cry havoc

I need three people who can test a site for me, preferably on IE8, IE9, or Chrome. It's an application to apply to sell items at a festival. We've got actual sellers testing the site, but I wanted a few folks who are savvy enough to be able to:

1) break stuff
2) catch any strange spelling, grammar, or just plain "you said this weird" errors/issues
3) think of any exceptions ("what if I wanted to do X instead of Y?" or "what if I changed this?")
4) are thorough enough and willing to spend an hour or so testing, and then follow-up and do it again once I've gone through and fixed anything found in the first round.

I can do paypal or Amazon gift card to you, 50USD total (for all of it, first test and follow-up to make sure I didn't miss anything). If you don't have paypal but you have a US mailing address, I can have a check mailed to you, instead. I'll be opening the app for testing probably Sunday evening, with the following Friday the deadline for first round. Then I'll spend the weekend making any changes, and then stay out of it for a week for the second round of testing. In case that's not clear, it's so you can do the tests at your convenience anytime from Monday morning to Friday afternoon. Well, Friday afternoon central US time, that is. So, uhm, Thursday afternoon if you're in Australia.

If you're interested, comment with your email so I can get ahold of you, first-come-first-answer. All replies will be screened. TIA!

ETA: Alright, I've got three, so thanks all!

...since anything is better than what I've got, which is nothing. There's a company that sends me email every single night, and I don't recall ever signing up for getting their shopping newsletter with whatever wacky Japanese department store stuff's on special that day. Normally this wouldn't be an issue, since the link at the bottom would be to unsubscribe, right? So very wrong: one link takes you to a log-in (and if you can't recall your password, it requires your name, your birthdate, and something else, and chances are good I didn't even entire the real thing, 'cause I never do unless c'card information is coming next). The other link takes you to the company's terms of service, and if you click on the "english" link, it doesn't give you the page in English. It gives you some other page about investing (in the company). I just want to bloody well unsubscribe, but there's no link (that I can see) that lets me do this quickly or easily.

Is there anyone on my flist/dwircle fluent enough in Japanese to help me decode this, and possibly figure out how to unsubscribe? I have tonight's email, and I know the address it's sending it to, and all I want is to make them stop sending me emails. The other option is to change my email, but that's a last-ditch thing seeing how it's gmail, not my own domain, so that's more of a hassle. But sheesh, this is annoying. Are unsubscribe options only a western expectation? or are unsubscribe options just spelled out in the kana, with no actual links? No idear.

*cries* I promise to love you and cherish you and call you George, if someone happened to have a few minutes to help me figure it out, or point me where to send an email to ask them to unsubscribe.

but if anyone knows the answer, it'd be one of you. I'm sure of it.

There was a recent ruling in the US, I thought, as regards translations -- that the translator owns copyright. Is this true, and wouldn't that mean that if your translation is stolen and posted without your permission, you have essentially a kind of copyright holder's right to have it removed?

Just wondering how far that ruling (if I'm remembering it right) would carry.

Currently having a slight mental breakdown over the tanks that just arrived. Not from a Taiwanese publisher like I'd thought, but from a Hong Kong publisher. Which for a moment made me happy, until I realized, it's traditional. Why is a HK publisher using traditional? As if it's not bad enough that the publisher's using characters that I haven't seen at all (from reading Taiwanese scans), they can't even be arsed to simply keep the original kanji for Japanese place-names. No, they're spelling out names phonetically, like instead of 名古屋 it's 那古野 (na-gu-ye?) so I spent several long minutes utterly baffled. At least most of the personal names (so far) have kept to the original Japanese, and thank the heavens for Wiki including the kanji for non-English names.

But still: why is a Hong Kong publisher, of a work that (according to the inner page) should only be distributed in Hong Kong (ahem), using traditional? Is this some kind of a political statement, or is there something else going on?

Because it just seems to me that if it's a manga that's supposed to be for readers 15-22, wouldn't most of those readers, post-98, have been educated in simplified per the switch back to PRC-rule? Wouldn't traditional be making the text just that much more complicated, comparatively?

Sheesh. It's like I can't win, sometimes. Taiwanese is traditional, and that's hard enough, but at least I've finally got the hang of the more common Taiwanese slang/colloquial... and now, looks like I have to do it all over again with HK.

sob, sob.

[Note: get a drink and have a seat. This is almost up to my usual levels of longwindedness, but this time, I do have a point! Other than the one on the top of my head.]

I came across an insightful comment the other day while researching, and the comment resonated with me strongly in light of the requirements compiling I was tackling at the same time.

"If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold." -- blue_beetle

Think about that for a bit, but first I want to run past everyone some of the thoughts bouncing in my head as a result of researching Delicious, Diigo, Pinboard, and various other (past and present) bookmarking applications. One particular journal entry (from 2008) compares Delicious and Diigo, though I'll rephrase some of the author's conclusions, since I think he got his main summary backwards. Here's the basis of his argument, thought:

Delicious, an original web 2.0 company, still has “user-generated” as its core raison d’être. Diigo has the later-stage web 2.0 philosophy of being a “social network”.

In essence (and to undo the backwards of his summary): Delicious is grounded in using content to find users, while Diigo emphasizes using users to find content. Somehow, I'm not surprised that so far, of the folks replying to my informal poll, that most of you have indicated that you follow the content and then, as a secondary step, discover like-minded users -- seeing how many of you have said you preferred old!delicious and don't like or care for the diigo approach.

Granted, these two things (users, content) are intertwined: you find a tag you want to follow, you start seeing the same names pop up, you realize the same people are marking things you're also liking, and you may switch your focus from the tag to the user, in hopes they'll lead you to even better stuff.

Here's the crux, though: what is the actual product?

This shit ain't free, y'know. Servers and storage and developers and designers don't just grow on trees. It's got to be paid for, either in cash or in kind or in stock or in some way, but usually cash since most landlords & mortgage companies don't accept vegetables, these days. If you see a product that you can consume, and it's free, someone paid for it. Maybe not you, but someone: NSTaaFL, after all.

( Let me step back here, to the days when I first found an investor, wrote a business plan, and opened a bookstore... and other commentary about the dot-com and post-dot-com business models. )

More thoughts later. For now, it's your turn.

Alright, here's what I've compiled so far. The real thanks go to everyone who contributed on the post: qem_chibati, haruka89, franzeska, cimorene, drunkoffthestars, zellieh, branchandroot, rageprufrock, bluevsgrey, brownbetty, shadytail, yeomanrand, 37cats, neotoma, and I really hope I didn't forget anyone!

It's not the prettiest formatting, but hopefully it's more readable.

( draft #2, w/paraka's ideas added )

http://en.viki.com/channels/1783-material-queen/videos/48340/3#231

There's a song playing from about 3:50 to 5:30, and I can't find it anywhere, no idea who sings it. No one's come forward on viki or baidu to name it, either. Any chance someone here recognizes it?

(No, this has nothing to do with any plans for world domination. JUST ASKIN', really.)

What happens if more than 50% of your country's tangible property -- land -- is purchased/owned/occupied by nationals of another country? I mean, is there any scenario in which you could visualize or rationalize or imagine buying out a country? Or maybe just causing significant political shifts (assuming it's a multi-party and/or non-authoritarian regime)? Or... what happens when refugees from another country completely overwhelm the existing population (numbers-wise)? Could you end up with such chaos that the country ends up in a state of quasi-claimant by the nationals of a second country?

Feel free to reference books, movies, other fiction that's addressed such ideas, or your own experience and/or theories, academic or just fantastical, or real-world political, economic, financial, etc.

[Consider it purely curiosity on my part, but probably a curiosity that's buttressed by my own culture's assumptions that a nation is made up of its people & its land, which is where the foregone conclusion resides that a massive paradigm shift of people & ownership would have to, therefore, affect the nation as a whole.]

For the Korean or Korean-familiar folks on my flist, there seem to be several ways to anglicize the honorific, but I'm not sure if there's some rule going on here or if it's just personal preference or something:

ajusshi
ajeoshi
ajeosshi

is there a most-common or most-accepted way to anglicize it?


I see the 'eo' for 'u' every now and then, like 'Jeong' for 'Jung', but I've also noticed that this 'eo' gets included most often when it's a Chinese-speaking person doing the anglicizing. Maybe it's an ear-thing, in terms of the sounds we're primed to hear, depending on our language, so to Mandarin-ears, the 'u' sounds closest to the sound that'd get an 'eo' combination in pinyin, or something?

Watching Jin and there's talk of a cholera epidemic four years before the show (a time-travelling history work) takes place -- that would be the massive cholera outbreak of 1858, apparently. In the show, there's word that cholera has returned and naturally the population of Edo (and the few doctors, especially those trained in Western/Dutch medicine) are panicked about it.

Naturally this prompted another foray into wiki and beyond, into pdfs and google-books history analyses and texts, because hell if I know jack about cholera. It's just not an illness I've run into, or that has ever been a threat, in the part of the world where I live (though it does continue to be a threat in many other parts of the world). I had thought it was a virus, but it's not; it's a bacterium.

Doesn't that mean that if you were exposed to cholera and managed to be one of the one-in-two to one-in-twenty who survived (honestly, a 50% death rate is just unfathomable)... that your body would have developed the antibodies? Wouldn't that mean that epidemics would be separated by generations, because it'd take time before a large enough percentage of the population existed that had not been exposed? So you might have an outbreak four years later, but wouldn't it be substantially smaller due to a large part of the (surviving) population having developed antibodies -- in other words, city-newcomers and young children would be struck, but anyone who'd been around four years earlier might not be affected?

Or do bacteria mutate, such that a return of cholera could actually be a different strain? I know viruses mutate (and that's why they're so difficult to treat and/or inoculate, something to do with having to inoculate against the specific virus and if you're exposed to a different strain, the inoculation does little to nothing)... but I thought the life-cycle of bacteria changes was much slower, comparatively. At least, that's my uneducated reasoning, given how long it's taken bacteria to develop antibiotic-resistance. (I thought viruses develop a resistance much faster, because they change/mutate faster.)

Just curious; hoping someone might know because I'm failing at the google to find any article that answers that specific question.

Incidentally, wiki also notes that in terms of treatment: "Rice-based solutions are preferred to glucose-based ones due to greater efficiency." I wonder who first realized that, and was able to compare the two. I presume someone in Asia, since I doubt a rice-based anything would've been first on the list in Europe, rice not being a major staple of diet for most of European history. At least, that's my guess. Hell if I know, really.

Man, watching historical dramas (from any country) always ends up with me running to wiki to look stuff up, even moreso when it's not my own country's history. Get into time-travel stories and it's even worse, because characters will know or reference something and I'm lost. Although this time, at least, I got that one reference -- when the from-the-now doctor asks a young woman of Edo, "what year is it?" She replies, "the second year of Buncho" (something like that). He draws a complete blank -- he's a doctor, after all, not a historian. He waffles about, trying to figure it out, then lands on a definitive historical landmark: "have the black ships arrived?" Ah, she answers, that was ten years ago. Ahaha, do the math, it's 1862.

The show's full of nice little touches like that, like when the young lady offers to run back and get the medicines she'd missed. The doctor -- with patient at hand, needing attention -- asks how long that'll take. She replies, "a moment." How long, he asks, is a moment? She says, indignant, "a moment is a moment." Frustrated, he finally asks, "how much of the day will pass?" We take "hours" and "minutes" for granted now. It's almost incomprehensible to think of a time in which there's no knowledge of the passage of time, even when we don't have a clock right there on our wrist.

Well, incomprehensible... but not nearly as much as trying to fathom a disease that took out one person in every twenty.

(Incidentally, some of the epidemiology articles I've found suggest that Japan's deathrate was lower due to the Japanese habit of boiling water prior to drinking.)