Dreaming in Chinese

Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love and Language by Deborah Fallows

The author, a lady from the USA, lived in China for years, and writes about her experiences there. What's interesting about this book is she doesn't write much about tourist sites, cuisine or martial arts, but rather about what she learned about Chinese people and society while living in China while trying to learn Mandarin Chinese (Putonghua). She writes about getting a Chinese name, something that “would demonstrate that we weren't just here to flit around China, but intended to stick it out for a while.” Foreigners are given a name made of Chinese words that sound like their name in their native tongue. For example, Dr. Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (who wrote as Cordwainer Smith) became “Lin Bai-lo” (“Forest of Incandescent Bliss”). Alas, Deborah became “jie bi” “borrow a pen”, which just plain sucks. She correctly deep-sixed the bad name, and spent three years dodging it. There's a lot more about Chinese culture, society and language – a lot of Chinese language here – because it takes a lot of work for English speakers to dream in Chinese.

A Writer is Me!

In the Kingdom of Loathing, the Naughty Sorceress is no more. Outside of the Kingdom of Loathing lies the domain known as the real world. In that place I wrote a book review for the Skokie Public Library Winter Reading program. To my surprise, they put my review in the library's blog! Way cool, but sadly, they didn't correct my accidental truncation of the title. The correct title is The Wordy Shipmates. The librarians probably respect my words too much to edit them.

 

What Skokie is Reading

from The Bookshelf by Lynnanne

As part of our Winter Reading program, we are encouraging you readers to write your own reviews of books when you enter them on your reading log. Many readers have already contributed book reviews and, during the course of the Winter Reading program, we will share with you some of these wonderful reviews.
Today’s review is of The Wordy Shipmate by Sarah Vowell:

This book, written by a former contributing editor and consigliore of the radio show “This American Life”, is a fascinating, penetrating, personal and funny book about the Puritan settlers who emigrated to the New World to build a “city upon a hill”. Few authors could get me interested in the minutiae of Protestant theology, yet I found myself reading eagerly about things such as “the covenant of grace” and “the covenant of works”. Not to mention all the other goings on – banishments, cruel and unusual punishments, the conjoined church and state, wars with the Native Americans and a legion of strong personalities with serious differences of opinions and only a little tolerance. These people, their issues and the events surrounding them, still resonate today beyond the cans of baked beans available in every supermarket.
Click here to find out what Skokie is reading and reviewing and to register for the Winter Reading program.

Still Looking for the Key

I'm still pillaging my way through Loathing, looking for the last necessary key. Above is one of my consolation prizes:

The Best Meal of My Life Trophy

which you can earn by eating  60 White Citadel burgers, 10 orders of White Citadel fries, four Cherry Cloaca Colas and four Diet Cloaca Colas. 

I'm still waiting for the heart attack.

 

 

Chasing the Naughty Sorceress

The Naughty Sorceress from the Kingdom of Loathing

Back in the day (the day being sometime around 1974), I used to play a game called Dungeons and Dragons. I was an enthusiastic player for a number of years, until I wasn't. I lost interest, and so did my friends. The thrill was gone. I stopped playing role playing games, cold turkey. I moved on to other things, and so did most of my friends. I cast no more spells, and adventured underground no more. Orcs were safe in my presence, unless they were very annoying.

This has all changed. I now adventure again, in a place called  The Kingdom of Loathing. Don't ask me why, because I really don't know. I do know that I am in good company and having fun, so I'm just rolling with it. Last night I earned the "Right Tool for the Job" trophy by adventuring 100 times in the Haunted Bathroom of Spookyraven Manor armed with a Gnollish Autoplunger.

That's a  tool I could use in the real world. The toilet has been acting up, and my arm is getting tired using the old-fashioned regular old plunger. Sadly, Gnollish Autoplungers appear to be unavailable for ready money. Later tonight, you can find me looking for Boris's key, which is hidden somewhere in the Kingdom of Loathing. With that key, the Naughty Sorceress is toast! Yes indeed!

Holy crap! I haven't posted here since August!

Earlier today, I removed a semi-frozen 1 pound, 15 ounce solid chunk of pork shoulder from the fridge and cut it into smaller pieces. Being semi-frozen made it easier to cut up, but my left hand sure got pretty cold. It was a necessary sacrifice for the plan. Miss Lizzy will make the pickle meat and rice; I'll make the red beans. I can't wait. I love beans and rice, especially red beans and rice. One of the worst parts about having cancer was the truly awful food I was given to eat while incarcerated in Rush North Shore hospital. Exactly once, and only once in all the time that I was an inmate there did they serve red beans and rice. They were beyond adequate, they were actually pretty good. They were one of the few things that actually smelled appetizing when you lifted off the cover over the plate. Of course, that meant that they had to remove it from the menu, to better inflict the patients with more poorly cooked chicken, mystery meat and dry turkey sandwiches with no readily available mustard. You know, healthy food.

Such bad memories. Enough of that.

I wasted some more time today playing Kingdom of Loathing. Great fun! I finally killed Ed the Undying, got the Holy MacGuffin and had a ticker tape parade. Then I discovered that I could adventure in the CRIMBCO WC while falling down drunk, so a had a few more Salty Dogs and hit the head to fight some hobelfs. Yeah, baby! Unlike in the real world, in the Kingdom of Loathing I'm the man. That's one of the cool things about KOL.

In the real world, Miss Lizzy and I went to Starbucks to get out of the house. George was there, and being a true gentleman and scholar, he bought Miss Lizzy a Eggnog Latte and me an Americano. We spent some time chatting, and I got to talk geek with George for a while. I love talking geek. I get to do it so little these days. I told him about the current status of my great vaporware project, BrikWars Arena and my current Project Euler woes. Yup, I talked too much. I need to learn how to curb my enthusiasm a bit.

So Happy Crimbo to all, and to all, a good night.

Adventures in Notetaking

I'm testing out using vimwiki, yes, a Vim script, as a notes program to keep some information synced between my netbook and my desktop. Keeping some notes in Dropbox so they can be accessed from two different machines shouldn't be an exercise in rocket science, yet this been an annoyance for a while. I've looked at some other programs to do this:

•  Tomboy, which is a pretty good program. It relies on Mono. I don't have many philosophical problems with Mono. (Hey, if Microsoft want to  support open source .NET, cool.) It's just that a huge pile of Mono needs to be installed for Tomboy to work, and I want to try to keep my netbook free of big, big, big programs. Especially big, big, big programs that use Microsoft-type technology.

•  Gnote is a reimplementation of Tomboy using C++ instead of mono. It's as great as Tomboy, only less filling. The problems that I had with it was that Gnote (and Tomboy) want to put the note files in a fixed location. A fixed location that is not in my Dropbox directory. I want that location to be somewhere in the ~/Dropbox directory, so that both of my machines can work with the files. I tried to use a symbolic link to relocate the files to the Dropbox, and it seemed to work, at least for a while, before it screwed up. Data was lost. No fun. Definitely my bad.  Possibly this will work in a future version. It may even work now, for all I know. Cleaning up the mess was a pain and I don't want to do it again, so I'm avoiding these programs.

•  Zim is yet another note program, this time implemented in Python. I like Python. It seems pretty good, and I can easily put the notes into my Dropbox folder. The problem that I have is the netbook version is older than the desktop version and can't easily find and read all the files created by the desktop version. The newer version on the desktop machine keeps wanting to uprev the files created on the netbook. They just can't get along. I tried to install the newer version on my netbook but that's a NOP. I get this error message:

       Error: Dependency is not satisfiable: python-support (>= 0.90.0)

Since the system uses Python for, well, I dunno, probably something  important, I'm not messing with it.

•   Viki/Deplate is another vim script that provides wiki capabilities. I did not have a happy experience with it. I installed it, and a few other scripts that it depends on my machine. Let's just say that I had troubles with it. As the author so helpfully points out:

See :help vimball for details. Also, make sure to read |viki-customization|. If you have difficulties to install this plugin or if you use vim 7.0, please make sure to use the current version of vimball (vimscript #1502). 

I did RTFM. It was like beating my head against the Great Wall of Vim. Guys, I just want to use a script, not study Vim scripting. This thing should just work out of the box.

•  vimwiki is the current contender. So far, so good. It allows you to choose where it will save the notefiles, and selecting my Dropbox  directory was not a problem. I can look in the directory and see and open the files. The files are plain text files, readable by darn near anything. I like this. I'm going to play with this for a while. We'll see how it goes.

July 2010 Update

I haven't written in my blog at all in July. Here's some things that happened:

• The Feds have collected all my remaining  census materials. The only things that I had left were my training manuals and workbook. I had already turned in my ID and enumerator's bag, so I can no longer impersonate a g-man.
• We had an end to the census NRFU (Non Response Follow UP) phase of the census. We had hot dogs, chicken kebabs and fun.
• The Feds telephoned me asking for my ID and enumerator bag back. I told them that I had already turned them in. "Who did you give it to?" they asked. My crew leader, (name omitted here). "How do you spell it?" they asked. Being a super grass, I told them. I then emailed her to give her a heads up. You got to love dealing with temporary feds.
• I fixed Python scripting in Golly on amd64, at least on my machine. It seems there is a two year old bug, reported to Debian, that has not yet been fixed.
 The bug report:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=495941

How to fix it.

• Installed and played a bit with some other cellular automaton programs. Golly and Mirek's Cellebration still rule, as far as I can tell. I plan to revise my CA (cellular automaton) program, but I'm in learning mode right now, picking up more C++ skills. I'm using a book from the library, Accelerated C++ by Andrew Koenig and Barbara Moo. I highly recommend it; at least it's working for me.
• John Biggins, the author of A Sailor of Austria, is writing again! His new novel, The Surgeon's Apprentice, is available as a kindle book from Amazon.com. It's great, even though it's not about the Austro-Hungarian u-boat service. He's working on another novel, too. Life is good.
•  It's bedtime, so I'll bore you dome more...  later.