… with crayons.

Recently, some discussion has been raised as to why blogs “aren’t gonna work”, where for example the Chicago Tribune speaks about it as if it’s a dying concept — at least as a business model. I wondered myself about the reasons why I went through the trouble, so to say, of maintaining a blog, and I think these people are missing the point.

While some blogs are out there for a higher purpose, most blogs are there simply to fill that need to express oneself, to tell things one wouldn’t normally be able to tell without things becoming way too serious and time consuming. So instead, I write what I feel like writing, and you ignore or you read, at your leisure, and I won’t hate you for ignoring anything or everything I write. That I think is why there are blogs. To fill that desire to express more elaborate thoughts without the traditional restrictions of environment or theme or setting or community.

So… fuck you very much, Chicago Tribune, but I think noone gives a shit what you nor Gallup says. I’m not blogging because I think I have something important to say, I’m blogging because it is a way for me to show my thoughts to the people who know me, and in turn, it is a way for me to see what their thoughts are. Whether blogs are valid business models or not is for you money-obsessed whores to find out.

You’re hard pressed to not have noticed by now that I study another language and have been doing so for a little over half a year at this point. One of the things that I thought right from the beginning was that I really, really want to document, somehow, the changes that take place inside my head as I go from comprehending nothing to comprehending everything (well, you know what I mean). Right now, it’s safe to say that I won’t understand what is being said unless it’s a fairly standard phrase — in other words, I could probably survive using only Japanese, but it’d be a fairly pathetic sight.
But some things have changed since I started. Some things that I expected to change did change. One of these things is what this entry is about — sentence-separation. The most significant border in learning any language out there is the fact that, initially, when you hear the language being spoken, you can’t even look words up! This is for two reasons:

1. Spelling and pronunciation. Hearing a word does not automatically mean you know how to spell that word. So you might hear “Can-O-Jo.” but that doesn’t really help you much in terms of spelling, unless, of course, you are familiar with pronunciation rules. Fortunately in this case, Japanese and Swedish pronunciation is nearly identical. Which means, with very few exceptions, all words, if spelled as I think they sound, are correct.
2. Distinguishing words from within a sentence. More importantly, however, is the ability to distinguish the separate words in a sentence. I’m not as lucky in this department, but I’m luckier than native English speakers, I believe.

Turning a sentence into a series of words, even if one doesn’t understand a single one of those words is purely grammatical but also has to do with hearing comprehension. To illustrate my point, I’m going to write a sample sentence for you in two separate ways. This is the first way:

- “Kanojowagakuseijanakutesenseida.”

Pretty hard to get anything out of that, I’d say, even though it’s a fairly small sentence. In natural speech, languages and dialects of languages seldom put emphasis on each separate word. While there may be emphasis on parts of words, sometimes the emphasis appears in the middle of a word, or at the end of a word, and so on. Learning how a language in general emphasizes words is one of the most important aspects of learning to comprehend that language when it is being spoken.

For example, my name is Kalle. This is pronounced in a way that native English speakers cannot* pull off. I had an American girlfriend for over a year, and by the end of that relationship, she still couldn’t say my name. The reason? Emphasis differs between Swedish and English. That’s pretty much it.
(* When I say “cannot” I of course refer to the general population, especially the caucasian, as many Mexicans or other mixed-culture/nationality Americans would have little difficulty saying it.)

Here is a separate sentence from the one above, this one in English. Exaggerated emphasis has been put in using “·” characters; word-separation (normally expressed using space) is for clarification purposes expressed using hyphens here:

- “·Hi-·my-·na·me-is-·Kalle.-·I-·often-·go-·fishing-·with-·my-·friends.”

To further clarify what I mean, here is the sentence broken down into blocks rather than the convential word separation:

- “Hi-my-nay-miss-kalleh-I-often-go-fishing-with-my-friends.”

While a part of the sentence is no longer word-separated, most of it, in fact, is. The words that were “split” here are name and is and that’s pretty much it. Let’s try this same sentence in Swedish:

- “·Hej-·mitt-·nam·n-är-·Kal·le.-Ja·g-går-·of·ta-·ut-·och-·fis·kar-·med-·mi·na-·vän·ner.”

And doing the same thing here:

- “Hej-mitt-nam-när-kal-le-ja-går-of-ta-ut-och-fis-kar-med-mi-na-vän-ner.”

A lot more mangling is taking place in this sentence. An English-speaking person who doesn’t know neither Swedish grammar nor vocabulary would hear something like this:

- “Hay-mit-nam-nayr-kal-leh-yaa-gore-off-tah-yute-ock-fizz-karr-maid-me-nah-wen-nar.”

Out of this sentence, the words mitt, namn, kalle, jag, ofta, fiskar, mina, and vänner have all been “mangled”. This is 8 words out of 14, i.e. over 50% of the entire sentence. Every second word is mangled, and thus, there’s a one in two chance that when you go to look that “fizz” word up, you’ll realize that there is no such word in any Swedish dictionary. (As a sidenote, I purposefully pronounced “Kalle” differently in the English version and the Swedish version, not to make my point stronger, but because my name is pronounced differently (due to this very issue) when spoken in English and Swedish.)

Let’s try this on the Japanese sentence now:

- “Kanojowa·gakuseijana·kute·sen·sei·da.”

Before we even go further, you should know a funny little detail about written Japanese. There is no word separation. Period. While we use a tiny gap to clarify “new gap word gap new gap word gap new gap word”, Japanese, written Japanese, handles this completely differently. While this may seem irrelevant to a hearing comprehension study, it most definitely isn’t. This is exactly where the emphasis point is made, because only one single word above was emphasized “as is”, and that was “da” - the last one. The other words were all mangled. This is what the above sentence looks like, in written Japanese:

In written Japanese, words are emphasized via the use of Chinese characters (kanji), and separated using Japanese hiragana characters. This lets the reader separate the words from each other without the use of spaces. There is a very natural explanation to this that I won’t go into here, but this, regardless, flows into and affects spoken Japanese as well.

I made it a point from the very beginning to get as much hearing material as I possibly could, to get accustomed to the sound of the language. Even before I knew a single word, I watched lots and lots of Japanese movies with subtitles, and initially, what I heard was just a stream of sounds. I tried to look words up and every time I actually managed to find one, I was grinning like a fool, because more often than not, I’d be attempting to look two words up, or half-a-word up or, worse, I’d be trying to look a word up that was “mutated” (something that happens more often than not in Japanese; and yes, I know that “mutated” is not the official grammatical term(s) for it) with no clue how to convert it back into its dictionary form.

Over time, however, it’s become easier and easier for me to distinguish words from within a sentence spoken at natural speed, to “demutate” mutated words into their dictionary form, and to, thus, look them up and figure out what they actually mean. I believe this is the greatest roadblock in learning a language, and I believe that I’ve managed to more or less overcome that roadblock. No amount of grammatical rules or complex grammar or horrifying requirements to learn thousands of separate characters in order to understand written Japanese are going to stop me now.

But, presuming you don’t know Japanese already, let’s wrap this up so you can find out what that sentence actually means. Explaining how the word separation takes place (inside my head) is something I honestly haven’t even figured out yet, but I do know it’s got less to do with word emphasis than in any other language I know. Instead it has to do with detecting particles, detecting “mutations” and detecting (common) words within a sentence. A normal, romanized (alphabetized) version of the sentence would look like this:

- “Kanojo wa gakusei janakute, sensei da.”

• “Kanojo” means “she.”
• “Gakusei” means “student.”
• “Janakute” sort of means “isn’t” (it means more than “isn’t” in this case, but what the hell)
• “Sensei” means “teacher.”
• “Da” means “is.”

Which turns it into “She [wa] student isn’t, teacher is.”

She isn’t a student, she’s a teacher.

A relatively unknown feature in Firefox (from what it seems) is the keyword feature, which I find immensely useful. The keyword feature basically lets you map a particular URL to a particular keyword. For example, the keyword go might point to the URL http://www.google.com/.

This lets us go to sites without having to type in the entire URL, or, even worse, having to use that cursed thing called a mouse.

Creating a keyword is simply a matter of bookmarking a page, editing the bookmark properties and type in a word into the Keyword entry.

Keywords also support arguments. For instance, you can make go trips to the bahamas go directly to a google search for “trips to the bahamas”. Or imdb kate beckinsale lead to a search on the IMDB for “kate beckinsale”. We’re going to set the go keyword up here. Since I’ve had to explain how to do it to a number of people, I figured I might as well blog about it and point them at the entry.

1. Google.

Skip over to http://www.google.com/

2. Search for “lalala”.

Or replace “lalala” with some easy to spot single word without odd characters in it.

If you look at the URL in the image above, you see that it’s a construct of arguments that Google uses to “remember” what you’re looking for. It doesn’t take a master’s degree to spot…

… the “q=lalala” part. Whatever we set q to in the above q=VALUE expression is what Google will return search results for to us. What we do here is replace lalala with %s. %s (percentage-sign s) is a special feature in keywords in Firefox, which means “the string arguments”.

Hitting enter, you will get some irrelevant search results for “%s”. Now you’ll want to bookmark the page you get which includes “q=%s”.

Give it some appropriate name, e.g. “google quick search” and then Add it. Next, you want to change its properties a little, so go into Bookmarks → Manage Bookmarks, then scroll down to the bottom, right click the new “google quick search” bookmark and edit its properties.

The Keyword field is blank by default. You’ll want to add “go” (or some appropriate, short word) like I have done above. After this, you’re done.

Typing “go testing google search” into the location bar should render the following:

I just got the grades from my education that I did back in 2003-04. The reason I got them NOW was simply because I had some loose ends that I didn’t give a damn about until now, when I sort of needed those grades.

I didn’t quite realize that I aced almost every single subject except

1. System design (which I still passed but didn’t ace, because I was in the US the first HALF of that course).
2. Business economics (which I more or less didn’t attend, thinking it useless to me — funny that I now run a (one man) company).
3. Business economics B (same deal, really, but unfortunately there were two separate grades for this baby).

And that’s it. 3 classes I didn’t get a top grade in. This’ll be helpful, I’m sure of it.

[My own translation of a Swedish news article which can be found here]
TOKYO.   On Monday, the office of the public prosecution in Tokyo brought in an indictment against Takafumi Horie, founder of the infamous business empire Livedoor. Meanwhile the Livedoor stock tumbled to an all time low of 40 öre [~6 US cents].

Horie and three other ex directors of Livedoor stand accused of  breaking the corporation law. They have been in custody since January 23rd and were arrested again on the Monday, suspected of crime against the bookkeeping law as well.
According to Japanese media, all involved save Horie himself have admitted that they’ve been spreading false information in order to push Livedoor up on the stock market. Furthermore, it is said that they have ordered employees to cheat in the company’s bookkeeping.
Takafumi Horie, who during the last couple of years has been commended for his business methods and for daring to challenge the establishment, has denied all charges.

- We have strong evidence, the assistant attourney Tetsuo Ito said at a press conference in Tokyo on the Monday.

Ito was the man who initiated it all when he, the 16th of January, ordered the police raids against Livedoor’s main office and the directors’ homes.

The Tokyo stock market responded to the public attourney’s actions by dropping the Livedoor stocks to a new low. Compared to the all-high from the end of last year, Livedoor has dropped by over 90 percent. During the Monday the stock fell to 61 yen, which is the equivalent of approximately 4 Swedish crowns [~53 cents].

The Tokyo stock market has placed Livedoor and its daughter company Livedoor Marketing on the so called observation list to investigate a potential removal from the stock market.

According to a spokesman for the stock market, Livedoor has as yet not responded to the series of questions the stock market sent at the end of January when the affairs were unveiled. Livedoor’s new management has requested respite due to the fact much of the bookkeeping has been apprehended by the police.

Around the same time as the indictment was brought in, further information from the police investigation was revealed. Among other things, Takafumi Horie is said to have, in an email, ordered an employee to tailor the bookkeeping and make it appear as if Livedoor was making a profit when it was in fact losing millions.

According to the attorneys, Horie and the others accused were systematically purchasing smaller companies in secrecy. Afterward, when Livedoor through a dummy purchase controlled the stock majority, they made a public offer. Thanks to the enormous attention, both Livedoor’s stock rates and those of the company being purchased soared.

In the shadow of the investigation, an intensive debate is being held regarding the mass media’s role in the “Livedoor Shock” affair, which it is now referred to in Japan. Many debators say that the media carry a part of the responsibility for the thousands of Japanese stock holders who’ve lost large sums of money.

By neglecting to investigate the business methods, media created an image of Horie as an economic savior. The debate reminds of that held in Sweden after the so called New Economy crash landed.
[Translation by me. Original article by Jon Thunqvist.]

The author of this translation humbly begs forgiveness for any flaws, errors or inaccuracies present and corrections are definitely welcome.

With the announcement on the forums, the MV developer blog has now gone live. Very cool.

Carefully, I imagine, they lay her down on the path toward her eternal rest in the back seat of his worn-down Volvo. I imagine they had her eyes closed shut, but her mouth slightly agape, dried from saliva for some time. Her hands closed as in prayer on her chest as the car made its way through the paved streets of the idyllic place where she’d spent the last of her years.And somehow I imagine the vibrations and bumps of the ride toward the furnace jerked her fingers loose, and that her arm fell down the front of the seat and dangled there in response to the motions of the vehicle.

But the furnace people refused to accept her as she was. She needs a coffin, they said, and so her path toward eternal rest had to be put on hold for another while.

“Whether you’re searching the web, comparing prices, or just staying on top of your favorite topic, Internet Explorer 7 lets you view many different websites at one time — all within one organized window.”

Holy SHIT, man, can you believe that? That fucking rocks! But… wait a minute. Isn’t that what Firefox/Opera have been doing for the last… 3 or so years? Heh. To be honest, they should’ve just written “We can do tabbed browsing now, too, just like the other browsers out there.” and they would’ve at least gotten some respect out of being honest about it.