Gibbous.org

In other news that’s not even vaguely exciting, I’ve re-uploaded a few galleries.

1. Pictures with my sophomore #2 class in Wenzhou
2. A trip to the Milwaukee Zoo in 2002
3. A trip to Devil’s Lake in 2002

These are all rather old pictures.

It had been a while since I looked at my class photos from Wenzhou, and I found that I miss those students. As students, they were very good and teaching them was one of my high points when I was in Wenzhou. I hated taking the long, bumpy bus ride to the campus, and I didn’t like the campus very much, but the students were great. It is sort of the opposite situation in my current position, to some extent.

To my former students, I hope you are doing well. If I were guaranteed to have students like you, I’d love to teach in China again, but otherwise, I’m not so sure.

Led by the draconian and dominating David Stern and his dazzling defensive demonstration against the duo of Amare Stoudemire and Boris Diaw, the San Antonio Spurs defeated the Phoenix Suns tonight to win their series and end the NBA season.  I’ve heard rumors that there still may be some games played, but obviously they are all pointless as the winner of this year’s championship will certainly be irrelevant.

That being said, and as stupid as the rule and the ruling were, the Suns have to take some blame for having such a thin bench, and, related to that, not at all playing any of their bench players.  I have to believe that Jalen Rose still has enough to be a factor, or at least not a detriment.

On the good side, besides the upcoming draft lottery and the lottery itself, I am now free from wasting time on sports for a long while.  Thanks Draco Stern.

Update: Phoenix lost the game, though they certainly give it their all. Now they need to win the last two games, a tall effort. In unrelated news, here’s hoping the Bucks win the upcoming lottery. Daddy needs a new pair of… Greg Oden or Kevin Durant.

Bill Simmons of ESPN has said it all more eloquently and completely than I could, or would want to. All of the 0.5 people who read my blog are probably not aware of the incident which occurred during the last Spurs - Suns game. So I will briefly go over it.

In the final half-minute of the game, the Suns had a lead and the ball. Steve Nash was dibbling in the back court up the sideline when Robert Horry hip checked him into the scorer’s table. Some of Nash’s teammates sitting on the bench at that time were naturally disturbed by these turn of events, seeing their MVP and friend flying into a table, so they took two steps towards him before remembering something and returning to the bench.

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Despite all of your best efforts, I still live. The knives in the dark alleyway, the poison-laced wine, the acid-filled Wanglaoji can, and the ravenous rabies-infected giant panda — I have bested them all. Though they have induced in me, apparently, a condition that causes me to overuse hyphens. No matter, I shall survive that as well.

There are times, though, that I almost wished you had succeeded. Then I wouldn’t have to deal with children in the classroom. I don’t mean real children, I mean the zombie-fied little menaces masquerading as university students, and who have yet to discover their purpose on this planet. Though the latter is a common predicament, isn’t it?

I don’t want to get into that at the moment.

Let’s talk about you. You are a vile, gluttonous (and glutenous), swarthy, pig-headed mote of a being. The next time you see me will be the last time you see anything. You will die with my smile reflected in your bulbous eyes, and I will take them as trophies for my mantle place, if only I had a mantle. So I will have to keep them preserved until the point when I do acquire a mantle. That could be quite a long while, as I don’t expect to own a mantle any time soon. In fact, I’m not entirely sure what a mantle is. Above a fireplace, usually, right?

Be warned, and step warily…

I have broken my rule of having only one blog post per month.

China changes a man…

I wrote this a while ago for mailing list I belong to. It has been edited a little.
About China:

1) It’s big, yet has only one time zone
2) There are a gazillion people, and they all stare at me
3) The people are generally friendly, curious, and kind, but they have no concept of a personal “bubble”, and have a somewhat different understanding of courtesy than we do in the U.S.
4) My students are college sophomores, but seem more like Highschool students — without the guns, of course.
5) Everyone’s home town is “beautiful” and “famous” for something, from fruit, to pork, to neckties.
6) It is old. Really old. But they haven’t yet discovered deoderant.
7) The Chinese language is cool, interesting, and fun.
The Chinese language is horrifying, evil, and only for masochists.

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Friends of mine, the indominatable Jody and Ryan, have offered to send me a package from the States. Now, it is up to me to find some things that are not too heavy, too expensive, too large, or too fragile. Sadly, that leaves out tortilla chips, root beer, avacados, tortilla chips and root beer, among other things.

Unexpectedly I am having some difficulty thinking of things they could send me. If anyone has suggestions, please feel free to comment.

So far my list consists of:

• popcorn
• hot chocolate
• macaroni and cheese
• Mexican spices
• Thai spices

That’s a pretty pitiful list…

Every Westerner in China, except weirdos and traitors, eventually gets tired of eating Chinese food every day and begins to long for change, and more than that, for old favorites from home. If you live in Beijing, Shanghai, or another large, modern city, there’s a good chance you can satisfy these desires. But if you’re like me, living in little Lin’an, you have few options.

So when I went to Hangzhou last week I intended to make up for that, and hoped to, at worst, find a Pizza Hut. We did that, my girlfriend and I, and also ended up having a nice surprise. A little treat. Earlier in the day we went to a large public square, I’ve forgetton the name already, which was lined with many booths of sellers hawking various odds and ends — mostly junk, but interesting none the less. I was rather daunted by the surging mass of Chinese flowing, bumping, nudging against and around me to the point I quickly lost my appetite for shopping. But as we made our way through this morass of humanity I spotted something unexpected: a sign with a large ‘D’ immediately followed by a large ‘Q’. Bliss! “Follow me woman!” I ordered my girlfriend, and pulled her along.

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Good afternoon Internet. Now that I have been here for one month, I can say with some certainty that I like it. First of all, the school, at least my department, is better than the school at which I taught previously. Here we, the foreign teachers, are made to feel a little more a part of the university. We are not completely segregated, nor left out of the loop. Though of course, we’re not completely a part of the university either. We’ll always be foreigners first, and teachers second in the minds of the Chinese. Maybe that will change some day.

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I’m not sure how it happened, but poor maintenance by yours truly was certainly the primary reason for the death of Gibbous.org. I think Gentoo, more than most Linux distributions, needs a watchful eye. Upgrading a huge batch of packages after months of negligence can be dangerous if not done carefully.

It wasn’t quite death as (almost) nothing was lost. A few emails were probably lost in the ether, and all MySQL databases are gone. That last is a pain, but could’ve been prevented had I realized the database files themselves resided in the /var directory. I was a little too liberal in cleaning out my old, dead, install of Gentoo before I re-installed it.

Email
Email now seems to work.

Galleries
All images are still on the server, but because the databases were deleted the galleries will need to be recreated. I hope to do this tomorrow for each gallery, and at the same time upgrade them to the newest version of Gallery 2.

Sorry everyone!

dedd Website and Forum
This is probably the worst hit from the entire fiasco. All the forum posts were stored in a MySQL database, which is now gone. Besides being more careful, I should backup everything periodically.