Posts from — July 2009

It’s too late for me to write up any sort of real review, but let me just get this out there:
Public Enemies is a terrible movie. You should not watch it. Even for free. They somehow made history less exciting.

I won’t write about the obvious motivation for this post right now, but here’s the question: what programs do you use on your personal computer other than a web browser? How long do you expect before what you’re doing can be accomplished in a browser?

Here’s my app list, ordered by the ease with which I think a web replacement could be written:
- Photo management (iphoto, picasa, though I just use these as a picasa upload client, basically)
- itunes (though sync with my ipod broke, so I haven’t used it in a while)
- Eclipse (for writing android apps and stuff)

What about you?

In college, I took Spanish classes off and on to fill elective spots. I was a couple of classes short of a minor when I graduated. It’s been something I’ve enjoyed studying for a while, though I’ve never been great at it. Despite having studied the language since 7th grade, I’d never actually used it until last week. I mean, yeah, I’ve translated the occasional sign from time to time, but I’ve never really needed to use it for anything. I spent a week in Puerto Rico during my senior year of college, and didn’t speak a word of Spanish while I was there.

In Chile, I had real opportunities to speak Spanish- many of the people I talked with knew less English than I knew Spanish (plus I was in their country, so I generally tried not to resort to English). It took a few days for it to come back, but it ended up being quite enjoyable. I was able to tell stories to my brother’s host family (more on that later), buy things, ask questions, etc. On the plane ride back, I sat next to a woman from Argentina who didn’t speak any English, and I felt comfortable talking with her and translating some customs forms for her (one wasn’t translated). I wouldn’t have been comfortable doing any of that on the way down.

Brian has been in the country since February. He didn’t really know much Spanish when he got there, but, as you can imagine, he speaks and understands it quite well now. His Spanish is better than mine, but I’d say it’s somewhere in the same league. The interesting thing is how the different modes of language acquisition affect the mistakes that we both make. It’s like I learned Spanish “in the lab” or something. I could conjugate weird verbs better than Brian, or remember irregular nouns (mapa, tema, clima, programa etc.), but his vocabulary, slang, and comprehension of Chilean Spanish were far better than mine. In practice, nobody is going to be confuse if you say la mapa, even though it’s wrong, so some of the things I was good at were not terribly useful.

Another thing that took me a while to get the hang of was different terms that translate to “I’m sorry” and “excuse me”: perdon, permiso, disculpe, and lo siento (there are more, and they generally aren’t interchangeable, as far as I know). These are things that you end up saying a lot when you’re somewhere unfamiliar, but aren’t terribly important in a classroom.

Chilean Spanish was rather challenging: they tend to drop the letter S a lot, as well as consonant sounds at the end of words. This took me a while to get used to. I asked someone where I could find post cards at one point, postales, but she didn’t understand my pronunciation of the word. I’m pretty sure I was pronouncing it correctly, but then I tried again, dropping the S sounds and weakening the L and she understood immediately. That made me think of someone from Boston not being able to understand the word “car” with all of its letters pronounced.

It was a lot of fun to somewhat be able to speak the language, and the experience made me want to learn another. Maybe Italian.

via

Last week, I went to Chile to visit my brother. Peyton also made the trip, and it was his first time out of the country. It was a great trip and a much-needed break.

I’m not going to write a long, monolithic travel summary, as those are rarely interesting, but instead I’m going to write several short posts about different topics of interest from the trip over the next several days. All the Chile-related posts have the tag chile, so they’ll be easy to find.

I brought my digital camera as well as my flip HD video camera. Because of the prevalence of theft (more on that later), I only carried around one camera at a time (if any). Lots of the pictures in these posts are from Peyton.

Brian has a periodically-updated blog about his time in Chile here.