4 January 2002 (20 Tevet 5762)
The majority of people, at least in Japan, seem to take those paths of life that have already been trodden by others, hence are empirically better proven and accepted more socially. They may do so under social pressures, even against their will, or out of inertia, but this seems to be one of the mechanisms that guarantee the cultural continuity of a given society. As I sleep now in the same room at my parents' where I spent the first 18 years of my life, I remember what I used to think at night. Throughout my childhood I felt uncomfortable even instinctively with the possibility of my taking these trodden paths like many people in the place where I was born.
Although I respect each person's life, I could not - and still cannot - find intellectual and spiritual meaning in such a life, at least in the Japanese context, and preferred trying untrodden paths. Although it may not be easy to live against one's own will in a social framework dictated by the society, it is not easy either to make one's way through thorns. In the former scenario one can at least know the past statistics of success and failure in certain life decisions, but in the latter no such empirical data are available. Whatever step one may take in life, one can never be certain perfectly about its consequences. What guides one is the higher probability of one choice over its alternative(s). This is how I have finally made some fateful decision some time ago.
Even in my life with no shortage of unprecedented things I have never been at such a crossroad. Although I am trying to have trust in my own decision, I cannot therefore help becoming a little nervous, especially when I see my parents and other people in their neighborhood who are taking trodden paths of life.
11 January 2002 (27 Tevet 5762)
Having acquired my own domain name (ts-cyberia.net), I have been busy this week preparing the transfer of my website from the old address to this new one, and I am still in the very midst of a total mess. It is not a problem at all to transfer the website from one web server to another; it is a piece of cake for anyone who knows how to FTP, i.e., transfer files on the net. The real mess results from the very nature of the World Wide Web, which is in my opinion one of the greatest inventions of the last century and one of the three greatest inventions of all time in the field of publishing, the other two being the inventions of paper and printing.
A website that stands alone with no hyperlinks that connects itself with other websites is useless and mostly inaccessible. The utility of the World Wide Web lies in the fact that websites are intertwined with one another through hyperlinks beyond the physical boundaries of countries as the name "web" indicates. To prepare the transfer of my website I checked the webpages that (seem to) have links to it or part thereof. To my surprise, I could identify more than 70 such webpages, including major Internet portals such as Yahoo and Google, scattered in various parts of cyberspace. As they have no obligation to inform me before they add links to my website, so I am not obliged to inform them of the change of my address. But I am trying to request them to update their links so that my website in the new address may not remain an isolated island in the cyber-ocean. I am afraid that it will take quite a long time until their links have been updated, and there will always remain broken links pointing to the old address.
This is why one of the most fundamental principles of web publishing is not to change addresses, or to use a technical term, URIs (sic!), of websites and webpages. I have decided to violate this rule once and for all because I had no intention of keeping my website in the old address, and the longer I wait, the more difficult it will be to transfer it with more links to it. Since it has been transferred to the domain that is my own property, it will remain permanent as long as I continue paying for the domain name registration and virtual hosting.
18 January 2002 (5 Shvat 5762)
Yesterday I received a most pleasant invitation. It was an invitation to teach the same intensive course I had taught in October 1999 at a certain national university in Japan. It was in the framework of a series of intensive courses introducing languages and cultures of various less known peoples of the world. The organizer and sender of the invitation is a graduate of the same department at another national university where I also studied, and it seems that he is inviting by turns those graduates of the department who specialize in less widely taught languages.
Although I do not know the reason why he asked me again, I am glad and feel privileged to be able to teach there again sometime in the spring semester of 2002 because the course I taught for the first time there under such an audacious title as "Languages and cultures of the Jewish people" still remains in my memory as one of the most unforgettable courses I have ever taught in my life. In this four-day intensive course I incorporated such diverse areas as the history, religion, languages and folk music even including actually dancing together in class (I am almost sure that I was the first teacher who danced with the students in class in the history of this university), and I spent two full months for the preparation. It was a good intellectual exercise for me as what I tried to do there was a kind of summary of what I knew or was supposed to know about some of the major aspects of the languages and cultures of the Jewish people though one cannot cover all the conceivable aspects in such a short period. Literature, at which I am not so good, is an example of an area not covered there.
Although I was told this time that I would be able to teach the same intensive course with the same content, I do not feel comfortable about this, firstly because I myself have changed in terms of the academic interests, and secondly because I find it academic idleness to teach the same course with the same content after an interval of a few years. I also want to incorporate the feedbacks I received from the participants. Although their comments about the course were very positive in that I could stimulate them by asking them constantly and exposing them to ways of thinking totally unknown to them, there were at least two main points where further improvement could be made.
The first point is that in spite of the fact that the course dealt with the languages of the Jewish people, I only explained about their history, sociology and structure, I did not give them the chance to actually "taste" them by struggling to learn any one of them. So this time I am planning to share with them the pleasure and difficulty of learning Hebrew.
The second point is that although I never dealt with Jewish humor officially in class, I did introduce some choicest juicy Jewish jokes from time to time as I always do in other classes as well. Surprisingly, quite a few students expressed their desire to know not only more concrete jokes but also about Jewish humor in general. Humor is not only for fun, and has much profound significance, whether psychological, pedagogical or whatever. So this time I am going to incorporate Jewish humor as part of the course. It will be a good chance for me to better understand Jewish humor and what characterizes it.
25 January 2002 (12 Shvat 5762)
Unsolicited commercial email (popularly known as spam email or junk email as well) must be one of the most irritating things for most netizens. If you are around in cyberspace, sometimes even for a short period of time, using functions of the Internet, especially Usenet newsgroups, you are sure to receive spam email regularly.
Unfortunately, I was no exception. I have been a netizen since April 1996, when the Internet was becoming an indispensable part of our daily life. It was not until around the beginning of 2001 that I started to notice these unsolicited commercial messages flooding my inbox. Sometime in the first or second quarter of 2001 the ISP (Internet service provider) that used to be my main one until quite recently introduced a spam filter rejecting all the incoming messages sent through the so-called "open relay". This filter substantially reduced the number of spam messages I received. But since last fall I started to receive more and more junk messages in Korean. I have no idea how my email address reached the hand of Korean spammers, but it enormously bothered me to receive messages which were not only unsolicited but whose script was totally intelligible to me though of course I have nothing against this language. In the end this flood became simply unbearable, and I was forced to stop using my old email address in the beginning of this month.
Fortunately or unfortunately, I am a kind of person who has to know as much as possible about something that really interests him. I have investigated various aspects of this issue, and found some useful answers. The biggest mistake I made is that when I used to post my messages quite regularly to a number of Usenet newsgroups, I almost always signed my email message as well. The commonest way how spammers "harvest" email addresses seems to be from messages posted to these newsgroups or even from webpages where they are made clickable with <a href="mailto:"></a> in HTML/XHTML like nospam @ nospam.com, and there even seem to be sophisticated programs that can do this automatically with enormous speed. And once you are on such a list, it will be extremely difficult to get rid of yourself from it. The worst thing seems to be to complain directly to the person who sent you spam mail because it only verifies that your address is functioning.
This problem of unsolicited commercial email really makes me angry not only because it bothers me personally, and I cannot complain directly to the spammer, but also because it causes a lot of waste of Internet resources. Unfortunately, however, I see no solution in the foreseeable future because even if there should be some regulation, it would be difficult or impossible to implement it worldwide in cyberspace. All we can do in the meanwhile is to stay away from Usenet newsgroups and avoid displaying our email addresses on webpages with <a href="mailto:"></a>.