Archive for October, 2007
My friend Chris Watkins from Appropedia introduced me to Geert Hofstede’s work last night when we were swapping notes on Indonesian and Filipino culture. Hofstede originated the idea of “cultural dimensions,” ways you can describe societies and compare them to one another. Yes, countries are not cultures, and individuals can act out of type for their nationality – but this doesn’t claim to be anything more than what it is; a broad, sweeping overgeneralization of the dominant national culture – as Hofstede found it, anyway.
Since you can only compare two countries at one time on Hofstede’s website, I whipped up a quick chart. The labels, from left to right, stand for Power Distance Index (the acceptance of uneven distribution of power), Individuality, Masculinity (the relative value placed on stereotypically male or female personality characteristics and actions), Uncertainty Avoidance Index, and Long Term Orientation.
The first two things you notice are the Huge! Orange! Bar! by IDV and the even more gigantic blue one by LTO. That’s America being insanely individualistic and China shooting for a long term view, respectively.
This could explain conversations like the one I had with my grandmother this morning about renewing the lease on my great-grandparents’ tomb in the Chinese cemetery, which expires in… either 25 or 50 years, we’re not sure. Her response was that well, we’d need to call the council of elders together, and then ask all their children, and then tell my generation, and so on. It also explains why my parents talked to me as a young kid (early elementary school) about the importance of saving money to put my future children (which I shall of course have) through college, and so forth.
I could pull out other stories to illustrate the other parts of this chart here, but that’s all ex post facto – I can pull out stories to illustrate almost any “fact” I want most of the time. I do see the first column’s gap here, though – and it’s the one that rubs up against me the most. As a nicely-dressed Chinese, I’m allowed entry into pretty much everywhere, even without ID in most cases. Less well-dressed Filipinos are chased away by security guards or made to line up by entrance gates for identity verification. (On the flip side, it’s “safe” for them to run around on the streets, whereas I’m confined to quarters because it’s “too dangerous” for me to go outside – so we have as hard a time entering their world as they do entering ours.)
After four whirlwind-filled years of college, I’m used to brazenly batting ideas around with folks with impressive-sounding titles – they’re people, after all, and when I get really into a conversation or I’m really passionate about a topic, I don’t care what their nametag says. It also makes me incredibly uncomfortable treating people as anything less than an equal. I can still get away with that here to some extent; I’m the American balikbayan, young and impetuous (and tall), and (if all else fails) an engineer and therefore a geek, so my lack of “conventional social graces” turns into a point of humor and even endearment. (I’m sorry, but I make eye contact and speak in sentences rather than statements that trail into questions?)
The discrepancies only crop up occasionally, but they jar me when they come. I squirm whenever I hear a well-to-do person talk pityingly (or denigratingly) about “the poor,” as if they were a homogenous lump of helpless and/or lazy shiftless bums. It means I’m having a hard time getting used to being served, and a hard time adjusting to the submissiveness of those doing the serving. (And I flinch whenever I hear a grown person in the “lower classes” referred to as a “boy” or a “girl,” and try to make a point of saying “man” and “woman” in my own speech.)
Problem: The gap between social classes is sufficiently ingrained that it makes them uncomfortable when I act as if we were equals. And when in Rome – right? What’s the line between “a righteous crusade of JUSTICE! and FREEDOM!” and just plain ol’ blind cultural imperialism?
It certainly keeps life interesting. And it makes for memorable conversations – like when my (female) cousins were astonished to find that you can keep your last name! when you get married! (“I’m going to move to the US so I can keep my last name!” one exclaimed excitedly) and another time when I was equally astonished to find that it’s legal here to specify gender* for a job posting and require all applicants to submit** a picture*** of themselves. It was explained to me that sometimes men and women had different characteristics – women are more nurturing and make better nurses, etc. I replied that the current statistics might make certain combinations more likely than others, but that wasn’t the same thing.
Conversations like that usually end up with a shrug and a “yeah, I know, but what can you do? It’s the ,” where is almost always China, the Philippines, or the United States.
*obviously, sometimes gender does give you an advantage – a job posting for a wet nurse or a sperm donor, for example. But I can’t for the life of me figure out why a construction supervisor should be a man, or a secretary a woman, and was puzzled why my gender should keep me from applying to some engineering positions I saw posted. To be fair, while many job postings specify gender (and height), many don’t.
** “pix plz”
***even for non-customer-facing jobs. I mean, if you’re auditioning for a play, I can understand why you’d want headshots, but do I care whether my programmer’s gorgeous?
Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Today I explained “open source” to my Chinese teacher in halting Mandarin – I was pleasantly surprised to find that I know enough words after 3 weeks to be able to get the concepts across at a (very) rudimentary level. It reignited this ill formed draft that’s been turning in my head for a while; I’m not sure how to put it into the right words and finally figured just blurting it out might help.
Here’s the premise: open source isn’t really open.
I’m not really talking about legal or physical access here, although of course that’s a barrier as well. [1] I’m talking more about moving from being a user to being a contributor. Hypothetically, there shouldn’t be that many barriers. Hacker culture values self-taught learners, so lack of formal education is no big deal; anyone can jump in and help, you can shield yourself from stereotypes to some extent by not telling folks that you’re in high school, or homeless, or a terrible stutterer. [2]
Nope. The biggest problem is that the folks who can “teach themselves hacking” were the ones who were thinking like a hacker in the first place. I hypothesize that open source hackers, to some extent, are raised and not born. Yes, they eventually make themselves – but it’s awfully hard to make people who realize they have the ability to recreate and reteach themselves and share things with the world.
Many people don’t follow or understand the open source development culture. “Just do it,” “Start something,” “Hack now fix later,” “Ask forgiveness, not permission” – they’re not necessarily optimal or natural ways of thinking, but it’s assumed without question that contributors to the project do think that way. [3]
Culturally, some people – in particular, those who aren’t western males – may actually be raised to behave in the exact opposite manner; the appearance of consensus, proper identification of leadership, attempting things indirectly to save face over being bluntly efficient and potentially contradicting something in public, or watching out closely for one’s own group instead of broadly for all.
How do you get involved with and contributing to something that may go against some of the basic social norms you’re surrounded with? How many people are willing to live with two (or more) lives – one as a contributor in the open source community, another as… whatever – if those two lives don’t intersect, acknowledge, and value each other?
I have no answers. I don’t even have much in the way of a well-formed question. But I wanted to get an artifact out there so there’s at least a concrete mass of words to tumble about and argue with. Thoughts?
[1] Not everyone is equally free to download, modify, and share “open” resources because not everyone has access to a computer, the ‘net, the knowledge of how to use these, and the time and opportunities to do so in a socially acceptable manner. (“Why are you playing with your mom’s computer? It’s not for kids. If you break it, she can’t work. You should be watching your baby brother.”)
[2] Many people consider the attributes that stereotype them to be integral to their identity and don’t want to hide that they’re female, Latino, etc. but will get short shrift in some way if they do, so this is really a case of some groups having “less freedom” than others – but that’s an entire series of posts all to itself, and others have written about it with much more eloquence.
[3] You have no idea how hard it was for me to wrap my head around “ask forgiveness, not permission.” It was like having a mental concept with no direct equivalent in my native language. I went through high school and half of college trying to convince myself that it was possible to think something like that.
Monday, October 29th, 2007 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
You don’t need it. Really. Sure, it makes a lot of things more convenient, but it’s not in the same category as air, water, and food; you won’t die without it. Cash (and later, credit) is an invention we’ve adopted into our social conventions because it serves as a handy shorthand for barter. Money is worth exactly as much to us as we think it is. I’m writing this after a month of not having spent a single cent (I am, however, racking up a gigantic karmic debt to family, but that only brings me tighter into the circle of blood relations; this is what we do for each other).
It’s like having a degree – the important thing isn’t that you have one for the sake of having one, but in what you can do, with or without the sheet of paper that proclaims you proficient in something. Similarly, what do you want lots of money for? Not for the sake of having lots of money, I hope. If you want to start a business, there are many options other than loans, VCs, and being independently wealthy. I usually put in sweat equity, do some bartering, see what other people are trying to get rid of and make use of that.
First: do you really need it? What’s the worst that could happen? I realize not everyone has this same luxury, but I’m able to do a lot of stupid things because I know that even if I lose everything, I can convince a passing stranger to let me use their cell phone to call – or pop into a library and grab a public terminal to email – a friend, a family member, someone who’ll let me stay with them, no questions asked, while I get back on my feet. I also know it’s not beneath my dignity to cook, clean, babysit, or take a minimum wage job – and resourceful enough to find other opportunities fast, or create them. I think that knowing I have a fallback plan makes me much less liable to use it.
Can you trade, convince someone else to share, or even just ask for it? Can you cook dinner for a friend who gives you a lift to the airport? I’m making websites and doing a little tech stuff for the family members who are so graciously hosting, feeding, and (despite my protests) clothing me here, and they know I’ll do the same to them if they come by my place.
Can you make it instead of buying it? My cousins and I went to visit an outlying barangay of Abra, a city in the northern province of Ilocos. Their cash flow is almost nonexistent; this is a place where ~$100 a month is a princely sum that can support an entire extended family. But they have fruit trees, a clean creek, some wandering goats and chickens, own their own land and homes, hand down clothes to younger kids – they don’t really need to buy much, because they can make or find most of whatever they need. I hope that a certain little project will someday render their (incredibly expensive in proportion to the total amount of money they have) expenditures for schoolbooks obsolete as well.
This may require a more collaborative mindset from that usually cultivated in the US. Money provides a convenient buffer between us and the holders of whatever goods or services we might want – no need to get to know them, figure out what you can do for them and vice versa – just hand over a wad of the green stuff and out pops a product. No need to ask permission or to share; it’s private property, yours, and yours alone. Liberating? Kind of. I think it’s actually restrictive. If “I can buy that!” is your only hammer, you’re blind to everything except nails.
If you’ve got money, you might as well do something sensible with it. If you’re reading this and you haven’t gotten a savings account and an investment account, do it now. I don’t care if you’re only 20, or 17, or 13, or 9, or claim you don’t have any money. Hey, Scott Adams (the Dilbert guy) says it’s a good idea. Even a couple of bucks a month will get you in the habit. Put a chunk of every input to your income in a high-interest savings account like ING or Emigrant (there are many options). Get an IRA (fancy name for a special type of investment account that gives you tax savings) by opening an account with Etrade or some other broker – the cheapest one you can find. The point is to make very few trades as infrequently as possible and for as little money as possible.
Then, once a year or so, buy stuff and hold it. By “stuff” I mean an index fund, which averages a lot of stocks automagically so you’ll get a pretty low-pass-sampled version of the market. Any index fund. Then don’t touch that money except to add to it every year or so, until you retire. This will make it possible for you to retire in the first place. (How did you think you were going to pay for that condo in Florida? Compound interest, baby.) If you love a company you think will be around and growing 50 years from now, buy stock, but that’s making stuff more complicated. That’s it, if you want – no need to read bazillions of complicated. If you don’t want to fuss with this “investing” stuff (I don’t), get your younger brother to do it in exchange for website help.
The point is to get to the point where you’ll feel secure that you’re not making decisions because of money issues any more. This is a different point for every person. If you can do this with no money, awesome. If you can only do it when you have 50 million in the bank, fine. But get out of being an indentured servant to cash as soon as you can. It should be your tool, not your master.
And think about what you’re going to do with this stuff in the future, since you can’t very well take it with you when you kick the bucket. Personally, I agree with my parents; I want my descendants, if I have any, to earn their own way through the world. Not that I’ll have much to give them, other than funds for college if they so choose. I hope to exit this earth at a nice ripe age with exactly $0 in net worth, having already spent it all on getting other people to take charge of their own educations.
And the occasional fruit smoothie, because you do have to live a little. Be a tightwad, but not a miserable one. It’s totally cool to splurge on the occasional gelato if you’ll really appreciate it and it makes you happy.
Note: I don’t actually know anything about money and/or investing, but it’s a good idea to think about it as young as possible so you won’t have to waste time later on getting it set up. Other people can give better advice, but you’ve got to spend an afternoon taking it, or nothing will happen.
Sunday, October 28th, 2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
It struck me that what I’m writing here is an excellent derivative of my life. That is to say, it doesn’t really describe what’s going on, it describes the changes in what going on. I first noticed this when I got concerned about the lack of technical content (and tech-related content, like – say, engineering education) on this baby, and then realized that this was because I already saw that as an innate part of my identity and thought “but of course I’m doing some technical stuff, and of course I’m still doing some engineering education stuff,” and assumed I didn’t have to put that in for folks to know I was doing it.
So that’s… kind of nice, actually. I do think of myself as an electrical engineer, albeit one in training. That’s new, and I didn’t expect it to happen for a very, very long time. I wish Chandra was around to explain this in terms of identity theory; it would make more sense that way.
On the other hand, I still haven’t come to think of myself as a language learner, or a member of the Chinese-Filipino culture, so I keep writing about that. I’m also not used to thinking of myself as a young woman, so… well, you can read about that now.
Longish hair is fascinating to have. It’s still quite short by most criteria, and I can’t quite sweep my bangs into a ponytail (I can barely gather enough for a stubby thing at my nape) but for someone used to a short black crop, it’s a little weird to have hair brushing your shoulders. It also takes longer to shampoo, which is why I’m going to cut it again once I grow it long enough to give me an idea what long hair is like to have (not sure how long that will be yet).
My hair also has red streaks in it – the one concession I was able to extricate from Operation: Make-Over-Mel. My hair has been trimmed “in a comely fashion,” and yes, it has highlights. This, I learned, involves getting your hair foil-wrapped in pasty grey froth for several hours while a dryer revolves around your skull, making the air smell like hydrogen peroxide and making you wish desperately that you were anaerobic.
Alas, said highlights are a subtle red*, not the “blazing neon” I asked for. This, too, was a compromise. I usually wouldn’t get highlights; they said I should try it. I groaned and said as long as I was in for one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences I’d give bright red streaks a shot. (This is a wink on my part; hypothetically, red is off-limits since we’re in mourning. However, if I have red hair, nobody will make me shave it off, as my mother has forbidden me to get another buzz cut.) They looked horrified and said highlights should be dark brown so they wouldn’t show.
“Why would I get highlights that don’t show?” I asked. “That’s like putting on makeup so you don’t look like you’re wearing makeup.” “Of course!” they said, as if that was the entire point. There is apparently some sort of parallel twilight zone of estrogen where these things make sense.
My eyebrows are also, ah… shapely. I’m not entirely sure why they’re shapely, but my aunt claims that ripping out portions of one’s eyebrows with thread makes your eyes look like a woman’s eyes ought to. As far as I can tell, ripping out portions of one’s eyebrows with thread gives one sore eyebrows. (“Where are they?” I whimpered afterwards, running my fingers across my now-much-smoother brow. “My eyebrows! Where did they go?”) They brought out the fashion magazines and pointed out that all the women in them had shapely eyebrows, therefore it must be normal. I am not entirely convinced.
I also possess twice the clothing I arrived with despite not having purchased any further clothing myself. Some of the new arrivals have lace. Some are dresses. I am washing my t-shirts and cargo pants repeatedly in an attempt to minimize the occasions on which I have to wear these Things With Lace.
Next I am supposed to have a manicure and pedicure. This is apparently to clean my nails. I am not sure what that means, as I’ve told them that I trimmed my nails yesterday and they’re quite clean and I can go at them with a brush if they needed to be even cleaner. They say it’s a different kind of cleaning, but don’t worry, they wouldn’t make me put on nail polish. Thank you for the nail polish decree, I said, but what the heck was there to clean from my nails if I already cut them?
That will also be interesting to see. I am putting up with this because I’m filing them under the category of “once in my lifetime” experiences, emphasis on the “once.”
In happier news, the 60-something-year-old ladies at the Tai Chi group can totally kick my butt. They’ve been (ever so patiently, bless them) reteaching me how to walk. It takes about two weeks to learn how to walk, they say. After a few hours of just putting one foot slowly in front of the other, I was drenched in sweat – more soaked than I would have been after running a few kilometers or lifting weights in the gym.
As I struggle to balance in a straight line with aching legs, they wave swords and fans around with impossible grace as they stand on one foot. Then again, some of them have probably been doing this for longer than I’ve been alive. Huzzah for pursuits that take a lifetime to master – they’re what make a lifetime worth having.
Saturday, October 27th, 2007 | Uncategorized | 5 Comments »
Orange ribbons lined the streets outside the house today. Why? Erap Estrada is coming home. Mind you, I don’t think this is a great idea. In fact, I think it’s patently unfair.
The former president of the Philippines, who was convicted of inane amounts of plunder after being forcibly removed from office by the populace, happens to live on the same street in the same subdivision as my grandmother. My aunt and I drove by the other night and saw his house brightly lit, with a contingent of white-baronged security men standing outside.
The current president (Arroyo) pardoned him today because of his age (70), his promise not to run for public office again (big whoop, he was President) and the “hardships he’s endured” (read: confinement in a luxurious mansion under house arrest for 6 years). The announcement went out over the radio as we were driving down the orange-ribboned street (Estrada’s favorite color, to celebrate his homecoming). “Great,” my aunt groaned. “And then there’s going to be a motorcade coming through here, and the whole Philippines will be stuck in traffic.”
My cousin was somewhat more vehemently vocal about the level of political corruption here, which makes American politicians seem like choir boys. I won’t recount the stories of first-hand experiences at government budget meetings, state dinners, etc. I’ve heard from various people here, but every single person – from a variety of backgrounds, stations, industries, jobs, races, ages, genders, everything – I’ve spoken to about volunteering in the Philippines has immediately said “don’t go through the government! You have to go through private channels!”
There’s a lot of history around here, and it’s not all good. If I step outside our subdivision, I can have dinner at the same club where Cory Aquino took oath as President after People Power ousted Marcos’ martial dictatorship. Driving to the office yesterday, we passed the mall where a bomb exploded a few days back while I was in Cagayan (in another mall, actually. “Don’t go 2 d mall – bomb just went off in makati,” texted my aunt. A day later, I read the news reports on the carnage.) I can see the prison where my great-grandfather was held and executed during WWII, or the monument including two of my grand-uncles who were kidnapped and deported during the Marcos regime… woo, legacy.
I hear stories about slum schools built in landfills (and one where the mountain of trash collapsed, burying the school and killing the children in it), see barefoot kids in elementary school selling flowers on the streets (a cousin had to interview several for a class, and the ones she found told her that they sold flowers after school, had to sell them all before they were allowed to return home to surrender the money to their parents, and that their earnings were used largely for gambling), get followed for several blocks by women with their heads wrapped in t-shirts holding grubby infants and moaning “baby hungry, baby hungry,” even after I told them I didn’t have any money (I don’t – and these people are often part of large begging syndicates, too). One of the most common prescriptions at the charity clinic I visited was multivitamins – a lot of folks get real sick here just because they can’t eat right.
The first time I came to the Philippines, I asked permission to get out of the car and give my hamburger to the other kids my age who were rapping at the car windows. It was explained to me that this would be both dangerous and prone to start a street fight among the kids for my leftovers; we drove on. Past people sleeping under highways. Rivers the color of thick chocolate, dotted with wrappers. Walls that smell of stale urine. I know exactly why they keep me inside the gates and inside the car, and I can’t stand being inside when that stuff is out there. I know the above descriptions sound melodramatic, but I’m trying to say them as matter-of-factly as possible. That’s life here. For some people.
I’m mad. No, not mad. But burning inside somewhere. It happens every time I come to the Philippines, and crops up occasionally between visits. How am I supposed to change a world that’s been deemed too dangerous for me to explore? How do you even begin to find out what’s going on? How do you jump from a school whose first Honor Code clause is “Do Something” to a country where the most common response to my questions is “oh, you/we can’t do anything, that’s just how it is”?
Aha. A challenge.
In other news, I learned about polyphase filters today. They’re really a fancy name for saying “If you’re convolving stuff and then downsampling, just downsample first before you convolve, so you’ll have less to multiply.” It was one of those “eh wait, there’s a name for that?” moments – less awe-inspiring than the one that went “wait… you call that calculus?” some years ago, but cool nonetheless. Laziness is fun (and computationally efficient). I need to learn more about how Python handles memory, though – I can see what’s happening in assembly and C (woo malloc and free), but as far as I’m concerned, things get stored in VAGUE-LAND! in Python. (“I work at the STORE! I do THINGS!”)
The stuff I’ve studied and done as an electrical engineer seems so far away from what people here need, though. And that thing is still seeping frustration inside me. And I can’t get out to do things here. And…
But, y’know, do what you can, learn what you can, and keep your eyes open, right?
Friday, October 26th, 2007 | Uncategorized | 5 Comments »
世界正在傾訴，你聽見了嗎?
OH MAN. (With the help of a great many cobbled-together technological aids), I’m understanding Chinese! Yes, I’m getting way too excited about this, but look, I get hyperactive about everything, okay?
世界 = (shi jie – both 4th tones) means “world.” The characters, individually, mean something like “era” and “divided.” I had to look this one up. I’m still not sure where they got that from. (I’d like to think the world is more than a bunch of divided eras.)
正在 = (zheng zai – both 4th tones) means “is in the middle of doing.” The characters, individually, mean something like “correct/righteous” “at/exist,” so it’s talking about an ongoing process that’s positive. I had to look the two up together – I hadn’t seen them in a pair before.
傾訴 = (qing su – 1st then 4th tone) is something related to being interested, along with the word for “announce.” Together they (apparently) mean “to pour out one’s heart.” I had to look this one up and I’m still not entirely clear on the exact usage, but eh.
你 = (ni, 3rd tone) “You.” Yeah, pretty simple.
聽見 = (ting jian, 1st then 4th tone) means “listen.” The first character is an ear and a bunch of other stuff. The second character is the symbol for “eye” over one of the variants for the symbol for “person.”
了嗎 = (le ma – no tones) make it a colloquial question.
So… shi jie zheng zai qing su ni ting jian le ma = World is currently pouring out its heart (and this is an awesome thing to do). You listening, dude?
And then we check it against the actual Global Voices slogan, and sure enough…
The world is talking. Are you listening?
Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
I love the gurgling ascending scale a large bottle of water being poured into a water bottle makes. If I needed a sound effect for a machine powering on, I’d love to use that. (Wonder if I can find a good microphone and make it my laptop startup sound.)
I’ve discovered something else I like here: massages. They are unbelievably cheap by American standards – 200 pesos per hour, or roughly $4. My aunt and cousins were astonished to hear that massages cost at least 10 times that amount in the US. Minimum wage here is about $8 a day, though.
Now an explanation of what the post title means. This morning, I read (or rather, struggled through with massive amounts of assistance from my teacher) my first classical Chinese poem. I need to figure out how to type tones – probably just accent marks over the right vowels. (I refuse to do things like “ta1 shi4 wo3 ma1 ma1″ where the number at the end refers to the number of the tone; it’s just ugly to read.)
Poem:
Chuang qian ming yueguang,
yi shi dishang shuang.
Ju tou wang ming yue,
di tou si guxiang.
A rough word by word rendition:
Bed front clear-bright moon shine,
Doubt is on-the-ground frozen-water,
Raise head look-hopefully clear-bright moon,
Lower head reminisce home-town.
My translation:
Moonshine is beaming down before me on my bed,
I half-believe I see a frosted blanket on the grass.
Clear moonbeams fill my gaze when I uplift my head,
Bowing, I think about my homeland in the past.
Ok, it’s a crude first attempt, and I have so much respect for translators right now. But it’s fun to translate, and it does sound a lot better in the original Chinese. Buoyed by this, I’m starting to translate some of my favorite English poems in the other direction. Mind you, it’s terrible Chinese I’m producing, I’m actually supposed to be writing characters repeatedly for “homework” instead, and my teacher will probably laugh uproariously when she sees it, but at least I’ll have fun and find out what I’m doing wrong.
Rudyard Kipling is probably not a good task for beginners (“If” is what I’m using for my first attempt) but if I don’t try, I’ll never know how I’ll do. Also, I like the poem and there aren’t many tricky double-meanings to render into an unfamiliar language. It is much easier for me to translate Chinese into English, but I lack appropriate reading material to tackle. (I can’t actually read that many words. I can use the dictionary, but looking up Chinese characters is aggravating; you do lookup by radical, then strokes, then…)
I’m really tempted to do the Ballad of Mulan, or the Tao Te Ching (the only two works in Chinese I know of that I really want to read), but both have an archaic vocabulary that will be hard to find definitions for and won’t do me much good to learn, plus their study has stymied native Chinese scholars for ages. Sort of like suggesting to a new English speaker that they ought to start in on their Shakespeare analysis. I could find or create readings with zhongwen.com but a speech by Bill Clinton isn’t really on my “woo I want to read this NOW!” list.
Maybe I can tackle some Wikipedia articles, or try reading Global Voices. I’ll be slow, inaccurate, and in some amount of pain at the start no matter what I do, but I might as well attempt to be helpful and/or read “real stuff” instead of baby books that serve no purpose other than acting as grammar exercises.
Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Why am I blogging? It’s almost ludicrous; I’m sneaking online in the middle of the night, trying desperately to catch up on email and work, have thousands of other productive things I could be doing, and… the first thing I nearly always do is post here. (For the record, every blog entry since October represents nearly every time I’ve managed to get online. So you can see why I’ve got a growing backlog.)
I write most of my posts offline (as I write most of my emails now, and read most of my webpages). This one is an exception. It means it typically takes about 30 seconds to actually post the thing live – so yeah, I stay productive online. For the most part, it’s spent in a furious attempt to keep up with wikis and docs and remote server configs and occasional forays onto IRC to stem the flood of “shit, I have to catch up” panic by talking to Bostonians up far too late.
Efficiency aside, I blog because it’s one of the things keeping me sane. I need to talk, to spout, to hash out things that may occasionally be more in keeping with Western cultural norms than Eastern ones, to use complex English words and American slang, and (most importantly) to yammer about technology and geekiness and crazy ideas about education with… anyone. People. Even if I’m tossing these words out into a black hole most of the time, I get to say them. Sometimes I even hear something back.
I need to speak and not have to explain for the umpteenth time why open source is not ridiculous, to not have to bang my head repeatedly against the “but this is the proper way to teach children because otherwise the poor misguided souls won’t do things correctly” wall. To speak into a space where I’ve made myself belong somewhat, instead of into one where I’m expected to belong but don’t quite. To feel entirely and completely, even for a brief moment, like myself again, and not an awkward variant of the young lady I’ll probably never properly become.
I guess that’s it, really. Despite this being a post where I’m trying somewhat to explain myself, the internet – and my blog – is a place where I don’t have to ask permission or explain myself. I blog so that the person I want to be gets a chance to de-rust her vocal cords once in a while and speak (however incoherently) so that I don’t lose her in the rush of things which are often beyond my control.
Despite the ranting, I’m really having a great time in the Philippines – it’s just that this part of me needs feeding too, and I don’t know a better way to get it.
Sunday, October 21st, 2007 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
Friday: Philippine Airlines has in-flight snacks that exemplify the national culinary obsession with meat; during the flight, I snacked on chicken-flavored peanuts and beef-flavored crackers. (There is an ad for “meat seasoning,” which it describes via sultry voiceover as “a woman’s secret.” This isn’t seasoning for meat; it’s seasoning for vegetables to make them taste like meat so that the men in your life will… love you more, says the TV.)
I was flying to Cagayan de Oro with Tito Pax, who once threw my dad into a lake when they were college kids at UP Diliman. Tito Tophie (who helped Pax dump my dad in the lake) was going to meet us at an event called “Go Negosyo” (Go be an entrepreneur) for which Pax was speaking. Pax and Tophie aren’t actually my biological uncles; we call the friends of our parents and the parents of our friends as if they were our aunts and uncles here. Also, they claim my father used to be a nerd. I do not believe them.
Several hours later, after the “Go Negosyo” theme song was running circles around my glazed eyes (short attention span + long lectures in a foreign language = MEL IS DISTRACTED) we had some fantastically spicy Filipino food (and in my case, three bottles of water) for dinner. Cagayan has more {space, trees, breathable air} than Manila, and the persistent hacking cough I’ve had for nearly 3 weeks slowed dramatically as soon as I arrived. We met up with Tito Tophie’s family, ate fantastically spicy Filipino food, and left for school. Er, home.
They’re actually the same thing. Tito Tophie’s family runs two Montessouri schools in Mindanao, and their house is a small loft above the mountainside classrooms with a gorgeous view of the bay. At night you can see the tiny pinpricks of fishing ships at sea, and hear the “EH!-gou, EH!-gou” calls of the large geckos that swarm the trees and buildings.
Saturday: Foundation Day! This is an annual festival where the entire 200-odd group of K-12ers at the school put on a musical extravaganza. This being a predominantly Catholic school, the (very, very long) play progressed from the Garden of Eden all the way through Noah’s Ark, then split into presentations of cultures of countries around the world that came from Noah’s descendants.
The show was an unintentionally hilarious one, as it turns out. The preschool Adam and Eve couldn’t get the Apple of Good and Evil off the tree and had to shrug and eat the Invisible Apple of Good and Evil instead before grabbing the Large Cardboad Fig Leaves of Nakedness Covering. Noah played baseball with his Gnarled Staff of Aged Infirmity offstage right when he thought nobody was watching. Toddlers in paired Winnie the Pooh costumes jumped up and down and waved their hands, except for a lone penguin who stared forlornly into the footlights, slightly stunned at the multiple copies of Eeyore and Tigger (isn’t the wonderful thing about them supposed to be that there’s only one?) costumes leaping on the grass beside him.
Music was… nontraditional, to say the least. I recognized the Gladiator movie theme, as well as the Hobbits theme from Lord of the Rings. The Russians got their segment from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, the Egyptians strutted to “Walk Like An Egyptian,” and Germany… well, Germany’s presentation featured small, decidedly non-Aryan children in costume waving cardboard cutouts of sausage, cheese, and beer. Then the music started, and suddenly the SS men and the pretzel ladies were doing… the chicken dance.
I almost knocked over the speakers laughing.
Sunday: My knees hurt. Whitewater rafting was involved. Apparently, my upper torso is sufficiently sun-browned to warrant only a coating of mild sunblock, but my pasty-white “I’ve been in jeans inside an office all summer!” legs… are not. They’ve metamorphed from pasty-white right to an angry stinging pink which I’m continually slathering lotion on top of. So that’s what sunburn feels like. Ah, new experiences.
Monday: Visiting Tito Tophie’s high school, which is built on a farm (the students run the farm as part of their studies). The school’s a year or two younger that Olin (depending on whether you count Partner Year). My blog entries get exponentially shorter as I attempt to hit the minimum parental description demands before passing out in preparation for a 5am wake-up call.
Good night.
Sunday, October 21st, 2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
It’s been a lovely and productive day at last. My grandmother went off to volunteer at church for most of the day, so in the last 36 hours I’ve popped off two project spec drafts and the majority of a Trac install (with lots of help – there are a good number of dependencies and the remote server I was working on is configured a little differently than usual), given a presentation, and coughed less phlegm down the sink than usual, which felt good (or at least less bad).
I also finally got to start catching up on OLPC stuff, which is kind of like trying to plunge from a standstill into the midst of a herd of stampeding wildebeest. So that’s going to take a while. But it’s a start.
Also: acquired an inordinate amount of hopia, a porcelain bowl, and two behemoth tupperware containers at the mooncake festival last night. Luck was with me; I won 3 of the 4 second-place prizes offered in all the games that evening (only my aunt had a luckier streak – she rolled a string of 2’s and got to take home a mooncake larger than her head).
On the other hand, now I’m stuck with large amounts of Lucky Tupperware and a Lucky Porcelain Bowl that I’ve been told firmly and repeatedly not to give away because – well, they’re lucky. I’m supposed to bring them to China, then back to the Philippines, then to the US and back to Boston so I can take the luck with me – don’t I want more of what I experienced at the game? “It depends,” I told them. “Is the luck for attracting good fortune in general, or just free serving dishes?”
Finally, I changed the company website of my aunt and uncle from this to this. I hadn’t planned on doing so, but after seeing the old site I couldn’t take it any more and asked for ftp access and permission to do them a favor.
Old site: huge flash animation that took up most of the screen real-estate in garish blue-grey, stiltedly misspelled English, One Gigantic Image File. (Yes, the text is an image. The entire webpage was one gigantic non-searchable jpeg.) Total: 4.7+ MB.
New site: standards-compliant strict xhtml and css, easily extensible page templates, Total: 28kb, which is… nearly a 175x reduction in size. Sure, I’m not the best at writing ad copy, and the color scheme needs to change, and I need to get some product pictures so the site actually features what they sell, but still.
It’s still a few hours before dinner – there’s plenty of time yet to get more stuff done. Whee!
Thursday, October 11th, 2007 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
