Well, my desktop PC was working a week ago, though the connection to the Net was dead. (Someone apparently cut the LAN cable during the renovations in the building where my office is located.) But last week I went in to print some files, and discovered that, all of a sudden, the damned thing was refusing to boot up. Some kind of hal.dll file in the System32 folder is ganked, and I haven’t been able to make it work again. The recovery CD and boot CD aren’t working. I’m getting close to the point where I’ll have to sigh and …
Month: September 2006
Current Positional Adjustments
New semester adjustments: There’s some new kind of antivirus apps on the uni PCs. They do such lovely things as prevent you installing the apps you need and nobody else needs, like apps that play both sound and subtitled for ripped DVDs that have not been released in Asia. There’s a workaround, sort of. But I hope it stays worked around long term. There’s some kind of SQL thing running on all the PCs too, and you can’t log out of it without a password of some kind. Ack! I’m trying to slow down my speech again. Having been out …
Bamboozled Redux
I just watched the Spike Lee movie again, and I gotta say, it really got me… again. I don’t get what people had against this film. The only thing I can think is that it cuts close to too many uncomfortable, sad, embarrassing truths on (all?) sides, maybe? I see those cartoons, those skits, the long set of clips at the end of the movie, and then I think of how blacks, whites, and other people are portrayed in the media in the country where I live, and I wonder: will my students get what the hell I am talking …
… San Peu-ran-shi-seu-ko~~~…
UPDATE (11/09/2006): There are a number of factual errors in this post, as to the derivation of specific Korean pop-music words. Check out Charles’ comment (appended to this post) for more info. Yeah, just goes to show you that you can’t take it for granted when people explain something to you that they actually know what they’re talking about, as I was assured of the derivation of these words more than once, back in my Iksan days. Shrug. Actually, that’s an exaggeration. The title of this post, I mean. Tonight, on the way home from the grocery store, I decided …
On Appropriation, Race, Popular Culture, and Dorky White Asiaphiles
So I happened upon this blog post at reappropriate, and it got me thinking. To be honest, I didn’t trawl my way through all the comments that followed the post, but I did read a fair number of them. I was tempted to respond with something snide about how young people are so apt to map their personal anger into statements about the entire world, couched in politics for the greater safety from criticism and negative response. But I decided that, as generalizing and as mistaken as parts of the post are (in my opinion), it’s unfair to respond in …