After installing multiple anti-spam methods (I may try to add a “are you human?” feature again) I got bombarded by a massive onslaught of commant spam. However, I can’t even call it spam, it was just a malicious attack since all the URLs and emails were just random characters stringed together, making it impossible to [...]
I watched an episode of the cartoon “Sagwa: The Chinese Siamese Cat” today on PBS while eating lunch (shǎguā 傻瓜, meaning “fool”). Aimed at kids aged 5-8 years old, it is perfectly targeted to keep me entertained. When watching anything these days, I always feel my critical knife want to go into attack mode but [...]
The only news that I have heard while here in OK is of the terrible disaster unfolding in the Indian Ocean. Wikipedia is collecting information about it on their article. There is a blog where you can track relief operations, casualties, and most importantly, various entries updating the many ways that you can to contribute [...]
My family Christmas celebrations have concluded. I spent a warm and happy time together with my parents, my sister Carleen and my brother-in-law Mike. Since I don’t really send out Christmas cards or even 年賀状 (new year’s cards) I’ve decided to try to compile a sort of “year in review” on my blog. It will [...]
My sister just passed on to me a scathing critique of the new project to digitize some or all of the contents of several major research libraries by Google (my own posting on this here). Rory Litwin‘s article, entitled “On Google’s Monetization of Libraries” has almost nothing positive to say about the project and fears [...]
I attended Kim Kyung Hyun’s talk today on the Korean movie Oasis. Kim has written The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema. His talk, “Between Greenfinches and Sparrows: Interpreting Signs in Oasis” (He actually changed the title but I didn’t catch the new one) focused on Fantasy, Language, and Naturalism in director Lee Chang-dong’s movies, especially Oasis. [...]
I just finished watching Oasis, a Korean movie directed by Lee Chang-dong. It is perhaps the most emotionally challenging movie I have ever seen. It is a tragic love story but also a merciless social critique. I’ll be attending a talk on the movie tomorrow given by Kim Kyung Hyun from UC Irvine and I’ll [...]
I just got a university-wide email regarding a pilot project that Harvard is starting with Google. It looks like Google will also be joining with other universities in this project, which will begin the work of digitizing, and in the case of public domain works providing public access to, the contents of the Harvard library [...]
I haven’t experienced this with people in my department (history) but based on my experiences so far, this is a very common first conversation with other Harvard graduate students (especially law school students): A: What is your name? B: Konrad A: Where did you go to undergrad? B: Western Washington University A: Oh Besides the [...]
There are lots of Chinese character dictionaries online (for example 中文.com or Jim Breen’s online dictionary) but I wanted to post a link to a Korean Chinese character (Hanja) site which I like. They have a number of reference tools there, and the site is definitely geared towards Korean native speakers but I find it [...]