I wanted to download QuickTime. It appears that iTunes tags along somehow… How annoying.

If you are old and not planning to pass your house down to anyone, a reverse mortgage lets the bank start buying your loan back from you. They start paying you instead of visa versa. Then when you move out of die, they are awarded the property!
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Insert hip, ironic reference here. That is right folks, my friend has jumped on the blogwagon. She is masquerading as a High School Math teacher.

Japan is decided it has been paraplegic long enough: Japan is rearming itself. Conservatives have swarmed Koizumi’s circle of advisors and the LDP as a whole. Issues, generally accepted as radical, are now regarded as important: Japan is building its own missile defense system; Koizumi routinely visits shrines honoring its worst war criminals amidst vociferous protest; Japan has deployed troops to Iraq and participated in military operations for the first time since WWII; Reputable politicians are voicing the idea of renouncing Japan’s commitment to non-violence by repealing Article 9 of the constitution without being shunned.

Japan claims ownership of territories in dispute with China and Russia in increasingly aggressive ways. This is troublesome because beneath the surface-level commitment to peace, the country has never–as a collective whole–assumed responsibility for its myriad WWII atrocities . Japan–to this day–continues to gloss over a sinister dark period of its history. The collective minds of China and Korea vividly remember World War II as the time when the monster called Japan systematically raped, tortured, enslaved, disemboweled and slaughtered millions (in Chinese): Japan teaches its children about its fight to “liberate Asian nations from the dominance of white people.”

Japan has recently been our most steadfast ally after Great Britain. But are we really ready for this Japan to begin glorifying the emperor anew?

As Japan begins its march back toward Imperialism, please remember that Japan is no more monolithic than America: Take this (probably not work safe) example rendition of the Japanese anthem. Art majors are the same everywhere apparently.

After Apple, who devotes the largest amount of human resources to Macintosh software?

Answer.

Is this even true?

Argh, Chinese is waay to hard to speak quickly!! I swear Chinese is three times as hard for beginners than any normal language like Japanese or German. Since Chinese has tones, you have an entire extra dimension to think about. Coincidentally, it takes significantly longer to make out a sentence, which often has a totally different meaning.

Observe:

General Process:
German:
Idea -> English Idea -> English Sound Phrase -> Replace with German Sounds -> Shuffle German Sounds.

Chinese:
Idea -> English Idea -> Similar Chinese Idea -> Chinese Sounds -> Chinese Tones -> Shuffle Chinese Sounds & Tones.

Even that flow chart does not capture the sheer agony of trying to do something totally foreign to western languages–associate different concrete meanings to different tones. Our brains have been programmed since birth to use tone to communicate feeling and emotion–all the soft aspects of communication.

Hence if you ask “Do you want to go bowling?” and I answer “okay” with an upward tone, I am telling you I am excited to go bowling. If I answer “okay” with a drooping downward tone, I am merely accommodating you.

As a result, we go to China and find it difficult to remember the difference between “big” and “to hit”. But what about when Chinese people come over here?

If you have ever talked to someone who recently came over from China and thought that they either a.) sounded like a robot or b.) felt cold or c.) were tough to read emotionally, then you now know why. We are apt to not think about a tone until we make a sentence and assign meaning (questions always end up, etc). Chinese are apt to remember a specific tone for each word.–partly because Chinese trained them to think this way, but also because they will naturally associate the sound a word makes with a Chinese character with a similar meaning and sound.

So if a neutral OK (o1kay4), they will associate it with two characters that are pronounced o1 and kei4 and say it that way every time. It is hard to remember that o1kay2 means yes (excited), o1kay1 means yes (frustrated), o1kay3 means yes (reluctantly)…and do that with every single word!

So Yahoo! is still alive and kicking, even in these, the golden salad days of Google.

While the Boys in Blue (and Red and Yellow and Green) bump craniums with their NASA homies, Yahoo! has been quietly buying companies like Flikr and Pixoria. They just published a Podcast site, on which I noticed this Chinese instruction cast. This is an awesome idea, and the site looks great, borrowing heavily from the Flikr mentality.

Nerd Rant:

Yahoo!, on the other hand, seems to be slowing down development of some programs – my intimate experience with a great program called Konfabulator highlights this. Pixoria, the small but talented developer behind it, has been plugging away for a couple of years at this cross-platform competitor to some technology that Apple has recently mimicked (and in some ways improved on) in their new OS (and Microsoft is hard at work at a similar feature for Vista). Pixoria has a great user base and some talented people in the community, but development has slowed to a crawl – apparently Pixoria has to wait for “some legal things” before they can so much as sneeze. As far as I can tell, they only have one or two new employees since their buyout. Yahoo! can’t afford a new member of the legal team for this program? Doubtful. It wouldn’t even have to be a full-time job. With such stiff competition from Apple and Microsoft, Yahoo! seems destined to have Konfabulator just fall by the wayside if they don’t give it a chance to catch up.

Perhaps David Frost does not think there is enough carnage and destruction in Englad. Maybe he just does not like representative Democracy. It could just be the good old-fashioned lure of a fatter paycheck. Whatever the reason, he has left BBC and will now try to make Al-Jazeera more respectable and responsible–or not.

Yes, even I can get overloaded with superflourous acronyms.