completely, and we’d only have known of his situation by extrapolation from the situation of others whom we’d heard about. Recall the many “disappeared” victims of past dictatorships. Such total “disappearances” are, erm, disappearing in this new internet-enabled world. Everything gets documented.
Bushcheneyian tyrants will always find ways to harass us, and they will be assholes, regardless of the technology available. Quakers, freethinkers and resisters were blacklisted by the CIA, the FBI, not to mention King George III, long before there were internet servers. Cheney and his secretive, Nixonian ilk are a fading breed… a failing adaptation. Or is this overly hopeful?
Perhaps if I believed in such a thing as divine providence, I’d be more inclined yearn for such a divine providence to be controlling our internet infrastructure, but there’s nothing divine: there’s only Al Gore – a deeply flawed human at best (and Al Gore’s not really controlling the internet, obviously, but he’s a good proxy for the human collectivities that ARE controlling it, and he’s an amusing proxy, too, since he “invented” it).
Broadly, my primary assertion is that the internet as a whole, and facebook in particular (mostly seen as a somewhat more intensely managed version of the internet as a whole), are AT WORST forces of an ethically neutral value, and AT BEST they offer the potential for radically transforming our human ethical space, mostly due to the eerie powers of grassroots transparency.
Partly, I’m thinking in terms of evolutionary psychology. Humans evolved an ethical space in which LYING and DECEPTION (including self-deception!) were easy strategies, and therefore those things were (and still ARE) also quite frequent. The direction in which technology is taking us has the potential to transform the social evolutionary pressures that led that way. Perhaps I’m guilty, here, of transhumanist (q.v.) thinking – which in general I find vaguely worrying. Be that as it may.
Writers like Tom Hodgkinson worry that facebook (and the internet in general) are primarily technologies that accentuate this potential of deception, and worse, that they can even facilitate oppression. That’s a very pessimistic view, and it will lead down the path toward luddism. Of course, all technologies present us with grave dangers: the warmongers and the kleptocrats will always be beating plowshares into swords, wherever and whenever they “need” them, and using campaigns of deception and spying to discover the weaknesses of their enemies.
My feeling is that the people who most fear the internet are the sorts of people who fear things in general, and that the people who extoll the internet are the sorts of people who extoll things in general – in other words, whether we fear the future or extoll it has more to do with our own inner selves than with aspects inherent in world-changing technologies.
There have always been future dystopians (once called millenarians, for example). There have always been pie-in-the-sky optimists regarding the future of the human condition. What’s true – or reasonable – must fall somewhere in between.
Caveat: Chupacabras and other fine tropes
It started out, because I was wondering, how does an originally Puerto Rican (and now naturalized Mexican, Brazilian, and even Texan) goat-sucking monster end up as a trope in a Japanese cartoon series? See the youtube, below, where the chupacabra creature is introduced in the Negima!? (the exclamation point and question mark are important parts of the correct spelling of the show’s name) series.
[UPDATE 2020-04-07: The video link here no longer worked, and I have been unable to find a replacement for it. So I guess just take my word for it.]
But then I began investigating, and found this most amazing, time-sucking website. A sort of intellectual chupacabra of my very own: tvtropes.org. Not only do they have these amazingly well-written, tongue-in-cheek meditations on everything from Hamlet to Battlestar Galactica to Chupacabras (of course), but they have such fun little time-wasters as the amazing “story generator“. I will never be able to spend my free time in only wikipedia. I’ve found something better.
So, that was yesterday. Today, I went exploring in Seoul, a little bit. Parts of Seoul seem like a very cold, temperate version of L.A., in terms of the urbanist style at work: these desolate mountain ranges push down into the heart of the city without really attracting development because of their steepness, so only a few subway stops north of downtown you can find a neighborhood that looks like this.
Caveat: Friends like these…
My facebook friend Kray pointed to an article in the guardian about the darker side of facebook in a recent post. I wrote the following comments. I'm going to be writing more, maybe this weekend. I think it's important.
Kray, this is a fascinating article, and I agree that much of it is disturbing, the way that whole parts of the "new economy" are disturbing. I think I will try for an in depth meditation on some of the issues raised, but meanwhile, two short observations:
1) While I agree that if you're using facebook to connect to your local community, then you're clearly short circuiting what could be much more productive "real" social interactions. But for me, it's been proving an amazing way to maintain and restore previously "disappeared" personal communities that span the entire planet because of my current location. That's a "good thing."
2) Yes, we are very "exposed" on the net, and I agree that having all that personal information out there is scary. But I've always been a huge fan of the concept of transparancy as a way to ensure ethics in things like government and business, and while there are big-brother aspects to something like facebook, isn't it possible that we could be hypocritical if we are unwilling to apply the same standards of transparency to our own lives? I'd rather have my "dark secrets" online in a medium I at least in some ways can monitor and control (e.g. my blog, or facebook) than in spaces I cannot control (e.g. that file the FBI/CIA undoubtedly already have on me, somewhere in Washington, or the file my past doctors have of me in some database).
Caveat: 25 random things (cross-post from facebook to blog)
I've been spending more time in facebook, recently. I'm not going to make much effort to "cross-post" things between the two places, but the potential for a sort of "online personality divergence" makes me weirdly uncomfortable — I'm not sure to what extent my miniscule blog audience overlaps my miniscule facebook audience…
Anyway, in this instance, here is a cross posting from facebook. A challenge is circulating there, to post 25 random things about oneself. Here is what I wrote:
1. I like making weird lists of random facts about myself. So this task
should go well and prove entertaining.
should go well and prove entertaining.
2. I jokingly tell people that I'm on my 6th career, and it definitely won't be
my last. Let's see… in reverse order: 6) Elementary EFL Teacher 5) Database
Programmer and Business Systems Analyst (maybe that's 2 at once?) 4) High
School Spanish Teacher 3) Graduate Student (that's a career, isn't it?) 2)
Bookstore Flunky 1) US Army Mechanic 0) Itinerant Hippie-Type-Person
3. I wrote a doctoral dissertation proposal on Cervantes' under-appreciated
novel "Persiles," but I dropped out of the Univ of Pennsylvania program in
disgust with the departmental politics; they gave me an MA as a "consolation
prize."
4. In 2004 I wrote a "temporary" computer program that a former employer of
mine used to bill a Very Large Customer (let's say they have corporate HQ in
Detroit, and the monthly billing amount was approximately $1 million, with
invoices running to 300 pages). As far as I know, they were still using that
program in 2007. When you log onto the intranet site that runs the billing
program, I had placed a quote by Mao Tse-tung on the splash page. It's still
there.
5. My television is broken. I like it that way. I use it to pile up my "half
clean" laundry… the stuff it's not time to wash but that isn't clean enough
to hang in the closet. If I need video, I watch it on my laptop.
6. I'm a language geek. I have studied 20 languages in some kind of academic
context for at least a few months. That doesn't mean I can speak them. In
most, I can barely say "hello, howareya?" In no particular order: Latin,
Ancient Greek, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Dakota (Native
North American Language), Mapudungun (Native South American Language), Korean, Medieval Welsh, Ancient Sumerian, Georgian (Kartuli), Japanese, Mandarin, Arabic, Purepecha (Tarascan, Native Mexican Language), Dutch, Catalan, German.
7. The languages in which I could truly claim any degree of competence are (in rapidly descending order): English, Spanish, French, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Italian… from there, don't even bother. I claim fluency only in English and Spanish.
8. I cook a mean mole poblano (famous Mexican Puebla style "chocolate chicken"). I haven't done so since moving to Korea, though. Ingredients hard to come by…
9. I love snow and rain much more than sunny days of any kind.
10. I died on November 17th, 1998, from intentional drug overdose. This is my 10th year as a ghost on planet Earth. I'm much happier as a ghost.
11. I love my family, though I don't communicate much with them.
12. I really want to learn Korean for 3 reasons: 1) the challenge — it is reputably one of the most difficult languages in wide distribution to learn 2) the novelty — it is very unique grammatically in the world 3) for my nephews (two Korean boys my sister adopted)
13. My childhood ambition was to be an architect. I feel like it's too late… but is it?
14. I secretly love cheesy romantic comedies.
15. There are still many places I want to travel to and visit. Top of the list: Phillipines, Japan, Mongolia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Finland, Russia, Turkey… uh, well, everywhere. OK? Everywhere.
16. I think I like being a "foreigner" — like when I was living in Mexico, or here in Korea, now. I think it helps affirm my inner alienation.
17. The big surprise of my recent career shift is that I actually enjoy teaching elementary kids more than older kids (and/or adults). It makes sense, but it honestly had never occurred to me before.
18. I own around 4000 books. They're in storage, in Minnesota. Except for, say, the most recent 50, lying around my apartment here in Ilsan. I can't seem to get rid of books, even if they're in a language I may never be competent to read.
19. If I go back to grad school, it won't be in Spanish Lit (which is what it was before). Maybe back to Linguistics?
20. I have more than 6000 music tracks on my computer. I admit… I'm a pirate. Argh.
21. I used to hate kimchi… but dang, that stuff kinda grows on you.
22. The place I've lived longest is Humboldt County (first 17 years minus a
half year in Oklahoma City plus a half year or so in 1990). 2nd runner-up is
Twin Cities, Minnesota (about 10 years cumulatively). 3rd place is Los Angeles
County, various locations (about 9 years total); 4th place is Metro
Philadelphia (about 3 years). 5th place is Northwest Gyeonggi Province, South
Korea (now about 2.5 years cumulatively). 6th place is Mexico City (about 14
months total). Other places where I've lived at least 3 months: Chicago,
Illinois; Valdivia, Chile; Boston/Cambridge, MA; Acuitzio, Michoacan, Mexico;
Quetzaltenango, Guatemala; Craig, Alaska; Oklahoma City, OK; Fort Jackson, South Carolina
23. Technically, I'm a widower. The real story is more complicated — we were
separated and discussing divorce when Michelle committed suicide in June of
2000. But I miss her nevertheless.
24. I have a stepson, Jeffrey, who is now 22 and a student at St Cloud State
in Minnesota.
25. An old friend of mine, Rosita (now 71), in Mexico City in 2007, asked me
why I'm single. "Porque todavia creo en el amor verdadero," I answered. (I
still believe in true love).
Caveat: Timeline
Lately, because of facebook, I’ve been “reconnecting” with people I haven’t interacted with or known about for up to 25 years. People from high school! Jeannine, Kray, Richard…. Anyway, questions crop up: didn’t you go to university in Missouri? (No). I heard you joined the Army? (Yes).
Being a fundamentally lazy person, I decided to answer a whole pile of these questions at once. I’ve added a year-by-year timeline [UPDATE 20210520: Link repaired, old link was broken] of my life-since-high-school to the bio page of my website: Jared’s Bio. Each year has 1 to 5 telegraphic sentences summarizing what I recall as the salient aspects of that year. I can now point people to it. If they’re interested. More me out there, for all the world to see: I believe in transparency – it cleanses the soul.
Caveat: Jared’s Friday Attitude Barometer
I haven’t done very well with coming up with what might be called “regular features” in my blog. I did really well over the summer with my “Notes for Korean,” but with the press of that nightmarish fall term, I abandoned it. It’s not even that I stopped posting notes… I simply stopped studying Korean altogether. I’ve been having a hard time getting back into a routine, now.
When I’m traveling, I like to say where I am. But that’s not really a feature.
And I love the idea of giving a “soundtrack,” although I haven’t figured out how to actually link in songs and all that… partly, I worry about copyright issues, and also, I’m so anti-Apple that the best online apps out there, which use Apple’s iTunes universe, are kind of off-limits for me.
Just for the sake of trying, today’s soundtrack, walking to work: Cat Stevens, Cafe Tacuba (mexi rock), 소녀시대 (k-pop), BigBang (k-rap), Cold (grunge / alt). “Shuffle” is awesome.
My student Tammy (2nd grade) sent me a message from her cellphone to mine which consisted only of a “cute” animated picture. I managed to capture it, but it’s not animated, now. See at right.
Anyway, I’m going to try for a weekly feature: an attitude barometer. Like most things in this blog, it’s vulnerable to the primary criticism I’ve received… it’s basically narcissistic. Of course. This is really just a diary, right? As long as we’re clear on that, hey, if you don’t want to read it, then don’t, OK?
The attitude barometer consists of a few questions that will have numerical answers. Some positive questions, some negative. Kind of like those questions in the Harper’s Index. The variation in numbers from week to week will provide an indication of my general mood and attitude, mostly about my work.
- Number of times I’ve opened my resignation letter and edited it: 1
- Barrier-surpassing moments of Korean-language usage (outside of work only): 0
- Spirit-destroying moments of Korean-language communication breakdown (outside of work only): 2
- Number of students that have said something to the effect of “teacher, you’re so funny” while fighting off an apoplectic fit of giggles: 3
- Number of times I’ve told someone that I am “much happier than when I was in L.A.”: 3
- Number of times I really meant it (as opposed to the “fake it till you make” approach I’m fond of): 2
- Days I was late to work this week: 2
- Total number of minutes I was late, minus total number of minutes I showed up early: 45
Caveat: Fear (embedded)
I thought I'd try something new. My first effort to embed a linked video. It's brutal, unkind, over-the-top satire. But it made me laugh.
[Noted added 2010-08-11: The embed is dead. It's really annoying to come back to my blog years later and see the links broken to things like this. I think this is why trying to add embedded materials is a fraught undertaking. I can't find where the original embedded vid went. Oh well. Sorry.]
Caveat: Oups… Franglais Triumphant
I was surfing some French websites earlier – don’t ask me why I do these things, it’s part of being an unrepentant language geek, I guess. I followed a broken link, and saw the following very un-french announcement: oups! So much for French language purity and all that. They let McDonalds into the country, and look what happens.
Caveat: The Obsolete Code of the Higher Eclectica
I was reading an editorial in the New York Times that, although clearly intended as satire and meant tongue-in-cheek, struck me as fundamentally accurate. And it made me feel outmoded, given the extent to which I buy into the "code of the Higher Eclectica" as Mr Brooks put it. I feel a certain scorn, combined with a distrust, of those who base their definitions of cultural coolness on media over underlying culture. But I think it's true. It's now the iPhone generation, and cultural content has become moot – all that matters is means of transmission.
I begin to imagine a marxian-style analysis that encompasses historically and materially determined transitions in "modes of transmission" that goes above-and-beyond the classically marxist transitions in "modes of production." Let's just call it the germ of an idea, for now. Mientras tanto, digamos adios a la "Higher Eclectica" del Sr Brooks.
Which reminds me of a couple of lines in the latest Korean drama that I've been watching episodes of: they mention the "386" generation as being those people in their 30's and early 40's (in Korea, but it applies just as well to U.S. culture I think)–people who's formative years included personal computers but for whom the internet and broadband cellphone connectivity seem just a tad "newfangled."
Anyway, the drama is called 달자의 봄 (Dalja's Spring), and it is consistently violating all the "rules of Korean drama" that I'd decided must exist up until now. It deals with all kinds of unexpected and "taboo" subjects that every single drama I've watched up until now scrupulously avoided: divorce, suicide, abortion, premarital sex, pregnancy outside of marriage, middle-aged career women, single mothers, irresponsible fathers. And more than just blinkingly, although by U.S. standards it remains utterly G-rated.
Yet despite all that, it is a very light-hearted, even sappy romance, with a fundamentally conservative social message, just like all the Korean dramas I've watched. This message strikes me as both compelling and unrealistic vis-a-vis human day-to-day realities in any culture. And it continues to reinforce my earlier not-so-clearly-stated hypothesis that contemporary Korean culture (and perhaps East Asian culture more generally?) is undergoing a kind of Confucian counter-reformation within a modernist and/or post-modernist trajectory.
Yesterday I worked–I'd "volunteered" to help with a speech contest, and so I woke up early and went over to ElBeuRitJi's Baengma Campus, and served as a judge for lots of not-bad student speeches. It was awesome to see some of my former RingGuAPoReom students (middle schoolers) who were participating, and one of my former students, shy-but-supremely-competent Irene, even managed to win a runner-up prize, which was quite an accomplishment in the context of ElBeuRitJi's much more intense academic standards, as well as a remarkable conquest of her own reticence. I felt parentally proud, as teachers sometimes do, I suppose–Irene is one of the few students who I remember vividly from my first few days of teaching back last September, when I realized quickly that she was the quiet one feeding all the right answers to her loud and gregarious friend, Amy, who was sitting next to her.
After work, I walked home in the steaming heat of mid afternoon, all the way down past Madu-yeok and Jeongbalsan, and when I got back to my apartment I felt terrible. Tired and sickly. Perhaps I had given myself mild heat stroke or something, I don't know. But I basically passed out, feeling exhausted, and had an unpleasant night of restless sleep.
-Notes for Korean-
context: 달자의 봄
쿨하게 나가야지="act cool" (kulhage nagayaji = cool-DO-ADVERBIAL go-out-SOME-IMPERATIVE-VERB-ENDING-THAT-I-CAN'T-FIND-IN-A-BOOK)
note that 쿨 (kul) is apparently directly from English
지금 뭔가 야한 상상 하고 있었구만, 맞지?
"Now you're having some vulgar fantasy, right?"
야한=dirty, coarse, vulgar
상상=imagination
일어나다=to get up, wake up
so… 일어났어요?="you're up now?"
context: obsessing on unparseable Korean
According to the drama transcript on the KBS website, in episode 18, about 47 minutes in, grandma says:
고저 한번 잘해볼라다가 끝나는거 고거이 인생이라구 말이디.
I had tremendous difficulty trying to parse this, and I have failed. Also, as I listened to it over and over, I don't think that's what she actually says. The last words sound more like … 인생이라고 말이야, which, conveniently, I find slightly easier to parse–so I'm going to assume, with great hubris, that there's an error in the Korean written transcript, or else the transcript is meant to reflect some kind of dialectical variation and that the actress playing grandma chooses not to implement when she actually speaks. Certainly, I've never heard of a verb ending -디 before. Anyway… according to the subtitlers, the phrase is supposed to mean: "The true meaning of life is to live well once through." So, you can see why that caught my interest–a nice philosophical, aphoristic nugget. But I really have been utterly unable to parse this successfully.
With my revisions to the transcript, the transliteration would be:
goseo hanbeon jalhaebolladaga kkeutnaneungeo gogeoi insaengirago maliya
=fluctuation once well-do-try-[INTRO-WARNING?(p231 in my grammar)]-[INTERRUPTED-PAST(but can this ending attach to the previous one?)] end-GERUND-[MYSTERY-ENDING-#1] [MYSTERY-WORD-#2] life-[COPULA]-[AUX VERB -고 말다?=finish up?]
words…
고저=fluctuation
한번=once<=한=one (ADJ form)+번=time (COUNTER)
끝나다=end, come to an end
고거이=?that?
인생=human life
Caveat: 웹 사이트 했어요
I made a new website. I’ve decided to redirect my “jareday.com” domain to this new website, because I am building the site as place where my students can stay in touch with me, and the jaredway.com is a nice, memorable address to be able to give them. My personal, more general website will continue to exist at https://www.raggedsign.net/way, for those who are interested. And of course this blog is redirected from caveatdumptruck.com
So this is going to be for my students. I’m not sure how ambitious I will be. It would be cool if it was a place where they could build their own content, eventually – I’m evaluating the possibility of a .NET-based wiki-clone that might provide something intuitive for them to interact with. But for now, it’s just a kind of place-holder where I might be able to post some photos and notes to them.
The reason I’m doing this, of course, is that this is my last week with all of my students. Because when I move over to work for 엘브릿지어학원 (LBridge Language Academy) for the last 5 weeks of my current contract, I will have a completely different group of students – none of my current students placed into the upper level that I am slated to be teaching, there. Which, actually, is something that leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, as I’ve commented on before.
I actually had a student in tears over her disappointmnet about where she’d been placed at 엘브릿지. And I’m not the sort who would suggest that a student who didn’t show the appropriate skill level should be moved ahead just for her self-esteem, but this student is one of the brightest, most hard-working and motivated students I’ve had at the elementary level, and if anyone at LinguaForum deserved to be placed at the top level at 엘브릿지, it was her.
[Update 2013-06-16: the jaredway.com domain has undergone repeated redirections since this original post, but the current address is a “gated” blog with detailed postings on class adminstrative stuff and student work.]
Caveat: Sith Master of Silicon Valley
I was reading a Forbes magazine article (byline Brian Caulfield and Wendy Tanaka 06.13.08) about the failure of the Microsoft-Yahoo deal and Yahoo's subsequent scramble for googlence, and one of the lines that stood out to me was a characterization of Larry Ellison (the wildly eccentric boss of Oracle Corp) as the "Sith Master of Silicon Valley." I liked the idea that this might be on target.
I'm a shareholder in Oracle, and furthermore, I hold an Oracle certification as a Database Administrator – which is ironic since all my actual DBA and development work has been with Microsoft's competing SQL Server product, for which I hold no certification.
Despite this, I am not a fan of their product line, exactly – it is about as baroque as a high technology product line can get and still function. The reason I bought stock in the company was, rather, because I saw first hand, during my years working with the Paradise Corp (a pseudonym) IT department the amazing ease with which Oracle's enterprise sales team took my employers for a multimillion dollar ride. A project which was started in 2003 is still going on, years after the original anticipated "go live" date, and as far as I know, it barely works if at all, and only with a zillion caveats (appropriate to mention, I suppose, for this blog).
I figured if all of Oracle's sales teams were half as effective as the ones working my IT higher ups at Paradise, that company had a locked down revenue stream for decades to come. So, through thick and thin, I remain a loyal Oracle shareholder – and among all my long-term holdings, it's been, overall, one of the most pleasing. Or maybe that's just the luck of jumping on (and off and on again) the bandwagon at the right time?
Caveat: The Quest for the Google-Killer
In the world of internet search technologies, there has arisen a trend where people are constantly looking for the "google-killer" – the "next big thing" in search algorithms or interfaces that will finally vanquish google's market dominance. There are problems with this quest, that render it somewhat unpredictable if not quixotic: first of all, google is a moving target, meaning they are constantly innovating their algorithms and methodologies behind the scenes; second, google, like many other large technology companies, has realized that brand-image is king, and as such, that marketing and design trump genuine innovation and genius (in this, they've learned well from Applecorp).
The technological problem of finding a better "search engine" is daunting, as we are right at the borders of AI (artificial intelligence). Thus, the next step seems to require real breakthroughs in natural-language- (and/or web-meta-language-) processing and interpretation. So-called "semantic webs" come into play – and somebody has to build these huge semantic databases, "tag" them appropriately (i.e. figure out how to automate the "tagging" process), and then spider through them effectively and rapidly.
A recent offering seems to go in the right direction: powerset.com. Right now, it's limited to a small, largely well-formed subset of the World Wide Web – namely, my own favorite haunts at wikipedia. But its ability to make sense of my "natural English" questions and find appropriate articles is pretty amazing. Try it out.
I'm listening to Jason Bentley on KCRW – he's playing The Black Ghosts' "Here It Comes Again." Great track… Jason Bentley rules.
Quote.
"I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation." – President U.S. Grant, on the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, in which he served as a decorated junior officer.
Caveat: From Behind the Redwood Curtain
I love wikipedia. I spend at least a few minutes there almost every day, and sometimes several hours. I love it the same way I used to love reading those big hefty paper encyclopedias as a child – it's a great way to learn new, random things.
Way back when the wikipedia was young, I actually edited a few articles there – most notably, I was proud of efforts I made to expand the entry on my hometown of Arcata, California. Most of what I wrote has subsequently changed and been improved upon many times (as is only right and good).
Earlier tonight, I was surfing the wikipedia using the "random article" button and ended up by pure chance on Humboldt County, Iowa. This prompted me to go to the Humboldt County, California, entry, to see what was there nowadays. And I noticed that there was a reference and link to a non-existent article on the "Redwood Curtain."
At first, I thought, "they definitely need an article on the Redwood Curtain." This is a frequently used term for the three most northwestern counties in California: Mendocino, Humboldt, and Del Norte, and is meant to suggest the ways in which the region's isolation is comparable to that of those Eastern European countries under Soviet hegemony during the Cold War, behind the Iron Curtain.
But upon reflection, I decided there wasn't enough interesting and notable information to merit a separate wikipedia article. But I hated to see that "broken" link in the Humboldt County article. So on second thought I decided to attempt a "redirect" – something that would point the missing "Redwood Curtain" article to something else. And in the end, that's what I did: now, when you go to "Redwood Curtain" in wikipedia, you get redirected to the "North Coast, California" article, where I added a single clarifying sentence that explains that Redwood Curtain is an alternate term sometimes used for the region.
And I've blogged the whole thing here, too. After more than ten years, I'm back in the wikipedia editing biz – ain't that simply fabulous?
Caveat: This Is A Blog
I found out today that at least one person at RingGuAPoReomEoHagWon has been reading my blog, or has seen it, anyway. If I understood correctly.
I have always been aware that writing my thoughts and experiences in this most public of places, the internet, could lead to this – that is why I have often kept things much more "bland" and generic than some of my audience (as small as it is) might expect. However, the actual knowledge is still something I have to adjust to, a bit. And it leaves me feeling compelled to reiterate, in more explicit terms, what this "blog" is supposed to be.
Mostly, this is just a sort of extended letter to my friends and family – at least, so far, that's what it's been. A way to avoid writing the same thing in 5 or 10 different emails each week. Secondly, it's a sort of discipline – a way to keep myself writing, if only a little bit.
It is most definitely NOT an effort at journalism (in which I have little interest), nor will I even guarantee truthfulness – I have dabbled in poetry and fiction a great deal over the years, and I reserve both novelistic and poetic license with respect to my writing here, even if I have, to date, rarely exercised it.
Back when I first started writing this, in 2004, I was actually quite careful to fictionalize e.g. my employer, but since then I've been much less careful, and I wonder if perhaps that has been a mistake. But on the whole, I don't actually write that often about work or about my employers – still, I should try to make clear that if I say something negative about my job, mostly I'm discussing my personal experiences and feelings.
Caveat: Trolleyology
A brand new word, with two widely variant meanings.
On the one hand, Word Spy (a website for "new" words) describes trolleyology as the practice of a sort of amateur anthropology in which people judge other people based on the contents of their shopping trolleys (shopping carts), especially to provide a means of evaluating potential love interests.
On the other hand, I have seen a reference in The Economist magazine (Feb 23rd, 2008), as well as googled sites such as ZhurnalyWiki or the mckimmy ethics blog where trolleyology is defined as the study of a collection of hypothetical ethics problems au courant in philosophy writing, in which people have to make decisions about switching the routes of runaway trolleys (streetcars) based on variant numbers of lives being at risk. I have run across this practice in my readings in philosophy before, but had never seen it called trolleyology.
It's a good word: so young, yet already deliciously ambiguous! I can already visualize a comedic skit involving people making ethics decisions involving runnaway shopping carts and potential love interests at risk, where the contents of the carts informs the decisions made. Lends a whole new potential meaning to the idea of a "streetcar named desire."
And for some reason I have this vivid image of a trolebus (Spanish for trolley car) in a poem by the neosurrealist poet Miguel Labordeta, but I can't recall the name of the poem or find it using google. But it was a poem definitely linked to mortality and love. So in the spirit of this, I'll quote another poem by Labordeta, "La voz del poeta":
Acariciándolo todo, destruyéndolo todo,
hundiendo su cabeza de espada en el pasmo del Ser
sabiendo de antemano que nada es la respuesta.
En lo alto del Faro.
La voz del poeta.
Incansable holocausto.
Caveat: Retract-o-Rant
Yesterday I posted a little rant about my frustration with KCRW and their link to iTunes. The day before yesterday, I had also sent a small email that was similar in tone and content to the KCRW email address. Lo and behold, this morning I had an actual personal message from someone at the station, guiding me to a feature of their "now playing" that I'd either managed to fail to see or that is simply something new. But wow – actual customer service. I was very pleased and impressed!
So I hereby retract the part of yesterday's rant against KCRW, and may even consider the possibility of supplementing my annual Minnesota Public Radio membership with a separate one for the station. Regardless, the part of the rant against Apple and iTunes still stands, but for KCRW I can say thank you, and great work – you've won over a loyal customer just through the effort.
For some reason, I've been really tired this week. I've been sleeping more than usual, and not studying my Korean as I should be. I will be going to my Saturday 학원 unprepared tomorrow. I saw a truck covered in baskets and stuff (I guess to sell them) on my way to work on Thursday, and I snapped a picture of it with my cellphone.
Caveat: Applic Elitism
One of my favorite online streaming radio stations is KCRW (out of Santa Monica), and one show I like is Jason Bentley's Metropolis. Often, I hear a track on this show that I would like to find out what it is, and on many streaming radio stations it's possible to go to a "now playing" list and find this out with very little problem.
However, KCRW's website, along with some others, essentially chooses to tie in their "now playing" list with Applecorp's iTunes website. And here's the problem: because I'm running Linux, I couldn't run iTunes even if I wanted to (because they only offer Windows and Mac versions). But I don't, in fact, want to run iTunes, because in general I dislike Apple's operating philosophy, focused as it is on image over substance, on dumbing down technology to just the level that they can sell it to righteous hipsters, their emphasis on paranoically closed-source operating systems and code, etc. etc. And I manage to feel this way, despite the fact that my "first" computer, way back in the day, was an Apple ][, and that I have very fond memories and a weird loyalty to that experience.
Actually, this should be a rant against KCRW, rather than against Apple: to the extent that it's the radio station's choice to make the tie-in to iTunes – although I assume there's some kind of mutually beneficial financial relationship there. But if there's a technological antithesis to the spirit of public radio, it's gotta be Apple. Compared to Apple, Microsoft looks positively communitarian, in that the development philosophy and marketing strategy at Microsoft is at least trying to offer some kind of lip service to universality (as opposed to Apple's elitism) – if only because Microsoft is monopolistic and bent on world domination at any cost. [Update – this rant is formally retracted via my retract-o-rant dated Feb 15]
Wouldn't a public radio station be more in line with a "for the people" marketing stance if they could try to make their website more universally accessible? Just a thought. Can we feel the love? It is, after all, St. Valentine's Day.
Caveat: Yasoft or Microhoo?
Microsoft is bidding to acquire Yahoo. I wonder what the new company/product could call itself?
Both merger names are so appealing!
Caveat: Klingons
Did you know that a group of people are working to translate not only the works of Shakespeare, but also the Bible, into the Klingon language? Is this a great world, or what?
In other news, I definitely despise my web host provider, hostingdude.com. Since coming to Korea, I have not once been able to complete any kind of transaction with the hosting admin website without also having to call them up to get them to accept a credit card number, or unlock a password which has been locked (probably because I’m coming at it from some disreputable “foreign” IP address), or some other problem.
This, despite the fact that I was very careful when trying to choose a provider to find one that allegedly would allow me to work with them exclusively online. So… they suck. But transferring my domains and website away from them while in my current overseas location will likely be very painful and possibly expensive. Which leaves me in that most unpleasant of positions, the helpless consumer. Maybe the people who run hostingdude.com are grumpy, human-hating klingons.
Below is a picture of where I work, with it’s new dark purple LinguaForum Eohagwon sign across the second floor. So those second-floor windows under the purple sign are classrooms where I teach.
Caveat: Chocolate Rain Obsession
Today was a very long day at work. I really liked my students today, though. Especially the incurably silly Gavin, Cathy, and friends in the new ER2(T) class, with their “happy singing zombie students” act.
Not to mention the “8th grade princess mafia,” aka the new TP1(T), which by some quirk of exam-scores and fate has become a girls-only class. They’re smart-alecky and unshakably in love with their cellphones, and only motivated under very generous definitions of the term… yet, they manage to be unmotivated almost exclusively in English, and thus I can’t bring myself to complain. I was feeling sad for the super-smart Lainy and Julia, the only 7th graders in the group having recently been promoted into it, given the other girls’ very cliquey behavior, but they’re so smart they hold their own and put the others to shame with stunning performances.
So. I stopped in the H-mart on the way home at dusk, and bought some food for my barren cupboards, including not just cabbage and tomatoes but a decadent bag of doritos and some chocolate milk. Then I proceeded to spend the evening surfing wikipedia and other bits of the internet. And became obsessed with a little internet meme that peaked over the summer, known as “Chocolate Rain.”
I’ll let you pursue it, if you’re interested – the tale of Tay Zonday, a University of Minnesota PhD candidate who, using a quirky youtube video, bootstrapped himself from obscurity into talk show appearances, big-bucks product jingles and endorsements, and major-talent collaborations.
And yet he continues to be a grad student, and the original ditty is actually an intriguing piece in its monotonous way: a little allegorical study of racism, with references to, among other things, the riots in the Paris suburbs. And, to quote: “Chocolate Rain / Made me cross the street the other day / Chocolate Rain / Made you turn your head the other way.” And continues, “Chocolate Rain / The bell curve blames the baby’s DNA / Chocolate Rain / But test scores are how much the parents make.” People who complain that the song is pointless, haven’t read the lyrics. And those who accuse him of selling out are missing the point completely, I think – publicity is a two-way street, and a thinking artist with a social-change agenda may in fact have a weird sort of obligation to leverage offers of publicity and money from commercial interests in order to further that agenda however he or she can.
A Brazilian vlogger observes (and maybe I’m just quoting him to showcase my own multilingual erudition, but I liked the way he phrases it):
É impressionante como a internet consegue transforma em celebridades os mais inusitados dos seres e as suas mais toscas exibições de talento. Veja o exemplo de Tay Zonday, um garoto que gravou uma canção chamada “Chocolate Rain” fazendo uso de uma voz grave, quase que robótica.
I’ve certainly got the tune and words stuck in my head, now. And so I listen to dozens of remixes and parodies of “Chocolate Rain,” while eating doritos and drinking chocolate milk, while I sit in my little apartment in happy Ilsan, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea.
To quote Mr Zonday: “This internet thing is wild!”
[Update: youtube embedded video added retroactively, 2011-08-03, a part of background noise.]
Caveat: “how many times can this train wreck wreck?”
The above is a quote from a blog on the New York Times website, talking about Britney Spears. I was doing some random web surfing… honestly, I don't really care that much about Britney. But I was immediately impressed with the twisted and unusual phrasing of the question, which uses 'wreck' as both a noun and verb, in sequence. I love things like that.
So. I'm so glad people use language creatively, even when discussing Britney's latest crisis. It gives me hope. In a weird way.
Caveat: surreptitious haggle
I receive quite a bit of spam. Like most people, I'm sure. But I received one this evening that seems exceptional.
First of all, like some of the best spam, it is clearly the output of some random word generation/selection algorithm, and ends up seeming like a fragment of avant garde poetry.
But what really stands out about it, is that it doesn't appear to be selling anything at all. There were no attachments. There's no embedded plea for financial help for a Nigerian, nor is there any recommendation for any "hot" stock or link to any enhancement-drug-selling website.
So… is this spam-for-spam's-sake? Spam-as-a-public-service, like the poetry they put on city buses some places? Spam-as-occult-message-from-another-dimension? Should I try to decipher it and discover the hidden meaning of life? It's begging me to. Is it the work of the Azerbaijani tourist bureau (note the dead links on the word "baku")?
Here is the complete text of spam:
surreptitious haggle
suppressible coachmen baku flathead dissuade cutthroatprecinct cutthroat dissuade idiosyncratic idiosyncratic middleweightindividualism drop brazilian idiosyncratic articulatory harshen dutiable haul summit dutiable purlpogo guidance articulatory drop articulatory precinct handout baku botch thee remorsefulhomage coachmen dowager botch middleweight summit
Caveat: Chat
At this instant, I'm chatting online in a weird mixture of Korean and Spanish – I signed up at this website called hanglingo.com to try to meet people for "language exchange" and just got an instant message from someone. This will be interesting…
Caveat: More Nonsense, or Immanent Cybersoul?
In other news: I found a blog that is stunningly bizarre. Go take a look at it. I dare you. [Update: the link is dead. The strange blog has disappeared. Which supports the spam theory, below.]
OK then. I’d like to hope that it is some kind of strange inside joke. Or the product of a random text generator of some kind, like that Kant engine I found some time back (see my blog entry from 2006.05.02). Or, at the least, I hope it is the output of some weird automated translation engine, from some profoundly syntactically un-English language.
Actually, I think it must be the output of some kind of automated, text-spewing tool: a database-driven textual abstraction engine of some kind? a spider-phisher (meaning a tool for attracting the attention of automated internet indexers, such as Google)?
But part of me enjoys imagining that there is a real, human author of the blog, who is actually sharing the poorly edited contents of his/her actual brain. I mean… what a remarkably strange brain that must be, to be inside of!
Actually, another thought occurs to me: this is an emergent symptom of a new, global, incipient cybersubconscious. Immanent (imminent?) oversoul of humankind. I’m sure some of you will be quite skeptical… but let’s think about it.
The internet today is an almost unmeasurably large text. Borges’s infinite library, maybe. But it is not just a passive text, sitting there for all of us internet-connected readers to read. It is also inhabited by a seething, swarming plethora of text-reading and text-generating machines (e.g. google-spiders and spambots, respectively). A vast ecosystem of predators and prey, living and dying, battling and fortifying, all in a text-based universe. The word made virtual flesh, but not incarnate. There be dragons.
So it is an unmeasurably large text in constant dialogue with itself – if not particularly self-aware dialogue, if not particularly meaningful dialogue, it is nevertheless a huge babbling demon. A giant idiotic infinitely schizophrenic mind. Grendel ruminates incoherently in his deep. The internet becomes humanity collectively dreaming.
Caveat: A Walled Garden
Not what you think: I'm going to talk about closed technical standards and the fun I had with them, last night.
Last Monday, after my trip into Seoul on Sunday, my mp3-player broke. Not sure what happened to it – it still turns on, fine, but it refuses to interact with me except to display its boot screen. I tried connecting it to my laptop with the USB cable, and it refuses to recognize the connection. Anyway… I'm kind of annoyed, as I've only had about 6 months of use out of it. And I was thinking, crap, so I've got to buy a new mp3-player.
I realized that, among other things, my new cell phone claims to be able to play mp3's. It's tied into a music-distribution website run by KTF (Korea Telecom something-or-other, who is my service provider). The service is called Dosirak (도시락). So, in my naivety, I thought to myself, well, mp3 is mp3 is mp3, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein.
I spent about 4 hours yesterday messing with my phone.
First, I realized that if I was going to be putting music on my phone, I would need some supplemental memory. So I went to the shop where I'd gotten the phone, and shelled out 20,000 won for a 1GB memory chip – hey, 20 bucks, no big deal, right?
Only after I got home did I realize that I had no USB cable to go with the phone – I had been thinking it was in the box I got the phone in, but no… there's a little notice in the manual (in Korean, but I got the gist, anyway, it was in bright red hangul) saying something to the effect of "USB cable sold separately." I was about to hoof it back to the telecom shop, but then I thought, wait, this phone speaks bluetooth – and so does my laptop, right? (Bluetooth is a wireless data-transfer protocol for very short distances, i.e. less than 100 meters).
So I spent about 30 minutes trying to get my phone to read my laptop. Under Ubuntu linux, forget it! There's an acknowledged bug with the current Ubuntu distro, with respect to reading bluetooth clients where the client requires passkey-enabled pairing – which my phone apparently required. So, after about 30 minutes of dinking around and online research, I rebooted the laptop to the despised and innately nefarious Windows Vista Business to see if I could bluetooth to my phone from there. Still it took another 30 minutes of messing around – there was a not-to-be-found-anywhere Wireless Device icon missing from my systray, and when I finally found it and ran the gadget, the phone was more than a little bit stubborn about reading the PC. I had to lower the security levels on the PC to zero, shut down the firewall, all that. Not sure what I was doing, just monkeying with switches till I could get it to work.
So. But finally, I was moving an mp3 file to my phone! I opened up the Dosirak player on the phone, and it couldn't see the file! Hmm…. turned out, after another 15 mintues of poking around, the file had been moved over to the phone without any .mp3 extension on it. And for some reason, the file-rename utility on the phone won't let you insert non-hangul and/or non-alphanumeric characters – crucially, the desperately needed "dot" in front of the .mp3 extension couldn't get typed in on the phone. So, with a heavy sigh, I went back to the PC and renamed the file to something very short, thinking maybe the filename had been too long, and retransfered it to the phone.
That worked. Now I had a .mp3 file on the phone. Once again I opened the Dosirak player, but the Dosirak player still couldn't see the file. I looked around some more, and noticed the 3 sample songs on the phone (all lovely K-pop pseudo R&B compositions) had .fmp extensions on them. Uh oh…
What the heck was .fmp? Extensive research on the web turned up exactly zero on .fmp as a music format. Something related to Filemaker Pro, but, for sure, that wasn't what these were. My heart was beginning to sink. In a fit of desperation, I tried changing the extension on the file from .mp3 to .fmp in hopes of tricking the Dosirak player into seeing the file. This actually worked – but the Dosirak player immediately complained that the file was corrupted. Clearly, .fmp wasn't just a secret renaming of standard mp3 format, but something different and/or proprietary.
I did some more web research, and finally found – in a PDF published in Europe, on international music encoding standards – a footnote that said that KTF (i.e. the parent company to Dosirak) had rolled out a proprietary encoding standard that included DRM (digital rights management) for its music-selling service. Heh… this must be the .fmp, right?
And there you have it. And I've been thinking about this in the broader context, on and off: this business of creating "walled gardens" using proprietary standards, and how annoying they are. One of the reasons why I refuse to jump on the Apple bandwagon – as everything they do is pure "walled garden" from a technical standpoint. Basically, I can play all the mp3's I want on my phone, as long as and only if I buy them from KTF. And thems the rules.
And some of you, reading this, will be saying: "I understand exactly zero of what he just talked about." And others will just shake your heads quietly in grim commiseration. Whatever.
I guess I'm going to go shopping for a new mp3 player today.
Caveat: Literacy, Post-Literacy, Textacy
So one of my students turned in a quiz last night on which she'd used not just a handwritten emoticon (ie. one of those little smileys done with punctuation 🙂 for example) but also the acronym "LOL." I was struck by how unlikely it was she'd learned these things in school, and yet she'd managed to acquire them via this universal internet culture that permeates everything these days.
There was a time when I was younger when the phenomenal growth of television was causing people to predict a demise of literacy, and the term post-literacy was tossed about. I'm beginning to wonder if the news of the death of literacy was a bit premature – the internet, and telephone text-messaging, and such, seem to be giving good ol' literacy a bit of a boost, but with some odd twists, too.
The odd literacy of the online world is qualitatively different from the literacy of books and even newpapers. It more closely resembles the strange permutations of advertising language than what we traditionally think of as literature. Of course, writers like James Joyce or Vicente Huidobro anticipated so many of its features, but I still feel inclined to think it needs a new name – something that conveys it is new and distinct from old school literacy. Not to mention I love to make up words.
So I shall call it textacy (in parallel with liter-acy I guess).
Caveat: The Virtual Life
Well, I'm getting more and more fully "connected" from an online standpoint. I have both Yahoo and MSN ("Live") Instant Messenger accounts, and found myself chatting online with a former coworker at HealthSmart the other day. It's a great no-cost way to stay in touch with people. Anyone who wants to interact with me can contact me under either username: jaredway{at}yahoo{dot}com or jaredway{at}hotmail{dot}com – I'm connected to both, simultaneously, whenever I'm on my computer, using Pidgin, an opensource chat tool that speaks both protocols.
Also, I've in the past experimented a bit with Second Life, and recently got the client for Linux running on my computer (it's an alpha release, but to appearances pretty darn reliable). I had a weird moment of synchronicity last night – I was experimenting with Second Life and at the same time listening to Minnesota Public Radio via streaming over internet. Anyway, the radio show had well-known folk/rock/pop artist Suzanne Vega in studio, and were having a fairly broad-ranging conversation with her. I've always liked her music, and she had several albums from the 80s that are among my top 50 favorites.
And just as I sat there poking around in the Second Life virtual reality, the subject of Second Life came up during this interview: it turns out Vega has been what you might call an "early-adopter" of this technology, having actually conducted concerts in Second Life. Furthermore, she said that when she's "on the road" she often goes "on dates" with her husband (who's home) inside the Second Life universe, and she was extolling the amazing virtues of virtuality, and the weird feeling dream-like intimacy that it can provoke. It was quite the endorsement, and I confess I spent too much time last night exploring this weird online world. Anyway, if anyone's in there, look me up: my avatar's name is Jared Eun (they let you choose a first name but the list of last names you're allowed is limited – so I opted for something nice and short).
Caveat: Computerlessness
Well, I got ambitious Saturday night, and decided to try to "fix" a few of the small things that have been annoying me about my triple-boot laptop. Consequence: I ended up reinstalling all three operating systems yesterday and this morning, and in the meantime, I was, naturally, without a computer. Ah well.
The problem with the triple boot config is the battle of the bootloaders… still trying to resolve. But I've got all three running again, but now the Vista bootloader is dominant, whereas before I had the GRUB (linux) one running the show – not sure I like this better. But I did get my "factory original" Vista Business edition working on the laptop on its own sector again – so that's a big step in the right direction.
Yesterday, taking a break from this computer stuff, I took the subway into Seoul and wandered around Insa-dong (a downtown neighborhood) a little bit. Perhaps, like when I lived in Mexico City 20 years ago, I could make a goal to eventually visit and explore the surroundings of every stop in the Seoul Metro. This would be very ambitious, but I may try it.