玩 – Wan2 – Play
Tomorrow Jenny and Susan are going to New York to 玩. Should I go too? Or stay home and be a 黑客 – Hei1 Ke4 – Black Guest — Hacker? (get it, Hei-ke, Hacker?)
This is cool… Hackers in China call themselves 紅客 – Hong2 Ke4 – Red Guest intead. In both cases, Red Guest and Black Guest, the kind of hacker they’re talking about is what we’d call a cracker. I don’t know if Chinese has a word for hacker the way I mean it.
Here’s a way of visualizing the searches people use to find Minutillo.com. The Minutillo.com Zeitgeist. Bigger words means more searches. Color is just for decoration.
I got the code for that at Everything Burns, which has lead me to a whole genus of new, strange, and interesting weblogs.
管 – Guan3 – Pipe, Tube, Care, Mind, Manage
Me: “What’s the word of the day?”
Jenny, annoyed: “Care.”
IMPOSSIBLE THING THE FIRST:
CIA creates parody version of Gangsta Paradise, broadcasts to Iraq. Among the lyrics: “If you don’t like me, I kill you. I am Saddam. Saddam in the house. Everybody in the house say I hate you. (we hate you!)”
I give you, via MeFi, the MP3.
IMPOSSIBLE THING THE SECOND:
That apparently wasn’t enough, so they went on to create a deck of cards, featuring the 55 most wanted members of Saddam’s regime. Saddam is the ace of spades.
I give you, via www.defenselink.mil, the cards.
There’s something really spooky about the way these new robots the Japanese have been working on move. Instead of being all jerky and wobbly and akward and, well, machinelike, like sci-fi always imagined robots would be, their movements are very human, smooth and perfectly balanced.
Slightly relatedly, lots of people have been using the Internet to welcome all sorts of new overlords.
蛋 – Dan4 – Egg
皮蛋 – Pi2 Dan4 – Skin Egg — “Thousand Year Egg”
“Thousand Year Old Eggs” are really only about 100 days old.Duck eggs are used instead of chicken eggs.
The raw eggs are buried in the ground in a mixture of clay, lime, salt, tea and straw. I have seen recipes calling for pine ash instead of clay.
This mixture leaches into the shell and egg, making the interior smooth and creamy – like a ripe avocado in texture.
The yolk turns a vivid green and the white various shades of yellow, blue and green. It has been compared to the colors of a black opal.
Sounds delightful, doesn’t it? These are so disgusting to the uninitiated that they’ve even been used to make people puke on Fear Factor. The first time Jenny showed me I couldn’t believe it. But she loves them, and so do something like 2 billion other Chinese and assorted asians. They were even the theme ingredient on an episode of Iron Chef! For some reason, Food Network has elected not to translate that episode to English. I wonder why.
Now I’ve come to accept them, I’ve eaten enough to say “I’ve tried it and I don’t like it”. I’ve also eaten 蟲 which actually weren’t that bad… dry, salty, crunchy.
A while back I was wondering about Flash, what the file format is, how open is it, how do you author it without the multi-hundred dollar software.
Today, I randomly hit the gold mine of information and links on this exact subject, an article at O’Reilly called SWF Is Not Flash. It answered all my questions, and the links led to mountains of technical specs, free parsers, free generators, books, documents, and more.
家 – Jia1 – Home
I’m very happy to report that a 家 is a 豕 – Shi3 – Pig (another word for pig) with a roof over it! I know a pair of pigs who need a roof…
Also don’t get 家 confused with 房子 – Fang2 Zi5 – House.
蟲 – Chong2 – Bug
迷 – Mi2 – Confused, Lost
Jenny totally 迷路 – Mi2 Lu4 – Lost her Way on the way to jury duty. She finally found it, but they didn’t need her to decide anyone’s fate.
The other webloggers featured in the story are starting to post about it:
A Life Less Interesting
The Worst Weblog Ever
Darn Tootin’
bobofett.com
Right Thoughts
怕 – Pa4 – Fear
I find it interesting that 怕 is made up of 心 – Xin1 – Heart and 白 – Bai2 – White.
What’s so 可怕 – Ke3 Pa4 – Scary about today? JENNY HAS JURY DUTY!
New Haven Register: Dear Digital Diary
Scroll down almost to the end, and what do you find?
Stephen Minutillo of Hamden, at www.minutillo.com/steve/weblog, blogs about everything from video games to favorite restaurants in Taipei.
鼠 – Shu3 – Rat
I’ve always liked animal names in Chinese. They’re very descriptive.
Squirrel: 松鼠 – Song1 Shu3 – Pine Rat.
Giraffe: 長頸鹿 – Chang2 Jing3 Lu1 – Long Neck Deer.
Owl: 貓頭鷹 – Mao1 Tou2 Ying1 – Cat Head Hawk!
A kitchen worker hits a water rat on the head to stun it before it is killed for a meal in a restaurant in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou.
//-------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Copyright (C) 1996, 2003 - 3D Realms Entertainment
This file is part of Duke Nukem 3D version 1.5 - Atomic Edition
Duke Nukem 3D is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
Original Source: 1996 - Todd Replogle
Prepared for public release: 03/21/2003 - Charlie Wiederhold, 3D Realms
*/
//-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Download the Source
Turn your NES into a PC – I must admit I haven’t tried this. But…
Make the Enterprise out of a floppy disk – This one works! And it’s way better than the primitive “disk cows” I used to make out of bad Amiga disks.
老 – Lao3 – Old
In honor of 老夫子 – Lao3 Fu1 Zi5 – Old Master Q.
Jenny found this site today, and sent me a link at work but I was all “whatever” and didn’t look at it. I SHOULD HAVE.
Ginger Wong’s Gingervitis
For one thing, she’s currently in Taiwan and has been taking lots and lots of pictures and posting cool stories. That would have been good enough. But then we noticed a link labeled “blatant self-endorsement” to Old Master Q Comics. WOW! She created the site for Old Master Q! You probably have never heard of it, but Old Master Q is an absolutely super famous and super good Chinese comic strip. Go ahead and read some, mostly you don’t need to read Chinese to get the jokes. Mostly.
They’ve made lots of Master Q movies over the years, from black and white to fancy computer graphics:
Then we explored further, and found this page explaining her involvement with Old Master Q. Alfonso Wong, the guy who created Old Master Q, is her Grandfather! Whoa!
I was about to post about this company, Stavatti, working on a totally sweet nuclear powered laser gun, which I found out about at Slashdot:
But then I got to reading the rest of their site. They also claim to be working on a Robotech looking fighter they call the F26, and a hypersonic nuclear heavy bomber!
And they have a division called Stavatti Special Access. On a single web page, both of these staements are made:
1: “Stavatti’s Special Access Division is responsible for the design and production of Top Secret/Special Access Required/Compartmentalized and COSMIC aerospace weapon systems and special products for the U.S. DoD and government user agencies.”
2: “Stavatti can neither confirm or deny that from 1997 to the present Stavatti SA has continued to perform special access contract work for U.S. government user agencies as either the prime contractor or industry team member.”
Well which is it then? It gets better. They’re also working on tactical space fighters, and interplanetay space craft. It just gets crazier and crazier the more you read the site. Oh, and drums, they sell drums somehow.
It has to be fake. But it is a very detailed fake! Reams and reams of PDFs of specifications, cost estimates, and production schedules for all these fantastic (with emphasis on the FANTASY) weapon systems.
The guys at rec.aviation.military agree that it’s bogus. But who are they trying to fool? And why?
One last thing, check the clear thinking in the chairman’s statement on the war in Iraq:
I think we as American’s know the reality. Our economy collapsed a long time ago. There have been numerous frauds organized by the powers-that-be to keep the gears turning, be it trickle-down economics, the Dot Com Stockmarket or now, the Invasion of Iraq. This invasion may well preserve the US status quo for at least another two to ten years, but then what? There are real threats to national security. There have always been. MacAurthor was fired for insubordination when he desired to deal with the roots of the problem. If America truly is the greatest nation on earth, we should act as police officer for the world, secure Babylon and eliminate Saddam. We should then preemptively strike all other threat nations which possess weapons of mass destruction and harbor no respect for human life. Those include North Korea, Libya, Syria, Iran and the People’s Republic of China. I am certain the CIA has a far more comprehensive list which could add a extra threat or two. Before we do that, however, we should actually rebuild our military, provide every soldier with a good pair of boots and a nice warm blanket, and start openly deploying some of the toys ‘we don’t have’ .
