Mei Wah is a page to help you learn Chinese. Well, at least some of the Chinese you need to read a menu in a Chinese restaurant. Cool! What’s even cooler is that through this page, I found out that McCawley’s legendary ::amazon(“0226555925”, “Eater’s Guide to Chinese Characters):: is back in print! I first heard about this book about ten years ago, but all available copies were mucho-bucks, and I couldn’t justify it. Now, it’s available for a mere $10 in paperback. Awesome. I think that you can learn an awful lot about a culture through its food, and it’s a fun hack to be able to decipher Chinese menus.
Monthly Archives: March 2005
More Chinese Calligraphy
Well, today was Chinese Calligraphy class again. This is one of the better attempts at writing the character for “Dragon” é¾ or long2 as writin in pinyin. Not very good, and a crappy scan because our scanner doesn’t have a bed big enough to scan large art.
I’ve acquired some books on Chinese writing to augment my study and appreciation.
- ::amazon(“0804832064”, “Reading and Writing Chinese”)::
- A great and useful reference, contains 2000 characters and 2500 combinations, includes names, meanings, and happily, the proper stroke order for drawing the forms.
- ::amazon(“0071419837”, “Beginner’s Chinese Script”)::
- A cool, cheap little book that can help you decipher signs written in Chinese. I like the approach
- ::amazon(“0823005569”, “Chinese Calligraphy Made Easy”)::
- The book that will tell you what you need to know to do Chinese Calligraphy. If you are gonna get just one book, get this one.
- ::amazon(“0823048381”, “The Simple Art of Chinese Calligraphy”)::
- A book which has less to do with calligraphy, but a lot more to do with arts and crafts surrounding Chinese characters. A decent second book.
Eeesh. Do I need practice!
AXS and WordPress Integration Plugin (2.1)
AXS is a pretty nice little program that can gather many of the web usage statistics that are provided by statcounter.com, but without any limits. There is a new AXS and WordPress Integration Plugin that makes it very simple to add to your WordPress setup: basically just put the plugin where they all go, configure three short options, and voila.
Check it out if you are in need of such a thing.
Slashdot | 95% of IT Projects Not Delivered On Time
I’m shocked. Absolutely shocked.
How much of anything you do gets completed on time and to everyone’s satisfaction?
Tale of our times…
New instant messaging phone for your son | Free |
Ability to have him ignore your calls when you call him | Free |
Ability for him to call you and remind you that he needs some money | Free |
What happens when he starts talking to a new girl and spends ten 24 hour days on the phone | $560 in overage charges |
For when you absolutely need to let your son yap about nothing for $25/hour: T-Mobile.
Cigar Box Guitars
Courtesy of Make magazine blog, here is a whacky DIY site on building your own Cigar Box Guitars. It seems like the kind of thing that my friend Tom would approve of, and he turned me on to Make in the first place.