The Young Man Who Wanted to Get Rich - original text

It's more than a few years ago now that I wrote my first (and almost assuredly my last) short story in Japanese, "The Young Man Who Wanted to Get Rich". By the time I finally got around to publishing it online, I thought I had lost the original Japanese manuscript, and had to content myself with adding a brief note that it was "translated from the original Japanese by the author". Today, I finally found the original Japanese manuscript!

Here, for those who can read Japanese or are interested in such details, is a scanned PDF of the story as I wrote it in the original Japanese.

The Browser is the OS!

The title of this post is also the title of the last link I bothered to post on Del.icio.us, as I had come close to finding something that I had been searching for for years. The link was to Webconverger, a minimal Linux distro which consisted of only enough back-end to run the Firefox web-browser as a web-kiosk. Now Google plans to go one better, finally announcing that it is, in fact, working on its own long-rumoured OS which, not surprisingly, will consist of an absolutely minimal Linux core - just enough to get Google Chrome up and running.

Interestingly, Google Chrome is not yet available for Linux! - although that may now be attributable to the fact that Google is not as interested in getting Chrome to run on Linux as it is in getting Linux to run just Chrome. As the browser becomes the OS, I think we will see netbooks finally start living up to their names! Now I can hardly wait to nuke XP on my HP 2133 and replace it with the new Google Chrome OS. Watch out Microsoft! Google is hard on your heels...

Interesting carrot from the church garden

Odd though it may seem, this carrot was delicious!

Life is Good

Life is good, and then it's bad,

  and then it's good again.

But if this life were all we had,

  I ask, would it have been

worth all the effort, all the trouble,

  only to have it turn to rubble?

But if this life is not the end,

  but just the shadow of

the tragicomical Event

  upon the stage above,

I ask, would it not be worthwhile

  if that event were Love?

One of my Japan poems, composed shortly before the Great Kobe Earthquake in January of 1995.

"Had an app for that..."

Looks like Apple, in a bid to stop some very marginal illegal (or grey) app-copying, may be considering removing our ability to re-download apps we've purchased over the air. iPhone 3.0 is still in beta, of course, and the reports of those who are running it vary (not surprisingly), but some users are reporting that if you try to re-download an app that you've purchase (as I've had to when my daughter accidentally deletes an app by pressing too long on an icon on the home screen and then taps the "X" that appears) some versions of the 3.0 beta won't let you re-download over the air without paying - instead they require you to re-download it via iTunes and sync your device, an inconvenient process which I avoid as much as possible! My two bits, for whatever they're worth:

1. If you've purchased an app, it's yours - you shouldn't have to re-purchase it for any reason!
2. I really, really hope Apple finds another way to resolve this - or at the very least enables syncing with iTunes over WiFi. That wouldn't eliminate the annoying sync process, but at least it would avoid the unnecessary hassle of having to hunt down a physical cable and leave your phone tethered to your computer for an extended period of time.

All that being said, this could all be cited as a classic example of our society's "instant entitlement" attitude - when one considers how difficult re-installing software on a desktop can be (grr... DRM!), having to physically sync one's phone with iTunes is not really that much of a hassle that it's worth complaining about. Still, when a technological convenience exists and then is taken away from us, it shouldn't be surprising if we see it as an unnecessary and inconsiderate step backwards...

I Want to Wave!

Google Wave, just unveiled today (well, yesterday, actually, now) at Google I/O, Google's developer's conference, has the potential to revolutionize the internet, just as e-mail transformed the nascent internet itself from a tool for remotely controlling and communicating with distant computers into a medium for transferring information between distant computer users. If this is done right (as it appears Google is doing, open-sourcing their software and turning Wave itself into an open protocol), we could be witnessing the rise of Web 3.0!

I want to Wave!

Official Google Blog: Supporting equality???

Official Google Blog: Supporting equality

This is when I am ashamed to be such a big fan of Google. Same-sex marriage is not a "fundamental right" - it is a redefinition of the concept of marriage that is at odds with the understanding of marriage held by every major religious tradition and most historical cultures. It has nothing to do with hiring or search or equality: being denied the right to call their same-sex union a "marriage" will not make Google's employees significantly less efficient; Google's stance on this issue seriously compromises the neutrality that I would expect a company committed to internet search would be concerned to maintain; and, as a secular company, Google has no special expertise to offer on the important moral and cultural question of whether or not allowing same-sex unions to be called "marriages" is a question of "equality" or merely a matter of personal preference.

Please, Google, concentrate on what you do best: providing quick, unbiased search results in an internet-friendly fashion. And if you are really committed to equality and to not being evil (both good things!), please allow for the possibility that there might be some truth in the religious traditions and philosophical beliefs that have lead so many to object to such a radical redefinition of marriage.

This Is Not a Frame - and Is

I have been meaning, for some time now, to publish this essay of mine, based on Foucault's This Is Not a Pipe, and Magritte's Ceci n'est pas une pipe:

Enclosed in the framing essay is an earlier essay about Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics [Google Book link]. The poem that begins the enclosed essay was written while I was working as a missionary/English-teacher in Shukugawa, Japan, and the essay as a whole deals with epistomological and linguistic issues that I had begun wrestling with in my final year of high-school and which ultimately led me to convert to Orthodox Christianity.

Anyhow, without further ado, here is a link to a scanned PDF of the essay in question, "This Is Not a Frame - and Is". Enjoy!