cat /proc/claus

Today was the Japanese Proficiency Test. Me and Marilia went down to Waseda University to take the first level. Well, I was mostly there to support her, since I didn’t study TO the test myself (so most probably won’t make it). But besides using more unusual/difficult words/grammar, there isn’t a whole lot of difference between JLPT levels 2 and 1.

However, what really impressed me were the HUGE lines for the female bathrooms in the test breaks. The test is divided in 3 sessions (vocabulary/listening/reading-grammar), and there is a 40 minute break between each session.

And at every break, each and all the female bathrooms in the 6 story building where the test was taking place had lines with more than 15-20 people in it.

The “female bathroom line” phenomenon is something that always makes me wonder. The few times that I ever saw a line in a male bathroom (like in Central Station in NY), the first thing that comes to my mind is “Gosh, so many people using the bathroom at once, it must be filthy by the time my turn comes” - and by then I just decided that I could go to the bathroom once I’m back home.

And bathroom filth should be something that does not affect males as much as females!

Now, doing some quick numbers, suppose six bathrooms, in three breaks, and suppose the line only goes over only 1 time during the break - 20 people per break per bathroom -> 20 x 3 x 6 - 360 girls going to the bathroom. Now, suppose we got 10 rooms with about 60 students each -> 600 students, and 50% of each room are women.

It means that on average, each girl goes 1.2 times to the small, overused, dirty bathrooms during the tests!*

It really makes no sense.

(I’m probably underestimating the number of people taking the test at my building - but I’m also underestimating the number of people who go to the bathroom - and I think the second underestimation is more conservative than the first)

Today I was supposed to write a Post about having installed Ubuntu in my academic laptop - but it so happens that I can remember exactly its model number, and the post would be quite useless without mentioning the model of the little computer So I’ll have to leave the ubuntu post to a later occasion - hopefully still this week.

Instead, I’ll discuss a somewhat more “philosophical” subject - naming computers.

To tell the truth, I have never meaningfully named my computers before. I had this “rule”, where I would name my computers after female friends of mine. I don’t remember exactly when I decided that. Maybe it was when I received “my” first laptop from my mother, near the end of my undergrad carrier - since it was my first mobile computer, it made no sense to name it in a similar fashion to the other computer in the networks they belonged (like the the computers in my student house, which were all named after Lego sets).

So, why female friends? There is no deep reasoning for that, to tell the truth. It was nice naming my computer after females, but I didn’t feel like using personalities, or any particular fictional characters. Since I was moving to Japan at the time, using the names of my friends felt like a tribute to my past life - I would remember them while working/studying/etc. But this is retconning my reason - It was a spurn of the moment kind of decision, and I just stuck to it for lack of anything better.

Until this week, when I had the chance to name two computers of mine, which systems I had re-installed (more on that on another post). This time, I had just finished reading the Chobits manga series. Removing the sugary plot and the Dragonball Z moments, that comic invites you to a few reflections - like the nature of the relationships between people and machines.

In Chobits, Persocons were part of the daily life of most people, just like PCs are becoming today. Among the major and minor characters, we had those who hated Persocons, those who treated them like people - depending on them, or loving them, those who saw them as entertaining machines, those who saw them as working tools, those who saw them as sex toys, etc, etc, etc.

From that, I started thinking: How do _I_ see PCs?

After thinking for a small while, I came to the conclusions that I see PCs as PLACES. When I use a computer, I don’t feel like I’m using an object, as much as I’m using some toy (program), inside a big room (computer) - Each of the computers I interact day to day have their own quirks and feel, but not like a particular object, or like a “person” (person, pet, animal, character, etc) - but like a living space, like a room, apartment, office, house, etc.

Thus I decided to change my naming convention for computers I own - Instead of people’s name, I decided to use names of fictional places from books/movies I read/saw.

If you took the time to read up to here, why don’t you contribute with your personal method for naming computers? And for those scowling me with “why would I name a computer?”, remember that even if you don’t think about giving computers a particular name, you still need to name them when you put them up on a network - and having a system to name them makes things easier if you want to assemble a network with more than one computer.

See you!

Japanese are often dissed about the way that they butcher foreign words. “Garaigo” is a term for foreign words “re-written” in the japanese phonetic system (which is simple, with 5 vowels and few consonantal sounds).

However, people from other places are often guilty of the very same crime - using foreign words without regards for their actual reading.

Case in point, I’m playing D&D with my thurdays role-playing group. I was first playing with a dwarvish berserker who charged his way to his own death. Then I started a young, brash fighter type. The name of the dwarf was “Banta” - which is pronounced more or less as バンタ, but none of the other players (most of them native english speakers), could get the name right. I heard bunta, bento, beitar, lots of variations - and things just got worse after I wrote the name down.

I named my next character “Chatorix” (from Chatotorix, the Brazilian translation name of Assurancetourix, the bard from Asterix comics). And he’s already been called “Chatrix” and “Chatris”

I certainly won’t let english speakers bash japanese’s accent unpunished next time

I am sometimes asked to proofread papers in english written by folks in my laboratory. Today was no different. I actually enjoy doing this kind of work, but that is not what I want to talk about.

Today, while proof-reading another paper, it came to me that one of the mistakes I see most often is the incorrect usage of “a/an” and “the”. There are people with varying degrees of proficiency in english in my lab, but regardless of that, this is the most common mistake (at least the one I remember seeing most).

Also, it seems to me that more often than not, the problem is an extra “the”, where none was needed, or a “the” instead of an “a/an”. I don’t usually see a lacking “the” (they do exist, however).

I wonder why.

The past two weeks I was in a trip to the US. It’s a bit strange going to the US as a tourist, when you have a very active online life on western websites. At the same time, nothing is really unexpected, AND you see many surprises here and there.

One of the things that caught me by surprise in the US trip was the “tipping” culture. There, you are supposed to add 15% to 20% of the value of a service as “tips” to your server. This is often paid in restaurants, taxi rides, services, et cetera. The servers, in turn, are expected to earn the larger part of their income as tips, to the point where their “official” income is reduced according to the ammount of tips they receive.

While tipping is not compulsory in paper, in practice you HAVE to do it. I had a friend being insulted by a cab driver because he didn’t tip him, and I heard a story of a guy who was kicked out of a nightclub for not tipping the waitress. My girlfriend’s friends, who were working there in their summer holidays, told me that in their restaurants the servers were reluctant to take tables where foreigners were seated, knowing that many of them didn’t know about the U.S. tipping culture.

I personally didn’t like it one bit. Tipping, in my mind, was a way to thank someone for a job well done. You would pay a little more than requested as to say “here, you deserve it”. However, as it becomes required, it loses that meaning. Actually, it becomes even worse, since you give that money you’re not theoretically “required” to give… or else.

Also, as Juliana puts it, it is a way for employers to show artifically lower prices, by skimping on the payment of their employees. They shift the struggle for higher earnings from employees expecting rises from their employers, to employees
expecting higher tips from their customers. They tried to do that in Brazil once, some years ago. Restaurants started asking a fixed 10% gratuity in their bills. People started complaining, and it was decided that this was a technique for artificially rising the stated prices, and now most don’t do this anymore, or, if they do, it is clearly stated that the “10%” is optional.

Well, all I know is that I felt ankward adding the tips every time I went out to eat anything in the US. Together with the “invisible taxes” (sales taxes are almost never added to the listed prices in the US, another (minor) gripe of mine during that trip), the real price of eating out was usually about 30% more expensive than the listed price.