Archive for July 2004
Videocassette/DVD recorder!
At last I got a new videocassette/DVD recorder! I had one before, but it broke down so often and didn't have a DVD recorder. So my parents decided to buy a new one.
In Japanese video rental shops, they have two types of non-Japanese movies: dubbed versions and subtitled versions. I don't like the former because they ruin the atmosphere of the original movie. When I wanted to watch a video but could find only the dubbed version, I used to give up on the video.
Now, with the DVD recorder, once I rent a DVD, I can watch the subtitled version. If someone wants to watch the dubbed version, he doesn't have to rent a new one but switch to the dubbed version on the same DVD.
I also appreciate that DVDs have an English, sub-titled version. I really wanted to watch movies in English altogether, but had no chance before. To study English and, of course, to have fun, I'll be using the DVD recorder now!
Google etymology
According to Google History, the word google derives from a technical term in mathematics:
Google is a play on the word googol, which was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, "Mathematics and the Imagination" by Kasner and James Newman. It refers to the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. Google's use of the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense, seemingly infinite amount of information available on the web.
The word, however, also has other -- and older -- meanings.
It appears, for instance, in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. At the beginning of chapter 29, the duke, one of the two scoundrels on the raft, plays the "deef and dumb" William Wilks, and goes "a goo-gooing around, happy and satisfied, like a jug that's googling out buttermilk."
I'm too lazy to consult the OED's second edition over at the big library, but the dusty copy of its first edition, which I have within easy reach, has an entry on google which dryly refers me on to goggle. The goggle entry, then, has the familiar meaning of "to look obliquely, to squint," but it also offers something a bit more obscure: "Onomatopoeic: an occasional substitue for GOBBLE, as suggesting a similar sound, but made more in the throat." The earliest citation for this usage dates to the year 1611: "gulped, or goggled downe."
Obviously, Google has gobbled most of the Web search market, but I find myself curiously intrigued by this idea of google as an onomatopoeia, a word that imitates the sound that something makes. If you listen closely to the flow of information, you'll notice that it gluggs, gurgles, and googles as it goes.
In hard news: Google is about to become a publicly traded company shortly. According to the company's own estimation released yesterday, their stock will be worth $3.3 Billion. That's a lot of buttermilk googling out of the jug.
Circle Party
For almost a year and a half, Tawawa has been posted to, in both English and Japanese, mostly by students at the English Department, Faculty of Education, here at Mie University. We have now decided to transform the site into a student circle, a university-accredited extracurricular organisation, which is open to anyone who would like to contribute.
Using the weblogs on Tawawa as well as the mailing list, the #Tawawa IRC channel and any other online toys we might think of playing with in the future, we will continue to provide students with an open, authentic environment in which they can interact with each other and the rest of the world.
Yukiko Kojima has been appointed President of the Circle, Masami Fujimoto will act as Treasurer -- myself, I will continue to honour my duties as Chief Cook and Bottle Washer.
To celebrate the Tawawa Circle, we will hold a party at Kamayan's, near Edobashi Eki, Tsu-shi, on 2 August, 2004, starting at 6:00 p.m.
Anyone interested in joining the Circle or contributing to Tawawa.org is welcome to attend the party.
See you there!
Yuki: An Interview
Photo © Karl Dubost
Yuki is the webmistress of Kissui.net, a weblog to which she posts stories, reflections, links and lots of photos. She lives in Tokyo and studies at Waseda University. She was born in Chiba, Japan, in 1986, where she spent the first ten years of her life. Then she moved with her family to San Jose, California, and returned to Japan after four years in order to complete her education. She speaks and writes both Japanese and English fluently, and currently studies French.
Yuki kindly agreed to be interviewed on Tawawa.
::
You're at Waseda University now -- how do you like it?
Getting into Waseda was the best thing that happened in my life. I'm having the most awesome time here!
That applies to your studies as well as to your social life, I hope?
Of course! It's everything that I've dreamed of.
Which class(es) do you enjoy most?
We are in our first year, so we get to take a lot of different classes. I like anthropology classes and linguistics classes.
In my experience, most freshmen are studying Chinese now. What made you choose French of all things?
It's used internationally, and it sounds sexy.
University is probably quite a bit different from high school...
Yes, there are a whole lot more people, more diversity, more excitement, and more independence.
Going back a bit: aged ten to fourteen you were living in California. How did you manage to adapt to your environment in the U.S.?
Other Japanese people who were in America knew that they were there for a certain number of years, for they had contracts with Japanese companies. But my dad worked for an American company, so we did not know for how long we were going to be there. I thought we would be living there forever, so I studied hard and considered San Jose home.
How did you cope with the different culture and the language? Did you manage to relate to your classmates in school?
Of course there were culture shocks, difficult times and things I did not like -- but I was in an ESL (English as Second Language) class at first, where everyone was going through the same thing. There were immigrants from all over the world, and I think we inspired each other to learn English and our own cultures as well.
When you came back to Japan, did you have any difficulties fitting in again? Being a kikokushijo (returnee) probably wasn't easy.
I came back half way in the third year of middle school, and we went to a local middle school where there were lots of kikokushijo (there are government apartments for diplomats nearby). It was a very strict, traditional school, but I didn't get picked on for speaking good English or for being a kikokushijo.
Japan's middle and high schools enforce a high level of conformity. After middle school you went to ICUHS, which might be a bit different, being an international school...
ICUHS is not an international school! And it does not enforce Christianity, and is not attached to ICU. It is just a small school with a fancy name in the countryside. Most students in the school are kikokushijo though, with basic education in Japanese. Therefore it's very international and liberal.
It is true that Japanese schools enforce conformity. I really wanted to change the way it is while I was in it, but now that I am out of it, I think it was a good life experience. What is an ideal school anyway? Schools in America are supposed to be very "free," but they're way too free so they aren't places to study anymore. It is very understandable that Japan's schools value conformity since it has been a tradition for a long time. You can't form group personality and individual personality at the same time. And most of Japan's schools are currently enforcing the former.
How did you get involved with the Internet?
I was in the U.S. then, and we had to do research with the Internet. Typical!
So you immediately got yourself a LiveJournal account?
I will just tell you my internet history, then! I got a computer in my room when I was nine. It was a Mac, and my friends and I sometimes used it to play games. And when we moved to the U.S. and I was about eleven, we had to do research on the internet for homework. I had a friend who showed me her website. It was framed and had cute animated gifs, and I was much impressed. I wanted to make one of those. Some sort of website creator came with the Netscape browser, and dad taught me the basics -- how to paste images, create a link, and upload a page.
I was twelve and the Nagano Olympics were on. I fell in love with this Russian figure skater Ilia Kulik, and so the first "page" I made was about him. It was on GeoCities, it had rainbow-colored buttons and stuff, and it was rather ugly! Then it evolved to an Evgeny Plushenko fan site, and I made other various fan sites which were very popular. Some of the mailing lists that I started are still running.
All of the html was self-taught from looking at other sites and learning techniques.
Then I got bored with figure skating and moved on to Cirque du Soleil. (Still very maniac, eh!) It was hosted on Tripod and my site became the biggest and the best fan site. I made a lot of friends doing that site, and got invited to their shows and backstage tours. I even watched "Quidam" from the sound mixing seat last year when they came to Japan! I got a domain and the site was very successful, a friend and I made an unofficial fan club, and it's still the best fan club!
And again I got bored with Cirque du Soleil, and moved on to make a personal site. I got a domain and I had lots of drawings and poems up there. But then I had to concentrate on my high school entrance exam, so I drifted away from the net scene.
Around the December of my first year in high school, I made another site -- a blog. It was hosted on a friend's site, and it was called "Japanish," where I wrote about Japanese culture. That site moved quite a lot, but the content was the same all along.
Then sometime later, I got stalked by some weirdos. So I closed down my site and moved to LiveJournal as "pineapplemonade" and continued the blog secretely. Somewhere along the way, the stalkers stopped bothering, so I tried to make my site more public. And it did succeed, I hope. I had close to a hundred comments on every post I made. But the fact that it was on a "free" hosting service didn't satisfy me; I got a domain, hosted and run by a wonderful fan. Some guy registered "Japanish" as a domain before I did, so I chose Kissui as my next weblog title.
Whew, long story, eh! But my design skills were much much better in the past, I can assure you.
I'm almost completely ignorant of the LiveJournal scene. From what I've seen, LiveJournal is a self-enclosed universe whose members interact quite a bit. Can you describe the LiveJournal culture?
Livejournal is for beginners who want to have a journal online. It has features which enable you to control who can read or comment on your journal, so in a way you have privacy but it makes LiveJournal a closed community. It's a very nice place to find people with same interest, though.
What made you leave it and switch to Movable Type?
In LiveJournal, you had to have their banner on every page, and pay to customize the layout. It just can't beat MT and its many features.
Do you think of Kissui.net as a community?
No, it's just a small site where I post things I like, and random people surfing the net telling me that they like it too.
Who are the people who comment on Kissui.net? Are most of them from LiveJournal?
I don't know most of them. My (real life) friends don't comment at all. But they give me their feedback privately and their opinions are what I value the most.
Could you comment on Japanese weblogging? Are any of your fellow students keeping weblogs?
The Japanese internet world is shrouded in much anonymity. Almost nobody writes their weblog under their real name, never reveal the place where they live, and they mosaic the faces out of all the photographs they post. It's pretty understandable since it's a small country, but with such advantages, the "comments" are usually rude and the webmasters are able to suddenly close their sites.
Some of my friends keep weblogs, but not many.
What's the difference between a nikki (diary) and a weblog?
I don't really get this but I think a nikki is a place where you write about your feelings and daily life in a way that is understandable for others, and a weblog is more like an entertainment, where you are able to write anything, mostly for other people. I have a separate journal for the nikki, but it's not linked from the site.
You also take a keen interest in photography and design. Are you planning to pursue these interests professionally in the future?
I would like to if I could, but I want to pursue my writing more. Art doesn't sell unless you are really talented, and I'm not risking my life for it!
Any other plans for the future?
Yuki is taking further questions...Graduate university. Study, learn, have fun, and travel as much as possible during that time.
One Evening II
One Evening I
Chat with Aaron Campbell
We will chat with Aaron Campbell on Monday, July 12th, starting at 8:00 pm (20:00).
Aaron was born in the USA, and he lives and teaches English in Kyoto at the East Asia Center of Friends World, an undergraduate liberal arts program running schools throughout the world. He is also working on a PhD and enjoys cooking, hiking, and reading in his free time.
His weblogs include Under the Influence of Epoche, a site where he mainly reflects on the use of online technology in education. The New Tanuki is a resource for his EFL students at Ryukoku University. This weblog contains links to weblogs maintained by his students. His apc33 contains short reflections on life in general.
The IRC session with Aaron is open to anyone interested.
Please come to chat on Monday evening.
Homepage?
In Japan, people use the word homepage for a personal Web site, and the acronym HP is widely used. The same is true in Germany, except for the acronym; a German psychiatrist has just published his finding that homepage owners suffer from low self esteem.
Whatever the merits of the psychiatrist's research, I find the word "homepage" very quaint. It seems to me that people who actually build Web sites don't use it, unless they're being ironic, refer to a site's topmost page, or mean the personal sites that were current before weblogging software came along in the late nineties.
I raised the question on a message board. Here are the first few replies (I copied and pasted them because the board requires registration).
I use it to refer to the index.html page of someone's website.
-- Fabienne
i use homepage to describe a mostly static, mostly bad personal website which includes photos, links and some sort of bio of the author.
I used to use "my homepage" in the nineties to refer to a small collection of web pages I kept on the student server. Now I use "my site" or "my website" since the whole server is mine.
At work, I usually use "Home page" to refer to the initial page you get when you hit a site, or first log in.
-- Brian
Homepage (hohmpaytsch) is used here as the non-web person's name for "Personal Website," which, by web people, is never called that way, but simply 'my site'. I also never call weblogs 'sites'. I call them logs. Pete's log, Puck's log, my log etc etc.
My dad, under my supervision, has become increasingly 'web'*, and no longer uses 'homepage'.
*) term coined by person writing smitten.typepad.com. I enjoy using it, since it hits the mark perfectly.
-- Willem
I always say "my site."
-- Bill
Ise shrine
Ise Shrine is one of the biggest shrines in Japan. I live in Misono village, right next to Ise City and I often visit the holy place.
When I was a child, I joined a jingu-ceremony called Shikinen-sengu. It is held every twenty years when the shrine is re-built from the ground up. People who can join the ceremony live in special areas around Ise City and serve God. In Shikinen-sengu, they carry many white stones called shiraisi with a big carriage and spread them around the new building.
I don't live in that area, but my grandparents' house is there, so I was allowed to join as a member of their family. We carried the stones a long way on foot, pulling a rope that was tied to the big carriage. When we got to the shrine, the group leader handed a white stone to each person. Each of us put it around the new building. It was so hot and I was exhausted, but it is a memory I cherish.
Mozilla in Japanese
Following reports of a new vulnerability in Internet Explorer and much concern about an impending attack, US-CERT (the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team) issued a warning that urges people to use a different browser.
As Wired.com reports, the warning led to a big increase in Mozilla downloads, reinforcing a trend away from Microsoft's browser.
A quick check of our server statistics revealed that Tawawa page requests originating from Mozilla browsers are increasing indeed; from below 20% only a few months ago, Mozilla now accounts for almost 30% of all traffic.
Earlier today, Yukiko-san remarked that her mother doesn't like Mozilla because of its English interface. I have just poked around among Mozilla's localisations, and it turned out that a Japanese version is available. I installed it on two of the English Department's library machines and it seems to be working fine.
If you'd like to try the software on your own computer but fear it might affect your current browser, you need not worry: it won't. A new version of Internet Explorer will invariably disable the old version, but Mozilla will happily run alongside any other browsing software.