Living good in Qingdao

So I have this LJ thing. I guess I might as well use it. One of the things I'm going to do is post random translations on it of Classical Chinese stuff. Start out with the basic Classical Chinese short stories (Children's stories, almost), then move to the more complex pieces my lecturer has provided. I don't imagine I'll get through them all before end of term, but meh. Still worth a try :). And I need to not be slack. Otherwise the exam *will* hurt. These are mostly the original Classical, except with punctuation, and in simplified. The original had no line breaks, full stops or commas or anything.

( 枭逢鸠 )

( 守株待兔 )

试一试。

There's been a bit on /. recently about piracy and how the corporations are fighting it and similar such things.
What gets me is that there are some people, even on /., that do not seem to quite understand the way that software has changed the way things work.
The thing that really gets me, that really makes me angry (at the moment) is that some people feel that they have a natural right to resale with everything they buy. And that's cool for most things. Books, cars, TVs, houses. But not for software. Not at all.
The reasoning is fairly simple. When you sell a car second-hand, you no longer have that car. It's gone from your possession. What's more important is that you can't keep a copy of the car hidden somewhere else. As it stands, you can't clone a car. You could steal it back, but that's a whole different kettle of fish.
With software there's no guarantee that the person who has just sold the software has deleted it or otherwise ensured that they can no longer use it. Hell, even if you watch them delete it, erase the serial key, and give you all the original packaging, there's no guarantee they don't have a copy somewhere. And that's the big deal. Copying software is so easy. That's really the point, in a way. And it's why resale will never be legal with software.
Imagine the following example for proof:
Person A buys software S. A sells S to B, but, unknown to B A has kept a copy of the software. There's nothing to stop him. Sure, it's illegal. But that just makes him a criminal. The Law won't come around to his house to stop him. B won't nark, because B won't know. And there's no end to the number of links in the chain. Well, potentially anyway. B can sell to C who can sell to D, etc etc. Remember, the sales are all legal if we allow first-sale right to apply for software. Keeping a copy isn't, but who'll know? Even worse, as I understand first sale allows for gifting. Wouldn't that be like legalizing piracy? If I can gift my copy to someone, they can keep on gifting around the circle, until everyone has a copy. Sure, all but one are illegal, but that doesn't matter, assuming that one person doesn't nark. The rest won't as they're just as guilty as each other.
So what we have is a situation where allowing software resale essentially makes the piracy problem much, much worse ("I didn't pirate it, I have a receipt!"), or where we need even more restrictive DRM to ensure everyone is abiding by the terms of the resale. Not that the DRM helps. It exists today in applications like Photoshop and Steam, and yet, strangley, they're still pirated. Hmmm.

The point of this is for me to have a good rant. And to provide food for thought for anyone that reads this.

Heh. I didn't realise they offered driving licenses to dogs these days :-).

Bleh. Money is good, and I have like none. Thus I could do with a job... Applied for a couple, but thus far nothing has come back. Probably the most interesting one would be the Windows Mobile Developer one, but I suspect I lack experience for that. Sad :-(.

Couple of others interest me, but the sad thing is they're all summer jobs. Had a look on Seek, and most of them don't really interest me. Feh.

Looks like I'll be sticking around until my girlfriend has residency. At least. Once she has that, I'm really tempted to go for a six-month holiday in China, provided I can save up around six grand + airfare. Shouldn't be a hard task. Just need to find the right job.

That's all fine and good. From next week, I'll probably try and do some development. Maybe learn how to write code for the Palm. Add some stuff to me Treo. Like the ability to search for a Chinese contact via Pinyin. It's driving me crazy that I can't! I have found a solution to it, but that prevents me from searching for my non-Chinese contacts. Doh! Sadly, it's unlikely to work in my messaging app as well (though that is far less essential). But if I can make it work with Ultimate Phone, then that'll be fine. Ultimate Phone being an app that makes my phone look rather a lot nicer.

There's a few other things I'd like to see. A slightly better LJ client would be good. Having the ability to read my current music from Pocket Tunes would be grand, as would a mood selector and a couple of other things. One more thing to code.

I'd also like an email client that is both free and being actively developed. But that's a bit beyond my means, I think.

Oh, and I should get onto studying Chinese some more. Yeah. I converted the Four Great Novels so they're on my PDA, but I can't exactly read them yet.

They are Dream of the Red Chamber, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, The Water Marshes, and Journey to the West. There's a couple of others on here too, but again they're beyond my ability.

That's it. For now.

I get up in the morning, read my email, and then get nothing until like the afternoon. It's weird. Probably because A) Most people are at work, and B) I get a lot of (forum-related) email from different Timezones.

Either way. Strange. And when I get one, I'll probably get several.

Also, I can apparently post images straight to my scrapbook, with captions. Awesome. Must make good use of that.

Woot. I can now post to LJ from my Treo, with an actual nice interface. Still can't do formatting. Unless it'll accept HTML? <b>Testing Bold!</b>.

Anyway, I may now post more often, which is probably a good thing...

Oh, and photos are posted directly! Attaching one now.

They should work together such that this post will appear in my Facebook mini-feed. Let's see if that's the case.

Like the title says. I have my last exam, hopefully forever, in about 2 hours. As such, this had better be a short post. And then I'll do some study (reading textbooks on the train is not the best idea).

So this next exam is going to be OK I think. Or at least much better than my last exam. Fucking AI. I'm not fond of it, to be honest. The idea is cool, but in practice... Not so much. Too many disparate ideas that, while all falling under the umbrella of 'AI', have little to no connection. Hmmm. That makes it a real pain if you miss lectures, as knowing one area provides no guarantees about another area. I just find them all too disconnected, personally. Whereas todays exam is more interesting, more practical, and more connected.

So yeah. I like one course over another.

After exams, need to get a job, Of course, the exact type of job does depend. Getting a full-time permanent job right now seems like a bad idea. Strange as it seems, it is actually true. The major reason is that I'd like to head overseas, and kinda soon.

The exact destination has been narrowed down to Shanghai, London, or Qingdao. Which means China or the UK basically. I'd prefer China, as getting a job teaching English should be pretty easy. And I have 2000 RMB in cash, which does me no good herez, and would be worth like £150... I could survive for like a month or two in China, provided I was frugal on that much money. I could survive for like a week in London. Ignoring Rent in both cases.

On the other hand my girlfriend really wants to go to the UK, and I could probably actually save money there. It would also have more cool stuff to buy, but the cost of living is way higher and I'd probably be working longer hours in a harder job. Or I might not be. It's hard to tell. But that's my feelings about it at the moment.

And that relates to getting a job in that a full-time permanent job would make it hard to go overseas, while a short-term casual type job would make it much easier. (Fuck! Treo texbox length exceeded!).

Here is some GB2312 Chinese. Does it look good? Ok, nevermind. LJ only accepts UTF-8 text...