cat /proc/claus | java

If you have ever been to those seminars about proactivity and other useless dilbert-esque keywords (or “the secret of happiness”, or “who moved my cheese”, or whatever). You have certainly heard this phrase, and must already have an idea on what this means - that no one can live by oneself, people need other people, yadda, yadda, yadda. It got to the point that whenever someone said “No man is an island”, I would reach for my revolver…

You must also have heard “Don’t ask for whom the bells toll, they toll for you”. And most probably you must think this quote to be quite moody, dark, or ominous. The undertone is always that every man is mortal, that you too are going to die, etc, etc. I think the Joker used it on a Batman story. Also this phrase was way down in my respect list, in company of most The Matrix quotes.

Well, it turns out that both these phrases have the above meanings only when completely out of context. I was quite surprised to find out that they were part of the same poem, and were used to pass the one same idea, an idea completely different from the two ideas above. Much more prosaic and, from my point of view, much more agreeable.

The poem is reproduced below, it is from John Donne, XVI century, and the general meaning, from what I could understand, is that no life is meaningless, and every man has his value in humanity. And just that.

I think I can now kill the next person who says “No man is an island”, in a motivational speech without much remorse.

“No man is an island, entire of itself
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were.
any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls
it tolls for thee. “

– John Donne

This week a person asked me through mail about cultural shock.

It seems to me that, much more than the social norms that we see in travel books, Cultural Shock presents itself in a very diferent manner, and does not necessarily require a foreign country for that.

You see, what I have realized is that the biggest form of cultural shock can be the many little things that make your daily life, and not this monstrous ghost called “national idendity”. The TV channels you see when you were a kid, your favorite and most hated politicians, commons games at school.

I mean, I felt some cultural shock when I came to japan the first time. But I came to realize that it was a culture shock not because I was in japan, but because I was in a mostly-humanities university, among mostly people from economics, marketing, history, politics background. So no one would care for the latest slashdot story, or get a Microsoft joke. Or talk silly things about integrals and numbers, or care about spurious logic. Even the tone of the generic jokes were different. Not to say anything about brazillian “deep” culture, like Chaves.

I think these kind of common things connect people easier… make half sentences go through. In this way, I have felt this kind of cultural shock before, even before leaving Brazil.

On the other hand, this time out, I feel much more at home. The nerds in the lab understand me, and I understand them a lot too. It is reassuring to see them reading slashdot (even if the japanese one), or playing Final fantasy 5 for a few hours at my place.

I mean, today I was talking to a couple of friends from the Micro-processor lab, and it went like this.

“I should be in the food business - that is where the money is. Everyone needs to eat!”
“And what would you do?”
“I don’t know… I could do hamburgers… I know! MOS Burgers!”

And the funny thing is, there IS a burger chain in japan called MOS Burgers…

Of course, it opened the worm can for all kinds of “the burger needs more silicone” jokes.

… cringe …

Yeah, I’m in the right place.

I think I might have written about this before, but yesterday I was talking to a friend of mine on the lab about japanese people online habits.

the first thing that hit me as strange, tech-wise, when I got in Japan, is how everyone’s cellphone e-mail addresses are some sorte of nickname that has nothing to do with their real name. If you check japanese (and sometimes other east asian) blogs, it seems to me you’ll find mostly mysterious nicknames, and they always refer to people in their posts just by their initials. On Mixi, the japanese version of “Orkut”, “Friendster” and the like, most people go by some artificial handle, rather than their real name. The same goes for 2ch, the biggest BBS in the world - you’ll find infinitely more anonymous postings than named postings - it is even part of their (2ch) culture.

Now, that is not to say that people everywhere don’t use nicknames or hide their indentity on the web. Of course they do. But, to make an interesting comparison of japanese and brazillian online culture, in Brazil using an elaborate nickname instead of your real name seems to be considered “newbieish”, a teenager’s thing. If you don’t provide your name behind what you say online, it seems that you’re afraid of being accountable, OR that you are pretentious, that you want to be someone who you really aren’t, for whatever reason. Anyway, whatever you say is taken with a greater grain of salt.

OTOH, for what I know so far, it seems that it is rude in Japan not to use a handle, and specially not to use handles for other people you talk about. It seems to me that, (and I’m extrapolating here) here it is quite the opposite. If you write with your real name, then you are accountable, and thus must keep proper tatemae. While, if you are anonymous, then you are free of tatemae, and can say whatever you like. So a person behind a handle is supposed to be more true than a person using her real name.

Of course, I might be getting it all wrong, since my experience on local internet communities is quite limited, and most of this was gathered from talks with different friends here, so it might be anedoctal. Feel free to bash me.

Sometimes I have friends who are surprised that Brazilians are the third foreign minority in japan, after Koreans and Chinese. Also some people are surprised to know that the largest japanese community in the world, outside of Japan, is in Brazil, specially in Sao Paulo.

Brazil and Japan have some deep ties of immigration and emmigration that go back almost 100 years (the centenary of japanese immigration to Brazil is next year, I think). Yet these ties are not without their share of pains and difficulties. Immigrants from both sides of the ocean faced great difficulties in their respective times, but slowly, are learning to fend for themselves.

Why all this? Today I found a text, which although focus primarily on problems faced by cultural discrimination in Hamamatsu (the city with the largest brazillian community in Japan), has quite a lot of information about japanese immigration and emmigration to be a nice introductory text for those not in the known.

http://www.jpri.org/publications/workingpapers/wp88.html

Enjoy!

I added a few more friends blogs today to my list. I think the blogging pheomenon, apart from the widely discussed effect it has been doing on traditional media, is also kinda important on a personal point of view.

Basically, people who start blogging sometimes complain they don’t have much to write about, or give up after a month of trying. Other people diss personal blogs that just ramble on about small everyday things. I think that, like all human skills, writing is something that comes by habit. So for those people who do not have the habit of writting, making themselves write about something everyday might help out. At first you seems to be always stump, not knowing what to write about. But after a few months, it starts to come out naturally. Who knows, it might even be a good therapy for shyness.

To support my statements with a little bit of fact, I would like to point out to my friend Neo’s blog . She started timidely, tentatively, but recently has been putting out very interesting content in a consistent pace (although I strongly disagree with her recent nacionalistic post).

Of course, the final step would be to be able to build a site with INFORMATION that would be useful for people other than those interested in your person. For me, it is a long way to that yet.

Now, for my recent news. This thurday I got my new HD from the lab folks, and restored Tamy (my work box) back to life. It was not as easy as I had expected.

First, the computer itself was a pain to open. Some manufactures build cases that are purposely hard to dissasemble. Probably they want to drive consumers out of upgrading and repairing their computers by themselves. These manufactures should burn in the flames of hell.

After some sweating, however, I managed to chuck the HD in, and it worked without glitches. I mean, until I found out that I had forgotten my Sarge CDs back home. Luckly, Deniz in the lab had some old Woody install disks. It should be simply a case of installing a skeleton woody and apt-get dist upgrading it into sarge, but there are some things that are not working smoothly, like the xemacs package :-/

ALSO, the backup system I posted so proudly about in the last post didnt work. I tried inserting the package list I had previously generated with –set-selections, but the program just pretended not to hear me. No error messages, no results, no nothing. I got my way around that, of course, but it was painful. I’ll try the mailing list for solutions anyway, this week.

Anyway, I got my computer working, and that should set me back on track with laboratory things now. And thus I finish my post for today. I’m supposed to write about my entrance examination and my gasshuku yet, but they deserve their own, careful postings.