Reversal

A reversal of fortune, I suppose.

Few years I got a chance to give myself a test of teaching in English. At the last minute, I flinched.

This semester my "Intro. to Western Lit." course has one foreign student whose presence I hadn't discovered until the first class session started. Out of reluctance, I have to teach the course in English the whole semester.

Forced to do so? In a way, yes.

Feel unhappy? No really.  Sometimes one has perforce to do something which, only years later, can prove itself beneficial and worthwhile.

Hope all this effort of mine would pay.

Another Start

It's never been easy to keep the habit of writing, let alone to do so on an electronic platform.

It has already been over 5 years since I first got acquainted with the web blogging system. At that time, I took a short note marking the event as "Origin." Yet it has stayed thus for a long time since. Not too much has been produced or blogged after the start. Probably for the too much time spent on figuring out how the blogging platform works.

Then almost a year later, I finally got the template done for the weblog. Half a year later, I transferred and translated my not too many blog entries to another platform, which was followed shortly after by another transfer to a new platform signaling another, or the third origin. What ensued was more time spent on familiarizing myself with the new platform and the server set-up procedure as I tried this time to house the weblog on my own machine. A bit more blog entries followed this second origin due likely to my feeling not too bad about the new platform. There was at least a short period of productivity.

Yet the process came to a halt suddenly in 2006. Then for almost two years the weblog has been left unattended and almost deserted. No upgrade of codes, no update of writing.

One cannot help thinking about what the hell has been going on during that period of mental blankness.

Now I finally have the site revamped, in a hope that this quite ridiculous fourth origin (isn't this kind of an oxymoron?) can boost me into a continuous life of writing. The layout, though kept the same, is remade for words to be more readable (much to my aged eyes' benefit), and the newly added feature of free-tagging should be more helpful in blogging something other than life snippets (something like research notes).

A comprehensive and automatic backup routine has also been set up to guarantee future restore or conversion of all of my past writings. The Linux server where the weblog resides will also simplify the character encoding problems especially regarding the Chinese characters (which gave me a lot of pain in exporting and importing SQL database).

Though self-ridicule seems a constant in my life, I do hope that this time my weblog can have its last say at least in terms of platform. Then the only problem left worth my full efforts will be the will to write and the perseverance in keeping that will alive.

Phone

Today I brought F to a short walk outside the cafe shop my family usually go for a brunch.

Quite to my amazement, I found a rank of public phones attached to a series of standing pillars of a telecoms company. Nowadays public phones are almost like an endangered species waiting for their ultimate demise. As the growth of mobile phones advances aggressively, people are more used to the disappearing of public phones as part of cityscape. Who would want to insert coins into the slot for a phone dialing that blesses only a few minutes of connection?

Yet the dying species persist, if only at obscure corners of this city. More to my surprise is one phone which provides a composite solution to the use of inserted coins, phone cards, and, well, a modem port.

A modem port? This is quite something that would fire up some imagination of sci-fi characters.

What a beautiful finding for a short city walk!