Japanese is a language that has interested me in over a decade as well as Japanese culture and history, both modern and ancient. I recently decided to really put an effort into trying to learn the language, and so far I have to say that it’s going pretty well. I can now read both hiragana and katakana, which means that “only” kanji remains before I can fully read a Japanese text — and by “only” I mean that’s going to be the tough part with over 2,000 regular kanji to master.

And when I say that I can read I mean that I know the syllables, that is I can pronounce the words in the text. I still don’t know many words and wouldn’t know what was written even when I know how to pronounce it. It feels kind of like you’re a little kid that can read the words very slowly, but not always have a grip of what you’re actually reading.

I’ve always been interested in language and recently gained an interest in linguistics as well. However I’m not that good when it comes to languages, sure I can read, write and speak English fluently, but for example I took French classes for four years and can barely say even a single sentence now. Besides English and Swedish I can read and understand spoken Norwegian as well as Danish (unless the speaker has a heavy dialect). I now wish that I had taken classes in German instead of French when I was in school, since I think I would have more use for German due to my interest in WWII history. But nevertheless I still have an interest in languages, and that is of key importance when you want to learn a new language. You need to be passionate about it and you need to devote a lot of time to it.

Tools for learning Japanese

This article is not intended to list good ways to learn Japanese, since I am unable to do that seeing as how I don’t know Japanese yet. But what I will do is list the different tools and sources I use right now, and then later on I intend to write more in depth articles on each of the tools I find really useful.

Course books

These first books are the course books for the Japanese courses I’m planning on taking this fall. So these are books intended for students, and I hope they will give me some good foundation to stand on.

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Nils Marius Rekkedal, a professor of war studies especially military theory, at the Swedish Försvarshögskolan (National Defence College), was last year found guilty of plagiarising others work in his 1980 thesis as well as other works done in recent years. The problem was first raised by students, who found that large portions of the textbook they were using in his course was plagiarised, and later other professors found that even his thesis extensively used other historians uncredited research as his own. Vetenskapsrådet (Swedish Research Council) were asked to look into the situation and said that they had never before seen such a serious case of plagiarism. The rector (president) of the college just came out with a statement in favour of the plagiarising professor, in which it’s stated that not only can he keep his job, but he will be able to continue leading scientific research as well as teach classes.

Even more absurd, to me at least, is the fact that other professors at the college have been warned that if they do not comply to working together with Rekkedal they may be losing their job since they then “refuse to do their job”, which is ground for firing. One last thing is that they, the other professors and everybody else involved, are not allowed to talk to anybody about this, which obviously includes the media. Recently Rekkedal himself accused on of the college’s leading professors for offensive treatment against him when the professor questioned that Rekkedal’s work was still being used in the education.

Now, why does this affect me and why do I care? Well first of all I was actually thinking about applying for a course in military history at Försvarshögskolan, something I have now decided not to do because of how the board has handled this issue. Secondly, I honestly find this offensive. There are a few rules in scientific research, one of the most basic ones is the fact that you should never plagiarise and always clearly state what work is your own and what you’ve used from other sources. If the professor in a class can’t even follow this really simple and very important rule how will that look to the students? Morally, he would not be able to, in any way, argue with the students on this issue and that’s not how it should be to study on an university level to say the least. Thirdly, I feel sorry for the other researchers at the academy. Any work they do together with Rekkedal will in the scientific community be seen as nothing more than trash and possible even as copyright infringement, there is absolutely no credibility in work that has the name NM Rekkedal next to it. For the rector to say that those that do not work with him may lose their job is so disrespectful to the honest working scientific researchers.

Things like this really pisses me off. Cite your sources, acknowledge the great research that has already been done by others and if you can’t follow this, the last thing you should be doing is teaching classes. Försvarshögskolan, I’m embarrassed by your total lack of scientific research principals and you’ve definitely lost a potential student here.

Sources:
From SR: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]
Fron DN: [1]

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Mac OS X is perfect for managing windows when switching between apps or windows with its built in Exposé feature, which neatly displays all open windows in a nice grid to give the user a good overview of where to find what and so on. However, when it comes to moving around windows and resizing them OS X is still lacking. I’ve heard many users complaining about only being able to resize windows from the lower right corner instead of all corners and sides like you can in Windows. Personally I never had any problem with the lower right corner resizing, since that is almost always the corner I would use back when I was on Windows as well. But there were other things that I did have problems with, like displaying two pages side by side or move a window from one monitor to the other.

Enter SizeUp. This application, developed by Steven Audette over at Irradiated Software, does just what I was looking for. SizeUp can move around windows, resize them and easily place several windows side by side or four on a quarter of the screen each, it can even move windows across monitors and spaces. You just use keyboard shortcuts, so you never have to use your mouse again to move a window, it’s like it was designed for my own specific needs. I must say that this application enhances my OS X experience many times over, it is so simple yet so powerful.

SizeUp is now priced at $13. Previously, when I bought it, it didn’t have a normal purchase price. Instead Irradiated Software used a payment model they called “Name Your Price!”, which meant that you could choose to pay whatever you thought the application was worth, with a minimum of $4.99 to cover PayPal expenses and so forth and a suggested price of $12.99. I was surprised to see that they had stopped using that method and went back to the more traditional way. Either way, you can read more about this on the company’s blog if you’re interested in software pricing. There is a demo you can try out which will pop up a window, every fifth of so move, about it being a demo version, I did find this pop up really annoying and it took away quite much from the experience of just using the keyboard — but I’m thankful that there was a demo, which also resulted in me paying the suggested price of $12.99 because I instantly realised the potential of this application.

If you’re the kind of person that likes to use the mouse more than keyboard shortcuts the developer has another app, Cinch, for that very reason — although it doesn’t have as many features.

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I’m so used to all my Firefox add-ons and Safari tweaks that when I first downloaded and tried Google’s Chrome browser I was in for a surprise. I had honestly forgotten how full of garbage the net is these days — or rather still is, since it’s more or less always been this way the last decade if not longer.

It’s in no way Chrome’s fault, which in fact is a pretty stable and good browser. But without my add-ons — like Adblock Plus, Greasemonkey and NoScript — the entire experience was so different from what I’m used to. Every page I visited was full of the most horrible flash ads, both with and without audio noise, and on sites like YouTube the comments took up more space than the video for example.

While on that subject, as I assume most people have discovered already, the comments on YouTube almost makes you lose faith in humanity if you still had any. I’m quite serious, during my Chrome test drive I watched some of the j-vlog videos I subscribe to via RSS and even the most helpful and friendly videos were full of several hundred hateful, sexist and just terrible comments.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but for some reason it did in at least a little bit. I’m so used to having comments hidden (with Greasemonkey) on sites like YouTube, and if anything this is a comment about myself. Anonymity and the mentality that leads to for example Godwin’s Law is something that shouldn’t surprise me, neither should ads do. But for some reason it did.

While writing this article I watched a clip, incidentally on YouTube, of the wonderful Stephen Fry when he was on The Graham Norton Show. Fry is a little bit better with the words than me and his thoughts on this subject sums up mine as well pretty perfectly:

I love the online world [...] but there is a downside, it literally is the downside. If you look at someone’s blog or you look at a YouTube film or something like that it’s filled with comments. People who have decided to be unutterably mean, unutterably resentful and angry and bitter and insulting and rude. That is the unwanted dead caterpillar in the otherwise lovely salad of the Internet. — Stephen Fry

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Okay, so I’ve really let this site sit in a dark corner for quite some time now. Which is rather sad since I love writing and was also hoping I could use this as a tool for remembering some of the stuff I’ve learned. Well that hasn’t happened so far, but I’m not giving up just yet. It’s time for a reboot, and this time I have at least prepared a bit and have a few articles to release in the next couple of days, along with a long list of ideas for further articles.

A few quick updates before I end this rather mundane post. I’m currently trying to learn Japanese, which is both fun and something I think will be useful in the future. I can already read both hiragana and katakana after just two weeks — it’s always more enjoyable when you really see the progress in front of you. One of the coming articles will be about the tools I use for learning Japanese. I just finished a course on WWII that resulted in a 48 page essay and I had such a great time writing it, although the seven course books was a bit of a struggle at times during the short ten week course which was only suppose to be part-time.

It seems like MacHeist season is about to begin again, which means that I will at the very least get a few new Mac applications to play with. I’ll definitely write some articles both on the apps from MacHeist and the experience, including the often superb but sometimes controversial marketing.

Finally I just wanted to make a quick comment on the fact that I love british comedy. Everything from QI to Peep Show and Coupling. These past months haven’t been easy to say the least, but being able to laugh for a few seconds or minutes is pretty much priceless.

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The county administrative board of Gävleborg closed a service today, after it had been up and running for just one week. The service allowed visitors to track local wolfs locations on an interactive map. The idea behind the service was to give hunters the ability to check where the wolfs where, so that they could stay on a safe distance from them in order to protect their hunting dogs from possible wolf attacks. Sounds like a good plan? Well that was what the Gävleborg Board thought at least.

New information has surfaced, actually some of this information became known to the local police on the very same day the website went online. The problem is that poachers use the service to track the wolfs in order to hunt them down. Wolfs are always a hot debate topic here in Sweden and there are several groups that would like to see the wolfs gone, or at least diminish them.

I think this is a perfect example of why it’s important to think your design through before you release it. Give people the ability to track certain animals and there are bound to be consequences—I for one would have loved the service so that I could be able to find great locations where I can find and photograph these beautiful animals. Instead of protecting the dogs the result was an illegal hunt of wolfs. It’s crucial in the design process to sit down and try to picture all the different effects the design might produce. Obviously, this is easier said then done—but it’s the designers obligation to do so.

If “we” as designers are narrow minded and only think about one possible usage of the service we are designing, then we have failed. We have an ethical responsibility when we’re designing. It’s impossible to foresee all different affects an application or a system might have. Everybody is individual and due to several varying factors the end user will use the product in unpredictable ways. That being said, even I would have raised my hand in a meeting during the design process if I was developing the aforementioned service. It’s such an obvious vicious usage of the service that I’m right out shocked that it was even released.

Source (in Swedish): SR.se: Tjuvjägare utnyttjade vargwebb

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I’ve been frustrated at Microsoft Office for several years now, especially Microsoft Word. Word is broken, it’s as easy as that. And I’m not just talking about the Mac version of Word but the Windows version as well. So, this frustration is the main reason why I wanted something else, something that actually worked. I’ve tried Open Office before, but it never really works as I wanted it to either, it’s a great project and concept, but I personally did not like using it. I didn’t have to look very far, I simply tried out Apple’s iWork (I’ve used both ’06 and ’08). iWork is simply amazing, it actually works.

Pages

Pages, which is both a word processor and a page layout application, could be compared to Microsoft Word in the word processor department, but Pages is so much more according to me. The grammar and spell checking works a bit differently and both the applications has their pros and cons here, Word however supports more languages than Pages does.

The true power of Pages is it’s simplicity. And with that I don’t mean that it lacks functionality, I mean that the software is simple to use, everything is located where you would imagine it to be (something that can’t be said about Word where most things are in weird places that you only know where they are because you’ve used the application for so long). It’s very simple to change a setting for either an individual paragraph or the entire document.

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I decided to start the new year with a new project — this site. I’ve had the idea for quite some time now, but wasn’t sure if I would be able to dedicate the needed time for it before. I really enjoy my studies and I think writing about what I learn and figure out will be very beneficial for myself. I’m not quite sure yet which direction the content will go in, hopefully it will be a bit of a mix but with the same foundation, which is information system science, (web) design and development.

Right now I’m studying for my exams in the courses “Design of IT” and “Database Systems I”. Besides the studies I’ve also recently started working with jQuery, which I think will be a great tool once I wrap my head around the “new” possibilities when I’m designing new sites. It feels like I’m still kind of stuck in the old way and so far haven’t had many practical uses for jQuery on any of my sites, but I think that will change soon, and if it does I’ll write down what I’ve done. I’ve also just started to dig into really learning Adobe’s Illustrator, I’ve often overlooked Illustrator and used Photoshop or InDesign instead. Now I’ve started to see the major benefits and will try to bring out my creative side again which has been a bit inactive lately.

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One month ago, the 14th of July 2007, I stood there on the beach outside of Falkenberg. But I didn’t stand alone, you were right there beside me, as you’ve always been for these past six years. It’s been an incredible journey so far, many rough parts and deep valleys, but I sense that some beautiful landscapes lies ahead of us.

Our wedding was the best one I could have ever imagined for us, just a private ceremony at the beach followed by a picnic in the sand dunes. This might sound like a cliché, but I guess there’s a reason behind that, but it was one of the best days of my life. I felt a bit silly during the ceremony, because all I could do was smile, I was so happy that my brain stopped functioning from time to time.

With the wedding we didn’t just exchange rings (yeah I have two rings now, one engagement ring and one wedding ring) we also changed our last names. Instead of Sanna taking my name or the other way around we simply decided to start a new family name together – Silverglimth.

A married man, that’s what I am now. It feels wonderful to finally be able to call Sanna my wife. I knew there was something about her the first time I laid my eyes on her. It seems like it was decades ago, that first day when we both sat on my couch in my room at my parents house. Two teenagers that turned into a married couple in a villa, and I love it – I wouldn’t change one thing that we’ve been through.

Sanna Lindgren + Fredrik Nyman = Mr. & Mrs. Silverglimth

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