Got Red Flag linux installed on my box today, but it's asking for a registration number so I can't log on. Anybody able to help?

In looking for a number through Google, found a Chinese version of Knoppix, the boot-from-CD linux distro.

Ian Hickson is the only person I've read to give a positive review of the Matrix Reloaded movie. I thought it wasn't bad myself.

I know it's silly, but Ziboy's pictures of Beijing still make me nostalgic.

Julie keeps posting about fashion on her weblog. So I wanted to mention that I wore my "Cheer Up Emo Kid" shirt to work today, and got two comments on it. I need to find a cheap T-shirt place around here. I got some more ideas. And a few emo T-shirts would make neat going away gifts for a couple people at work. Also, I put a gift for Shirley's birthday on hold at work. Yah, I'm early, but I may be away on her birthday. I think she'll like it.

Also, I'm jealous that Julie can even conceive of reading Catcher in the Rye in Japanese. It reminds me that I should try to use my Spanish more. Especially after I found out my brother took a Spanish Lit class this semester at Berkeley; now I just now he's gonna upstage me this summer on our Central American trip. ARgh.

The already-generous offer of financial aid I received from the University of Michigan has been unexpectedly upped. I won't say how much, so I don't sound like I'm bragging. Let's just say I'm very, very happy.

On the flip-side, in the same e-mail the secretary for the Chinese Studies department said that I would probably be too busy to TA a class, and that I should take it slowly at first. Good advice, no doubt, but I'd still like to get some more experience teaching. Preferably older kids. My friend Josh wants to be a high school Chinese teacher. Isn't that buttah?

Ahh, web nostalgia.

Aaron will go with me this summer, woo!

I'm looking into buying Lamp Eye's Shougen (証言) at the Tower Records Japan website. Any other recommendations for really good Japanese music, just to make shipping worthwhile? Anybody want to piggy-back on my order? Hmm, maybe some Neil & Iraiza. I love the fact the @Tower.JP website has a J-Indies category tab on every page.

I'm bummed that I missed the end of the auction for m-flo's The Replacement Percussionists: Rocket Scientists In Disguise, and I'm very tempted by these Pizzicato Five t-shirts.

This is sorta interesting, if you're into unix/linux: Matrix Sequel Has Hacker Cred.

As at Caltech, at the University of Michigan the most helpful information on moving into the school comes from the Taiwan Student Association.

(Blogging from school, where I'm overseeing a US History test.)

From the article Japanese Cult Vows to Save a Seal and the World:

In most places where they have stopped, their unusual dress and behavior—they do not believe in bathing, and reportedly eat only instant noodles—has scared the wits out of the locals, for whom memories of another doomsday sect, Aum Shinrikyo, are all too fresh.

Japanese cult, or Caltech students?

I love how Japanese people write their last name in all caps when using romaji. Like KONISHI Yasuharu, and Ryoko HIROSUE. I think everybody should do this.

Seen the new $20 bill candidate? It's got those little Macintosh rounded corners. The article says:

The Treasury plans to redesign bills every seven to 10 years to keep up with technological advances in counterfeiting.

So when I'm 60 years old, I'm supposed to be able to recognize seven or eight different designs for each currency bill? With my memory slipping already, I'll be surprised if I can do that at 60.

Guess who was on HEY HEY HEY Music Champ last night? A name from the past for me, Zeebra. Back when I was at Caltech, I spent a while looking into Japanese hip-hop, and the three names that came up most were Lamp Eye, Rino and Zeebra. I'll have to look him up again.

Elebugi was an underground hip-hop site that had a secret page and downloadable samples of songs. Also found a more recent page with a good list of names. See post by HarajuKUN. Dragon Ash is hit and miss, in my opinion.

There's three people I haven't seen together in a while.

Oh, and I found USD 330 one-way tickets to Costa Rica. Still waiting on Aaron.

The Smashing Pumpkins never had a weblog.

Oh my gosh, may I take all of these?! Urdu! URDU!

So the plan for this summer has turned into waiting for my brother to get back to me, and basing my decision on his. I'm more comfortable letting somebody else decide my plans.

Today was the monthly meeting of the OCLUG at Cal State Fullerton. The meeting was more of an informal gathering and install-fest by the time I got there at about 1pm, though I missed the first three hours so I can't comment on what happened during that time. The ages of the attendees ranged from high school age to old seasoned pros, probably fifty or sixty years old. About a dozen laptops were scattered around the room, with clumps of guys (oh, did I mention 100% male? Caltech all over again) gathered around pointing at the screens. A little Linux evangelism here, a little howto-ing there, sharing programs and scripts, installation disks and burned CDs. I met two handsome fellows: Scott, a computer trainer and consultant who was having a SuSE partition installed on his Acer laptop; and Dave, a programmer who was helping Scott, and showed me his most recent project involving libxml, a little C coding to transfer files across HTTP and FTP, to process orders for a large department store. Very cool stuff, it even gave me a breakthrough idea for the problem of sending my e-mail through UGCS.

ALL YOUR BASE.

Is this what I stay up all night for? It turns out that if I try to pipe my mail through a string of pipes in the .forward file, it will only pipe mail through the last program in the string (this is running sendmail with smrsh on RedHat 9). For example, my .forward file was:

"|/etc/smrsh/nyt|/etc/smrsh/filtermail"

And the mail was only being run through the filtermail program. So I ended up just sending the mail to procmail, then piping it from there. Now my .forward file looks like this:

"|IFS=' ' && exec /usr/bin/procmail || exit 75 #msittig"

And .procmailrc looks like this:

VERBOSE=off
MAILDIR=$HOME/mail
PMDIR=$HOME/.procmail
DEFAULT=/var/spool/mail/msittig
LOGFILE=$PMDIR/log
INCLUDERC=$PMDIR/general.rc
# INCLUDERC=$PMDIR/other.rc
# add as many INCLUDERC's as you like
# end of .procmailrc


And ~/.procmail/general.rc looks like this:

:0
* To.
| /home/msittig/bin/nyt | /home/msittig/bin/filtermail

Ta-dah! I love frickin Linux. It's a tinker's paradise. These links came in handy while figuring this out: O'Reilly Sendmail, Procmail Tutorial.

Peter N-H, from a BBC article, on the Oriental mailing list:

Kazakhstan closes its border with China and plans to evacuate its citizens from China until the outbreak is controlled.

...further narrowing down my plans for this summer. Costa Rica, here I come?

Now this guy got into the eBay spirit! That's art.

I've got this Friday off from Borders, and it just happens to be the day of this month's Orange County Linux Users Group meeting at Cal State Fullerton. Shall we go?

For future reference, I was compiling faad2 support for mplayer tonight, and an email called [MPlayer-users] faad2 help came in very handy when I had trouble with compilation errors mentioning no samples in a certain struct, and undefined references or something of the sort. Plus, it motivated me to figure out how to make patches using diff and patch.

Via the Angry Asian Man, Charlotte Sometimes is coming out in June. Interesting cast interviews on the site. Check it out.

And in this picture from Better Luck Tomorrow, Karin Anna Cheung is wearing a cheerleading outfit that says "Wildcats" across the front. It's a Brea Olinda cheerleader uniform, isn't it? Rumor has it that the movie was based on the infamous Sunny Hills incident. I'll ask my sister about the uniform tomorrow.

East Asian Language classes at the University of Michigan.

Physical Education classes. No ping-pong!

Course Details for Asian Studies 375
Title: Japan Pop Music
Description: Japanese Popular Music: This course will deal with both historical and contemporary forms of popular music in Japan. Amateur and professional music-making, as well as vernacular discourse about music (in translation) will be treated as resources for thinking about the culture and experience of the populace, and way sin which they have been distinct from the 'high' culture of Japan's elite.

Ripping more music: Barry White rocks my world.

Wow, I so wanna learn to read Arabic, just to read these Persian weblogs. When I see a page like that, I take it as a challenge to figure out what meaning is concealed there. Unfortunately, it will have to wait until I have a basic grasp of and measure of fluency in Korean.

Speaking of languages, which I do a lot, a name I like a lot is Nitin. I think it's from India. I'm not sure how to pronounce it. It's a palindrome.

Went up to Pasadena tonight with my dad to see the Capitol Steps perform at Caltech's Beckman Auditorium. They are a political satire group that do an excellent job of lampooning everything in Washington. Saw Amit, Ron and Jonathan, Caltech alumni, at the show. Ron said he ran across my webpage while searching for info about Japanese drama. Had dinner afterwards at Burger Continental, a greek restaurant with live music and belly dancing.

Going back to the topic of music, I'm about two thirds of the way through ripping my CDs, and I just came across another artist that really impressed me. He happens have a tenuous connection to Pizzicato Five. A couple, actually. First off, he's half Japanese. Second, he's on the Grand Royal record label, which was founded by the Beastie Boys. Other Grand Royal artists include the John Spencer Blues Explosion, and another band of artists from Japan, Cibbo Matto. Yes, I'm talking about Sean Lennon. Ignore the review on Amazon that calls Cibo Matto "Sean's other band." He had dated one of the CM girls for a long time, and collaborated on their CDs. Did I mention that I saw Sean Lennon play at the Troubador? A long time ago...

After tutoring tonight I went out to Del Taco with some of the kids. I chatted with Mrs Davis on Wednesday, and she brought up the fact that one of the students in her class had finally arranged to have vision therapy done to work on her bad vision, and how it was good that her doctor was a young medical student. The reason this was a good thing is that the student, while bright, is a little rebellious and needs somebody younger who can sympathize. Little kids need older authority figures, like my mom as a kindergarden teacher. Older kids need younger teachers to sympathize and speak from recent experience about life. I'm not saying that older teachers don't belong in high school; it's still important to have a balance of viewpoints. But it's good to get some younger teachers in there to talk about the issues of adolescense with a fresh memory. Don't get me started on the other qualifications for teaching, though; that's where BOHS is failing big time...

Madame Li, the principal of CRIS Elemenary School in Tianjin, also boasted of the fact that her elementary school had a high number of male teachers. More in the upper grades of course. But still, it's important to expose kids to different kinds of authority figures. Hooray for diversity!

From: oriental-list
To: msittig
Subject: [oriental-list] SARS News

About a week ago, as was reported on this list tourism was stopped in Tibet. Yesterday, the local governments of Shanghai, Guilin, Yunnan and Jiangsu followed suit. Other destinations are expected to follow suit. Foreign tour operators are being told to cancel all incoming FITs and Group travel.

Guy

Well, at least that narrows down my vacation options. My brother still hasn't responded to my e-mail about joining me.

Oh, and Happy International Labor Day!

Arise ye workers from your slumbers
Arise ye prisoners of want
For reason in revolt now thunders
And at last ends the age of cant.
Away with all your superstitions
Servile masses arise, arise
We'll change henceforth the old tradition
And spurn the dust to win the prize.