Disqus - Friends of reikiman

Re: HD Failure

Ben Hourigan — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 22:20:39 -0000

Yeah, it is. Mind you, it's a lot more reliable on x86 than on PPC. It beats Windows, but it doesn't beat MacOS X.

In any case, when you get your CDs you should be able to try it out using the LiveCD, without installing it over Windows.

And bear in mind that it wasn't Linux's fault that my computer died. When the HD finally died, I knew that had been the problem all along. I'm just going back to OS X because it works and I'm tired of messing with my computer.

Re: End government arts funding now!

Ben Hourigan — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 23:55:20 -0000

Sorry, Band_Geek, but what exactly are you disagreeing with? There have been a lot of points put forward in this discussion, but the main one I've been espousing is just that government shouldn't fund the arts.

In no way would this bring about a world "where music isn't available to all kids across the United States." I'd hate to see that as much as you would. The USA is founded on private enterprise, and the reason that music is available to kids is because of the music _industry,_ not because of government funding.

People can and will make, distribute, and sell art without government funding. That's precisely why there's no need for our taxes to subsidise the arts.

Re: In search of home

Ben Hourigan — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 00:39:40 -0000

Hi Akiko, yes... I think that you have understood how to leave a message!

I enjoyed my class with you, too.

Akiko2... Evidently I've offended you, and I'm sorry, but I'd like to hear more about how you feel. Let's not just trade insults.

Re: In search of home

Ben Hourigan — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 03:11:21 -0000

Thanks, Ron.

In response to your comment about the Japanese girl, there are far too many men who've been trapped here, in a country they don't like, by scheming Japanese women who've wanted to capture a _gaijin_ husband. At worst, some women here will get pregnant to keep a man who's about to break up with them, and abort the baby if the strategy doesn't work. Of course, not all Japanese women are like that, but it's a pattern that's been reported to me twice, by people affected enough by this kind of manipulative relationship between the sexes that they know it well. The fact that it happens enough to be commented on as a pattern is chilling. I've got no quarrels with abortion, but I do have a problem with people manipulating their sex partners.

Re: New Hampshire Numberplate – Live free or die!

Ben Hourigan — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 23:42:46 -0000

Well, then, JL, tell me what you mean by dying for freedom...

Re: New Hampshire Numberplate – Live free or die!

Ben Hourigan — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 23:48:49 -0000

Kudos to those who put their lives on the line.

Re: New Hampshire Numberplate – Live free or die!

Ben Hourigan — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 00:00:10 -0000

Will do. Thanks for the tip! :-)

Re: Not only the right, but the duty to caricature god — Non seulment la droite, mais le devoir de caricaturer le dieu

Ben Hourigan — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 08:20:13 -0000

Wow... Thanks Mike! You don't have to agree with me; I'm just glad to hear you enjoyed the post, and that it provoked you to think. I really appreciate the comment.

Re: Be a man; be an asshole

Ben Hourigan — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 08:15:00 -0000

Yep, that's right. Not much more to say, really, except that it sort of sounds like some kind of bizarre alternate-reality game.

D'you get Midlerized often?

Re: Corrupting the Youth (review)

Ben Hourigan — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 02:32:47 -0000

Thanks Jim. I liked your question: "Are they [the youth of Australia] resisting these hegemonic discourses, or being sucked right in?" At least at Melbourne, many humanities students are completely under the spell of post*ist thinking. Yet most of them would like to think of themselves as resisters of (capitalist, heteronormative, patriarchal, Anglocentric) hegemonies, through and through. Ah, the irony...

Re: More tiresome discussions of gender in popular culture

Ben Hourigan — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 01:19:33 -0000

Hi, Christian,

I don't "disagree that there's an experimentation with gender ideologies and performance going on", generally speaking. What I do disagree with is Ruberg's claim that this happens whatever players intentions or their interpretations of their actions; that it happens "whether they like it or not".

In "The Myth of the Ergodic Videogame", James Newman fairly well exploded the idea that players *necessarily* identify with their in-game avatars. Re-examining M. Kinder's analysis of _Super Mario Bros. 2_, which ramped up the gender-bending implications of male players' choosing to play as the princess, Newman wrote that

bq. the character-selection process described by Kinder reveals a relationship with these characters that disregards representational traits in favour of the constitution of character as sets of capabilities, potentials and techniques offered to the player. The player utilises and embodies the character in the gameworld. While it may retain significance on the box, in adverts, even in cut scenes and introductions within the game, during On-Line engagement, the appearance of the player’s character is of little or no consequence. By this, I mean to suggest that the level of engagement, immersion or presence experienced by the player – the degree to which the player considers themselves to "be" the character – is not contingent upon representation. On-Line, "character" is conceived as capacity – as a set of characteristics.

Put simply, if a skilled male player chooses the Princess in _Super Mario Bros. 2_ (as I always do), it's probably because her ability to fly makes it easier to pass through the stages, not because they are "virtual cross dessers ... using the medium of cyberspace to experiment with the bounds of gender ideologies and performance... whether they like it or not." (Ruberg)

I'm not aware of there being distinct gameplay advantages for male players of "World of Warcraft":http://www.worldofwarcraft.com to choose female avatars, but the example of _SMB2_, highlighted by Newman, shows that a player's choosing an avatar of the opposite sex should not always be considered an act of experimentation with gendered identities.

Maybe Ruberg's "whether they like it or not" isn't intellectual dishonesty; maybe it's just incredibly faulty logic. But I do still suspect dishonesty, of the kind we find where we lie to ourselves about what our life experience tells us we ought to do and to believe. I find it difficult to imagine that a literate adult would really think that the account people give of their own actions ought not to have any bearing on how _we_ ought to interpret them.

Re: Loose change

Ben Hourigan — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 03:20:25 -0000

21 days now. If I'd been back, I'd have called you out for a beer already. The lack of MSN-time is because it's the busy season at Berlitz now, and my days have devolved into a simple mix of work and sleep.

Re: Gonna give you my love

Ben Hourigan — Thu, 11 May 2006 08:13:00 -0000

Thanks, Chris; it'll be good to _be_ back.

Re: (Not) living in the city

Ben Hourigan — Wed, 24 May 2006 01:16:10 -0000

I was looking to live in the CBD because I know that I'm more likely to turn down invitations to go out, or opportunities to do interesting things, the further away I am from them. This is not the time in my life to be languishing in a suburban apartment. And I loved the convenience of living in downtown Osaka.

I'm curious to hear why you think that highrises springing up will increase pollution rates. I would have thought that as people moved into higher density accomodation, closer to shops, services, and their workplaces, they would give up their cars and that air-pollution would _decrease_. One of the key factors contributing to air pollution in Osaka was not that people used cars (most didn't), but that elevated highways above nearly all major streets allowed heavy vehicles to spew diesel smoke within the city limits as they traversed the area on their way to and from it and other more far-flung destinations in the area. The key is not to keep residents out of the city, but to keep cars out. Of course, you may not just be talking about air pollution.

On the subject of crime, again, it seems to me that it's not population density which increases the incidence of crime. While I was looking into living in Canada, I remember reading that per-capita murder-rates were actually higher in many rural areas than they are in big cities like Toronto and Vancouver. Japan has very high population densities in Tokyo and Osaka, but the self-repression of the citizens keeps crime at low levels. Where crime _is_ a problem, it is so in areas that are renowned for their _poverty_, not for their population density. If we wanted to keep crime at bay in the city, we'd want to make the uncharitable (but reasonable) suggestion that rents should remain high to keep out the poor and the uneducated.

On leaving Melbourne's skies unscraped, it seems to me that the key issue in maintaining the charm of a modern city is not the height of the buildings, but their quality. Osaka was packed with mid-rise, and the problem there was not the buildings' height, but their ugliness, flimsiness, and the fact that they were packed along extremely narrow streets (with the wide streets nearly all shaded under highways). In comparison, Melbourne has at least 2 things going for it: that the majority of the high-rises are high-quality and intrinsically attractive, especially most of the new residential towers, and that they are combined with a very large number of charming historical buildings. What I would like to see is _low-_quality modern low-rises demolished and replaced with high-quality mid- to high-rise residential towers.

Anyway, consider the email shot.

Re: Slow blogging month

Ben Hourigan — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 07:44:56 -0000

Indeed it is, and indeed I am. At present, though, wireless broadband (even Unwired, which is relatively cheap) is too slow and too expensive to be a credible alternative to ADSL for all but the lightest internet users. A pox on download-limited broadband plans!

Re: Portal

Ben Hourigan — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 08:36:32 -0000

Emails? I thought it was just the one? And I replied last night... Didn't I?

Re: 2005 at benhourigan.com

Ben Hourigan — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 09:06:05 -0000

Hi, Michael. I haven't got to Canada yet... At the moment, I'm more focused on starting a career here that might be able to take me overseas, but you never know, I might just up and leave here again.

Thankyou very much for your kind words about my prose. You give me a good reason to keep working on the blog, which has languished as I've scrambled to get my life here in Melbourne back together. I assure you I haven't abandoned it, or the PhD, which is still a work in progress.

Good work on leaving NOVA. I'm sure it's a first step on the road to better things. For your interview with Berlitz, I'm not sure I can offer you any pointers, but I'll tell you some things about Berlitz...

From what I saw, the teachers at Berlitz are, on average, much more experienced and talented than instructors from other _eikaiwa_. They tend to be older, to have spent longer in Japan, and to have better reasons for wanting to be there. At Umeda, most of the teachers were distinctly quirky, which I count as a good thing.

You'll want to play up your teaching experience, especially if you have any teaching qualifications, and you'll want to show your interviewer that you can take responsibility for tailoring lessons to students' needs. With the exception of kids' classes, which are a big part of business at schools like Tennoji and Senri-chuo, but entirely missing from Umeda, Berlitz classes are mostly one-on-one, so if you're good at them, you might want to play that up, too.

In my interview, there was no demo lesson, and no grammar test. I'd be somewhat surprised if your experience was different. You will, however, be asked about your availability, and it's best to have as open a schedule as you can. Beginning teachers at Berlitz won't have a predictable schedule or even a reliable income, since the best timetables are given to the more senior teachers. Yet because the pay rates for per-lesson teachers are relatively high, you can make a good wage with less actual working-time than you'd have put in at NOVA, if you are available for most of your schools' opening hours. You will also want to be enthusiastic and confident about teaching outservices (classes at high-schools, offices, and so on), since that's a big part of Berlitz's business.

Good luck!

Re: The IT Crowd, Episode 1 (review)

Ben Hourigan — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 09:10:33 -0000

Jesus Christ. I can't believe you can have a problem that sounds so ridiculous.

I blame Microsoft.

I only partially take back my comments about it being nonsense, though. How could you force an unexpected reboot? If you forced it, it wouldn't be unexpected, would it now?

Re: Portal

Ben Hourigan — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 05:58:49 -0000

Sorry.

Re: MacOS 10.5 (Leopard) Preview

Ben Hourigan — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 06:17:01 -0000

Don't tell me you're a Mac user, too...

I often like Apple's hardware, and as you say, the Mac Pro looks pretty good. Nice little signature touches like the snap-in hard-drives are what make the stuff great. And yet, I always have to think how much more power I could be getting for every dollar I spend. Last night I was looking at Dell's 6400 laptop range, and realised that for the extra money it takes to turn a MacBook from white to black, I could get an extra gig of ram and a 1600x[something] screen on a Dell, and probably more besides.

And then at work I use Windows XP, and notice just how fast applications opens on a P4... So the interface sucks, and there's horrible screen redraw issues, but it seems really _zippy_...

Re: In search of home

Ben Hourigan — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 03:42:58 -0000

*Joseph:* Well, I may consider Dublin, though I'm having a good time back in Melbourne, now, and I'm not anxious to leave yet. Unlike you, I _am_ Irish, or at least my ancestors are, so maybe I should go back and discover my roots someday.

*Ato:* I'm glad I've been able to offer you some insight. I've been pretty negative about Japan sometimes, but this post, looking back, is one of the places where I've been fairest. If you do get to Japan, I hope you find a way to make it work for yourself. Just be careful: there are a lot of pitfalls out there for _gaijin_, but if you're aware of them, you won't fall in. Best of luck.

Re: Christmas in Japan

Ben Hourigan — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 06:26:37 -0000

Hi, Amy.

Do I know you?

Re: Will

Ben Hourigan — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 07:49:57 -0000

Thanks for pointing out the error, Luke. I've corrected it. Glad you enjoyed the article.

Re: K2 0.9

Ben Hourigan — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 05:38:25 -0000

Thanks for that, Borat.

Re: Homogeneous vs. homogenous

Ben Hourigan — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 01:30:18 -0000

Took me a while before I came across this, too. I caught another homogenous today.