Section 43 Entry 0001. Date: 2003 May 20 Tuesday
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I wasn't planning to blog today, since I'm a bit tired, and I can't be bothered to write about SARS, our two recent earthquakes, the weird woman who was talking to herself on the train, the weather (cold yesterday, wet and sticky right at the moment), my new bookcase (actually a second-hand sideboard which I bought at the weekend for a hundred yen) or any of the rest of that stuff.
However, when I checked on Salam's website in Baghdad I found he had posted some new material about a trip he took to Basra, which I thought was worth mentioning.
(Unfortunately the photos that supposedly accompany Salam's latest entry are really slow to load ... in fact, for me they didn't load.)
Later: 2003 May 26 Monday. Today, Salam's site was loading quickly for me, complete with his latest photos of Iraq.
Salam also provides an informative link about Iraq, which is to:-
Electronic Iraq Net which features news from Iraq.
On Salam's site there's also a link to something called www.almuajaha.com, whatever that is, but this timed out when I tried to access it ... Google does not seem to have a cache of this, nor does it have any pages which contain the term "www.almuajaha.com" ....
Today's mystery ....
Later: 2003 May 26 Monday. Today, I managed to access www.almuajaha.com, which previously timed out. The site came up with a headline saying Al-MuaJaha - "The Iraqi Witness", with the language in the search box on the left specified by default as "American English".
The "info" button on the Al-MuaJaha front page led me to an URL baghdadimc.dyndns.org. When tried, this led to the same Al-MuaJaha front page.
The site features a bunch of articles, which, from a quick glance, do not seem to be of the pro-Bush variety.
There's an "i" logo in the top left corner with the words "independent media center" under it, and on the right there's a "MEDIA GALLERY" saying "34 new media uploads since 19 May 2003."
One of the items is accessed through a link saying "Reject Nomination of the Terrorists Bush and Blair for Nobel Prize".
Out of idle curiosity, I clicked on the link, and then after that I punched "Bush Blair Nobel" into the Google news search box, and it seems that maybe possibly perhaps someone really has gone and nominated the Bush-Blair team for the Nobel peace prize ....
I think this falls into the "no comment" category.
This ends the update of 2003 May 26 Monday. Back to 2003 May 20 Tuesday:-
There should be an artistic way to transition from this topic to the entirely different subject of the photos I took of Kyoto and so forth, but I can't think of it right now.
So I'll just change the subject - zap!
Selvonchulapatopa (this may or may not be a real name - you be the judge) spent some hours over the weekend sorting through the five hundred megabytes or so of digital photographs that I shot while my parents were in Japan.
For the purpose of sorting through these photos, the larger of my two ThinkPads was used - running under Windows 98, since Selvonchulapatopa has not yet been initiated into the mysteries of Linux.
Unsurprisingly, on a couple of occasions the computer locked up solid. In fact, twice it locked up so solidly that Alt-4 failed to close open windows and ctrl-alt-delete failed to reboot the computer, so in the end the only option was the brutal one of pressing the ON/OFF button ....
.... and, when that failed, I was reduced to disconnecting the external power supply then yanking out the battery.
"Does the computer get tired?" asked Selvonchulapatopa innocently.
Selvonchulapatopa comes from a planet on which gadgets that you pay good money for (TVs, CD players, air conditioners and the like) are expected to work reliably for hours on end without needing to be kicked, bullied, bashed, disconnected, reconnected, defragged, doctored, rebooted, reinstalled, upgraded, sworn at, exorcised, researched, initialized and generally despaired of.
On Selvonchulapatopa's planet, gadgets are supposed to spend their time working for you, not vice versa.
I did my best to explain the foibles of the Windows 98 operating systems which was foisted on the world by Microsoft.
One of the demerits of Windows 98 is that it tends to crash if it is being used to run complex programs (such as Microsoft Word.) Another is that it is perfectly capable of crashing even if you are using it only to perform simple tasks, such as the job Selvonchulapatopa was doing - opening up some digital photos and copying some of them into a separate folder.
From what I've read, it seems that Windows XP might be an improvement. But why should I pay good money to migrate to Windows XP when I already have two legal copies of Windows 98, one for each of my ThinkPads?
At this stage I'm tempted to launch into a thoroughgoing attack on the Microsoft Corporation, its software, its monopolistic practices and its incredibly bulky code.
So what restrains me?
Well, first, an overwhelming sense of futility. There are entire websites devoted to attacking Microsoft, and it's like shooting breadcrumbs at a dinosaur. (By contrast, the Bush regime looks like a soft target.)
And, on top of that, I'm busy. Apart from everything else, I've got a novel under construction, a piece called Bamboo Horses, which is going very sweetly, thank you very much. And, on top of that, I want to find time to sort through all those photos.
Yes, I really DID shoot five hundred megabytes of photos. In fact, closer to six hundred. It's very easy, really. It helps to have a 256 megabyte flash memory card that you can plug into the digital camera. It also helps to have a spare battery pack for when you exhaust the first one. Then it's just a matter of pressing the button every ten seconds or more.
Zap! Photograph of my mother's head! Gray tiles in railway station, at an angle! Closeup of commuter's elbow!
I hope to get some of these photos up on the Internet over the next week or so ... but this comes into the don't hold your breath category.
Section 43 Entry 0002. Date: 2003 May 22 Thursday.
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Today I had hoped to make progress on getting some of my photos online, but my free time got chewed up instead by the job of building a Japanese kanji study guide, the entry page to which I plan to locate at zenvirus.com.
As mentioned earlier, I want to remedy my state of illiteracy, and after chewing over the options, I've decided that building a study guide is one way to do this.
So far, however, after quite a bit of work, I've only got as far as one kanji ... this could take quite a while.
Technically, the hardest part was figuring out how to draw characters stroke by stroke. I tried drawing them on paper with a pen then photographing the result with a digital camera, but the result was pretty ghastly - stunningly amateur.
In the end, I fired up my copy of Red Hat Linux 8.0, which includes every single piece of software which came on the installation disks, and went EXTRAS - GRAPHICS - ICON EDITOR to access the KDE icon editor.
(Because the standard Red Hat installation includes only some of the KDE stuff, if you want the icon editor I think you have to either make a special effort to include it during the installation phase, or else do what I did, and take the quick and dirty route, and install everything.)
Working with a 51 x 51 grid, it was very easy to draw a set of graphics to show how the kanji for "en" (yen) is built. Saved as a series of JPEG files, the result looks like this:-
My hope is that I will be able to add kanji to this study guide at a rate of at least one a week.
Section 43 Entry 0003. Date: 2003 May 23 Friday.
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Today's adventure was an eye test in Japan - a trip to a shop which sells spectacles - an optician's, I suppose. (I don't know what this is in Japanese, but these shops typically have spectacles in the window plus a sign saying "megane" - spectacles - so it's no problem finding them.)
Some fifteen years ago, I had a pair of spectacles optimized for deskwork - specifically, for doing computer work. When made, these spectacles were optimized for arm's length distance. However, I've grown long-sighted with age, and an opthalmologist recently advised me that the spectacles are now optimized for a distance of about twenty feet, which I figure to be roughly six and a half meters.
(If I'd been seeing an opthalmologist once a year, as I should have been doing, then this would have been detected earlier. The next thing on my "should have been doing" list is the dentist ....)
It was an American opthalmologist who supplied me with the "twenty feet" figure. One of the anthropologically interesting things about my life in Japan is that I get to meet a certain number of real live Americans, who generally come across as being pleasant, well-balanced human beings.
(The America I meet in Japan and the America I see on TV - these seem to be two entirely different nations. Of course, the America that I'm meeting in Japan is an America that has succeeded in the basic task of integrating itself with the human populations living upon planet Earth ....)
Anyway, the consultation time with the American opthalmologist who said "twenty feet" was given over to a thorough health check which included, amongst other things, having my pupils dilated. This leaves the eyes unable to focus properly for some hours afterwards.
The options were to go back and see the opthalmologist again at a later date, and have a prescription for spectacles made up, or just wander into an optician's and have them test me on the spot. I opted for the optician's, as I went to one in Japan last year to have a pair of spectacles made up specifically for driving, and doing that proved to be no problem.
So today I showed up at the optician's and exercised my Japanese language skills by explaining what I wanted (precision at a distance of sixty centimeters) and by talking my way through the various eyesight tests. This included reading stuff off eye charts featuring Japanese hiragana and katakana, such as the hiragana "to, i, ri," which look, respectively, like this:
I also had to look at some characters on a red background and some characters on a green background, and to say which I could see more clearly.
There was also a test involving a bunch of dots. I'd look at a bunch of dots, then I'd see the same pattern through a different lens, and I'd be asked which was clearer, the first or the second.
Additionally, there was a test involving a bunch of vertical lines and a bunch of horizontal lines, and I had to say which was thicker. I'd forgotten "koi" (thick) and barely remembered "usui" ("thin"). I didn't initially know what was meant by "tate," but I soon figured out that in context it must mean "vertical". (The dictionary says "height".) Which meant that, in context, "yoku" must mean "horizontal".
Additionally, I got quizzed by the guy who was doing the eye testing, who was making sure that what he'd been told was correct (that I wanted these spectacles made up for desk work, and, specifically, for working with computers at a distance of sixty centimeters.)
I was at pains to say exactly what I wanted and why I wanted it. The American opthalmologist had warned me that (for some unexplained reason) Japanese people tend to like to have their spectacles a little on the weak side. By contrast, an American would aim for optimal precision - "and I guess it's the same in your country, too." Yes, very much so.
After the testing and the discussion, there was the business of choosing frames, and then there was a discussion about plastic lenses versus glass lenses, and how thick and how heavy these lenses would end up being.
By the time I was through I'd had, in addition to an eyesight test, something of a Japanese language competency test into the bargain.
What I didn't see today, although I had expected to, was the standard Japanese eye-testing circles. (I have no idea what the proper name for these is.)
I saw one of these circles for the first time some years ago, when I went to the big police driving license center in Yokohama to get a Japanese driver's license.
For some foreigners, such as Americans and South Koreans, who drive on the other side of the road, getting a Japanese driving license involves, amongst other things, getting behind the wheel of a car to show what you can do.
Because I had a New Zealand driving license, I did not have to do a practical driving test. Nor did I have to do any exams. It was simply a matter of swapping my New Zealand license for a Japanese license - and doing an eyesight test.
I had no idea what the eyesight test would involve, so, as I waited in line, I tried to figure out what the other people ahead of me were doing. As far as I could figure out, they were looking into the machine and calling out the names of the shapes they saw. When I looked into the machine I saw a circle, which looked approximately this:-
This was obviously a circle, so I said "maru," which means "circle," but that was the wrong answer, and the Japanese policewoman doing the eyesight testing said a bunch of stuff, none of which I understood.
(Don't get me wrong. The Yokohama driver's license center processes thousands and thousands of people, and going there is like seeing a cattle drive from the cow's point of view. Even so, the people there, in my experience - and I've been there twice - have been uniformly helpful and friendly, despite being extremely busy. So far, all my contacts with the Japanese police have been positive.)
Anyway, the Japanese policewoman went through her spiel again, and this time I cottoned on. You get shown one circle from a selection of four circles. The four possible circles look roughly like this:-
There's a gap in the circle and you have to say whether the gap is pointing up, or to the right, or down, or to the left. You need to know four words: "ue" ("up"), "migi" ("right"), "shita" ("down") and "hidari" ("left").
What happens if you want a driver's license but don't have basic Japanese language skills I have no idea.
If I remember correctly (and perhaps I don't, despite having now done the police driving license center eyesight test twice) there may also have been a requirement to correctly identify some simple Japanese character, such as "kita," meaning "north":-
So today I was expecting to meet with the same circles at the optician's. But, instead, there was a regular eye chart. In Japanese. (Yeah, and at one stage, so I could gauge the effectiveness of a particular set of lenses, the optician showed me the newspaper - which was also, of course, in Japanese.)
If you're just visiting a country then you can probably scrape by with just a phrase book, or perhaps with one of those computerized translation gadgets which will tell you that English "sushi" translates into Japanese "sushi".
But, if you're actually living in a country long term, then, as time goes by, more and more situations come up which really demand a working knowledge of the language - getting spectacles made, for example, or house hunting.
Fortunately, my Japanese dentist (the one I haven't been going to for a sinful length of time) speaks pretty good English. (And is a good dentist into the bargain. I have no excuses.)
photos Japan - Japan photos - photographs of Japan
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