technology kicks ass

I’m currently writing from my nintendo DS. That is all.

Tired, and tired of post-colonial nonsense

Wow. So this morning, I managed to sleep through two alarms and a call from my girlfriend, missing my morning class in the process and waking up at 11:30am. I guess it was going to catch up to me eventually, what with me sleeping 3-4 hours every night and spending all day reading ethnomusicology journals. On the plus side, I’m hoping the extra rest this afforded me will allow me to push forward and get a little bit ahead in my classes so that it won’t have to happen again. I’d been doing so well too, but everybody has an off day, right?

But the real point of this entry is to rant about something I read on the BBC News about the political activity and clout of Buddhist monks in Burma. 90% of the Burmese population is Buddhist, so the monks and monasteries command a lot of power. While generally peaceful, they do occasionally rise to political action when they feel the cause necessitates their making a move, and this tends to rally the people together. That’s all well-established in the article. But here comes the silly part. In reviewing the history of Burmese monks’ political activity, BBC News had this to say (underlined text by me):

Their political role stems from the days of the Burmese monarchy, which operated until the late 19th century, under which monks worked as intermediaries between the monarch and the public, and lobbied the king over unpopular moves such as heavy taxation, said Mr Aung Kin.

They became more confrontational during colonial times, in protest at the failure of foreigners to remove their shoes in pagodas, he said.

There’s no way white men wearing shoes could be the main reason the Burmese monasteries decided to rise up against British colonial power. No monk was saying, “these white men keep dirtying Buddha’s holy rug with their big nasty boots, we better go send the peasantry to kick their asses.” Now granted, it probably annoyed them, and may have even been the straw to break the camel’s back, but you can’t tell me that their political work in this case was because of some nasty cracka’s shoes.

When will people start realizing that people in 3rd world countries might just have mental acuity comparable to their own? “Oh look at the cute little Asians that get mad when you don’t take off your shoes.” Rawrgh.

Photo from this BBC article

Something more lighthearted

Okay, so my last post was a little depressing. Here’s something more amusing:

UPDATE: After the Korean press had a hissy fit over this, Colbert had a rebuttal.

Sometimes I wonder…

I’ve had a thought today, that may or may not be continued and expanded upon in a later entry, but which I thought I’d put down briefly while it was still in my mind. In fact, the point is that the thought won’t leave my mind, and I’m hoping that putting it down in writing will be, in some small mmater, cathartic.

Anyway, sometimes, I get really fed up with the condition of the house I’m currently living in. I’m here at IU with two other guys, you see, and my tendencies towards cleanliness and organization, while not comparable whatsoever to either of my parents (whose hospital-influenced cleanliness borders on OCD), are still in the top 5% of all Y-chromosome-carrying graduate students. That said, I do let a lot go, and my room is not always a model of sanctity and germ-free living. Still, the entropic mess that is the community kitchen and bathroom drives me nuts.

I spend a good hour or two every day to keep things from falling apart, washing dishes, scrubbing counters, tossing out trash, making sure rags are clean, etc., and probably once or week or so, I have to buckle down and do a really good job of it. Otherwise, produce and trash would be left out, there would be no pots/pans for cooking dinner, etc. The house would reek.

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Another day, another new laptop

Today, I received my sleek new Dell Inspiron laptop. I’m quite excited about it overall. It’s got a sexy Intel Core 2 Duo processor, a pretty screen, all the quirky little things I need like S-Video outputs and firewire, extra USB ports for my massive number of peripherals, and I’m overall quite happy.

With the hardware. The software, however, is another story.

First, Windows Vista is probably one of the more horrific things I’ve had to deal with in recent memory. First, you do not make an operating system better/more efficient by asking me MORE questions when I do something. It reminds me of something I read that was sent from my employer recently: if there is some tedious task, find a way to automate it instead of doing it yourself. Why, then, must I confirm every single thing I do in Vista? Yes, I really want to uninstall AOL Internet Offer. Yes, I really do want to run that program…I clicked on it, didn’t I?

Gah. That takes me to another thing. Not only does it ask for my confirmation for every other action, it does the asking needlessly slowly. Microsoft, just so you know, I did not buy a faster system so you could use up more of my system resources. I was hoping maybe, oh, I don’t know, I could actually…go faster? Vista is one of the biggest system hogs ever, so even though my Dell is immensely faster than my 3 year old Thinkpad, dumb stuff like uninstalling the stupid pack-ins takes much longer than it should.

(Okay, just now, I clicked on a button to change Windows features, and it asked for my permission. Vista is like the dog that doesn’t recognize it’s own tail so he decides to chase it. In fact, the little swirling loader icon looks just like that.)

Anyway, I’m going to install Command&Conquer 3 tonight. It better run like a dream, or heads will roll.

Oh yes…unto a god…

I always really liked the gods from the good old days. Apparently, it’s because I’m one of them:

What kind of God are you?
Name
DOB
Favourite Color
You earthly time was spent	Raining torrents of blood while sailing over the prostrate masses in an iron chariot
Your throne is	fashioned from thorns and human femurs, surrounded by writhing, howling servants, with a footstool of souls on the sizzling shores of the Lake of Fire
You wear	A humble tunic and robes, belying your inestimable supernatural powers just waiting to shatter the woes of Creation
Your Godly superpower is	A flaming, indestructible sword with which you shall avenge the slain innocents and humble the arrogant
This cool quiz by pelagicboreas - Taken 863 Times.

Making my peace with medicine

Every once in a while, I feel the need to give the world an update on my life. For one thing, I know how hard it is for friends to stay in contact when they’re traveling all over the world to vastly different places, and although some people say that it’s disingenuous to just pick up with somebody as if you’ve been talking to them every day, I think it’s just fine, and even quite touching. (However, this is not the same as meeting somebody with whom you were never close friends, who then acts as if you were bosom buddies.)

Such genuine acts of friendship transport you back to an earlier time in your life. If you want to talk about time-traveling, you don’t have to watch Star Trek or Back to the Future, just send an e-mail or letter to a friend with whom you haven’t spoken for a few months or years. If the connection is rekindled, you will experience a powerful time-defying moment.

But anyway, all that really is just a preface to say, “it’s okay if my friends keep tabs on me in a medium such as a blog or facebook.” That anybody wants to keep up with me at all is a sweet gesture, and in the past week or two, friends from all about have come out of the woodwork (spurred on no doubt by summer’s approach) to ask me how I am doing and also to tell me about their own adventures. Those who want the juicy details can read on, and those who want even more can e-mail me anytime (dochuyen84@gmail.com).

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Go Fly a Kite!

This past Saturday, my dad, grandpa, and I took a short trip up to Salem, Virginia, about 20 minutes or so from Blacksburg/Virginia Tech, to check out their 9th Annual Blue Ridge Kite Festival. Many V. Tech students and families were there as well, no doubt to get a few brief moments in the sun and forget the dark tragedy of this past week.

The place was bustling with energy and youth, and although the wind was neither strong nor consistent, a few good breezes lifted the dozens of kites up into the air in a gorgeous spectacle that made the two and a half hour drive completely worth it.

My dad’s reason for going was to take pictures, and I don’t really think that anything I could say we will quite as well as seeing the pictures themselves, so take a look see!

(Click the images for larger versions)

Read only if you know Javascript…

…otherwise, your eyes will bleed. Really.

Anyway, I’ve been reading up on closures: http://jibbering.com/faq/faq_notes/closures.html

And it’s so painful. So painful that I thought I’d share it with you all.

Memes and Asian pop music

When Americans hear pop music from other countries, the tendency is to immediately assume that they are some kind of bad rip-off of the American originals. Now, barring the fact that often enough the originals are uninteresting pieces of fluff themselves, the argument does have at least some merit. In Asia, it seems like every major country has gone through a temporary period directly imitating Western culture before settling on a distinct identity of its own.

Part of that identity-building comes at the interface of ancient cultures and customs versus what is cool and modern. For many in the older generations, this is less of an interface and more of an insurmountable impasse, but for many of those growing up and making music today, there is a strong desire to retain cultural identity while keeping one’s hipness. The examples that will soon follow I think demonstrate that this goal is indeed achievable.

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