Projects

At any given time there are a dozen different projects and ideas that I'm working on or planning. Some of these are never seen through to fruition. Others have come quite far. Below are a list of some of my current, past, and future projects. While most of them are computer or internet related, this is only because I have for various reasons not chosen to include my language, history and philosophy studies, or other projects which are dealt with on the interests page.

The Fool's Workshop - Project host and Software Distribution site.

In February 2000 I registered foolsworkshop.com as my little online "workshop" where I could post my programs for download, and host other informational pages that I have created. I have 300MB of space through American Hosting which offers a very decent deal and has so far provided good service.

At the site I host my programs and other pages such as the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies WWW Board, a page about flashcard applications, a page about pinyin fonts online, and forums and guestbooks for my parents. I will also host my father's genealogy pages and other future projects.

ChinaJapan.org - Portal for information on Sino-Japanese relations, Japanese, and Chinese culture and language

In March, 2000 I registered chinajapan.org when I came up with the idea for a huge project. This project is so big I don't dare start this until I get much further along in my studies.

One of my strongest interests is in Sino-Japanese relations, something that is pretty natural given my strong interests in Japan and China. I have been really depressed by the deep hatred for the Japanese that many Chinese have and sympathy for their continued dissatisfaction with the Japanese in their reluctance to deal with the issues surrounding the war. My studies into this field are but barely begun though, so I dare not say too much.

When I asked one Chinese friend, "How can I help in some small way to improve relations between these two giants?" he simply replied, "Give it up, it is simply impossible." I refuse to believe so. I think information and education are the most important tools and I hope to change chinajapan.org into a source of that information or at least a place for open and constructive debate. I'm not yet sure how the portal will work yet but I can see two scenarios:

So far I have only registered the domain and forwarded it to a small page at The Fool's Workshop. I have a 100 ideas for this project but must be patient as I have not the funds now to host the site, nor do I have any of the contacts necessary to make this dream a reality. I think this could potentially be my biggest chance at participating in the improvement of sino-Japanese ties, modest though it would be.

Flashcard Wizard - Macintosh Software Program

Flashcard Wizard grew out of two things. First of all, I wanted to create a program to replace the Kanji in Context software program I wrote for the Inter-University Center in Japan. I gave the Kanji in Context program to the center and thus could neither distribute it or easily improve on the program after leaving the program. I wanted my own genuine program which I could distribute as educational shareware.

The second motivation for designing Flashcard Wizard came from the desire to create a computer version of the vocabulary study method I used at Princeton in Beijing in the summer of 1998. I used a kind of "interval study" which went something like this: When I studied a word the first time, I would put the card in the box for "tomorrow." When tomorrow arrived and I studied the word again I would put the word in the "tomorrow" box again. On studying it the third time, however, and assuming I hadn't forgotten the word, I would put it into the "3 days from now" box. After that, I would put it into the "5 days from now" box. After this I would increase the "interval" to 7, 10, 15, 20, etc. When I got words wrong, I would decrease the interval again, often back to one day. At the end of the summer, I really had remembered all the words I had studied. I gave up at the end of the summer, though, because organizing and writing these flashcards took almost as much time as studying them. I wanted to design a computer program that could do this for me. The result: Flashcard Wizard.

Flashcard Wizard was first released in February, 2000 and has had several beta releases since then. I'm always trying to rid the program of bugs and add new features. July 1st, 2000 I plan to release the full 1.0 release and begin selling it through Kagi.com as $18 shareware. I have already received awards from Tukids educational software site (5/5 cows) and the software award at Simplythebest.net Shareware. As of April, there have been over 1,000 downloads of the program, and more hits are being registered every day.

Pinyin Font Converter - Macintosh Software Program

Pinyin Font Converter is a simple utility I designed when I discovered that the net has almost a dozen different fonts and different methods for displaying tones above letters in romanized Chinese. I compiled a page describing the fonts that I found and wrote the small conversion utility. The program can convert text files to from a wide range of fonts and even syllable final tone numbered texts. This program is freeware and it has received a warm welcome from a number of Chinese instructors.

Fool's Lexicon - Macintosh Software Program

Fool's Lexicon is free software dictionary client I designed for searching EDICT and CEDICT, the public domain dictionaries for Japanese and Chinese. As far as I know, there is no program out there that easily searches the CEDICT file. As I improve the program, I plan to add support for searches in other downloadable dictionary databases and more powerful searching features.

Realm - Macintosh Software Program

This is one of my "projects on hold." I started this kingdom simulation/game when I was working at Norwegian Telecom in 1999. The idea was to create a very advanced medieval kingdom simulation/game for the Macintosh in which politics, strategy, and economic planning played a greater role than brute force and invasion. In the game, which would be very light on graphics, which is not my strong point, I wanted to track hundreds of variables, and allow the player to perform hundreds of different actions which would influence the future of the kingdom. The most unique part of the game though, was that I wanted to make the game playable from different roles. Besides the role of the king, I also wanted to add the possibility to play other roles, such as a merchant, a bishop or leader of a religious order, the leader of an ethnic group, or a knight. Each different role would have different actions but could interact with players in the other roles. Thus the game would be completely different in play for each role, with different goals and features, but all participating in the same community of nations and simulation play.

I will hopefully come back to this program some summer when I have more time. So far, only the map, graphics, menus, and windows are created, no other progress has been made.

The countries and history for Realm come from role-playing. I have loved role-playing since I was very young and have almost always played the gamemaster or "Dungeon Master". I have created lots of fictional kingdoms, the most recent of which is Alawn, used in the game Realm. Alawn is the setting for the role-playing I did with friends from Norwegian Telecom when I was in Norway 1999 working for eight months.

Kanji in Context - Macintosh Software Program

I designed Kanji in Context while studying Japanese at the Inter-University Center for Japanese language studies in Yokohama. They had a nice Macintosh multimedia lab and had already a wide variety of software for all their texts except for Kanji in Context. I designed Kanji in Context so that students could easily study the kanji and vocabulary that they were being tested on every morning. Together with the help of about a dozen students, we entered the more than 8,000 vocabulary items into the program. Later I also included the 2,000 or so individual kanji characters and information about them. Other tools, such as radical information, and Japanese idioms were also included in this program.

I gave the program to IUC and signed away all claims to it so that they could freely distribute the software with their published texts. At the end of the year I received a reward in recognition for my work on the project, and it continues to be one of the most important parts of their Kanji study program. I read in a bulletin from IUC two years later that they demonstrated the software to the US ambassador Foley (ambassador to Japan) when he visited the center in 1999.

Poetry and Stories

In junior high school and high school I wrote a lot. Because of all the great support and encouragement I got from family, friends, and teachers, I even thought I was good at writing. However, my attempts at poetry and short story writing died off when I went to college and read the works of some young writers with real talent. That is not to say that I regret writing the things I wrote or that I won't write again in the future, but I know now that my writing suffers from some serious weaknesses.

First of all, because half of my time since high school has been spent reading or communicating in foreign languages, my English is very boring, and suffers from what my freshman English professor describes with a touch of disgust in her voice as, "verbosity." This might be partly because of weakness three below. Secondly, I'm impatient. I don't like to look over what I write and hate rewriting drafts. My thoughts fly from one place to another and I rarely follow through on one description. Finally, I simply lack the mastery of vocabulary that comes from wide reading of literature and fiction. While I feverishly read literature in high school, I turned all my reading to history and philosophy when I got to college. These are not, I assure you, good sources for creative English. Also, memorizing Japanese and Chinese vocabulary have been two my chief struggles since 1993 and I have all but abandoned attempts to improve my written English and Norwegian.

However, for the amusement of friends I will post my old stories and poetry on the net soon. Like baby pictures we can all look and point and laugh. The only story that I have started recently is The Widdlesmit, a story dedicated to my sister which I have only just begun but never seem to get around to finishing.