Muninn

We are all struggling with garbage. It comes in so many varied forms. In the world of information the battle against garbage may not take the form of a threat to the environment, but its threat to our time, sanity, and intellectual positions is clear and present. Like any researcher in an archive or a student in their favorite library, the moment all of us began using the internet for our work, study, or daily questions, we have all needed to refine our garbage filters. The arts of skimming, sorting, and analysis are combined with our most powerful weapon against garbage on the internet: the back button.

Of course, one researcher’s garbage, is another’s gold mine. The same, I think, can be said for some of the physical garbage we are filling our landfills and furnaces with. However, I’ll leave that question for another time. It is the many different ways of dealing with this physical garbage which has caught my interest of late…
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I gave my presentation today at the ICICE conference being held at the Yuanshan hotel here in Taipei.

To be honest, it was a spectacular failure, and I record the story of it here for posterity. From the time I arrived, well before the conference formally opened with smoke, flashing lights, and Las Vegas boxing match intro-music and drums I was memorizing various notes I had taken in Chinese and working out the exact minute by minute allocation for my presentation. I slipped out a little early from the last morning session and ran down to the lunch area where downed a boxed lunch in about 5 minutes in order to use the lunch hour to make final preparations for my presentation.

Almost an hour before I presented, I confirmed my Power Point presentation was working on the conference supplied laptop, and tried to open the web pages of the OWLS software that I had developed. We soon discovered that their whole wireless network was down (a room nearby with dozens of laptops for conference participants to use were all also being scanned for viruses and reconfigured by a group of techies, which is never a good sign). I explained that I was presenting on some software and giving a demonstration that was online and would need to know if the network was going to be down during my presentation. If so, I could use various snapshots of OWLS and Sutaitai.com which I had brought on a CD. I was assured the net was going to be working by 13:30 and indeed, they resolved the problem within 15 minutes. I then tested the network every ten minutes or so until my presentation started. I also made a change to the order of my presentation file.

I estimate there were between 50-100 Chinese instructors and other conference participants in the audience for my presentation. As I approached the podium to begin my presentation, while they were introducing me, there were suddenly two conference employees hovering about the computer I was to use. I looked at the screen - the Windows XP machine had crashed and she was restarting the computer. Meanwhile, my 20 minutes for the presentation were already ticking and the audience was waiting while I was surrounded by conference employees whispering Chinese SOS signals into the CIA style radio sets attached to their uniforms.

I lost all composure. I completely lost all the stuff I had memorized and, between trying to work with the staff on the technical problem, tried to start a presentation by just casually introducing software and features that I had neither a Power Point presentation or a working computer to demonstrate. It was a nightmare. My Chinese totally failed me in this desperate moment of required spontaneity.

Half way through, the computer was up and running and I quickly tried to demonstrate the Sutaitai.com site. After finishing this, with again horrible Chinese, I then moved to my climax: trying to show the instructors how simply anyone with OWLS can create interactive exercises. Of course, just that moment, the whole wireless network of the conference hall died again and was I faced with a beautiful white Microsoft IE connection failure screen.

Again losing all my composure I fumbled for words for a minute or two while hoping the network would revive itself, again finding myself swarmed by conference employees who had no technical ability but who decided to stand around me and whisper into their radio sets. My time quickly came to an end.

There were two comments and two questions. A Chinese instructor teaching in South Africa was kind enough to be blunt, “Your software isn’t useful” (没有用).

Another Chinese instructor who teaches US military personnel caught me in the elevator as I was trying to flee the conference in despair. She tried to be polite by saying the same thing in about 15 minutes of indirect criticism.. From what she said, I realized how completely I had failed to communicate some of the most basic features of the software and the limited applications for which it can truly be useful.

There was one technical question about the software and the other question was simply a request for the password to be removed from Sutaitai.com so the teachers can evaluate for themselves how effectively the software can been used.

I learnt a few things from today’s complete humiliation: 1) When I panic, anything stored in short-term memory gets fried, especially when it is in a foreign language. 2) Try at all costs to avoid doing presentations which heavily depend on technology or computers not under your direct control. If you can’t, make sure emergency plans (like my snapshots) are available for fast and immediate implementation. 3) When you are giving a presentation, make sure you front load and heavily emphasize points which can funnel constructive criticism into the areas where it is most useful and relevant. 4) My Chinese, and especially technical Chinese, still needs a lot of work. 5) When measuring time for parts of a talk, double the time it takes you when you practice your presentation. 6) Know your audience well. Preferably speak their language fluently.

It has been quite busy since I arrived in Taipei. I have been trying to pack paper research, PhD applications and rewrites of my statement of purpose, spending some time with Sayaka and preparations for next week’s conference all into my limited two weeks here.

Last night I began working on the powerpoint presentation (due today) for my talk at the conference this Friday when I got an email with some brutal, but much needed and appreciated comments back from my friend Jai on an early draft of my PhD statement of purpose and was just moving between Microsoft’s email application for Mac, Entourage, and Word when everything froze up and I couldn’t force quit anything. My computer is a Mac, this is not supposed to happen. We don’t have crashes anymore.

When I restarted the machine in “verbose” mode to read what was going on in the background as the machine starts up, I find that I have been hit with the infamous B-Tree corruption, and in all likelhood, my hard drive, and all of its contents are lost…As far as I can remember, this is about the 4th time I have had B-Tree corruption destroy my hard drive’s contents in as many years and every time it happened just as I was using Microsoft’s email application. The demons of Microsoft must, of course, be responsible for my ills, trying desperately to get me to abandon the outlaw world of Apple for the imperial XP operating system. Jai, who is a Windows user, is of course their agent, and was instructed to deliver the order to strike via the trojan Microsoft application on my machine…
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As I mentioned in an earlier posting, the conference I was to present at in Taiwan was postponed because of SARS. Well, in about an hour I’m finally heading for Taipei both for this conference and to do a some research for a paper I’m working on. It doesn’t hurt of course, that Sayaka is living and studying in Taipei and I will definitely try to spend some time with her even as I continue my various other projects (including PhD applications, which I’m in the middle of). I’ll be back on the 28th but expect to have fairly regular email access while in Taipei.

My mother sent me an email a few days ago concerning her website:

“There’s a guy who constantly leaves silly messages in my guestbook (calls himself Mugu). This has been going on for a couple of years now. I just delete them of course, but do we have any way of figuring out who he is and blocking him? He is really starting to annoy me.”

Being the loyal filial son that I am, I immediately (well, ok, a few days later) set to work finding out who the mysterious mugu man was. All I had to go on was the fact that he leaves messages like this on my mother’s page:

Name: MUGU
Addressfrom: mugu@mugu.com
Subject: seee
Message: Mugu no fit finishMugu no fit finishMugu no fit finishMugu no fit finishMugu no fit finishMugu no fit finishMugu no fit finishMugu no fit finishMugu no fit finishMugu no fit finishMugu no fit finishMugu no fit

This strange and obviously not quite sane creature would not hide long from me. I would find The Mugu Man and discover why he haunted my mother’s online guest-book. Being the highly trained researcher that I am, my first course of action was, of course, to do what everyone else does these days to find absolutely anything in the online universe: I googled the Mugu man…
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My servers are getting a little out of control. I am trying to consolidate all my sites to a single server in such a way that allows room for expansion, better control over my domains, and lowers my hosting costs. If you are reading this message, it means that the domain Muninn.net has successfully made the transfer to its new server where I have several gigabytes of hosting space to work with and freedom to add domain accounts. This server will probably also serve as a base for other web design projects and OWLS software hosting.

I got tired of the fact that my site can’t be easily searched on Google and has a poor ranking. Ok, so my site has a poor ranking because no one is linking to it, but deep articles aren’t showing up at all because even if people linked to them, they aren’t linking to the “print” version which is the only think which is cached by Google from Muninn. Only the main page and the “print” version of the articles at Muninn make it to Google’s archive because it ignores the long complex links which PostNuke, which I run Muninn on, uses far too much.

After poking around, many others have had a similar problem. The simplest solution I found here (at another complex URL).

It didn’t work completely because my site uses “&” for ampersands instead of just “&” so I had to modify the code for the replace_for_mod_rewrite and also used the code for this function based on a site that linked to the above article at Aquanuke. In case others have the same problem, try the version of the function below (read more) instead of the one found at those various sites:
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A big box was waiting for me this afternoon when I came home. On the mailing label it just said, “Rice”

My friend Hiroshi came back to Japan after working for a time in Central America for a charity, setting up a small school in rural Guatemala. While he is currently studying Spanish on the beaches of Thailand (all I can say is, that’s Hiroshi), he stays at my place whenever he is homeless in Tokyo. I remember he asked me if I like rice when he was on the phone with his parents somewhere in rural Japan and that his parents would send me some in thanks for housing him…

I didn’t imagine a box of close to 20kg of his family’s own harvest of rice (judging it roughly by comparison to my half eaten 2kg bag in the kitchen) would arrive on my doorstep, covered only by a large paper bag and a cardboard box!

Thanks Hiroshi! You have guaranteed that I can’t possibly go hungry here during my last 6 months here in Japan. I’m now accepting recipes for some good rice dishes!

Lots of fun stuff going around the net in the last few weeks. Some I found interesting:

-Glenn has passed on some good links lately. Looks like Japan is considering a project to provide GPS tracking of their kids in response to a recent kidnapping. This could do wonders for their safety, although I’m somewhat uncomfortable about the other potential applications of such a system.

-Looks like a few Austrian and german Villages, as well as the country of Liechtenstein are available for rental.

-Universities feeling the pressures of competing for students are apparently providing various new ways to attract top students.

-University of Tokyo is getting over a thousand Macintoshes. Also on the Mac front, Gen Kanai noticed the huge proportion of powerbooks at BloggerCon. See the pictures. Rush Limbaugh, whose current troubles are not getting much of my pity apparently wanted to be in an Apple switch ad. According to the story, Jobs rejected him for political reasons. A company who used images of Gandhi (think different campaign) is not likely to want an ignorant and racist man for a new campaign. Also an article on Apple’s new developer tools coming in the Panther release of the OS.

-Look for your old professors or current ones here. You can rate them online and leave comments…

-Find out what conferences and such are inviting papers through this new online service. Choose topics to watch and get notification on.

-Interesting article on homework by children in the US. 19 minutes is the average per day in 1997.

-Some good articles on blogging lately. Columbia’s Journalism review has three short articles on the technical history of blogs, a list of media blogs, and an article talking about the growth of blogs. He makes an important point on the importance of 9/11 on the explosion of the blog movement, and this also helps account for the conservative nature of many of them (which includes this writer, see his links, which include a young misguided Norwegian who I have very little taste for). There is also an interesting survey on blogging and an article at The Register. A good article at teacherlibrarian.com on the use of Blogs for educators and librarians. There is a whole corner of the Blogosphere now talking about this and it is frequently getting presented about at conferences. There is a good article here on the important “trackback” feature of blogs, which unfortunately, my own blog here at Muninn does not yet support.

-Apparently the more you watched TV, the more likely you were to be wrong about the basic facts of the war. Also, the more you watched the “Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News channel, in particular, the more likely it is that your perceptions about the war are wrong, adds the report by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes” The fact that 70% of Americans still believe that Saddam was involved in 9/11 is one manifestation of this. Although we can also thank Cheney’s stubborn efforts to maintain this connection.

-A quick look through some of the blogs listed on my blogroll will show how interested I am in issues of copyright and intellectual property. Some recent articles I have enjoyed is one on the“Copyright Cage” and an article on fair use in the education world. Interesting little row on the internet about an article about Hitler’s home that resurfaced. Read a Wired article and a NYT article on this.

-Old news, but check out the fun features of Google’s new calculator features.

-Blog entry and links to idea of hyperlinking philosophical texts

-Link passed on by Claire, BBC has a new history site which is very interesting.

-Some interesting ideas being thrown around about things like emergent democracy. See Joi Ito’s version of emergent democracy, he seems to be focusing a lot of energy on it of late. I haven’t looked at this closely but may blog my thoughts on this at some future point…

Sayaka and I went for some sandwiches at subway a few days ago. While enjoying our meal, I watched as someone ordered a side of french fries with their food. An employee filled a little bag with french fries and placed it on a scale. She then removed one french fry before giving it to the customer. The experience reminded me of buying vegetables in the market.

On the train home yesterday we heard the usual announcement overhead which includes the standard warning, “Cell phones are an inconvenience to other passengers, please turn off your phones while on the train.” I’m used to this now. The inclusion of this phrase comes from the ubiquitous use of the phones on the train have become annoying for others but also, apparently, due to trouble they cause for passengers with pacemakers etc.

However, before the final, “Thank you for your cooperation,” there was a new addition to the announcement, “By the way, chikan (sexual molestation in the form of touching, groping etc.) is a crime. Please report it to our staff.” What can we conclude from the new inclusion of this phrase? (Also, this same train line has just introduced, or I have just noticed, the “Women-only” cars during commuting hours.) Read a recent article on this issue.