Monday, October 20, 2008

I've made the switch

Well, I knew it would happen. For a long time, I was an Opera user. I liked using my mouse gestures, my Speed Dial, and my beautiful tab management. Then, for about 20 minutes, I flirted with IE 8. Then it was on to Chrome, which I still love. Believe me, it is a wondrous platform. What it denies me, though, is the ability to do 8000 things at once within a single window.

Granted, my Chrome interface was deliciously simple - there was no title bar to speak of. But with FF3, I can get all I want and more. Goodbye, Chrome.

Espanol y Turkce

So my degree program here at the Korbel School involves proficiency in a foreign language. When I came out here, I just figured that it would be Turkish, since that's what I had spent the most time working on when I was at Aurora University. OK, now that was about 14 months ago and I still haven't perfected my Turkish. Is this a bad thing? Yes and no.

I've decided to switch over and take my proficiency exam in Spanish. I figure that even though for my purposes it is the less attractive option, it will have to suffice. You see, when I got out to Denver, I started working on Latin again made yet another stab at Greek. Midway through the last school year, I found some free Arabic classes on campus, and even got a little teeny tiny bit of Hebrew. Turkish got pushed aside. Oddly enough, I feel that my Spanish is better than usual, due in large part to interactions with Espanol-proficient folks. I'm linguistically greedy, I guess, and if it's useful to be functionally illiterate in six different languages, then bully for me!

I take notes in class with four different alphabets, but if I could pick one and stick with it, I think we'd all be a lot better off. As my old boss used to say, "Knowledge a mile across but an inch deep is dangerous."