eekim.com: EEK Speaks

Tue, Dec 16, 2003

Culture Clash, Shared Language, and Story Telling #

Speaking of names, a recent Newsday article on Viggo Mortensen, who plays Aragorn in the Lord of the Ring trilogy, notes that Danish people find his name: (KK)

"Corny?" he says. "Yeah, I know. It would be like being called Oscar. Or Otto. It's an old name. A really, really old name. And a little bit corny. Like Oswald or something ..." (KL)

Elmer? (KM)

"Yeah! Elmer. Yeah," Mortensen says. "I think there's a comic strip in Denmark, a Dennis the Menace character, and his name is Viggo. He's all over the place." (KN)

Names are a great example of how our different cultural backgrounds can make SharedLanguage challenging. There are many great examples of brand names gone wrong because they mean something obscene in other languages. (KO)

See more....

/collaboration | Posted at 11:20am

Why I Have Three Names #

One thing that the articles cited in my two previous entries is that they both mispelled or misarranged my name. This is actually a relatively common phenomenon. (K9)

For the first dozen years of my life, I went by my middle name, "Eric." Using one's middle name is also a relatively common phenomenon. What's more unusual is that, upon changing schools in the seventh grade, I decided to go back to my first name, "Eugene." (KA)

It's been long enough now that most people know me as, "Eugene." Notable exceptions include my family, all of whom still call me, "Eric," and the few people who remember me from way back when. I think my brother-in-law, Isaac, is still thoroughly confused as to what to call me, although he seems to be settling on "Eric." (KB)

In my bylines, I use my full name, EugeneEricKim. This is partially an acknowledgement of my dual identity, and also a feeble attempt at uniqueness in a world with way too many Eugene Kims. (KC)

See more....

/personal | Posted at 10:28am

WikiWhiteboard #

Many moons ago, DannyAyers reported the successful prototype of WikiWhiteboard, a simple tool for creating editable SVG images on Wikis. Motivated by the simplicity of the design and a little subtle prodding by Danny, I ported it to PurpleWiki. (See PurpleWiki:WikiWhiteboard.) Danny's writeup on WikiWhiteboard, "Creating an SVG Wiki", appeared last month at XML.com. (K4)

The WikiWhiteboard code will be released in the next version of PurpleWiki, although I will be happy to release code early to anyone interested. (K5)

/tech/wiki | Posted at 10:04am

Ross Mayfield on Coevolution #

A few weeks ago, I posted some comments about RossMayfield's talk at the Bay Area Futurists Salon. Ross recently posted a good response at Many 2 Many. (K3)

/collaboration/tools | Posted at 9:47am