http://muninn.net/blog But I fear more for Muninn... Sun, 06 Jul 2008 14:43:55 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Having spent a wonderful year or so in Korea I have had occasion to speak of my experiences to people I meet here in Taiwan. I have been surprised to see some anti-Korean sentiment amongst people I have met here. I first got a hint of this soon after I arrived ... http://muninn.net/blog/2008/07/anti-korean-sentiment-in-taiwan.html As historians, we often engage in the liberal use of quotations to sanitize and quarantine distasteful terms or phrases that lend legitimacy to a category or a way of referring to an institution or other body. The use of these quotes, which I confess to frequently using, presumably robs such ... http://muninn.net/blog/2008/06/quotational-quarantines.html In addition to my Muninn blog, I occasionally make contributions at the various Frog in a Well blogs, the East Asia Libraries and Archives wiki, some programming weblogs at Fool's Workshop, and create various scripts and other creations. I have a Friendfeed profile but I don't really like leaving this ... http://muninn.net/blog/2008/06/the-workshop-wire.html The Problem: Let us say you have a list of Chinese words or single Chinese characters in a file. There are a lot of them. You want some easy and fast way of getting the pinyin and English definitions of that list of words or single characters and you want ... http://muninn.net/blog/2008/06/script-for-creating-a-chinese-vocab-list.html Wenlin is the the best piece of software around for students of Chinese. Among other tools, it has a powerful and handy offline dictionary with very flexible and fast search options as well. I know many students of Chinese that use Wenlin to get their definitions and input vocabulary into flashcard ... http://muninn.net/blog/2008/06/wenlin-conversion-script.html I'm a huge fan of Korean food and I will sorely miss it. I'm generally not as fond of the many oily and fried foods commonly found throughout China and Taiwan. I'm a big fan, however, of the many vegetarian buffets I have been to in Taipei. For the price ... http://muninn.net/blog/2008/06/taiwans-vegetarian-buffets.html "Let Obama teach you charming English" Above is an advertisement at some kind of English academy near Chinese Culture University in Taipei. Somehow I don't think this concept would have worked with our sitting president as a model. http://muninn.net/blog/2008/06/presidential-english.html I just remembered an anecdote I mentioned in a longer posting here at Muninn as I passed by one of the street side trash cans here in Taipei today where, even when it is far from full, one has to concentrate to get a coffee cup through its small hole. ... http://muninn.net/blog/2008/06/freeze-drop-your-garbage.html My Fulbright in Korea has ended, as has a year of language study and dissertation research in Seoul. I moved to Taiwan on Monday and will be here in Taipei until the end of the summer. I'm quite fond of this island and look forward to shifting my research to ... http://muninn.net/blog/2008/06/taiwan-for-the-summer.html I yearn for the old days of HyperCard, which I started learning back in the glory days of the late 1980s. I'm trying to learn how to use the monster currently maintained by Apple that is AppleScript Studio. It is the flawed scripting language AppleScript, which has some similarities with ... http://muninn.net/blog/2008/05/learning-applescript-studio.html I'm happy to announce the results of a few hours of tinkering: The Pinyin Tone Widget. This OS X dashboard widget will take a series of Chinese pinyin words with tone numbers appended at the end of each syllable and will add the tone marks where appropriate (e.g. zhong1guo2 becomes ... http://muninn.net/blog/2008/05/pinyin-tone-dashboard-widget.html I just heard from Sayaka that Charles Tilly passed away. He was an amazing scholar whose work has had a powerful impact in the fields of sociology, political science, and my own field of history. I have learnt much from reading his work and attended several of his talks. I ... http://muninn.net/blog/2008/04/charles-tilly.html A long time ago, in the last millennium, I designed a flashcard application for Mac OS that implemented something I called interval study (known elsewhere as spaced repetition or the Leitner method). I sold and later gave away the software at a website I created for my software tinkering called ... http://muninn.net/blog/2008/04/fools-flashcard-review.html It seems like everything has a song in Korea. Go to the web page of almost any institution, whether it be a school, political organization, clubs of all kinds, you can often find their song online. Maybe I'm getting a little too "close" to my topic, but I was on the ... http://muninn.net/blog/2008/04/korea-national-police-university-song.html Spent the weekend in Kanghwa-do with a friend. I have never been one for the usual tourist destinations so many of the highlights of the island listed in tourist brochures went unseen. The highlight for me was the hike on the first day through some hills on a small country ... http://muninn.net/blog/2008/04/weekend-in-kanghwa-do.html