UbuntuCat

I’ve always considered myself a good speller. Whatever that means.

I won the spelling bee in 4th grade, and I was bummed to have been eliminated in the pre-trials in 5th grade by the word necessary. The representative from our homeroom who did get necessary correct (after everyone else had already exhausted the other logical possible spellings of that word) lost in the finals on the word hexagon. Yes, she was a smart person in other ways, and she turned out in high school to be an excellent swimmer (far better an athlete than the runner I was). Still, I was quite resentful at the time (Hexagon? Hexagon?!).

I pride myself to this day on not using spellcheck in word processors or web browsers. I don’t want a program to automatically flag words as misspelled that I should know how to spell, but I will deliberately look up the spelling of certain words I’m not sure of. Disingenuous, for example, is one I can never remember the spelling of.

Of course, despite my bravado and hubris, I’m more or less an average speller when it comes to college-educated folk (that’s university-educated, for you readers outside the US). After watching Spellbound and Akeelah and the Bee, I realized just how mediocre my spelling skills are. Those kids are spelling words I don’t know the meanings of—words I’ve never even heard of, words I would doubt are in the English language if they didn’t have dictionary entries.

But not only am I a mediocre speller for my demographic, ultimately; I am, in fact, deficient. I misspell constantly. In fact, I just wrote mispell just now and then corrected myself. That isn’t my usual kind of blunder, though. Usually, I don’t misspell the appropriate word so much as spell correctly a wholly inappropriate but vaguely similar-sounding word. For example, if I intend to write something like I like the way my cat smells after a bath, I might actually type I like the weight my cat smells after a bath.

From an English teacher’s perspective (I used to be one), this is a rather odd kind of spelling error. Most people who misspell do not substitute in correctly spelled wrong words; they use the right words and just spell them incorrectly. For example, you might see a phonetic speller spell imagine as emagen or spell segue as segway. Not being a learning specialist, I don’t know where this comes from, but in my unprofessional opinion I’d guess it stems from people not having read enough. The more you read, the more familiar you become with the way words look and are spelled, and (even if you don’t know the exact spelling of a word) you grow to recognize quite quickly if a word doesn’t look right.

In fact, if anything, people who read a lot have the opposite problem of those who do not read as much—the super-readers tend to have an extremely large vocabulary but not actually know how to pronounce all the words they know the meanings and spellings of. I had a friend in high school (one of the top-ranked students in our class who went to top Ivy League schools for undergraduate and graduate schools) who didn’t know until junior year that the word rebels is pronounced REbuls and not REEbuls. I myself have had that problem. I learned the words deny and renege from a comic book called Power Man and Iron Fist, but I thought they were pronounced DEnee (instead of deeNAI) and REnegeh (instead of reeNEG). If you watch the movie Trekkies, you’ll see one Star Trek-obsessed fan make this blunder several times during the documentary.

The acquisition and application of language is a fascinating thing, and I’ve loved writing about it. Now, let me go back and proofread this sucker…

Our cat probably has at least another decade left in him. He won’t be dying any time soon. Nevertheless, I keep thinking about what I’ll miss about him when he dies. I think I’m trying to cushion the blow as much as possible, because I know I’ll be absolutely devastated when he goes.

When I was younger and had less sentient pets (hermit crabs, for example), I couldn’t understand why people were so upset when their dogs or cats died. Well, even though he hasn’t died yet, I now know why I’ll be upset when he does finally kick the kitty litter. First of all, we have a relationship. Yes, one can imagine a relationship with one’s hermit crabs, but really how much affection is shown (Oh, it poked one claw out of the shell today—that must be an expression of love!)? Secondly, dogs and cats just live longer. Indoor cats can live up to 20 years. That’s a long time to be spending with another being.

Well, it’s entirely possible my wife and I would eventually get another kitty, but here are some things I think might never be replaced:

• He does “the monkey hug,” where he’ll wrap one front paw around my neck when I hold him.
• He lets me clip his nails holding him upside down, and he actually appears to enjoy it, sometimes purring and kneading while I do it.
• He will let out a few meows when I first put him in, but he doesn’t seem to mind baths (he just walks around the tub while I shampoo him).
• He lets us manhandle him more than any other cat I’ve ever seen. We can pick him up in pretty much any position, hold him upside down, put his paws over his face to play peek-a-boo. Yes, we are cruel, but in a playful, nice way. Not enough for people to sic the SFSPCA on us.
• He moos. Yup. Like a cow. Sure, he also meows, but most of the time he sounds like a cow mooing.

I have friends who work from the morning until midnight five days a week. I know others who are traveling every week for their jobs. When I was a teacher I felt as if I were working every waking hour of the day (except summer vacations). But now I’ve turned into a workaholic lightweight.

I usually have to be convinced to leave early, but working on weekends gets me down. I just worked part of Saturday and felt I had to use the rest of the weekend to recuperate. I probably don’t have a right to complain since I’ll have reduced hours during the summer.

I just feel a little tired. I’ll say the cat certainly got a lot of snuggling time the past two days.

If you have followed tech news closely at all within the last ten years, you’ve probably heard the phrase year of the Linux desktop before. This is the year that Linux makes a breakthrough with home users, and suddenly Microsoft’s dominant market share comes toppling down. I believe people have been proclaiming various years as the year of the Linux desktop since as early as 1998 (possibly even earlier).

Sometimes the writers will say the current year will be the year of the Linux desktop. Sometimes they’ll be a little more conservative and say some year a few years from now will be the year of the Linux desktop. For example, if I were one of these writers, I would either write 2008 will be the year of the Linux desktop! or with the progress we’re saying right now in 2008, it’s likely that by 2011, we’ll see the year of the Linux desktop.

Did we see the year of the Linux desktop? Nope. That, at least, I think most of us Linux aficionados can agree on. But some naysayers go a step further. Through a leap in logic, they decide that the fact that none of these previous predictions have come true precludes the possibility of a future prediction coming true. In other words, the extrapolation goes something like this: Oh, come on. For years, people have been saying such-and-such year is the year of the Linux desktop, and it’s never come. It’s never going to come. Microsoft will always be on top. Just deal with it.

I would contend that we have no way of knowing whether that year will ever come or not. Just think of the fable “The boy who cried wolf.” In it, the boy tells the village that a wolf is coming. The village gets all up in a panic and then realizes the boy was lying. He cries wolf a second time, and a second time the village is in a panic and realizes the boy was lying again. The third time he cries wolf, there really is a wolf, but no one in the village believes him any more. That’s what’s happening with this whole YOTLD business. These writers who keep proclaiming that some year is the YOTLD are losing their credibility every time the year doesn’t come. But it also means that it’s possible the year might come, and no one will believe the writer who really does get it right.

So I guess it boils down to two things: 1. If you’re a writer who wants to proclaim that such-and-such year is the YOTLD, don’t even bother. Even if you’re right, no one will believe you anyway, as people have been saying that for years. 2. If you one of those people who thinks the YOTLD will never come, you have to come up with other reasons than “They’ve been saying that for years.” After all, I could say every year that I’m going to die that year, and I may be wrong most of the time, but one year I am going to be right. Whether I say it’s going to happen or not has no bearing on the actual outcome or occurrence.

I’m just beginning now to read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, which talks about the moment when there’s a huge sociological change (crime rates dropping, fashion trends being adopted, new technology going mainstream), and it’s made me change my mind on Linux adoption. I used to think the growth of consumer Linux would be gradual and stay gradual indefinitely, but there is a tipping point, and if we get to that point (maybe about 15%), there will be a huge flood of new users. I’m not going to speculate on what year that might be, but it clearly happened for cell phones (as Gladwell points out) in 1998, and it also happened for iPods in 2003, and Firefox in 2005. It won’t necessarily mean the end of Windows’ dominance on the home user’s computer, but it could mean a lot more third-party support for Linux—the kind that Macs currently enjoy.

Which year will be the YOTLD? No one knows. There very well still could be one, and it would probably be a year and not a decade.

This is a boring account of my life with running. I just felt inspired to write it after assistant coaching and coming back from a track meet, which made me nostalgic and reflective of my own running experience. If you don’t like self-indulgent crap, please read no further.

Never before I was in high school did I ever imagine I would be a runner. Runners were athletes. I was not an athlete. It pained me to have to run for the Presidential Fitness Awards. It pained me to run even half a mile, and I got cramps like nobody’s business.

Well, after sixth grade, I decided I was no good at soccer and that soccer was getting to be too big a time commitment (after all, middle schoolers have so many places to go!), so for seventh and eighth grade, I was sportless.

Once ninth grade rolled around, though, I thought I should probably do a sport, since it would look good for college admissions (I don’t know if it actually did), and knowing I had terrible hand-eye coordination, I opted for running. Cross-country seemed like suicide, so I waited for winter track (aka indoor track). It was only after I signed up for track that I realized that all the other freshmen who had done cross-country during fall were in much better shape than I was. I was definitely the slowest person on the track team. At first, the coaches stuck me with the girls, but I couldn’t keep up with them. It took me a while to run a mile without stopping, and I think the only reason I stuck it out was the encouragement and good modeling of my teammates.

No matter how good they were, no matter how much better runners they were than I was, everyone on the team (superstars to solid runners to slow runners who were still faster than I was) congratulated me on every small bit of progress I made and showed me through their actions how to be serious about training and competition while also having fun. The coaches knew my skill level and gave me appropriate challenges for my body’s condition (i.e., out of shape).

I did make progress, though. I set a goal for myself to run a sub-six-minute mile by the end of the year, and I did (just barely—I think my time was 5:58). I also made a commitment to try cross-country to be in better shape for winter and spring track of my next year. The payoff came in the middle of winter track my sophomore year. I was in the middle of what felt like an extremely long run (somewhere between four and five miles). Suddenly, in the middle of the run I just felt like Hey, I have energy. I think I can run a little faster. I think, actually, I could run a lot faster! And that’s what I did. I caught up to the faster runners on the team and run with them to the end of the run. It was a huge turning point. I finally felt as if I was making big improvements. Unfortunately, all of the improvement was in my body and not in my mind. Throughout high school, my coaches and teammates kept telling me running was 20% physical and 80% mental, and I couldn’t believe it. Not believing it had a negative impact on my races. Sure, I was keeping up with “the big boys” in practice, but my race times were improving only marginally. My spring track coach thought I could easily go sub-five in the mile by the end of the season, but I didn’t. He thought that come my junior year I would be the number three runner on the cross-country team.

I had consciously agreed with him and had high hopes for myself, but my unconscious was still saying You’re slow. You can’t keep up with these guys.

During preseason before junior-year cross-country, we had some pretty hard workouts, and I was keeping up with our top two runners (who eventually broke our home course’s longstanding course record—together). My coach still had it in his head that I would be the number three runner. When our first meet came around, he told me to go out with Mike and James at around 5:30 pace for the first mile and then see how I feel. I couldn’t even keep up with them for the first mile. I got passed by most of the varsity squad during that race, and as the season progressed I moved down in the rankings until the coaches couldn’t, in good conscience, keep me on varsity (I was below the top seven runners).

Somehow, I managed to earn a varsity letter in winter track that year, but that was it. The other three varsity letters I got were the ones they automatically give seniors who’d been running track all four years of high school. By the time senior year rolled around, both of my track coaches were visibly disappointed in me. They saw me race and were just scratching their heads. They saw what I did in practice and knew I could race better than that. I was probably the worst racer on the whole team, even though I wasn’t the slowest runner.

The problem, from their standpoint, was that I was the biggest waste of talent. The problem, from my standpoint, was that I enjoyed running but didn’t enjoy racing and didn’t have that killer instinct, that drive to win. Good racers feel the pain and say “I’m going to fight through the pain.” Good racers say, “This runner’s better than me, faster than me, but I am not going to be passed. I am going to win this thing. I have decided I’m going to win.” My mindset was “Let me give this an honest effort. Ouch. This really hurts. I think I have to slow down a bit.”

Do I have any regrets? Well, it’d be easy to say in retrospect that I should have tried harder, adopted a different mindset, become more competitive. It’s hard to say whether my mind and willpower were in the right place at that time to do that. I definitely don’t regret running. I loved the camaraderie and loved being in shape. Given how out of shape I was to begin with, it’s amazing how my coaches and teammates were able to help me improve so much. Even now, sluggish non-athlete that I am, running maybe two times a week and then walking the other days, I still consider myself a runner at heart. I won’t ever probably be a racer, but I do love the track and the rush of the runner’s high.

Most people who know me in person (what some people refer to as “in real life”) don’t know that I have an online alter ego. Participating in a social networking site like Facebook does not mean you have an online alter ego (unless the people you are “friends” with are people you’ve never met in person). Your online alter ego is the person you are to people you have “met” online and even befriended online and had arguments with online but have never met in person.

I try, believe it or not, to make my online alter ego as much like the in-person me as possible, but somehow people who “meet” alter ego me don’t always react to me the same way in-person people do. A number of factors contribute to the difference in reactions:

• Whether we admit it or not, when we meet people in person, we judge them by how they look—and not just their facial features: we judge them by physical stature, mannerisms, gestures, tonal inflections, eye movements, and other social cues.
• Online venues tend to cut down on a lot of the small talk that happens in in-person social situations. People online have shared with me their sleeping habits, political opinions, sexual orientations, pet peeves, angers, and joys without asking me where I went to school or how long I’ve lived in the Bay Area.
• Online venues offer anonymity, which leads to more honesty… and sometimes unwarranted abuse.
• Written language allows you to put more thought into what you say. You can edit, you can proofread, and you can mull over before anyone even has an idea that you are even considering offering an opinion.

You’d think that with all those factors involved, people would think more highly of my online alter ego than they do of me. Such is not the case most of the time. I’m a friendly guy. People in person tend to like me (or at least do an awfully good job of pretending they do). Online, though, I’ve had people accuse me of being sexist, racist, homophobic, too politically correct, pedantic, lacking in a sense of humor, and enforcing draconian policies (I’m a moderator of an online forum). Oddly enough, I’ve had people accuse me of opposite things. Some people have said I’m anti-Linux. Others have said I’m a Linux fanboy. Some have said I’m too pro-Gnome. Others have said I’m biased in favor of KDE. Some have lorded over my newbieness with their “leetness” (re: elitism), and others have considered me to be very knowledgeable in the geek realm.

All of this makes me wonder if some of the people online whom I’ve grown to like and respect would actually get along with me in person. I suspect probably not. Many of the people I connect with in the Ubuntu world or even through this blog are anti-gay gun-toting right-wingers, or at least present themselves that way. Some of them drink too much beer.

Well, such is life… and online life. I’ll close with a message from my online alter ego: If you don’t read me laughing, it’s not because I lack a sense of humor; it’s because your joke wasn’t funny.

If you read as many reviews of the Eee PC as I’ve read, you’ll know that many of the negative reviews come from people who mistake the Eee for a notebook or laptop. Granted, it looks like a laptop (albeit one hit by a shrink-ray) and does a lot of things a laptop does, but it is not a laptop. People are calling it a subnotebook, a netbook, or UMPC (ultra-mobile PC) replacement. Who knows what name will stick? But this isn’t a total computer replacement any more than your cell phone is (think iPhone and not Macbook).

I was able to replace my desktop computer with an Eee, because I also happen to share a household with my wife, who has a regular laptop (a Macbook Pro), so when I wanted to give a CD mix to a friend, I burned it on my wife’s Macbook Pro (the Eee has no optical drive). The screen on the Eee is tiny—you won’t be doing any heavy graphics editing on it.

The Eee is an internet appliance that also happens to do a few non-internet-related things as well (it has a word processor, a spreadsheet program, a sound recording program, and a music organizer). Mainly, though, it’s great for browsing the internet, emailing friends, and Skyping (I just yesterday tried out video Skype on it, and the webcam and microphone work quite well). There is the occasional website I have to do some side-scrolling with (using the Right arrow key), and if you want to watch YouTube videos, you may want to use Firefox in fullscreen mode (press F11 to toggle back and forth), but it’s a nifty little appliance I’ll think nothing of toting around.

It’s actually made doing laundry bearable (I love reading books in the bathroom or on the bus, but for some reason not while doing the wash), and I’m looking forward to taking it on the plane with me when I visit my parents for Christmas—I won’t have to worry about it weighing down my backpack or being too much trouble to take out for the security check at the airport.

If you find yourself in coffee shops using wireless to blog or check out the latest news feeds and are tired of hauling your 15″ or 17″ laptop around, you may want to check out Asus’ Eee PC (or its upcoming rivals from HP, Dell, and Acer in the upcoming months).

Right now, our church is doing a sermon series about creation and is also experimenting with allowing congregation members the opportunity to create during the sermon. Children are painting murals. Adults are playing with pipecleaners and making pizzas. We’re even encouraged to blog during worship (which is what I’m doing right now on my Eee PC).

Bruce started off his sermon talking about how he finally realized he needed a day of rest, and he went to a cafe and read a book. That was his way to relax and reconnect with God. Now, he’s soliciting responses from the congregation about how they feel renewed (some people go out into nature, some throw barbecues).

What I like about this line of inquiry and this whole experiment is a recognition that people have different ways to create, to connect with God, to be fed, to feel renewed. A lot of times, you go to church or to a church retreat, and you’re asked to perform a particular ritual that is intended to be the most appropriate thing for you to do in your spiritual life at the moment, but everybody is required to do it. How could we possibly all be at the same spiritual place and have the exact same activity to be appropriate for our spiritual needs?

For example, I’ve had services where someone will ask you to write down three ways you want to improve your relationship with Christ and commit to doing those three things this week. That may work for a lot of people, but that sort of thing doesn’t work for me. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to connect with God or be a good Christian. I just do things my own way, and I think it’s important for people to recognize that the old saying of “To each her own” (or, as some of you may have heard it, “To each his own”) has merit, particularly on spiritual journeys. Blogging during the sermon… interesting. Still not sure if it’s for me, but it was certainly worth exploring!

A few months ago, I marveled at the ability of Beowolf’s animators to hide the title character’s penis, despite the fact he was naked and jumping and moving every which way.

Well, I just saw Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and I have to say I’m impressed. For a bawdy sex comedy featuring a male protagonist, it was a bit subversive in making the male nudity far more prominent than the female nudity. Sure, you briefly see a photo of Mila Kunis flashing her breasts (and you’re not even 100% sure it’s her breasts in that photo), but you see Jason Segel in the buff numerous times throughout the film and see his penis very clearly at least three times. I’m amazed that got past the MPAA (which typically has an inexplicable fear of the penis and no qualms about female full frontal nudity).

Even though Segel’s body isn’t fun to look at, in my mind, this is cinematic progress.

You may have missed it, but if you search for it, you will find it in abundance. It wasn’t played up a lot in mainstream media, but there was a little controversy about the hit movie 21.

Apparently, a lot of Asian-Americans were in an uproar about how the race of the characters had been changed from Asian-American to White. Some were even calling for boycotts. The argument went something like, “It’s hard enough for Asian-Americans actors to get good roles in Hollywood, but now that they would actually get the opportunity to play a lead role, the role suddenly has become ‘white-washed.’” Sadly, I don’t think it makes an economic difference whether or not Asian-Americans boycott a movie; we aren’t a significant enough demographic for Hollywood execs to consider. The film was a commercial success.

One person commenting on a blog or article (I forget which) thought people were overreacting and pointed out that the original novel I Am Legend featured a white character who was then ‘black-washed’ for the movie in the form of Will Smith. I think that’s just rubbing salt in the wounds even more, frankly. There is still a lot of racism against African-Americans in Hollywood, but there has also been a lot of progress, and the fact that Will Smith can carry off an “everyman” role like Robert Neville is evidence of that progress.

This is what it ultimately boils down to—Hollywood execs will cast whomever they feel will bring the biggest box office draw. If Asian-American actors brought in the dough (Harold & Kumar was profitable, which is why it gets a sequel, but it is not a Titanic-like blockbuster), they would be cast in lead roles more often.

Hollywood, through its amoral greed, is just providing a lens into the racism that America as a whole demonstrates through its ticket purchases. White Americans are just beginning to accept the notion of identifying with an African-American as “the everyman” (think Jimmy Stewart or Tom Hanks) in the form of Will Smith. Asian-Americans are still finding themselves identifying with White (and sometimes Black) protagonists, but White Americans never find themselves in the position of having to identify with only Asian-American protagonists.

Even though all of my examples so far have had to do with male actors, I think the trend applies equally as well to female actors. Lucy Liu and Sandra Oh have become household names, but how many movies or TV shows feature them as the leading lady. Lucy Liu has been able to be a main character side by side with Ally McBeal and the other two of Charlie’s Angels, but has she been the lead in anything by herself? Has Sandra Oh (without Ellen Pompeo or Diane Lane)? And, no, Double Happiness was not a box office hit.

It’s easy to put all the blame on Hollywood for being “racist,” but like corporate America in general, Hollywood studios are amoral, not immoral. If casting Asian-Americans in lead roles will make them profitable, they’ll do it. Hollywood is more a barometer of America’s racism. Most Americans still find it difficult to identify with an Asian-American protagonist—that’s the bottom line. I’m not sure how to change that, but clearly boycotting “white-washed” movies isn’t the way to do it.