JET

Bladdy Bladdy Blah...

Sat, 6 Mar 2010 01:34:04 CST

Not much going on here, huh? :)

I've been working pretty hard on a... uh... real?... site idea. It's a job seeker tools site that I'm still kind of brainstorming the real profitability of... but regardless of where I take it, it's turning out to be a nifty little project... lots of JavaScript and Ajax tricks as I work towards much cleaner code than in previous web projects. It's the first time I've started something this extensive almost entirely from scratch in a long time. (The pictures and weblog applications are my standard scripts.)

Geography Lesson

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 08:51:16 CST

Southern Indiana isn't the midwest. It's the south. Unfortunately, their lack of awareness of this geographical association means they simultaneously do not fear snow AND have no clue how to drive in it. Stereotypically, southerners fear it, and midwesterns can drive in it. This poses a serious hazard to my safety on the road when it snows.

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When you don't pay for coffee...

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 02:01:31 CST

When Friday afternoon boredom kicks in at work, then if you're not the only one it's affecting, they might ask you to help them with something... um... only mildly work related?...

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You know those BloomingtonSingles.net signs that you see all over the place?

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 02:50:55 CST

They kind of look like election campaign posters. Well anyway, here's a partial screenshot of their home page:

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It's been like that all day.

I wasn't actually looking for singles on that particular site, but did click when it came up as a business location when I was Googling Bloomington bars. I'm sick of the ones I keep going to (well Bears is great, but it's not really a singles place... the rest of them suck so far). I'm trying to figure out where I could go either on my own or with my friend and maybe actually be able to run into singles that aren't self-righteous hipsters (Vid), hillbillies (Office Lounge), or babies (Kilroys, Bluebird, and just about everything else that ISN'T one of the first two). A few exceptional places don't count because they're too "restauranty"... you can't really comfortably wander around Bears or the Lion to mingle.

Any suggestions? I've never really spent much time at Farm (but I think it's overpriced) or Finch's. I guess I keep imagining that stereotypical bar that you see on movies, but honestly the closest thing that comes to that in Bloomington seems to be the bar sections of chain restaurants. It's sad to live in a town where the best cafe is Starbucks and the best bar is O'Charlie's.

Poika Joka Elää

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 11:21:11 CST

I finished chapter one of Harry Potter ja Visasten Kivi last weekend and spend a lot of time Monday and a little bit more time Tuesday reading and listening and enjoying the fact that I completely understood what was going on (by the end of Tuesday, even without the help of the text in front of me), and am happy that I was able to listen ahead a little and still follow pretty well, though I'll still need to buckle down and do the vocab if I want to do this the way I said I'm going to do... namely translate everything... maybe it builds character?

I'm pretty excited about this new weekend activity, and look forward to getting the entire book (17 chapters, I think, so 16 more) done by the end of the semester or shortly thereafter. I figure by the time I'm done, my vocabulary will have shot up tremendously and I'll have a pretty good passive understanding, even if I don't get much (or any) speaking practice.

Now I need to get my hands on Russian versions of the text and audio, preferably for #2. (I have #3 in Spanish).

Update
Finished the word lsit for Chapter 2 on schedule, and I'll be reading through it as planned during the week. I think that's becoming my pattern. The weekend gives me several solid hours two days in a row to plow through the list of words that I don't know each time, and then the weekdays that follow give me time here and there to just casually listen again and again until I comfortable understand without the printed text.

Harry Potter ja Visasten Kivi

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 03:34:36 CST

So the other day I was thinking to myself how shitty it is that I don't have the time to go study languages of interest over coffee like I used to do a decade ago back in Greensboro. But then, as I started considering my (lack of a) social life here in Bloomington, the relatively easier academic responsibilities that I have, and the relative lack of stress at my (daytime-only, no-overtime) job, I started realizing with some degree of shame that what's really going on is that I don't TAKE the time to do it.

One language that interests me, despite being nearly useless for any real purpose other than just saying I know it, is Finnish... just because at some point years ago I made a Finnish friend, took some interest in it, hung out with other Finns in subsequent years, had a crush on a Finnish girl or three, and ended up taking two years of it at IU when I first came up.

I happen to own a copy of Harry Potter 1 both in book and CD format in Finnish, and even more luckily, they're the same translation, meaning I can read and listen at the same time. So I've started the slow yet (so far... I'm sure I'll tire of it) somewhat enjoyable task of (1) reading and listening to a chapter, (2) translating every single word in the chapter, and then (3) re-listening and re-reading once I know exactly what's going on.

I'm in the middle of the first iteration of step 2: Chapter 1 is taking me days to translate this way. I did 2 pages Thursday, 2 pages last night, 6 pages today, and will do the last 6 pages tomorrow, reserving Monday for a few read-throughs along with the complete vocabulary list until I feel like I can follow along without having to constantly look back at it for reminders.

Right now it's taking me about 30-45 minutes per page to compile and translate the lists of words that I don't know, but that will quickly shorten as words get repetitive. Based on this rate, even though chapters will get longer, I'm hoping to pull off a chapter a week so I can be done by the end of May or so.

The benefit of reading something I'm familiar with is that I can guess a lot more from context without resorting to a dictionary (same reason Calvin and Hobbes is good for short spurts.) But admittedly, after listening to it all in German two or three times each, I'm getting a little burnt out on Harry Potter. I'm willing to tolerate it a bit longer simply for the convenience of familiarity and the fact that I have both audio and print versions of exactly the same text.

Update
I finished Chapter 1 without too much trouble, so one per week is starting to look pretty realistic.

A strange opinion... or is it?

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 01:16:10 CST

My new resume states, as did my old one, that I have a reading knowledge (I believe originally it said "Familiar/Reading:...") of Spanish, Finnish and Russian, which is true. I don't claim to speak any of them particularly well on a conversational level, though I have had conversations in each of them at times when I might have been more competent (or drunk) in the past. Anyway, I was showing off the resume (for it's technical value, not its content) when someone at work (who is from another country and speaks several languages, including Russian), told me she thought I should remove that. At first I just figured she meant that I shouldn't put languages that I only kind of know on there, as if it's somehow fake (and maybe that's where it originated, and then it just got twisted up as we argued about it)... but when I made that assumption and explained that, since I'd consider taking work either in (or related to) countries that speak any of those languages, and that it made sense to me to point out that I at least have a willingness and competency to quickly refresh my knowledge of those if ever necessary, she kind of changed tracks to suggest that it made me seem "too liberal", and that "most" employers (?) prefer conservative employees. She said that being an American interested in lots of languages made it seem like I was a hippie.

Am I nuts that I found this is a really strange view from ANYone, not to mention someone who comes from an area of the world where they speak lesser-spoken languages? Is it indeed a bad idea to put languages that interest you (and that you're at least halfway legitimately competent in) on a resume if it's of geographic relevance to areas that you might like to work in?

All it really did was make me feel stupid for not knowing them better... particularly when she contrasted it with a hypothetical situation in which being able to claim 'advanced' knowledge of them would change how appropriate it was to mention the interest. Was she just being skeptical about my ability and somehow interpreting my inclusion of these languages as posing, or was this really an assumption/concern that she has about the professionalism of this kind of information on my resume? Of course she claimed the latter... but I find that a hard opinion to believe... should I?

Check this out.

Tue, 5 Jan 2010 08:43:01 CST

This is the new web version of my resume, and the first step in a web site/service idea. The XML class that I'm taking in SLIS (more for the project that I hope to do for it than for what I think I'll learn in it) will help me flesh out step 2. Then step 3 will involve programming an interface to allow people to edit their resume information (and add custom items/groups) before moving on to step 4... which shall remain a mystery until at least summer.

Racism

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 01:38:32 CST

Josh has a good gripe about "Non-racist Racists", the gist of both his post and my comments about it (in which I agreed) being that we're annoyed by people who complain about racism but express it in other ways that don't seem any more innocuous than the offenses that they complain about. I won't duplicate his points here, or any more of my own comments, but I will go ahead and share a funny link about HP webcam technology...

It apparently can't recognize black faces.

Is this a power struggle, or just a missed point?

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 10:30:41 CST

An excerpt from a recent email from me to select people in my office about the ongoing edits to a holiday card we (= I) have been making:

For the sake of time, I?d advise against opinion-based edits at this point (obviously typos and such can still be corrected), and focus on getting [person] the text and recipients info that he needs to send this by noon.

Quite possibly the last response I could have expected to such an email... one that made me both laugh and cry at the same time:

Looks good.  

Edit:  add possessive -  "Images from [our office]'s [event]"

Add a little color ? maybe the "Images..." Text could be in red??

Any way to make scroll arrows thicker, or include a few in succession ... to make it more obvious to scroll?  

Also, both paragraphs begin with "As..."  maybe change the second paragraph to:  "We invite you to share in one of our highlights from 2009..."

Finally, reduce space between photos and last paragraph -- Would be nice to see all of the message in the window.

If I had treated this as a power struggle rather than just a failure to read past the first few sentences of my original message, I could have won said struggle pretty easily. I'm the one in control of the web site, and I doubt not making those changes would lose me my job... it's a university job, and firing me takes a lot of work.

Fortunately I'm mature(/sensible?) enough (most of the time) to just bite my tongue, make the edits, and send it along.