Refraction

I hope this doesn’t get moderated. :biggrin: And I think I really need to see that Monty Python sketch 😀

Well, after deciding to lie low for a while (and by a while, I mean a few days) the spammers have come back. Luckily, I’ve had nowhere near the initial rush of comment spam–SK has deleted 691 comments, and not a single false positive, which makes me happy. Unfortunately, the spammers are moving onto trackback spam. That might help if I er, actually used trackbacks. Oddly enough, I can’t seem to find trackbacks to any spam sites, so I guess I’ll count myself lucky, then?

Oh, I read this interesting interview with a link spammer. I’m not any more sympathetic, but I guess I can understand where they’re coming from. Still, doesn’t it make them even slightly uneasy to be exploiting people’s stupidity? I guess not.

Oh, and is it just me, or has the size of spam emails increased as the free email providers tried to outdo each other? Maybe it’s not that the individual emails are any larger, but that my accounts can hold a lot more of them. :tensed:

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WHEREAS Michael has revived his blog; and
WHEREAS some people who read this blog read that blog too,
NOW, THEREFORE, LET IT BE RESOLVED that you all go read his blog now; and
LET IT BE FURTHER RESOLVED that people keep blogging.

See, this is what happened when I get bored before an exec meeting and start wandering around the Student Union Building. I read Council Minutes!

*has just been subtly reminded that she owes people layouts* Send me an email, people, you know who you are (and, hopefully, you know what my email adress is :tensed:). Procrastinators unite! Tomorrow. (Slogan on the back of one of George’s t-shirts.)

This has been one random entry. So I think I’ll add some coherency to it.

In case you were wondering about the spammers, they’ve slowed down. A lot :biggrin: SK has caught every single spam comment and let all the others through ^_^ So far, that’s saved me deleting 372 comments. Hopefully it’s good enough to keep the spammers away forever.

I’ve been plugging away at both Le libraire and Le coeur est un muscle involontaire. They’re different enough books that I can keep the characters straight in my head (unlike, say, two Jane Austen novels.) I’m actually enjoying Le libraire more than I thought I would, actually, which can only be a good thing, right? The latter is more difficult to slog through because of the slang… although I find the random bits of English amusing. How often do you find random bits of French in English novels? (Okay, so there was some in The DaVinci Code, but it was all glossed. I think.)

I also read Eats, Shoots & Leaves this weekend. It’s a great book. Who would have thought that punctuation could be so interesting? Or that a stickler needn’t be alone? Oh, hrm, there’s actually a good quote about the use of emoticons like 😉 in there–we’re demeaning noble punctuation marks by making them into eyes, noses, and mouths! 😯 The author makes a good point when she says that using colons and semi-colons is addicting. I think I actually had that written on my composition for the myth test in grade 10. Heh. :pirate: I think it might have happened to me in Socials, too.

My hard drive is now making funny sounds. 😮 I think this means that I should format the thing soon, which means I’ll need to back up all 20 GB >_>;; I’ve only been putting this off for five months…

I’m really looking forward to CORE OF SOUL’s new single, which comes out on Wednesday. I downloaded the PV for it (a streaming version can also be found at their official site), and it’s just so cute–they have a little boy introducing them! :kawaii: The video itself is kinda odd, certainly not one of my favourites, but at least it makes sense. In a music video kind of way.

I’ve given some serious thought to starting work on a COS fansite again. Last time, my host disappeared on me, but with some careful planning this time (and a better host :cry:) that shouldn’t happen. I think it’s time this group had an English fansite, anyway.

It’s always fun to listen to covers. I download a cover of Train’s “Drops of Jupiter” this weekend, and… well, it’s different, but I like it. Tanya Chua sings it; her English is quite good (not surprising, given that she’s from Singapore) but her rendition is a little breathy and lacks the power of the original. w-inds. (Japan’s answer to, um, the whole boyband phenomenon) did a cover of Clay Aiken’s “Perfect Day,” and that’s just funny. XD It’s about an amicable breakup, while the original is… not about an amicable breakup. :weird:

I have installed Spam Karma, a truly delightful WordPress plugin that kills spam dead. I decided I really had to get a move on after I discovered 158 “Please approve” messages sitting in my inbox this evening. I chose Spam Karma over some of the others because it discriminates and gives commenters a chance to prove that they aren’t spammers (using an image authenication test.) That being said, I really encourage everyone who thinks s/he will leave a comment sometime in the future to comment on this entry so that I can add you to the “safe list.” (I think one of Neale’s comments got caught by the default filter for no reason several entries back…)

It even emails you a list of the spam deleted, so that you can tweak the settings to your liking.

Tee hee hee hee hee.

[edit @ 11:29]: Tee hee hee. TAKE THAT! AND THAT! AND THAT! Spam Karma is great.

My Cantonese sucks.

I’m not being modest; that’s a statement of fact. If you asked me to have a conversation with someone wholly in Cantonese, without any English at all, I wouldn’t be able to do it. Especially if it came to something like, “So, what do you think of university?”

I still consider my Cantonese comprehension to be better than my French, though.

Recently, I came across a blog entry (I’m afraid I’ve lost the link) of someone who travelled through Europe. This gentleman had been immersed in German at an early age (but subsequently lost much of it) in addition to having studied French academically for several years. He remarked that he had to work really hard to understand French; he couldn’t let his attention wander in the least, or he’d lose the conversation completely. Conversely, when he understood a German phrase, it was practically instantaneous. (BAM would be the correct sound effect to use here.) By the end of his trip, he concluded that his German had improved markedly, while his French only showed marginal gains.

I believe that it’s not necessary to learn a language depuis la maternelle (as about half of my French class seems to have done…) in order to achieve near-fluency in it. But if studying for years didn’t help him, then… what exactly is the point of such instruction?

Speaking from personal experience, I go tongue-tied whenever I need to speak in French. Oh, I can stammer my way out of things, but there’s always gesticulation and sometimes even (gasp!) the use of franglais to bail me out. Ask me a similar question in Cantonese and I’d probably be much more confident in answering. (Unless it is the aforementioned university question, in which case I stammer in English, too. Unless it’s been raining.)

Obviously I’ve been exposed to Cantonese my whole life, and French for a comparatively shorter period of time. My parents speak Cantonese at home, not French. That might account for the level of comfort. Yet, in terms of vocabulary, I would say that my French vocabulary is probably larger than my Cantonese. My skills in writing Cantonese hover at around a kindergarten level (verified by a friend who grew up in HK and declared my most advanced Chinese school books to be her grade 1 texts), while in French they’re definitely higher. I can struggle through a French novel, but I wouldn’t dream of picking up anything other than a children’s book in Chinese.

All in all, it seems my French is better than my Cantonese. I’m still more comfortable conversing in my “mother” tongue, though. So, the question for all the multilingual readers of my blog: Do languages that you learned through limited immersion come more easily to you than those that you learned at school?

The comment spammers are back.

I’ve probably deleted something in the area of 1500 spam comments by now. They trickle in steadily, and the spammers are getting more and more resourceful–tricking the filter by using HTML entities, for example. They usually don’t show up because WordPress (correctly) flags most of them for moderation, but it’s still annoying to have to manually delete all of them. (And rather discouraging to find that by the time you’ve done away with the first batch, a couple more have popped up.) This is only compounded by the fact that WordPress doesn’t catch all of the spam–and the longer spam sits on your site, the more likely Google is to cache it, and let the spammers know that you’re an easy target.

So I’ve installed two plugins, one which will glean “spam words” and add them to a blacklist from comments I mark as spam, and another which will … actually, I’m not exactly sure what it does, but hopefully when I check my inbox tomorrow, I won’t have any emails with the subject line “[Refraction] Please approve: …”

Okay, see, this is what happens as soon as I get back to school.

I sit down for a few hours and I make a new skin for my blog. :tongue: Plus, now the skins index actually has descriptions and stuff for each skin. Plus, I have Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell to read. It’s about 700 pages long, so we’ll see how I deal with it. And it’s due back to the library on Friday.

I don’t know how I’ll survive this term if I keep doing stuff like this. 😉

This is a stupid random post really, but for those of you who haven’t been reading the papers, or hanging around people who like Harry Potter and have been reading the papers, the sixth book (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince) is coming out on July 16th! :cheerful:

And, of course, being semi-rabid fan I am, I have placed a hold on it at the library. I’m number 65. Assuming they order about 30 copies, I should get it by early August. If I’m lucky they’ll order more than 65 and I’ll get it a few days after release.

Or, I could read it like I started reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: by reading an electronic copy of someone who probably scanned the entire book. That’s really hard on the eyes, though.

Whoo-hoo! :star:

Oh, forget political correctness. Click for the full-sized image; that WP-generated thumbnail is HIDEOUS.

Enjoy this seasonal drabbble :biggrin:

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Blogging for the sake of blogging. But I feel like asking questions.

1) Am I the only one who laughs at rappers? I mean… listening to them isn’t all that bad, really. I don’t laugh when it’s purely audio. But watching a music video… I watched the PV for “let go” and I couldn’t stop giggling at VERBAL. His movements just seemed so affected. Couldn’t stop smirking at the live performance of “miss you,” either. :biggrin:

2) What in the world is in the hot chocolate at Starbucks? It’s not very good at all v_v;; Not worth the three bucks I didn’t pay for it, anyway.

3) Is it just me, or does Gackt really, really, really look like a woman?

4) *yawns* Why are the holidays always so busy?

5) When Asian artists give their songs odd English titles, do they do it purposely, or is it the same kind of logic behind the random English on Asian stationery? Is there even logic behind those things?

6) Is re-gifting ever acceptable?

7) How much duct tape would it take to tape someone to a wall?

8) Why are busses never on time? Or is it only because spacetime is warped around bus stops?

9) When will Gmail go public? Does it really matter? Will there be another round of invitations?

10) RAWR. No, it’s not really a question, but… meh.