Category: general

Okay, I so did not need to read this story.

I am totally freaked out now.

(Damn you, BoingBoing…)

Formula for success in naming your protagonist:

1) Pick a nondescript, normal first name, like “John” or “Thomas”.

2) Pick a word for the last name that you have never heard used as anyone’s last name, ever. This word must reek coolness, and it must also have some semantic connection with the character’s purpose in the story. Pick a legendary warrior, like “Constantine”, or a word with boatloads of implied meaning, like “Covenant”.

1 + 2 = Badass

All I have to do is state definitively that I am going to wuss out, and I am goaded into not wussing out. I guess it’s my own brand of reverse psychology.

In any case, I rode my bike to work. It was a little cold, and it drizzled on me, but it was worth it!

I guess I won’t ride my bike to work today, because weather.com says it’s going to start raining at noon, which means that it’s either raining right now, or it’ll start raining before I come home from work. I don’t really feel like biking in the rain, and it’s kinda chilly out right now anyway, so bleh.

The weather needs to get over itself.

In other news, the Chinese used glutinous rice porridge as mortar.

I’m looking at the Google cache of the page that explains how to do templates and themes, and meanwhile my brains are slowly oozing out of my ears.

So I guess I won’t work on a theme or anything just yet :P

I am bored and restless. So finally I thought, well, I’ll get down to business on building a template and theme for WordPress.

But codex.wordpress.org just reroutes me back to root.

The world hates me.

I’ve purchased a lot of books about the Japanese language, and I own a handful of CD-ROMs and language CDs/tapes, but I don’t seem to have the motivation to use them. Part of the reason is that it’s hard to motivate yourself to do anything on your own, but another part is simply that I don’t have anyone to practice with or to correct me.

So, I’m trying to figure out if there are Japanese classes anywhere near here. At all. So far, all I’ve come up with is the following:

First, some high schools in the area have Japanese courses (Augusta Christian, Davidson Fine Arts High School, and Glenn Hills High School). Even if I did somehow manage to get permission to attend those classes, I would feel like a moron in a high school setting.

Second, the University System of Georgia has online interactive Japanese lessons. This might help me…if I were going to a university.

Third, there’s Irasshai from Georgia Public Broadcasting, which is very expensive, but might be my best bet.

Unfortunately, none of these go past a “Japanese II” level (with the possible exception of the high school courses…no idea what their curriculum is). I technically had Japanese I and II in college. I took four semesters, after all. So these courses would be more of a refresher for me–although, to be completely honest, I didn’t actually learn a lot of what I was taught.

I guess my main concern is finding a way to learn that will reinforce my existing knowledge and my new knowledge, and force me to apply that knowledge. What I’d really like to do is go to some sort of immersion retreat, get completely inundated in the language for awhile, and then come back to Augusta to a group or class or something that would help me maintain what I’d learned, as well as teach me more. I feel like being immersed in language training would really help jumpstart my learning. I’m very out of practice.

There was an immersion program I was looking into that took place in New York City, but I can’t seem to find the bookmark. Oh well.

There’s also a Meetup.com group for Japanese Language in Augusta, but it seems to be really inactive. It doesn’t even have an Organizer :/

So I’m not really sure what I want to do. I do know that the best motivational tool I have ever used is DietPower, and that’s because the program asks me to log my weight and everything I eat every day. If I could find some software that would demand updates on my study of Japanese, and offer resources and suggestions, that might really help :> Bleh, it seems really lame that I don’t think I can accomplish things without a guide/personal trainer/outside motivator…

Sometimes there are things I think are worth commenting on, but I don’t feel like posting for whatever reason, so I end up not linking them. Then, later, I want to find the thing I thought was cool, and realize that I never posted it, so I can’t find it in my blog archives. Kind of annoying, given that I use this blog as the Compendium of Me.

So, even though I’m not in the mood, here are some stories.

First, teaching your child sign language may save your life.

Second, two entertainment stories: 1) CG animation is pretty costly and that’s why it hasn’t made a huge impact on television programming. ReBoot is mentioned, rightly so, which is why I think the article is cool. 2) Here’s a piece about Terry O’Quinn, one of my favorite actors. And no, AJ, I haven’t watched any Lost yet. I have started watching a new anime called Bleach, though ;P

Check out this email sent to Hanzi Smatter by a guy named Julian Grybowski:

Now that that contract has expired, these first 67 episodes [of Dragonball Z] are being released uncut with Japanese and English audio, and the trailer on the page linked above reflects that. But therein lies the rub.

All of the Japanese text is complete gibberish, except for the title logo (“Doragonbo-ru Z,” which is correct). This is evident from the very first time the Japanese characters appear. Son Gokuu, whose name uses the same (unsimplified) kanji as “Sun Wukong” (孫悟空) in Chinese, is spelled out as “numahiyu” (ヌマヒユ) in Katakana (one of the two Japanese syllabaries). It only gets worse from there, to the point where the Japanese displayed behind the promotional phrases (“Original Uncut Japanese,” etc.) is just long strings of absolute nonsense.

I had to watch the trailer to see it for myself. Holy shit. I am just…incredulous.

As Julian puts it:

Japanese is not English written in some “secret code,” and a company that is playing up the Japanese aspect of its releases should know better than to use pretend Japanese to promote it.

Just…wow. I guess FUNimation has a pretty low opinion of its customers…

From “The New 65“:

Calculating backward, [Kenneth] Manton [of Duke’s Center for Demographic Studies] deduced that at age 65, active-life expectancy–the average number of years a person could expect to live free of chronic functional impairment–was 8.8 years in 1935, 11.8 years in 1982, and 13.9 years in 1999. Based on the trend line, he projects that by 2015, active life expectancy will be 17 years. In short, if you were designing a system in 1999 for people who could expect as many active years as a 65-year-old person could expect in 1935, you’d set the retirement age at 70. And by 2015, you’d raise it to 73.

[…]

How much money would a higher retirement age save? According to the Congressional Budget Office, if the ascent to age 67 were accelerated and completed by 2016, and if the retirement age kept rising two months a year until it hit age 70 in 2037, and if the rate of increase then slowed to one month every two years, Social Security outlays in 2050 would decline by 12 percent. A fully adjusted retirement age–one that kept pace with biology instead of lagging 40 years behind it, as the CBO’s scenario does–would generate an even bigger surplus. By one rule of thumb, every year of recipient eligibility consumes about 7 percent of Social Security’s financial commitments. Compared to the currently assumed retirement age of 67, an increase to age 73 could cut the government’s obligations by as much as 40 percent. Either way, the projected Social Security deficit would disappear–and with it, the Democratic objection to personal retirement accounts, which could be funded out of the new payroll tax surplus.

It seems like common sense, doesn’t it? But I bet we’ll hear a lot of objections like “I don’t want to retire only when I’m unable to work, I want to retire early enough that I can go on world vacations.”

So, I’ve got two people stealing bandwidth from me currently. (This is far less than what happens to big websites with lots of visitors, but it’s still annoying!) I discovered them by running a report on my server logs and then looking at the top referrers.

The first one is some dude on a forum. He direct-linked to this image I made back in 2002. I don’t really care if he uses the picture, because I don’t own the art by any means, but yeesh, dude, get your own server space!

The second one is a guy who, for some inexplicable reason, direct-linked to my little “XML” picture instead of saving it on his own server.

So, I’ve created an .htaccess file in my /journal/images directory that redirects people to this picture:

It seems to load really, really slowly on the perpetrators’ pages, and I’m not sure why. I hope doing this won’t cause me further bandwidth problems.

There may actually be more than just these two doing the direct linking. They were the ones who showed up in the Top Referring URL list, but I’ve also got the following in the Top Referring Sites list:

http://teenforums.studentcenter.org
http://www.eurodltd.co.uk
http://boards.theforce.net
http://boards.ign.com
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org
http://ddkclanforums.proboards19.com
http://forum.gameitalia.net

I’m not a member of any of those forums, sooo…

There are also a few things in there that confuse me:

http://www.paulmusgrave.com
http://www.xopy.com
http://www.dvdtalk.com
http://www.netcraft.com
http://www.nutzu.com

Who are these people? Are they linking to my site? Are they stealing bandwidth?

Note that some or all of these could be outdated now…I ran a report for practically the full history of my website, from February 13, 2002 until yesterday.

In other news…

Most Active Date	Friday, May 14, 2004
Number of Hits on Most Active Date	6,619
Number of Visits on Most Active Date	220
BandWidth on Most Active Date	42.97 MB
Least Active Date	Tuesday, February 12, 2002
Number of Hits on Least Active Date	1
Number of Visits on Least Active Date	1
BandWidth on Least Active Date	252 Bytes

I don’t think I’m in any great danger of exceeding any bandwidth limits ^^;;

This graph is pretty cool, though, right?

A man suspected of being the BTK serial killer in Wichita, Kansas has been arrested.

I hope they got him. This is a shame, though:

Prosecutor Nola Foulston said that while there is no statute of limitations for homicide, the death penalty would not apply to any crime committed before 1994, when the death penalty was introduced in Kansas.

They’d better at least put this guy away for the rest of his life, if he truly is the killer.

Watch out for these dangerous fellows!

“There are thousands of stupid laws in the United States, but we are limiting ourselves to breaking about 45 of them,” said Richard Smith, from Portreath, Cornwall.

The journey, which appropriately enough begins in Alcatraz, will cover around 18,000 miles and take eight weeks – provided, of course, that Mr Smith and his accomplice, Luke Bateman, are not apprehended along the way.

Via BoingBoing. I wonder, would it really be prohibitively expensive to get rid of all those ridiculous laws? I mean, it’s kind of embarrassing ;>

(Plus I’m annoyed that they might get a book deal out of it, and they’re not even Americans! I wish I’d thought of it ;P)

It seems like my blog loads slowly. The title graphic will appear, and then I’ll wait a very long time for the rest of the page to appear. Does that happen to anyone else?

I didn’t code the site by hand. I used Dreamweaver to make it look the way I wanted to, and then edited in the Blogger template tags in Notepad. Maybe there is something in my code that is bloating everything. Or maybe I use too many images. Any suggestions?

Really, I will have to turn everything into CSS anyway when I make the move to WordPress. Maybe that will solve the problem?

[Edit 12:55pm:] I just noticed that IE tries to block my images and Blogger cookies due to my current privacy settings. Is that slowing the load time down? Is this problem caused by using Blogger, IE, both?

People from my past have been popping up lately. First there was Jazz, who I still had a line of contact with but who I’d sort of lost touch with lately. Now there’s Alana, of Wes and Alana, from kung fu class. (1993, baby!) Alana sent me an email after seeing a post I made over on Jazz’s website. It turns out that both of them have blogs, so I’ve blogrolled them.

Now what would really be crazy would be if Christy Bremer or [person who doesn’t want her name anywhere on the Internet] or somebody suddenly appeared…