I’ve been dealing with my jet lag after returning from Taiwan by upgrading all the software on my web site. Its all gone pretty smoothly, except for my wiki. If you understand anything about PHP, .htaccess rewrite rules, Apache, and that kind of thing, please help me out. The problems are explained on the front [...]
In the early days, my blog was actually an e-mail list sent out to a group of friends and family members. Then I figured out how to post everything on the web, but I kept the old e-mail list via a service called Bloglet. Unfortunately, that service never worked reliably, and I still get occasional [...]
The most rewarding aspect of blogging for me has been all the other bloggers I’ve gotten to know. Unfortunately, it is only rarely I get to meet them face-to-face, like I did at the South Asian Bloggers Meetup. So it was really great to meet a cool bunch of Taiwanese bloggers last night. I owe [...]
I didn’t see the concert, but I’ve been following responses on the blogsphere. Here are some highlights: Ethan Zukerman wonders whether the whole process really needs to involve Robbie Williams. Or whether it wouldn’t benefit from the involvement of a few more Africans. African artists that is – although it seems they’ve been ghettoized to [...]
Someone recently mentioned to me that I should see Yuan Zhang’s 1999 documentary “Crazy English.” Although the few reviews I’ve found of the film suggest that it could use some editing, the subject matter is fascinating: China’s first major self-help guru, Li Yang, whose gimmick is a new way of learning English. Namely, by shouting [...]
The opposite-of-indubitable Tom Friedman has been raving about Ireland lately. How rich it is, and now how its labor system should be admired for its brutality. If he was right, I’d perhaps be willing to assume that the unprotected workers in the “anglo-saxon” labor system are better off; but he’s dead wrong. Point One: Ireland [...]
When I was visiting Aborigine villages in Taiwan I noticed that every house had a satellite dish on its roof. Anthropologist Scott Simon explained to me that the Council of Indigenous Peoples had given these out to every Aborigine household in preparation for the launch of the new Aboriginal television channel 原住民電視, or ITV, which [...]
No, there is no sumo wrestling Hello Kitty yet (at least not that I know of), but there is women’s sumo wrestling in Japan: An interesting, if brief, article here on the history of women’s sumo (onnazumo), which was at one time more popular than the men’s sport. Another good article here details the current [...]
Shashwati left it to me to discuss the strange orientalism of Batman Begins. Let me start with a brief movie review: It was good, but I wasn’t nearly as thrilled with it as everyone else. For one thing, I hated the fight scenes which were edited so that you couldn’t really see any of the [...]