In China, it's Children's Day!
The New York Times to make you think about NOT beating your children, and American culture assimilating immigrants: Cultural Divide Over Parental Discipline.
I'm not really an orange person, but... if Zeldman has a cool graphic, why can't I?! Now, if I was really cool I would write a perl script using Image::Magik to automatically generate a random collection of blocks for the bottom of the links column.
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Remember being away from your family at college, sad and alone on your birthday? Remember checking your email and finding a dozen pleasant messages (including one from the Klingon Language Institute) wishing you a Happy Birthday? Well today the World Wide Birthday web is back! Update(06.05): Micah's Birthday!
Make a caesura with CSS.
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Tonight Julie, Shirley and I went out to Jinhuan Western food restaurant. Julie had the chicken steak with mushrooms, I had a chicken steak with pepper sauce and almonds, Shirley had ham and cheese wrapped in a pork chop. Of course, being a Chinese-run restaurant, the food was nothing we recognized. That'll teach us to go anywhere besides the Broadway for good ol' American food. Althought the cooked apple with strawberry jam was interesting.
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Dan joined the Young Pioneers, along with the rest of first grade. Wayne did not join last year when he was in the first grade, but arrangements are being made. Dan and Wayne are brothers. Dan and Wayne are Japanese. Hey, whatever burns your bridge.
The Young Pioneers oath was added to the Chinese Buzzwords section. In the process, I came up with a cool Microsoft Word macro called Char2pinyin to turn Chinese characters into their pinyin, in conjuction with the cedict.gb dictionary.
Class is suspended this afternoon because the entire school is watching the Chinese team World Cup soccer game. Sweet! My corduroy shorts came back from the tailor. They are a little short, but that's ok because I bought more of the same material for a pair of long pants.
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Here is the Daily Comics page. It's part of my morning bookmarks now. It works in Mozilla, durnit!
Our keyboard has gone funky, such that certain keys will not work in combination with Shift, which makes writing perl a pain in the insert-body-part-here. To top it off, it rained today. One of the few bright spots in my day was the world's flags given letter grades.
I guess it's out of the bag and onto his blog, Aaron is going back to school next year.
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Once again, Eric Costello of Glish.com provides the inspiration, and my font-switcher reaches its final form. The key factor is that the script document.writeln's a style declaration into the header. (I still get the blinking scroll bars on hover in IE5.0/win, though)
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Talk about a bald-faced cowardice and blind "patriotism", when danger rears its head even Jello Biafra's webmaster backs down. A big two thumbs-down.
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Today was the first class of review for my first graders. One more week of teaching them, and after that I will begin oral testing and Eileen will take over leading the class while they review for the final exam on Friday of next week.
Shirley and I picked up the thirteen(!) t-shirts from the shop on Nankai University - mine came out ok but I wish they had bolded my courier fonts. Still, they will be fun to wear. They are:
people over profit
cheer up emo kid
God is my DJ
Tonight for dinner we are cooking macaroni & cheese, broccoli, some jiucai buns we picked up at the outdoor market, with Julie's finger jello for dessert. Woo!
I learned something today: Language Poetry, or langpo. Will this help me to appreciate modern poetry? Or answer the question, "where now, poetry"?
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Can you believe the craziness going on in the World Cup? All of the Greats except Germany have been knocked out, South Korea and the US are still in the running. Alas, my most insane dream cannot come true because the USA and Spain are on the same side of the knockout round and would meet in the semi-finals, but it would be my second most insane dream for them to advance and play each other in the next-to-last round of the tournament.
Plane tickets have been booked: Shirley is leaving this(!) Friday the 21st of June, while I'm leaving the 12th of July. This will give me two weeks to run around and do final China things. I'm fantasizing about a trip to Urumqi, but time may not permit it: research shows it's a 80 hour train ride from Beijing! Research also says Beijing-Urumqi Y429 for a plane flight, but I'm skeptical. I'll do some calling around this week.
This week the kids are doing oral testing. No class, very easy schedule and Shirley is rushing so it has got me in a hard-working mood.
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Recent updates:
A horizontal page: the timeline of a life.
A CSS page: I join the Bug Ring.
We ate dinner with Shirley's relatives tonight at their house. They brought out a bunch of old photo albums. Great revolutionary pictures, strapping young ladies (they are four sisters) beaming like the red sun of Socialism. Even a poster-perfect revolutionary guard, with a band on her arm, a pin on her lapel, and a little book tucke dunder her arm. Also a stamp album with hundreds of Chinese stamps. Highlights were the opera stamps and the table-tennis stamps.
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Shirley let this morning. Her brothers will see her next at LAX. She said goodbye to the kids last night, lots of them cried and gave her little gifts to remember them by. She and I had business cards printed ($2 for 100) with our names, addresses and e-mail, which we handed out to our students. Hopefully they can contact us, I also offered to carry letters back to Shirley when I leave in July. I think that made some students feel better.
I did some more research into my trip, I'm thinking that I will take the train and try to leave before this weekend rather than after it. But probably the best idea I had was this: go see Louie at CITS. I don't know why I didn't think of it before. He is such a nice guy and he could answer my questions, book tickets, etc. For reference, Louie's office is in the Olympic Towers. I forgot the phone number.
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I stayed up late last night writing a bunch of e-mails that were long overdue. This morning I went to ancient Culture Street with Adam and we bought a bunch of souvenirs to bring back to people. I hope my friends like Tiananmen Square fridge magnets! We ate lunch at a dirty little roadside restaurant, then Adam left for the Broadway to watch the Spain-Korea soccer game. I was not in the mood to go home yet so I browsed the antique market which is just west of the south end of Culture Street. I ended up spending a little too much on eleven old records: three of them are jingju (Beijing opera), three are pingju (a milder, slower style of opera more popular in Shanghai), one is a marching music, one is sung by a little girl, and two more are patriotic songs about Chairman Mao ("Long Live Chairman Mao! Ten Thousand Years!" and the like).
I got home in time to watch the penalty kicks between Korea and Spain. Spain lost. Today is a sad day for me. Shirley e-mailed. It is a happy day again.
I spent a few hours tonight designing a simple weblog app. I got it to write to my directory structure, tomorrow fancy stuff goes in like error-checking and actually turning my daily entries into a front page so I don't have to edit the index.html file directly.
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I said somewhere that I would post people's comments on my webpage if they sent me an e-mail. The first person is my mom, go figure:
great to read your web page. Although you did lose me on all the computer talk. But I just skipped over that and read over your notes about school etc. Anyway, thank you, thank you for the news. Love it.
On an unrelated note, Chinese people drink their milk warm. And see css/tables/ for my take on a Table of Contents layout.
Hehe, people cannot spell Britney Spears.
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The Table of Contents does not render correctly in Opera 6 nor in IE/Mac, according to reports from css-discuss. It looks like too many display: inline declarations.
Google search for "Micah is":
Congregation Micah is a synagogue offering creative and diverse ways to celebrate Jewish life using as its foundation the rich beliefs and practices of modern Reform Judaism
Milwaukee Innercity Congregations Allied for Hope (MICAH) is a multiracial, interfaith organization committed to addressing justice issues that impact upon the community in which we live
[Bible reference]
Micah is a 9 year old boy with mixed spastic dystonic quadriplegia cerebral palsy.
Micah is cited in Jeremiah 26 as an anti-establishment prophet who, nonetheless, was respected by the king.
Micah is a senior mechanical engineering student from Baltimore, Maryland.
Craig and Nancy know a great dog when they see one! Micah is one of the best. (a Sterling dog)
Micah is often thought to be acting older than he is. (a linux programmer)
Micah is a varmint! (journalling Christian college student)
Micah is leading his own groups on the pristine Kona coast. (kayaking guide)
I should be wrapping up school today or tomorrow and heading off soon. I will be talking to Louie at CITS today.
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Two off-site links for today. One is Ryze, a site for business networking that is more like a big schmooze club for businesspeople in tech companies, mostly in the San Francisco area. Being myself a schmoozer, you can check me out. In fact, my photo is on the front page right now. I look more like I belong at the MOC. And a second nod to... now you made me forget. I'll post it later.
In the meantime, reacquaint yourself with the CRIS Elementary School webpage, updated to render correctly in Mozilla. Also, read a hastily scribbled down Tips for CRIS Teachers.
This page is getting way too long. It's time to build the "build" script.
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I finished the build script and got it running all nice. Next come the archives, which unfortunately means they that most of my posts are inaccesible at the moment. For now, I'm leaving the last ten visible.
I finished my first grade reports today, and also finished grading the tests for fifth grade with a little help from Eileen. I should be able to write comments, run Shirley's errands and turn everything in today. Friday I'll head to Beijing, Monday to Xi'an, and who knows where I'll head from there.
I watched the Brasil-Turkey game this evening. Boy, Turkey came out of right field hustling their little hineys off, even in their final game. I don't think anybody can begrudge them their success. I know that Brasil was the better team and that they deserved to win, but it was frustrating to watch the ladies in yellow get away with so much play-acting. I wouldn't have complained if they referee had handed out a few more yellow cards for that. The mystery man behind aaronland.net said it best:
And the world laughs together, as yet another Brazilian player takes a dive and plays the drama queen.
I know who I'll be rooting for come June 30.
Entries have been posted for the 2002 5k Design Contest. I recommend the following: last stickman standing, 5kOS [Version 5.1.2.0], the5k.org Mahjongg and wtw - fade into grey (nice artwork). The funnest are always the games, but I try to find ones with artistic merit and good design. The quick download times are always the best part of perusing the entries.
For a final treat, check out this gem from our local CSS guru Eric Costello: Blogger template. It may seem ordinary at first, but just sit and watch the page for a few seconds. You'll be entranced.
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I went out to Korean barbacue tonight with Julie, Kathy, Jessica (a friend of Kathy), and Eileen and her husband. It was pretty good, we had beef, lamb, fish, octopus, pork and vegetables. The meal was finished off with a plate of simple sushi and a serving of potato pancakes. I majorly overate.
I'm putting aside the Table of Contents for now, until I get access to a Mac. It works in Windows on Mozilla 1.1, IE5.0 and Opera 6. IE5 for Mac is the only browser giving me trouble. People raved about it when it came out, but it seems like every week it breaks another person's page.
How come gay people get all the good ones?
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I woke up today and I'm the only one left! July and Adam took off this morning from the Beijing Internationap Airport and should be somewhere over the Pacific by now. Now, to get cracking on those 5th grade grades...
Working on a CSS-based photo display page, I came across an issue with Opera. See my write up about Opera's Letter-Spacing Rendering Quirk.
I did it! I finished. Now I turn everything in to Lawrence, clean up the Resource Room and lounge the afternoon, pack my box and suitcase this evening, and I'll head up to Beijing tomorrow morning. As proof of my industriusness, I put my Class of '07 Description online.
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Note that the date on these entries is slightly off, as I am posting from China onto a server in Pasadena, California in the USA.
Bill Moyers on China? Bill Moyers did a presentation to the PBS executives at their annual meeting on a series he has funding for: "Becoming American: The Chinese Experience." Bill Moyers? That's right, and with only a few Asian-American producers. The author of this article is skeptical and mentions other documentaries Chinese-Americans. There have been quite a few since the "model minority" has given rise to talented TV producers. However, these documentaries tend to be tinged an activist bias, and/or a sappy "pity our hard lives" bias. It will be nice to watch a documentary about Chinese Asian America where the final say comes from a non-Asian (but still American) perspective.
An article titled "China-U.S. Housing Demonstration Project Starts in Beijing" (from Frank Yu's NewsPage) talks about a joint US-China project to build a couple "New York-style housing project" in certain areas of Beijing and Shanghai. My first thoughts went back to the early immigrant days of New York and the awful conditions of the tenement housing. My second reaction was to the words "housing project" which don't have a very good connotation either ("the projects" etc). However, after reading the article I came away with a very good feeling. This is a cool example of cooperation between the Chinese and Chinese-Americans.
I just hope it doesn't become another abandoned or half-empty housing development. An article a few weeks ago stated that housing in Beijing is the most expensive per square meter in China, which on one hand is hard to believe when you look at places like Shanghai or Guangdong. But at the same time it is an emerging reality. Places like the old Muslim neighborhood are being torn down to make way for modern apartments. It's a shame.
Today is a good day for articles. I found this interview with Tomas Casas Klett, a Spanish businessman who owns five companies in China. He is a very interesting fellow, and is not just spouting the usual line about China.
If you have a browser that supports alternate stylesheets, an alternate is available for this page. For example, in Mozilla you could follow the menu View > Use Style to select the new style "Blue". I'm afraid Internet Explorer is not capable of taking advantage of alternate stylesheets.
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Micah Sittig's Chinese improves and worsens with the phases of the moon. He enjoys non-fiction books, bicycling, foreign languages and ethnic restaurants. He is an inveterate globetrotter, but can always be found at micah@earthling.net