It's hard to keep up with Chinese slang when you're living "abroad", so I get excited when I run across pieces like John's (IM?) conversation with jennifer. At the very end, John says this:

潘吉 说：我要下班！

潘吉 说：８８

John said: I'm off work.

John said: 88

At first I was confused: what does "88" mean? My guess was that the key is to say it phonetically, "ba ba", which sounds like "bai bai", or "bye bye".

In fact, a Google search shows that such phonetic plays-on-words are very popular in Chinese, no doubt due to the new cellphone culture. A few good examples:

88 = bye bye,白白，拜拜，再見。

"ba ba" = "bai bai", goodbye

9494 = 就是就是。

"jiu su jiu si" = "jiu shi jiu shi", sure sure (but not in the sarcastic sense).

04551 = 你是我唯一

"ling si wu wu yi" = "ni shi wo wei yi", you're the only one for me.

Some of these number puns show the influence of other languages:

4人民 = 為人民。4為for.

this is a play on the english "four" = "for", because 為 (wei) means "for"

+U = 加油。

"+ U" = "jia you", another play on the English "U" sounding (or reading) like "you".

39 = Thank you

Knowing that 9 is "kyuu" in Japanese, "san kyuu" = Thank you.

⋯⋯ing 　 表示進行時。

...ing, means the transitive tense, and is a cross-over from English.

⋯⋯的說 　來自日語語法“⋯⋯と����ます”，表示認為、覺得。

...的說 is from the Japanese "...と����ます", and shows that the preceding is an opinion, or a supposition.

The tough use print, but the smart use something like this bit of Perl:

my debug = 1 ; sub err { my $msg = shift ; print "err: $msg\n" if $debug; }

George suggests an improvement in the comments.

To the folks who read this for news from me:

I left Ann Arbor on Friday the 12th. Thanks for the ride, John and Josh. At the airport, I was involved in a small mix-up. I had booked and payed for my ticket online but I didn't bother to write down a confirmation number or remember what airline I was flying, only that my flight left Detroit on Friday at 7:30pm. Unbelievably, the check-in counters have no way to search other flights leaving from that airport that day. Kindly, Joyce of the Spirit counter called Orbitz and found out that my reservation was on Northwest, so I shuttled over to the other terminal and checked in succesfully. Take-off was delayed by an hour due to mechanical problems, but I had an empty seat next to me, sat by the aisle, and slept most of the way to LA. I really should drop my habit of not sleeping the night before a flight, but it sure is darned convenient for cutting down perceived flight time.

I've been lazing around home for the last couple days, polishing up some wiki development work, reading, watching Japanese soaps on channel 18, visiting relatives, etc. On Saturday I talked with Ted about our China2004 trip, and today I ordered a digital camera for keeping a visual record of our travels. NewEgg has been good to me before, it should be here in a few days.

John G, I picked up the Chitra Banerjee book you pointed out at After Words, it's not my cup of tea, but I bought it fully intendeing to leave it with my mother, who really enjoyed the Maladies book. They're birds of a feather.

It's 9:20pm and I can hear the Disneyland fireworks finale popping just over the horizon.

Be back in a year, Ann Arbor.

Over the past few weeks, I have been procrastinating from finishing my Econ paper by hacking on the Kwiki Wiki. A few months ago I set up a personal wiki to organize my thoughts, make to-do lists, and post recipes. Over time, I discovered that there were certain data structures that I wanted to use but Kwiki didn't support, so I implemented a flexible alternative to DefinitionListFormatter (see my code on the same page), and a new procedure to mark-up email style blockquotes. Presuming myself to be a perl programmer-in-training, I borrowed heavily from code by Kwiki originator Brian Ingerson and ArchLUG KwikiMaster mike808. I was very happy this week when my blockquote code was turned into a MyFormatter subclass, and I got this message from mike808:

mike808 -- See? Refactoring and OO ain't too hard after all. :=) Welcome aboard, Micah.

So you'll now find MicahSittig in one more place.

And I quote:

WFUS53 KDTX 091745 TORDTX MIC161-091900- BULLETIN - EAS ACTIVATION REQUESTED TORNADO WARNING NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DETROIT/PONTIAC MI 145 PM EDT WED JUN 9 2004 THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN DETROIT/PONTIAC HAS ISSUED A * TORNADO WARNING FOR... WASHTENAW COUNTY IN SOUTHEAST MICHIGAN * UNTIL 300 PM EDT * AT 140 PM EDT...NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DOPPLER RADAR INDICATED A SEVERE THUNDERSTORM CAPABLE OF PRODUCING A TORNADO 14 MILES WEST OF CHELSEA...OR ABOUT 9 MILES NORTHEAST OF JACKSON...MOVING EAST AT 35 MPH. * THE TORNADO WILL BE NEAR... CHELSEA AROUND 205 PM EDT DEXTER AROUND 215 PM EDT ANN ARBOR AROUND 230 PM EDT 8 MILES NORTH OF YPSILANTI AROUND 240 PM EDT IF YOU ARE IN THE PATH OF A TORNADO...THE SAFEST PLACE IN A HOME OR BUSINESS IS AN INTERIOR ROOM ON THE LOWEST FLOOR POSSIBLE. AVOID WINDOWS. LAT...LON 4243 8413 4223 8413 4222 8357 4244 8357 $$ BT / SC

The neighborhood tornado siren just went off.

2:18 - Black couds have rolled over the sky, the wind is picking up. Trees are whipping around, and a light rain has begun to fall.

2:48 - After about 5 minutes of heavy rain, we have settled into an overcast sky, occasional thunder and a light drizzle. According to the tornado warning, the worst is past. This was very anti-climatic.

You might think that Googling for Sandbox in Chinese would turn up a few wikis that could tell you how to write the word in that language. Nope, most of the search results are English-language blogs that have been spammed heavily by Chinese businesses, so Google has reclassified them as Chinese-language web pages.

I bought my plane ticket this morning. I leave Friday evening from Detroit, so I'll be back in LA late Friday night. I still have to take care of a few things, like getting transcripts for Taiwan from the registrar and figuring out what to do with the Michigan football season tickets I payed for a couple months ago.

It helps one to parse The Streets' Fit But You Know It if one is clear on the definitions of to shark and to pull.

(I've made the song available for a limited time)

Sometimes, the way you hear the words to a song isn't the way it actually goes, but it speaks better to where you are at the moment.

I'm tryin' to be all yours,
althought I ain't aswering your calls.

—Luomo, Tessio

I'm already late to Access, I think I'll just take my time wandering over there.