My comments on other blogs, blogged.

(ie, the poor man's trackback)

http://www.sinosplice.com/weblog/archives/001276.html

I had a friend in fourth semester Chinese named Jaime, the Spanish name. The teacher found out that he had never been given a Chinese name and insisted he take one, so Jaime thought up...

还没

It was promptly vetoed. Like wulong said, this cuts both ways, but I don't think anon should be so sensitive about it. Part of the learning process is making mistakes and looking like a fool, and the job of the teacher is to point out your mistakes and correct them. Thank goodness for students exploring the language and trying out silly names. But thank goodness for Name Nazis, they are just as necessary.

5/23/2004 02:21:00 AM

http://www.brainysmurf.org/archives/001024.html

It's sometimes helpful to compare the rights of "ugly people" across legal systems. This article in Bankers Online [Link] says that for American companies:

* It does not appear to be a violation of federal anti-discrimination law to hire on the basis of looks, attractiveness, personal appearance.
* However, such a policy may be forbidden by state law (e.g., District of Columbia Human Rights Act: unlawful to hire on the basis of personal appearance).
* But it does violate federal law to hire on the basis of gender, race, national origin, disability and other protected characteristics.

Meaning that a company can have minimum standards of "beauty" as long as the standard is applied in a non-discriminatory fashion across lines of gender, race, national origin or disability.

That's the legal position of the US federal government. Now, if you want to talk about ethics, civility, business smarts, or just about any other measure, it's another matter completely... I think you're absolutely in the right to react that way to your school, and to fiancee's (ex-)potential employers. Not only do they show that they're just "not nice people", but like you point out, they just demoted a very competent employee. Hopefully they'll recognize their mistake.

5/22/2004 08:35:00 PM

http://boingboing.net/suggest.html

Dave Enders left the University of Michigan (go Wolverines!) to study abroad in Beirut, and then decided that starting the first English-language newspaper in post-Saddam would be more exciting. Well the paper folded after a few months but Dave is back in Iraq freelancing for, among others, High Times magazine. His writing is edgy, frank, and slightly jaded. Occasionally he will post sound bytes of interviews with soldiers or locals. His weblog is a slightly more personal view of the situation on the ground, and Dave is one heck of a writer.

If you want a single entry to judge this blog by, try the latest:

http://66.241.226.47/davidsblog/archives/000082.html

Here's an entry with an audio clip of poetry by a soldier posted in Najaf:

http://66.241.226.47/davidsblog/archives/000081.html

(submitted to BoingBoing.net)

5/22/2004 07:17:00 PM

http://www.brainysmurf.org/archives/001025.html

Like some of the commenters in the Marmot's thread said, the uniform size of the fires and the season suggests that this is simply agricultural burning. When I was a kid, we would watch Spanish farmers do this after the sunflower harvest. But I hear you on the China analogy, it's incredible to me that so much of North Korea is still a mystery to us.

Here's another impressive picture from North Korea:

http://www.uriminzokkiri.com/Russian/data/album/janggun/html/084-2.htm

5/22/2004 02:02:00 AM

http://george.hotelling.net/90percent/linkage/sites_that_i_wish_werent_down_an_incomplete_list.php

Ever since the World Wide Birthday Web went down and came back, it hasn't been the same as it once was.

5/22/2004 12:59:00 AM

http://www.livejournal.com/community/ann_arbor_ypsi/328904.html

I didn't figure this out until recently either. The Wikipedia has a few good articles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techno_music
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_music
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_dance_music

5/21/2004 05:35:00 PM

http://www.xanga.com/item.aspx?user=p33p33&tab=weblogs&uid=90926031

Steve Jobs has got to be either chuckling amused or hopping mad.

5/20/2004 03:43:00 PM

http://wobumingbai.typepad.com/wo_bu_zhidao/2004/04/waiting_for_a_v.html

Since you mention Jeb Bush, have you thought about writing to your Representative in Congress and see if an exception can be made? They have been known to work "miracles".

5/20/2004 03:37:00 PM

http://disjointed.org/archives/000883.html

Yup, sometimes. I'll add a disjointed link to the bottom.

5/20/2004 12:32:00 PM

http://cookiecrook.com/2004/05/#cc108485654777677651

For what it's worth, JVDS [link] is doing a pretty good job for me. Service is pretty bare-bones, but my issues have been resolved quickly. 0xDECAFBAD [link] is also hosted there. _Debian_ or RedHat VPS starting at USD 12.50/month, FreeBSD starting at 15.00/month. Unmetered (actually, hardware-limited) bandwidth starts at 40/month.

5/19/2004 07:39:00 PM

http://www.xanga.com/item.aspx?user=jinganlin&tab=weblogs&uid=90187357

This picture is my new desktop pic.

5/19/2004 02:04:00 PM

http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/chinadn/en/archives/002579.html

For folks interested in the financial side of this deal, Walter Hutchens has linked to an article in Finance Asia about the Tencent IPO. Interesting quotes:

The main difference between standard SMS services and IM services is that the latter operates on the basis of a closed system. Customers can only message other users of the system, but the system itself has a far wider range of applications than phone based SMS services. IM users, for example, can send messages between computers, mobiles and pagers.

Tencent's IM service, known as QQ, has become one of China's most recognisable brand-names, although it has virtually no name recognition outside the Mainland. According to a 2003 People's Daily study of Chinese internet usage, QQ ranked among the top 10 most used words alongside the likes of Bin Laden.

(This comment will be posted when the CDN weblog is fixed. UPDATE: posted 2004-05-28T22:01:59-05:00.)

5/19/2004 01:21:00 PM

http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2004/05/19/domainKeys

And like Photo Matt says, the DomainKeys page is styled entirely with CSS. Try the disable stylesheets bookmarklet on it. Very nice.

5/18/2004 09:58:00 PM

http://broccoli.wubi.org/w00t.cgi?perm=108475149359030660

I've considered it:

Pros: 1) # of comments listed on each post, 2) links to commenter profiles, 3) HTML

Cons: 1) closed source, 2) data recoverability, 3) HTML, 4) "anonymous" posters

Either way: 1) comment functionality, 2) e-mail notification (for me)

It's a close call.

5/18/2004 06:02:00 PM

http://www.xanga.com/item.aspx?user=jinganlin&tab=weblogs&uid=90187357

I had trouble finding your photos from the links above, folks can try using this one:

http://community.webshots.com/user/kekingChina

Thank you for taking pictures of food! It's so scrumptious-looking, it's making my mouth water right now. In particular, the spicy(?) pepper dish from Suzhou looks wonderful.

http://community.webshots.com/photo/144078721/144088621QYGXEE

It's funny that you made curry, I just did the same on Saturday night. But I made it with the Japanese curry that comes in big blocks, it's great with potatos and carrots over rice.

The story about "bu hao yisi" is hilarious, I can just imagine the looks on the waiters' faces when they discovered that you could understand them.

5/18/2004 03:04:00 AM

http://gominosensei.org/2004/05/testing-waters-google-groups-beta.php

Les Orchard points to ocblogs atom feeds. Sweetness.

5/18/2004 02:29:00 AM

http://broccoli.wubi.org/w00t.cgi?perm=108475149359030660

The ironic thing is that it has the *look* of a CSS-styled site. It reminded me of this comment:

http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2004/05/15/tables_oh_th/#c005009

that refers to Andy Budd talking about CSS having a higher barrier to entry, and web standards being an "ivory tower". My interpretation is that sites like the Michigan Theater's are gimmicky imitations of more elegant — and time consuming — CSS design. But then again, there has been plenty of valid criticism of the ivory tower mentality, so I won't be too arrogant :)

5/17/2004 08:13:00 PM

http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2004/05/15/tables_oh_th/

A couple years ago, I heard tabular data described as data that still makes sense when its rows are made columns and columns made rows. I don't remember the source for this idea, probably a member or link from the css-discuss list. I wish I did, because it made a lot of sense to me and has guided how I think semantically about tables and use them in marking up content.

As a special case, the data in a table with a single row and multiple cells will read the same whether read row by row or column by column. The same is true for a table of a single column. So as long as an author is OK with having an immutable order dictated for his/her content, a single row/column table should be semantically OK for marking up a series of data points / cells / sections.

This perspective is attractive to me because it's an argument based on semantics for the light use of tables in marking up "non-tabular data". I can appreciate the "just gotta get the job done" approach, but I rest just a bit easier when I have a justification based on semantic reasoning.

5/17/2004 03:01:00 PM

http://keithdevens.com/weblog/archive/2004/May/15/Unicode.testing

The Chinese text is, in fact, Chinese. Some sort of classical poem, I'm guessing. It's actually traditional Chinese characters, so I'm going to paste some simplified characters into this comment:

这达标、那达标，
都要农民掏腰包；

这大办、那大办，
都是农民血和汗。

5/15/2004 05:53:00 PM

http://www.xanga.com/item.aspx?user=ani_sittig&tab=weblogs&uid=89067437

Not mushy enough! Glad you had a good time.

5/14/2004 02:16:00 PM

http://www.littleyellowdifferent.com/miniblog/archives/week_2004_05_09.php

Dude, I use this all the time. Have a copy saved locally. Greatest thing since the edit styles bookmarklet.

http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/webdevel.html

5/14/2004 11:20:00 AM

http://www.integertech.com/blogs/zaimeiguo/2004/05/home-sweet-home_04.html

How could I forget one of the best?!

http://wobumingbai.typepad.com/ (Shijiazhuang, thereabouts)

5/13/2004 04:59:00 AM

http://mcomment.blogspot.com/2004/05/blog-post.html

The author name on the Atom feed for this weblog is "Jason Goldman", and there happens to be a Blogger employee... here , with that name. So, hi Jason?

Anyhoo, regarding the Scribe template, I do believe the designer was Todd Dominey. In fact, his last post is about Scribe, so you may wanna check it out.

5/12/2004 07:25:00 PM

http://broccoli.wubi.org/w00t.cgi?perm=108418993210894205

Well, waddayaknow. Good eye there. I got those in a forwarded e-mail about a year back. Put them up on my msittig.freeshell.org space, then had to move them to the school account when bandwidth became an issue. Now if I could just find pictures of cute bento being eaten off of naked people...

5/12/2004 05:23:00 PM

http://disjointed.org/archives/000873.html

The point of my terse previous point being that the decision each person makes of who to vote for should be much more complicated than simply thinking "who would Osama vote into office?" Besides, I don't see how the beheading changes things at all; soldiers are dying by the handful every week, and just because the DoD manages to de-sensationalize their deaths (as best as they can) doesn't mean that they count more or less than Berg.

5/12/2004 03:16:00 PM

http://disjointed.org/archives/000873.html

Inspired by a John Stewart analysis, try this question: if we had elected Kerry last time, would Berg have been in Iraq to be beheaded?

5/12/2004 03:02:00 PM

http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/chinadn/en/archives/002579.html

Ahh, thank you Xiao.

5/12/2004 12:28:00 PM

http://www.actsofvolition.com/archives/2004/may/thoughtson

Are there any weblogs or templates that you think tastefully incorporate the banner ad?

The Google weblog uses an alternative button:

5/12/2004 09:09:00 AM

http://www.integertech.com/blogs/zaimeiguo/2004/05/home-sweet-home_04.html

I dunno about photoblogs about Chinese cities specifically, but I keep a few Chinese photoblogs bookmarked:

http://54boy.com/ziboyhome.htm (Beijing)
http://21mm.net/ (Beijing)
http://dsbym.blogone.net/ (not sure, probably Beijing)
http://www.chinesetriad.org/ (forgot)
http://www.socoolbbs.com/500miles/ (Tianjin)

5/12/2004 08:34:00 AM

http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/chinadn/en/archives/002579.html

Can somebody comment on the significance of this news? I did my best to read through the corporate-speak in the press release, and the way I interpreted it is that Tencent (QQ) is a relatively inexperienced company ("limited operating history, the limited financial resources, domestic limited management infrastructure") with an exceptionally large user base (but slowly losing users to MSN) hoping to draw on Telecom's experience to expand into other areas, e.g. SMS-related services.

5/12/2004 06:11:00 AM

http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2004/05/11/approved

The Moztips wiki uses an ascii art captcha system, generating a string of letters in different ascii-art fonts for the user to identify. It addresses both points that Ken brings up in being both monochrome and large in size.

5/11/2004 02:32:00 PM

http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2004/05/11/approved

Neato; isn't it validating to see your ideas adopted by very internet saavy folk?

Matt, isn't cutting weblogs out of the PageRank equation something that many people were asking for when Googlebombing became the rage about a year ago? It makes me wonder if Google will ever drop the redirects at all.

In the meantime, though, we can have a little fun with them. For example, chain the redirects to jump from site to site. Or visit Google's redirect script without a target link to generate an infite loop of redirection. I can generating about 6-8k/s of traffic by letting it run continuously.

5/11/2004 06:48:00 AM

http://mcomment.blogspot.com/2004/05/reactions-so-far.html

(via your comment on Jeff Veen's weblog)

You echoed my feelings about the new blogger app; it's so dumbed down that some of the conveniences were lost. Like you said, it was nice to see your previous posts on the same screen as the textarea for composing a new post. And when I'm logged in and type "blogger.com" into Mozilla's Location bar, it takes me to the Dashboard, where both Blogger News and Recent Updates are below the fold, both sections that that could be enjoyed without scrolling on the old Blogger.

5/10/2004 02:54:00 PM

http://www.simplebits.com/archives/2004/05/06/sq.html

To the folks worried about having to write personalized DTDs: I don't think the point of XHTML modularization is to have each web designer write his own DTD, I think the idea is to allow other bodies to create standard DTDs for people to adopt. For example, Amazon could write a custom DTD for marking up data on books, and book enthusiasts across the web could link to Amazon's DTD. Even the W3C itself could write a small DTD defining the target attribute and allow people to link to that. It's probably just a matter of time before this process becomes commonplace and a natural tool for any XHTML newb (and hopefully vets too).

5/08/2004 03:38:00 AM

http://www.livejournal.com/users/shaaarii/42817.html

But how will you survive without your rou-song sandwiches!?

I'm totally behind you on this one. Not only do big animals take up more resources to grow for food, meat is darned expensive at the grocery store.

5/08/2004 02:59:00 AM

Is there anything Bittorrent can't do?

http://www.animenfo.com/animetitle,1245,ykywyy,r.o.d__the_tv_.html

A little into the future from now. A few years after the army's "Human Selection Campaign".

In a street somewhere in Hong Kong, there was a detective office. The name of it was "The Three Sisters Detective Company". The 3 beautitful sisters there were working day and night to settle an incident regarding a book. The girls' names are Anita, Maggy and Michelle.

The oldest sister Michelle who likes all kinds of books, Maggie and even the youngest sister Anita who doesn't like adult books, in truth possesses the special power of a "paper user".

Using and not using their powers, what will happen to the cases they get?

Sounds... exciting.

5/08/2004 02:56:00 AM

http://www.clagnut.com/blog/340/

May I add an "amen" to this post? The DOM inspector has saved me countless headaches trying to track down conflicts in the cascade. It is especially nifty to be able to view the _computed_ styles rather than simply the styles that are dictated by the various style sheets. It's the one feature in Mozilla that kept me from switching to Firefox for so long.

5/07/2004 11:16:00 AM

http://www.livejournal.com/users/bokane/50620.html

If you do, I will be happy to write something to try and convince you otherwise :) Basically, the gist of my reply would be that there are plenty of ways to live a lazy and inactive life in the United States too.

5/06/2004 12:07:00 AM

http://www.livejournal.com/users/bokane/51410.html

I get the idea that the author was trying communicate that the traffic on Chang'anjie is normally slow -- like you wrote, rush hour traffic -- in contrast to, and in order to highlight, today's brisk clip. That's why he would also use 《转眼间》 and 《捏了一下车闸，车晃了晃》 to show that the stop was very sudden.

5/06/2004 12:00:00 AM

http://www.xanga.com/item.aspx?user=Tsubasa97&tab=weblogs&uid=86234145

If you can drive through Detroit snow, you can drive anywhere. Don't let these people get you down. Practice defensive driving.

5/04/2004 06:15:00 PM

http://jclark.org/weblog/CoolStuff/Potpourri/20040502.html

CRTL-PgUp and CRTL-PgDn work for switchign tabs in Mozilla on Linux. As for the dictionary, I also use dictionary.com when I'm in X, dict when I'm in the console. In fact, using Mozilla's keywords I can type "dict [word]" into the Location bar, hit enter, and Mozilla will look it up (bookmark is http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=%s, keyword is dict). Very nifty.

5/03/2004 03:29:00 AM

http://www.xanga.com/item.aspx?user=ani_sittig&tab=weblogs&uid=85058205

Annie, I read this story and thought of your post:

"It was just one of many recent curious moments for Mr. Haimovitz, who was once a major cello prodigy accustomed to playing in the elite halls of Europe and America. Now 33, he has chosen an alternative world, traveling the nation to perform in country and folk cafes, jazz spots and nightclubs: places where Budweiser flows freely and Beethoven does not, including the legendary punk club CBGB in New York, where Mr. Haimovitz will perform on May 15.

"This is not another marketing gimmick, nor a strained attempt to make classical music hip. It is one man's unlikely quest to find meaning and connection in an art form that for years set him apart from the world."

5/02/2004 06:26:00 AM

http://joi.ito.com/archives/2004/04/30/does_google_help_governments_censor_results.html

The China Digital News weblog has good coverage of the annual China's Digital Future conference, that took place this weekend at UC Berkeley. Some of the speakers seemed pretty knowledgable on technology-government interaction.

5/02/2004 04:07:00 AM

http://www.decafbad.com/blog/2004/04/30/fun_with_shell_scripting

Is "sort | uniq" the same as "sort -u" ? Uniq is cool, though, I'd never seen it before. And very nice scripts, it's (almost) always fun to read other peoples' code.

5/01/2004 01:36:00 AM