If you're new here, please consider subscribing to my RSS feed. Thanks very much for visiting!
My spam count is nothing compared to most blogs, but considering that my total spam count had been in the 40s about a week ago, I considered it a sharp spike when I discovered how busy my filters are becoming.
Seriously, I’ve suddenly become the target of truckloads of spam. I’ll take it as a sign that my site is getting slightly more popular if it’s being circulated through all the lists out there. Luckily Akismet and SK2 are sniping about 99% of the garbage before it hits the comments section. But I feel deflated somewhat. The traffic that I thought I was receiving is really distorted by the influx of random peddlers and their questionable pharmaceutical wares. So I’ll take it with a grain of salt.
Anyhoo - you may bump into maintenance mode splash pages over the next few days. I’m attempting to finally get sharpened up a bit, and I’m new to this so it’s taking me a while to work out the kinks. Please be patient!
My family rules. Even when I’m on this side of the planet, they find ways to prank me from afar. At least it wasn’t a sparkly red sequined bra and thong set this time. Thanks for the cereal and the laughs that accompanied it! I already finished the box. I’m trying to figure out how to use it in class… By the way, the background music was ウルフルズ (the Ulfuls) with their song すっとばす.
So apparently, my brain is composed of 2 hemispheres; one each of happiness (幸) and the desire to play (遊). These hemispheres are divided by a thin line of secrets (秘). All in all, I’d call that pretty positive. Ha ha. Want to discover what your brain contains?
I picked up on this meme over at Clay’s blog.
I just finished reading a really interesting 3-part survey over at What Japan Thinks. If you’re interested, or if you want to know what I’m talking about, I encourage you to go take a look: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. While Ken Y-N seems to think that a few folks will jump on it because it’s wide open for foreigner discrimination based criticism, I’m going to briefly talk about what I found interesting.
I guess you could say that Japan is headed slowly in the direction of modern Western liberalism. I’m not a big fan of the American variety, and by extent, I’m not a huge cheerleader for the entirety of Western liberalism. Looking at the multiple answers used in this survey, I feel like Ken Y-N hit it on the head when he wrote, “The key question is, of course, what do Japanese consider human rights?” Sure, they have defined them in the Constitution, but the survey to me had a distinctly different flavor.
The responses that surprised me (taken from multiple questions, in no particular order) were as follows:
- People staring, running away
- Opposition from others regarding marriage
- Problems being financially independent
- Rumors, others speaking ill of me
These things are not what I consider human rights. In fact, I get pretty annoyed when someone starts bandying about trying to enforce public behaviors that fix the so-called problem. This is an issue for me when dealing with Western liberalism: people are unbelievably hypersensitive! Now, don’t get me wrong. That doesn’t mean that I think people staring at you or running away from you, opposing you regarding marriage, or speaking ill of you are good things - or even socially acceptable. I simply feel that they fall outside of the realm of human rights. It aggravates me that in my country people cannot put up Nativity Scenes during Christmas anymore because they’re considered eyesores to people of differing religious beliefs, in the same way that hearing “Merry Christmas” is a startling affront. Nobody has the right to not be offended. That’s just silly. Similarly, I don’t feel like any laws or government intervention is called for in the case of people staring / running away, opposing marriage, or rumor mongering. People’s behavior is ultimately their responsibility.
I also don’t think that being financially independent is a human right. I think it’s a goal, not a condition to be taken for granted. And I don’t feel like its the government’s role to “help” in that case either. Surely society should step in and help our floundering individuals. But the individuals who are currently floundering would be mistaken to charge everyone else with breaking their inviolate human rights if they did not help out. In short, I draw the line between social ills and legally protected human rights. Anyway, it was an interesting survey. I just hope that Japan doesn’t encourage the same mentality of victimhood that is so pervasively nurtured in America and other Western countries. It seems to run hand in hand with this kind of thinking. And hey, once you have victims, you have court cases and an increasingly litigious culture. Please, Japan, think that over. I’d rather see you fix the actual problems, and not fight the windmills. (And this is coming from a fellow who gets stared at, run away from, and incorporated into rumors every day I live here.)
This is not Japan-related. This is a quick post in defense of girls from my home state of South Carolina. The following video showing Miss Teen South Carolina is a travesty. A travesty of monstrous proportions. I went to school with lots of girls far more gorgeous and far smarter than this. What happened? I feel misrepresented. Anyway, don’t judge us South Carolinians by the stereotypes…spoken or demonstrated in video form…
Now, while I’m being defensive, let me say that I don’t know Lauren Caitlin Upton, or whether or not she was just having an off day. Poor girl. I hope that’s the case. (Though, to be fair, I think it would be understandable if “US Americans” who had no maps couldn’t locate the US on one…after all, they need one to do that…right?) Anyway, point made, I guess. Thanks. Hat tip to Hot Air. And for those of you who are done cringing, you can look forward to some new posts this week. Got a new camera. Got back from Monster Bash. School’s starting. Things are moving rapidly now. Just gotta hold on while the new schedule sets in.
What is the best solution to hosting a bilingual blog in your opinion? Posting everything twice? Posting parallel text? Using an automated (ahem…questionable) translation service like Babelfish or Google? I really want to be able to feature some of my posts in both Japanese and English, but I’ve not yet found a satisfactory approach.
I recently caught the link to an article on Weblog Tools Collection that was featured at the bottom of the administrative WordPress dashboard about 2 amazing plug-ins. One of them, the Worldwide Lexicon plug-in, caught my eye. It’s an interesting PHP based solution to hosting a multilingual blog. Here’s a blurb from their website explaining the wiki-style translation concept.
WWL makes it easy for people to view, contribute and edit translations to websites. It is similar to Wikipedia (anyone can contribute to the index of translations, or edit translations sent by other users). Any website with an audience will have bilingual readers, some of whom will be happy to contribute translations for other people to read.
I recently installed the plug-in and fooled around with it. I translated a really short article I wrote, just to see how it’d function. My problem? The plug-in is kind of ugly. It places an expandable list of languages at the top of each post, and if a translation is available, apparently it displays the first line in blue as a preview. Ugly. What’s more, it removes any content that I had on the post - a flash player, pictures, whatever - and I don’t want to publish the paths to these files on a 3rd party server. On the main page, whenever more than a single post is being viewed, it lists the other languages as “undefined.” I don’t know if there’s a problem with my particular theme or some other code that I’ve customized, but it’s really unpolished. Then again, it’s still in testing. So that’s fair enough, I guess. If you guys are listening, these problems would be the biggest hangups I can think of.
Otherwise, the idea really appeals to me. Allowing anyone to translate or edit translations on your site would really open it up to more readers. And since the translations are stored elsewhere, changing themes and the like wouldn’t really mess it up. Compared to the other ideas that I’ve seen for making a bilingual blog, this approach is much less demanding. The integration would be a piece of cake if it worked better and looked nicer. Hrrrm….
I’m still fooling around with it. But if you imagine, like I do, that we could have translation help from our blogroll buddies, or site visitors, or collaborations between the community as a whole, and you want to help support the plug-in, feel free to download it.
In the meantime, while that thing is getting developed, debugged, and smoothed out, does anyone have any good ideas for bilingual WordPress blogs? We’ve gotta be careful, because as Alex knows too well, sometimes you lose all of your foreign language entries if you do something funny. Makes the whole enterprise a little shaky. Anyone have a good take? Successful blog? Hints? I’m rambling, now, which means it’s time to stop writing and click the publish button.
