Work. A sneak peak at what I've been working on all week. This will only make sense to you if you can read Thai, and even then, it probably won't make sense because all the text was translated using one of those automatic translators which often produce humorous results. The technology has a long way to go.

In addition to Thai, I can now generate similar versions of our product in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, as well as Malay and all the standard European languages that use standard English-like letters. We're still hoping to be able to do Hindi someday, but their crazy script is only just recently being tackled by computers.

It's been something a revelation to work on this stuff. I'm reminded of Huckleberry Finn:

"Why, Huck, doan' de French people talk de same way we does?"

"No, Jim; you couldn't understand a word they said -- not a single word."

"Well, now, I be ding-busted! How do dat come?"

"I don't know; but it's so. I got some of their jabber out of a book. S'pose a man was to come to you and say Polly-voo-franzy -- what would you think?"

"I wouldn' think nuff'n; I'd take en bust him over de head -- dat is, if he warn't white. I wouldn't 'low no nigger to call me dat."

"Shucks, it ain't calling you anything. It's only saying, do you know how to talk French?"

"Well, den, why couldn't he say it?"

"Why, he is a-saying it. That's a Frenchman's way of saying it."

"Well, it's a blame ridicklous way, en I doan' want to hear no mo' 'bout it. Dey ain' no sense in it."

"Looky here, Jim; does a cat talk like we do?"

"No, a cat don't."

"Well, does a cow?"

"No, a cow don't, nuther."

"Does a cat talk like a cow, or a cow talk like a cat?"

"No, dey don't."

"It's natural and right for 'em to talk different from each other, ain't it?"

"Course."

"And ain't it natural and right for a cat and a cow to talk different from us?"

"Why, mos' sholy it is."

"Well, then, why ain't it natural and right for a Frenchman to talk different from us? You answer me that."

"Is a cat a man, Huck?"

"No."

"Well, den, dey ain't no sense in a cat talkin' like a man. Is a cow a man? -- er is a cow a cat?"

"No, she ain't either of them."

"Well, den, she ain't got no business to talk like either one er the yuther of 'em. Is a Frenchman a man?"

"Yes."

"WELL, den! Dad blame it, why doan' he talk like a man? You answer me dat!"

I'm a little like Jim, in the way I've always assumed that languages used a discrete set of letters that correspond to sounds, and build words out of them. It just isn't so. Symbols get combined, lines are drawn to connect things in weird ways, and symbols are used to represent whole words, giving no clue as to how they get pronounced.

Having a small set of discrete letters may even be one of the key reasons for Western advancement; first because they made the printing press feasible, and lately because computers can deal with them much easier. (Recently the Chinese have gotten in step with the times through widespread use of a simplified form of their alphabet.)

Thai is pretty cool looking, no? Definitely one of the more interesting-looking languages out there (though I would give the nod for beauty to Arabic and Hieratic).

It's the seventh lunar month in the Chinese year, otherwise known as the Hungry Ghost Month. During this month Taoist Chinese believe that the gates of Hell are opened and the dead are allowed to enter into the world of the living. To appease the "hungry ghost" food offerings are laid out and ghost money and accessories (paper clothes, cabinets, dinner wares, anything a ghost might need) are burned. Believers do not buy property, get married, move, or do much of anything that may be affected by "luck" during this month. It's interesting stuff and I'm trying to find out more about the holiday, but it's harder than you might think. A trip to Chinatown this weekend is definitely in order. Also, I believe there will be a lot happening on the full moon. Anybody have any recommendations?

Yes, apparently my signature no longer matches... my signature. They have some serious check nazis down at the bank. I'd be willing to bet the signature checker's job title has the words "Anal Retentive" in it somewhere.

Always good to bounce your first rent check in a new apartment. This sort of thing is not a problem back in the states.

Another (probable) bombing in S.E. Asia. This one in Jakarta at the Marriot Hotel, no articles to link to yet as this just happened. The timing is telling as the main man suspected in the Bali bombings in on trial with a verdict due any day now, as is a general linked to crimes against humanity in East Timor.
On a completely different tone, I finally received approval for my dependent pass today. Finally.
Another thing to bitch about: Our second rent check to our new landlord bounced not due to insufficient funds but because our bank said of Mark's signature "he doesn't sign his name that way". Um, what?!

Upgrading from Windows 2000 Server to Windows XP on my work computer. A short list of all the software I have to install:

NVidia video card driver

TextPad text editor

Cygwin (all the standard pieces, plus: clear, crypt, cvs, doxygen, emacs, file, fortune, gcc, gdb, make, man, openssh, openssl, vim)

XEmacs

Panicware Popup Stopper

WinCVS revision control system

Apache Tomcat web server

Seti@home screen saver

Winzip

The Gimp (open-source PhotoShop)

Java 2 Software Development Kit

NJStar Communicator for chinese language entry

ElevenProspect License Manager

XP language support for Japanese, Thai?, Korean, Chinese

Google toolbar

Netbeans IDE
What a joy. That should take just about all of tomorrow.

The dream. When I worked at the Space Center, the stress of being responsible -- even in a very small way -- for a shuttle launch seemed to give everyone the same recurring nightmare. The nightmare is that it's launch day, and something goes wrong during the fueling, or worse -- during the launch, and it's your fault. Everyone I worked with had this dream at some point. It's not a good dream.

I still have the dream, every few months or so, including last night. It's changed a bit over the years; the shuttle still goes haywire, but it's no longer my fault when it happens. It's still distressing. This time, I was really close to the launch; only a few hundred yards, and it was really cloudy. Through a hole in the clouds I could see sparks flying out of the shuttle where no sparks should have been, and thought "Oh, no...". I told everyone it was going to crash, and while I didn't see the impact, molten lumps of debris started raining down on us, and we had to dodge them. Then I woke up.

I can't imagine working on some of the probes they are launching now. Each requires more than a decade of work to plan and build, and it all comes down to a single launch. I think the Mars probes they've launched have had less than a 50% success rate in just getting there. I sure those guys have The Dream a lot too.

Okay, this is a cool game. It's like Myst, you just have to figure out the right things to click on.

Our government-issue SARS kit has arrived. Contents:

A pamphlet, "Taking Your Temperature Correctly", translated into English, Malay, Chinese, and Thai.

Two surgical masks.

Mask instructions, also in English, Malay, Chinese, and Thai.

A rather nice digital thermometer, with instructions in English only.

Just in the nick of time, too.

Mark and I watched a documentary on Bhutan tonight and it struck me -- I'm the third generation in my family to spend at least a year in southeast Asia. My grandfather was stationed in Bhutan (then Burma) during or around World War II, my father spent a year in Vietnam, then another in Thailand, now Mark and I are here. Of course I'm here under very different circumstances than my predecessors.

A great site for movie reviews is Rotten Tomatoes. What they do is to collect and summarize views from critics around the world. A good review is marked with a red tomato; a bad one with a green splat.

It's a rare movie that some critic, somewhere does not like. But there is one out now. Maybe the filmmakers should have listened to their focus groups.

Update: Oops! Looks like they found one reviewer who liked it.

The latest "Awwwww...." My dad's been on a mission to scan in all our old slides. Here's Another picture from my childhood (me on the right). I love this stuff. Hey Dad, where the heck was this, any idea?

We hosted pub trivia last night at Shamus O'Donnell's. It all went pretty well, excepting the small turnout. We did make the mistake in one question of implying that the Boomtown Rats were British, when in fact they are Irish. This is not a good sort of mistake to make in an Irish bar. Marjorie, who was reading the question, received several indignant shouts. Proving she can "take the piss" with the best of them, she responded, "England, Ireland... Aren't they the same thing?" This cracked me up, and everyone else too.

I'm fed up will the old comments provider (klinkfamily.com) which kept going down, so I've swapped in a new one (haloscan.com). These will hopefully be more reliable. Now all I have to do is come up with some actual content that's worth commenting on.

There'll be two comment links at the bottom of each post for a little while, if the old comments come back up. Please use the one that just says "Comments".

We had a pretty nice day yesterday. We went up to the Chinese Gardens and walked around for a bit. It's a great area for birding. The first thing we saw there was some kind of Heron (perhaps a Purple Heron) eating a snake. The gardens were quite nice themselves, but overall I'd go for the critters (turtles, and fish, and birds, oh my!) The turtles were engaged in a rather bizarre behavior which involved the little ones repeatedly and persistently getting into the faces of the bigger guys. I have no idea what this was all about, but the big guys looked (understandably) annoyed.
After the Chinese Gardens, we went to buy plants for the new apartment. The nursery also turned out to be a nice place for birding (I know, we're scary) and we got the best view yet of a crimson sunbird. We also saw some cool pitcher plants, which Mark would have been happy to take home, but are a bit too creepy for me.

Four reasons to be angry.

1. US just lost to Brazil, in heartbreaking fashion. I was so hoping for a US-Mexico final.

2. National Geographic reports that Singapore's biodiversity has been ravaged. Paints an awfully bleak picture for the effects of rising population everywhere.

3. The comments have stopped working again.

4. Ice cream, my newest kick, is really bad for you, according to a new study by the people who previously ruined Chinese and Italian food for everyone.

Playing around with the Terraserver web site. Here's an overview of where I grew up in Cherry Hill, NJ, age zero to ten, and a guide to the marked points:
1. Our house.
2. The church parking lot that I first rode a bike without training wheels.
3. The church (Pope Pius X) where we went every Sunday, and I had my first communion.
4. I used to catch big preying mantises here. I had an awesome insect collection.
5. I caught a ton of cool butterflies here, at a larkspur bush.
6. This used to be a field. One time playing softball(?) here, where if I remember correctly, my sister ended up with stitches after a collision.
7. My friend Dale's house.
8. My friend Terry's house (I think).
9. Here I knocked over a small tree in the yard of my friend Donny, and had to work it off in their garden.
10. Mean Mr. Taylor's house. Once our kickball went on his lawn and he took it and put it in his garage.

Up the street from the new pad is a hawker center and a wet market. Marjorie and I walked up there today for dinner.

I was hoping she could see the wet market, but it must just be a weekend thing. I scoped it out last Saturday, and it's a trip. Everywhere is fish -- whole fish to cook up, fish heads, aquarium fish, prawns, crabs... A bucket of dead squid in their own ink. And, a container with about thirty live bullfrogs. Also they have meat, fruits, and vegetables galore.

Tonight we found the grounds of a "bird club", which probably explains all the caged birds we see hanging outside area houses. Apparently, the old men bring their caged birds to this site in the evenings and hang them next to each other so they can sing to each other. They have larger cages in the back containing numerous birds. Interesting.

Dinner was a decent chicken murtabak and a Nasi Lemak that we tried unsuccessfully to order without anchovies...

At last, a photo from Sydney. I'm looking more and more like my dad every day, it seems... We have other photos, but they weren't taken with the digital, so this is all you get right now.

Nature walk. We went back to the Fort MacRitchie reservoir today, in an effort to check out the tree-top canopy walkway we recently learned they've set up. Unfortunately, the tree-top walk was about a 4.5 km walk in, so we only just walked some of the other nature trails. New bird: the terminally drab Olive-Winged Bulbul. Also saw another Greater Racquet-Tailed Drongo, some swifts, a kingfisher, a (water?) monitor lizard, a lot of turtles, and a lot of these guys. They weren't that happy to see us, it seems; they kept dropping sticks on us. Just one would've been a coincidence; after the third, we figured we ought to move on.

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction contest results have been posted. This is the contest where the object is to come up with the worst possible opening line for a novel. I was going to enter this year, but I couldn't firm up my entry in time. Next year maybe. There's some good ones this year; as usual, they aren't the ones that won.