Learning Putonghua at Culture Yard
Last night I began my first Mandarin lessons.
From 19:00 to 21:00 every Monday and Wednesday night until the end of July I will attend class at Culture Yard, a just-opened educational center begun by my friend Ilya. Located just two minutes’ walk outside of Beixinqiao Exit C in the quintessentially Beijing Shique Hutong, there’s nowhere better to have a Beijing cultural experience. It’s the same place where I had a tasty New Years Eve dinner, though at the time it was half-finished, but full of friendly Russians and Israelis and Chinese. Ilya wants to turn Culture Yard into a central location for all kinds of cultural education: foreigners learning Chinese, Chinese learning English, screening Chinese films, hanging out and meeting others learning other things. It’s a great place and I hope it succeeds.
I am actually the only student in any classes, for now. My class last night was taught by one Chinese teacher named Brendan, or more fully, Fang Chao (Chao being his given name). In a couple of weeks more students will join but since I was interested in starting immediately they were kind enough to set up for me to begin this week.
It is clear that I have a lot to learn. For now it’s going over some very basic stuff (ni hao ma, etc. etc.) focusing especially on understanding the differences between the tones and how to pronounce them. Both Ilya and Brendan said my pronunciation (effort) is surprisingly good, but I have the problem of trying to enunciate too much, especially from my chest or diaphragm as if I was speaking my normal loud English. Brendan explained that Mandarin is spoken much more lightly and thus flows much more easily. When I was speaking I put a lot of force on each syllable to make sure I was getting the dips and the rises in each syllable down so my tones would become second nature. The biggest challenge will be to learn to speak from my mouth, not from the chest. Doing so is much easier when you get the hang of it.
In addition, I was very hungry the whole night. In the future I will need to leave work about thirty minutes early so I can make it there in time to down a bowl of noodles.
Nigerian House Rental Scam
Kelsey is looking for a new apartment. This was the response to one of the first that she came across on craigslist:
Hi,
I did get your response concerning the AD I posted on craigslist. The house is still available but presently I’m not around.. I did bid for a portion of petroleum land sometimes ago in West Africa and fortunately I won the bidding so I have to move quickly down to Africa to have my company set up because I will still have to rebid for it in the next 10 years. I came over here with my wife, we both bought the house when we got married. As soon as we settle down here I had a thought of selling the house so I have to look for an agent, after getting one, we got a deal but later my wife advised against that. She said we may not be able to win the bidding next time, in other to keep our head when we return that we have to keep the house. I reasoned with her and accepted her advise. So I contacted the agent back and requested for my keys and documents. Later we decided to have the house rent out, we would have give the same agent this job also but the truth of the matter is that the agent would want to handle it professionally and the occupant may not be able to reason along with him later. If you notice, you will discovered that the price we are offering is far below standard price, this is enough for you to know that we are not after the rental fee but the absolute care for the property. I know there is no way I can be sure that you are the right person to live in the house because we won’t be able to see physical before sending you the keys and the documents to occupy the space. But I just had a feeling that anyone who knows what it takes to put the kind of structure down should know that maintaining a building is mandatory, so if you belief you can take good care of the house and handle it like yours then I will be more than happy to let you rent the house.Please if you are ready now to occupy the house kindly provide the information below for record purpose.PLEASE TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF
Full Name__________________________________________________ Home Phone ( )________________________
Date of Birth_________________________________
Other Phone ( )___________________
Current Address_______________________________Apt#________ City__________________ State______ Zip________
Reasons for Leaving____________________________Rent $__________Phone ( )____________________________
Are you married____________________________
How many people will be living in the house____________________________
How many people will be living in the house____________________________
Do you have a pet____________________________
Do you have a car____________________________
Occupation____________________________
Move In Date____________________________
How soon can you pay the deposit_____________________TAKE NOTE: YOU CAN ONLY DRIVE BY AND SEE MY HOUSE FROM THE OUTSIDE AND IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN RENTING GET THE APPLICATION FORM FILLED OUT AND SEND IT BACK TO ME SO THAT I CAN SHIP MY KEYS TO YOU FOR YOU BE ABLE TO GO AND LOOK AT THE INSIDE OR MOVE IN IMMEDIATELY. I WOULD HAVE REALLY LOVE TO SHIP THE KEYS TO SOMEONE IN STATE BUT I DON’T HAVE ANYBODY THERE RIGHT NOW AND I DON’T WANT TO MAKE USE OF ANY THIRD PARTY THAT IS WHY AM HANDLING MY PROPERTY MYSELF..
House Address
XXXXXXX
Washington, DC 20003Monthly Fee ; $800
Security Deposit:$800
Pets Allowed:
Available :Available Now for move in.So pls get back to me today.
I await your reply ASAP.
Regard and God bless you!!!Owners Name:
XXXXXXXXCell phone:
+234-70233-XXXXX
For a nicer neighborhood in DC, this price – $800 / month for a 2br – looks almost too good to be true. Of course, it was. All the stuff screaming “NIGERIAN SCAM” in this email (absentee owner, no third parties, long and unnecessary explanation including the wealth of the owner, and the Nigerian phone number) should have stopped the conversation in its tracks. However, even the sliver of a chance at such a good deal at a place in DC required a bit of faith. This part killed it though:
KELSEY: The ad has been flagged for removal on craigslist and I can no longer access it and the photos. Do you know why this is?
NIGERIAN “OWNER:” Hello,
Thanks for the information you just pass to me,Have made the correction of it and it’s that you have interest in my house can you please fill up the application form so we can proceed on how to forwards the keys and document to the address you provided in the application form.
He did not acknowledge why the ad was flagged. Obvious scam. When I Googled “nigerian apartment rental scam” plenty of examples came up. I had no idea they were into this market too, I thought they just liked to go for email spam! Just look at all the crazy stuff in this blog, especially the comments, as a set of examples.
I just hope that when my job search comes I don’t get scammed by any job search Nigerian hoaxes!
The Hurt Locker
Last night I watched The Hurt Locker, which I acquired for 10 RMB at the Silk Street Market DVD store just above the subway entrance.
In short, I thought it was a powerful movie with excellent directing and camerawork. The strongest point, however, was that the acting did not get in the way of establishing the mood and the story, which is what sets it wholly apart from most other war movies. There is no hero, no villain, no deus ex machina, and you find yourself not expecting any of these. Watching The Hurt Locker therefore makes you feel as if you are just a fly-on-the-helmet of the soldiers who do one of the most dangerous and necessary jobs in war. I think it will be looked upon in the future as an accurate and artistically notable look into what it was like to actually be there, in Iraq, being paranoid of every pair of eyes and every window you could see as you ventured in your bomb-suit with your fingers crossed towards unexploded ordinance.
Spoilers follow.
Tweetable Leaps Over the Great Firewall of China
I just installed Tweetable as a WordPress plugin for this blog, mostly to display my tweets to the right in a more useful and attractive configuration than a simple HTML solution provides.
What I have received is a far greater boon: I can tweet from inside China without having to turn on a VPN.
Tweetable installs a module inside the WordPress dashboard that allows the admin to track searches (such as for my own blog) and view your Twitterstream. You can also post tweets from inside Tweetable. This is a nice feature of course, but such things are usually useless from inside China since the Golden Shield blocks everything that is directly populated from Twitter. I’m not a Web wizard but I guess the reason that my old HTML solution for displaying tweets worked is because my Web server is in the US, and the PHP to translate that to HTML all occurs within the US, so when the data comes over to China it’s just so much text – not recognizable as coming from Twitter.
I had to activate the plugin with a VPN on, since part of the process requires interacting with the Twitter applications service. Once all that was finished, I tweeted with Tweetable while the VPN was on, then turned it off.
I noticed however that when I reloaded the module’s page – while the VPN was off – it still displayed my Twitterstream. Again, this normally does not happen – especially in this case since the Tweets come straight from the Twitter service and aren’t just served as HTML. This heartened me. If this module will pull straight from Twitter, I thought, perhaps it will let me post to Twitter as well?
The VPN still deactivated, I tweeted once more to test and Tweetable recorded that I had posted. Before I popped the champagne however I refreshed my home page to see if the tweet had been recorded. Behold, it had! Rejoice!
Now I can tweet just by logging into my WordPress dashboard, without having to switch on and off a VPN. Let this spread to the four corners: if you are one of the oppressed, server space in the Free Lands and a WordPress installation are your allies!
Wired Conspiracy Theory Generator
This Wired article called “6 Elements Every Conspiracy Theory Needs,” has hilarity potential thanks to its included “Conspiracy Generator.” You can enter data into six fields and generate your own conspiracy theory! For example (not my own work):
Are you kidding me? The past was a total sham! Think about it! Everyone knows that you can’t prove the past. And have you noticed that history books has started to act very strangely? They obviously don’t want this story getting out. I mean, what would happen if people began asking why do history books keep being changed? Well, they may be able to fool the sheeple, but the members of Carpe Diemists aren’t swallowing their story. Look, don’t take it from me; my neighbor with amnesia is convinced as well. But we have to act fast, because who knows when the present could become the past. I just wanted you to be aware of this, in case I disappear.
First Post on WordPress at my own URL!
Hello World all over again.
I finally moved from Blogger over to my own domain, where I have WordPress installed. I want to do more with my blog, and I’ve gotten some practice with WordPress thanks to my work on BrainCanvas (now much more readable!) I also could not keep up with posting as much as I should since Blogger is blocked behind China’s Great Firewall.
No more posts to come from my Nomadlife blog; fitting since Google is ending support for Blogger FTP publishing in a couple of months. I tried to post one last time on the old blog but Blogger wouldn’t publish, neither when I tried to insert a redirect into the old blog’s header. I suppose that is a result of having to temporarily change my old blog to publishing to a Blogspot.com address in order for the WordPress import to work. I set it to publish to Nomadlife just for the one last post, but no dice.
Here’s to a successfully maintained, appropriately developed online personal brand.
Them Bandwidth Blues
The photos from the trip to Qufu, Confucius’ home city, finished uploading to Flickr hours before I left for my Indochina vacation so I didn’t have a chance to write anything about them. It was a nice time generally, worth visiting if you have a free weekend in China. The nicest thing by far was the Kong Family Cemetery, which we didn’t have nearly enough time to wander around in. Photos from that trip can be found here.
Once the photos from Bangkok, Laos, and Cambodia are loaded onto Flickr (all 1 GB of them) I will write about that wonderful trip with my girlfriend, the first time I got to see her in six months.
It takes a terribly long time to load anything to Flickr from within China, VPN or no, so my solution for getting these photos loaded is to send them to Kelsey where she can then download them and upload them to my Flickr account much faster and more reliably than if they were just uploaded by me. My webspace FTP is just as slow and unreliable from here as Flickr is and YouSendIt requires you to break the files into 100MB chunks, which would be too cumbersome in terms of each unreliable upload to send 10 different zip files. Ever to the rescue, Ubuntu offers a cloud storage service called Ubuntu One with up to 2 GB free storage. I was able to upload all the files to a shared folder in the space of a few hours, which can now be easily downloaded on the other side of the globe.
I have been watching Caprica as it comes out on the Internet. It’s a painful process however, as Hulu knows I am connecting through a VPN and therefore won’t let me watch it there. Thus it is up to very cheap and very slow substitutes like Megavideo to pick up the slack. Megavideo takes about five times as long to load as the length of the video itself. The pilot was good, then there were some less-than-stellar episodes but the most recent one, “There Is Another Sky,” was on par with the intrigue and quality of the parent show, Battlestar Galactica. I am looking forward to the development of Tamara Adama especially, as she brings an unforeseen wildcard into the plotline.
Finally: Tomorrow, March 1, marks one year since Kelsey and I began our relationship. For that, I blow a party noisemaker, alone in my room.
Re-Up
In about 18 hours I fly out for Bangkok, Thailand, where Kelsey and I will begin our two-week vacation in Laos and Cambodia.
We will spend the first couple of days in Bangkok, then head for Luang Prabang, Lao People’s Democratic Republic. Fun times in the jungle highlands abound. We will also spend about three days in Siem Reap digging the wat temples, and a day or so in Phnom Penh. I’ll return to six more months of Beijing on Feb 22.
Damnably excited. Especially after the stress-fest which has been dealing with getting the new website up at work. In the meantime, look out for a new BrainCanvas post come Monday.
My New Productivity Email and Task Set-Up
I decided a couple of months back that I should take time to look into productivity for tasks and email management. On account of I have much more free time now than I did when I was a student, I look into such matters at my whim. Anything manageable would be better than my old system, which may have ruined a good bit of my GPA: keeping it all in my head and avoiding using any piece of paper whenever possible. I probably went crazy from trying to shove tasks along with study into my head and not letting it out on paper or into my email.
This is not comprehensive but for my purposes it has already improved my productivity and my sanity ten-fold. Many thanks to the amazing Web site Lifehacker, the task management tool Remember the Milk, and the die-hard fans of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” philosophy. I have not read the book (and I am pretty sure I won’t jump on that bandwagon anytime soon), but the idea behind it is largely expressed through this setup.
What I do now with emails and tasks:
- Organized Gmail with a series of tags called the “Trusted Trio,” key among which are “FOLLOWUP” and “HOLD”
- Got a free account with Remember the Milk to handle task management from everything between simple to-do and project management at work
- Read email as it comes into my inbox. If it takes less than two minutes to reply to or follow up on a task contained therein, I do that immediately then tag the email with whatever accessory tags I choose (AIESEC, BrainCanvas, Travel, etc.) and then click “Archive” to move it out of my inbox.
- If the email takes more than two minutes to follow-up with, I move it to the “FOLLOWUP” folder (along with tagging it with any other pertinent tags) and out of my inbox. I keep it marked unread so I can see how many emails I need to follow-up on; I also add a RTM task to deal with it.
- If I expect a response to the email, or if it contains information that I will need to revisit soon like directions to a restaurant on Friday night or a plane ticket to Bangkok, I move it to the “HOLD” folder and out of my inbox.
- Regarding tasks, I have set up Remember the Milk according to this blog post. This takes the most practice and patience to deal with, but it’s powerful and enables me to accomplish a lot more than I used to. When I make a task (call my mother on her birthday this Tuesday), I type it out as specifically as possible and add as many pertinent tags and info as I can. This way, all the thinking about the task has been put into the to-do immediately and all I have to do to complete the task when the time comes is just do it, since all the info is right there for me to follow. It has also enabled me to do some great organization for multi-step work tasks. I even use it for “someday” wish lists, like “wardrobe overhaul” with the help of the tailors of Beijing.
- The thing to tie it all together: do a weekly review in which I check up on all outstanding tasks and emails. So far I’ve been bad at this, but it’s not a problem since I am not awash in tasks right now.
There was one much larger component of implementing this. After doing the general setup, I realized that I had not used Gmail to its full extent because I had wholly ignored labels, I used my gatech.edu email as my default email inbox until I came to China, and I had neglected the “Archive” button. My gatech.edu email was set up to copy all incoming email to my Gmail as well since January of 2008, but since I did not use Gmail as my mail client, every bit of email I’ve received since then, deleted or not in my gatech.edu inbox, was present in Gmail. One of the key sanity-saving features of this email setup is in keeping your inbox empty, so I had a task ahead of me. After deleting all of the auto-update emails from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, I had about 16,000 email threads stretching from December 2009 to January 2008. I resolved to tackle one month at a time, starting at the present and moving backwards, labeling, archiving and deleting one month of email per day. It was extremely interesting when I came to 2008: reading the history in emails of the July 4 letter’s origins and aftermath, and the democratic renewal of AIESEC US, in reverse. I read each and every email related to the subject and was surprised to see some of the places where I made the right decision, the mistakes I made, and how I reacted to certain situations knowing what I know now. A lot to be learned from that time, now well-organized for future review. It was about two weeks ago that I finally reached the fabled “inbox zero.” I keep it that way with rapid follow-ups and moving email to its right place – out of my inbox.
I have now joined the sycophantic ranks of bloggers about productivity, a set I generally distrust. However, I liked this setup enough that I felt it worthy of publishing here. If I had known about this when I started my LCP term, this setup would have become an integral part of task management for my EB team – and we’d have accomplished a lot more.
My Kind of Politics
US President Obama talked to House Republicans on Friday, at their invitation, during a retreat they were holding in Baltimore. Plenty has been said of it elsewhere, but I particularly liked watching the videos of the actual exchange when he answered questions for over an hour. During that session, he was like the lone player on the dodgeball team catching everything they lobbed at him and then, one by one, tagging out each policy point and clearly putting the Republicans in the harsh spotlight of rhetoric exposure.
Hardball with Chris Matthews with choice excerpts from the session:
Full Q&A, courtesy of MSNBC:
I liked it not only because his intelligence took center stage (for once in the last twelve months), but also because it could be a very positive development if this kind of exchange occurs regularly. There are many advantages to such public meetings, not in the least due to the transparency of testing policy points against different branches of government in the public view. The process won’t be perfect, but I expect that weaker policy points would get dropped, ones that didn’t get dropped would be refined through the questioning process, and the strong ones would gain more supporters.
Some people may say that a regular (monthly?) meeting of the President with different factions in the legislature would be against the spirit of the separation of powers. I do not think so. The separation of powers lies in each branch’s ability to formulate and execute its Constitutionally-derived powers, and whether or not the President has a British-style “Question Time” with the legislature would neither change his ability to use his veto nor reduce the ability of Congress to draft legislation. I think of the intelligence agency situation prior to the September 11th attacks. Due to their compartmentalization, separation, and even bitter rivalry (even though they serve the same god!) was a significant obstacle to preventing those attacks from happening. There are reasons why different functional areas should be separated in different agencies, but a healthy network and knowledge exchange among those different agencies could only produce a more capable intelligence community, in which everyone knows their role at the same time as knowing more pertinent information about their areas of focus and to whom information should be delivered in a time of crisis.
The same ought to be true of the government itself, for so long as we have to have one. Building those rich inter-branch connections and regularly putting policy through the gauntlet can only mean a legislative branch and executive branch which can (more readily) agree that they are on the same team.
If this kind of exchange does occur more regularly, it would turn my interest somewhat more towards getting involved in the political process. I cannot stand the inane “that’s just the way it is” attitude and reality of the institution, but with more opportunities like what went down on Friday, I would find participation to be much more valuable.
