The Internet has failed me. Or, at least, my search-engine skills have failed to turn up the nugget of information I’m currently interested in.

Wednesday afternoon, in preparation for my upcoming vacation in Japan, I applied for a passport. The man at the downtown post office who took my picture and processed my application was really cool, and when he found out where I was going, said “man, I haven’t been to Japan since 1964, as part of the Olympic volleyball team”.

I didn’t hear his name clearly at the time, and I was in a rush to get to a doctor’s appointment, so I didn’t hang around and talk more with this former Olympian.

But I’m curious. And my web search has failed to answer the question “who was on the US Men’s Olympic Volleyball Team in 1964?”. I might have to go to a library and look it up in a book made out of dead trees.

Or call the passport office and just ask him. That’d work, too.

If Brian and Lion are right, the worst mistake Disney has made with this movie is creating a trailer that makes it look like a remake of Doc Hollywood.

My struggle for Japanese literacy continues, as my kanji writing practice catches up to the new textbook we start on in July. I’ve now practiced 238 of the 302 kanji in the first volume of the text, writing out each one at least 20 times in correct stroke order, along with all of the standard readings (dictionary-style: on-yomi in katakana, kun-yomi in hiragana, to keep up my practice with both). These aren’t the only ones I know, but they’re now the ones I know best.

I’d wanted to be a lot further along by now, but between work and the demands of my other Japanese class (which involves the opaque writing of Daisetz T. Suzuki, the wretched haiku translation of Harold G. Henderson, and my ongoing struggle with brush calligraphy), not to mention the physical pain of writing lots of complex characters for the first time, progress has been slow.

[side note: the top review of Henderson’s book at Amazon says that his translations “push the envelope of what good translation of poetry of all kinds should be”. I agree, but not in a good way. Not only does he impose his interpretation on the work, but his need to make haiku rhyme adds words and concepts not present in the Japanese text (which he at least provides in romanized form with a usually-accurate literal translation as a footnote, unlike most English-language haiku books).]

One of the things that makes writing practice so important to kanji literacy is the relatively small number of elements that are combined to create thousands of distinct characters. The authors of our textbook assume that they can simply show you a bunch of vocabulary words repeatedly with furigana, and somehow you will learn to recognize them as something other than blob-blob, blob-blob-blob, blob.

Sorry to burst their bubble, but without any knowledge of structure, strings of kanji just look like an explosion in a serif factory, especially when printed small in a Mincho typeface, as opposed to the Kyōkasho fonts used in actual Japanese schools.

Not all of the graphical elements in a kanji encode meaning, or even pronunciation, but some do, and even false associations can be extremely useful for composing and decomposing a character. There are a number of books that actively encourage the student to create such associations.

I’m not using any of those. A while back, I gave up on learning kanji in any sensible order and extracted them from our textbook, lesson by lesson. Until I have at least a thousand under my belt, I can’t really read Japanese text that’s not artificially constructed for students, and I have to read our textbook anyway, so that’s the most useful order to learn them in.

I am creating mental associations, however, and today I caught myself making one that was downright silly, for 難: “it’s the grass-headed robot from kan, next to the bottom-right corner of yō”. That is:

Oddly enough, this will improve my memory of all three.

Today, my life is devoted to cleaning up after an old automated daily backup script that included a line like this:

tar cpf - . | (cd /mount/subdir; tar xpf -)

Guess what happens when /mount/subdir doesn’t exist? “Hey, why are all these files truncated to some multiple of 512 bytes in size? And why are they now owned by root?”

[update 8/9: The ActionTec GT704 that I replaced my SpeedStream with has been rock-solid with WoW; I haven’t had a single disconnect since I started using it]

[update 6/21: I scrounged up a different brand of DSL modem, and preliminary testing suggests that this one doesn’t have the same problem. Current working theory is that excessive packet fragmentation is causing the ethernet port on the Speedstream to choke.]

I recently started playing WoW again, after a lapse of several months. I like the game, but I really hate the way it crashes my DSL modem when I turn in quests.

This is not my imagination. Frequently, the act of turning in a quest disconnects me from the Internet, forcing me to power-cycle the modem. It happened five times this morning, as I was running my Orc Warlock through some low-level Crossroads quests. Turn in quest, lose connection, power-cycle modem, log back in, repeat. It’s not the volume of data; I can flood the line with BitTorrent traffic for days, upstream and downstream, without the line going down. I think that since I got the current modem, it’s lost connection maybe once every six weeks.

Except when I play WoW. I’m stumped. And despite the fact that I know I’m not crazy, I can’t think of a way to explain this to SBC tech support that would result in useful support.

[update: more details. I’ve now repeated the crash using the PC version of WoW, and it’s 100% consistent. Turn in a quest, power-cycle the Siemens Speedstream 4100 (running in bridge mode with firmware 1.0.0.53, upgraded from 1.0.0.48 today without fixing the problem). Even the direct web-admin connection goes down.

To my astonishment, SBC tech support believes me. It took a bit of doing, but I managed to get to a second-tier support guy who spoke sysadmin, and we spent half an hour on the phone diagnosing the problem. There is no evidence on his side of the modem crashing and failing to resync, or of other problems on my line. What may in fact be happening is that the uplink port on my switch is crashing, not the DSL modem at all. Connecting directly to the modem and turning in a quest worked once, but I didn’t have any other quests to test further with.]

[update: I’ve been wanting to upgrade to a gigabit switch for a while now, so I did that today, replacing the 10/100 that was connected to the DSL modem. I was able to turn in three quests without a problem, and just as my confidence started rising, the fourth quest crashed the modem. To do more serious testing tomorrow, I’ll have to move the G5 into the same room as the modem, so I can easily try with and without the switch in the loop. I’m coming to believe that it’s simply the LAN port on the modem that’s flaking out, not the software actually crashing. Supporting evidence is the fact that it’s still up enough to detect the disconnection of the phone line and reconnect when I plug it back in.]

I think boingboing put the adjective in the wrong place. Let me fix it for them…

Tomorrow, seven activists in seven cities across the US will picket Apple Stores, handing out information about the dangers of the DRM hidden in Apple's iTunes.

I think my version better carries the flavor of this important event.

more...

春終わり
筆でしっぱい
一じゃない

Or, in equally fractured English:

Spring Term with the brush,
a ragged line on the page.
"That is not ichi!"

[I think most of the students are feeling the pain, but us southpaws suffer the additional indignity of being forced to confront our limited control over our right hands.]

A leftover steak!
Kosher salt, black pepper, and
a really hot fire...

In the hornet nest,
an oppressive heat begins.
Hey, it's my grill, guys.