If you’re at Incheon Internacional Aeroportul and are looking for a wireless connection, go to the Korean Air Business Class Lounge – the wifi is very strong and you might be able to pick up a signal. The network used to be open, but since they wisened up. Select kalpr1 or kalpr2, the WEP key is

2e5d0e2d68

.

In other news I am on my way back to Bordeaux, after a pair of weeks in HK, and a week in Seoul. Business looks promising – finally! – and I might even keep my current job!

What I like in pat’s writings is that his view on things are always off-centre and interesting. He’s a fellow linguist, with the same curiosity and eagerness about languages as I think I have. And with this post on LOL, he provoked amusing, if slightly off-topic – as far as teh Internets is concerned.

item:

There’s something about this usage that seems “wordy” to me: for one thing, I find it difficult to avoid a comparison to Cantonese’s famous “tag” word, la

…which led me to dig into sino-XXX to see if I could find a funky sinogram equivalent… Cantonese doesn’t have final -L, but -T, direct from Middle Chinese, like Viêtnamese, so no love. [Sino-]Korean does have final -L, evolved from Middle Chinese -T, but there’s no [lol], the closest being [lal]: 剌 [clash, contradict] and 辣 [spicy].

So I went the Idu route, find a character that has the meaning of loud laughter, and found 3:

• 㘌 kek6/ju4
• 㰤 kaa3/ke3
• 䐖 zi4/yi2

The first one is – in a “I really am off my rocker” way – a perfect candidate. 㘌’s Cantonese reading, kek, looks almost like a typo, and sounds like something having a derisive laugh, and it is based on 劇 kek6/ju4 – theatrical plays, drama, opera– and 口 hau2/kou3, the mouth, which is fitting… So there you go, LOL = 㘌.

㘌!

I used to think – and still do – that Koreans have a wee little problem with space. One only needs to go down a subway station and watch people collide like balls in a pinball machine. The space you are in is between me and the place I want to be, and lo and behold, even if I’d have to bump into you and break something, I shall try and go in the straightest possible line.

Enters China. Dude. One of the reasons they make now announcements in the Hong Kong MTR, asking people not to trample each other to death, is that maybe some of the people using the MTR may have realized that Hong Kongers at their best demeanor are a fucking disgrace as far as the use of two-way doors is concerned. This happened in Korea a few years ago, and starts producing results. Even Koreans have started to acknowledge the markings on the floor showing that one should stand on both sides of the doors, and let people step out before stepping in. Here, the markings are green arrows, on the sides of the security doors, pointing towards the center. The result, if any, is that it draws a battle map for disaster. People wait in a semi circle around the doors, and when the train arrives, people at the front rush to the doors, standing flush with them, while people in the back try and pass them over, wiggling in any nook and cranny that may appear between any two passengers. Works also for elevators.

The result, as you may imagine, is a fine mess. I can’t swear in Cantonese – except to other foreigners, which is not the point – so I use my one other gift from Nature, beyond languages: bulk, density and speed. I managed so far to rotate a few people by 45°, a couple by 90°, and I got one clean 180°. Having played billiards for many years helps too. English galore! The most disturbing part is that they don’t understand why they collided with me, and so hard… At least Koreans understand, most of the time, that what they were doing was wrong, but they couldn’t care less. Here, apparently, the basic notion of two solids colliding hasn’t yet taken firm roots in the collective knowledge base. Ah well…

Enters China, the mainland variety. Don’t try this at home, kids. There, it’s not only that they care fuck all about space and its temporary occupancy by other fellow human beings[?], there’s a gazillion of them. And they pay even less attention, if possible at all, to people around them. I have seen, inside an elevator, a dude trying to wedge himself between a man leaning on the elevator’s wall, and the wall; I thought that while it was dumb as crab meat, maybe he wanted to reach the control panel to press a floor button. Nope. He just wanted to be where the other person was. Which he managed to get, once the previous occupant of the coveted square foot relented and moved away from the wall. Unbelievable.

I haven’t taken the Metro in Shenzhen – the KCR to Lowu was enough – and I guess I am lucky.

> How can I write a regexp to match CJK characters?
> Thanks in advance:)

print “Yes!” if varname =~ /^CJK$/

Needless to say the helpful(?) dude providing the unhelpful regex/ruby code was a proud citizen of ASCII-land… Mwahahaha!

In Top firms’ websites not ready for IE7, we learn of a “short internal study” to “[compare] the homepages of all one hundred FTSE 100 companies in both IE6 and IE7.” And the conclusion of this “study” is that 13% of the web sites are not ready for IE7. I shite you notsky. They don’t say “IE7 borks on this site and that site,” or “incompatibilities have been found on sites that prevent proper display on IE7.” Nononono. They say that the sites are not ready for IE7. Never mind that the web sites mentioned as having failed are, like for instance in the case of The Sage Group’s, Valid XHTML.

“It is worth pointing out, however, that the general lack of adherence to web standards among the FTSE 100 companies may have insulated them somewhat from IE7’s various bugs and glitches,” said the Etre statement.

While I fail to see the relation between lack of adherence to W3C’s standards and being protected from IE7’s glitches – apparently Etre hasn’t checked the validator either… This is fucking retarded.