ChinaJapan.org Down My host for my ChinaJapan.org site had a crash and had no functional backups. They handled the whole thing with complete incompetence which I will be describing at major hosting forums to warn future customers. I’m going to be moving the site to another host where I am hosting Muninn and FrogInAWell along [...]
I don’t drive in Seoul so I don’t have to face any traffic jams and such. The subway system in Seoul is fantastic, easy to use, and is very cheap compared to Tokyo and even New York and Boston. The network is in my opinion far superior to New York and Boston. One of the [...]
One of the many fun things about Japan is that a very large number of bakeries in Japan claim to be “Scandinavian” bakeries (occasionally, they claim to be French). The puzzled Scandinavian visitor who enters them will, of course, find nothing (except perhaps a long loaf of fresh Parisian bread) which is remotely recognizable to [...]
I usually use the digital Wenlin dictionary because of its convenient look up features, speed, and high quality. Today an assignment I’m working on consists of reading reading a 1936 essay about Shanxi 山西 village life. (I often have to look up older terms in an 1930′s dictionary known as the “Mathews” dictionary. Wenlin is [...]
I just tried the Sperling’s BestPlaces survey and It would appear the top 10 places for me to live in the US are: San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, Washington, DC, Tacoma (WA), Long Island (NY), Syracuse (NY), San Jose (CA), Minneapolis-St. Paul (MN-WI), and Denver (CO). I’m a bit confused about some of them, but the [...]
I had some Kimchi Sundubu at a little Korean mom and pop restaurant in a mall north of my dormitory. As I tried to eat without splattering the bright orange soup sauce onto my copy of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations (a task I ultimately failed), I watched a couple approach the restaurant, the father holding an [...]
Today during my Korean class, our instructor was introducing everyone to Korea’s use of Chinese characters, or 한자. It was a welcome respite since I usually don’t understand about half of what the instructor is saying. Chinese characters, on the other hand, I feel much more comfortable with. At one point in the discussion our [...]
In celebration of the month of the flying squirrel, a holiday spanning late September and most of October with a 3000 year long tradition in the land of Muninn, I have resolved that for about one month this blog’s name will change to the Chinese for Flying Squirrel (鼯鼠 or wushu in Chinese, musasabi in [...]
I have been using a piece of software (for Macintosh) over the last six months or so which I have really come to depend on. I have just realized how often I now use this that I wanted to recommend it to others. It is called VoodooPad. It is basically a kind of offline Wiki [...]
As a kind of follow up to my recent article at Chanpon.org on Japan “Losing its soul” I have also noticed a lot of posters in recent Japanese advertisements which claim that visiting some place will help you discover yourself—that is, discover one’s latent or forgotten Japanese identity. Today I noticed just such a poster [...]