Yesterday Chinese in a Flash, Volume 1 arrived.

They are basically a set of flash cards with common Chinese characters on them. On each card, they have:

• A Chinese character (in both simplified and traditional)
• stroke order for writing the character (simplified only)
• pinyin pronunciation
• English translation
• radicals with translations
• a sample sentence with characters, pinyin and English translation
• compound words / combinations

It’s a LOT of information packed into a tiny card. It’s great to carry them around and then break them out when I have a spare moment and learn some Chinese.

I’m also learning some interesting things about Chinese.

For example, the word for “to be agitated”, when literally translated, means “like 15 buckets, 7 going up and 8 going down”. I’m still not sure how that one works

I just discovered Xara Xtreme today and it looks like an amazing tool. It is a vector drawing program (as apposed to Photoshop, Gimp, etc, where are raster or bitmap based) but yet has some really cool features. If you have the time, check out their video demos. I’ve watched their demos and I was really stunned at the tools that are offered.

In addition to being faster than any of its competitors, Xara is cheaper too! It is just $79 which is a steal when compared to Adobe’s products.

The best part? It has an Open Source (free) Linux version which I’m trying out right now. Now that Xara is OSS (Open Source Software), they are talking with the developers at Inkscape (the current leader in vector graphics for Linux) to share ideas and try to make a killer graphics program for Linux.

I’ve been really attracted to Inkscape to use for web development, but I stuck with The GIMP because of some core features that I needed (easy shadows, fading, etc) that were hard to do in Inkscape. However, it looks like Xara can do all that and more

Information about Xara:

• Windows version: http://www.xara.com
• Linux and OSX version: http://www.xaraxtreme.org

I’ve started taking Chinese lessons and I’ve been learning a ton. My pronunciation and intonation is fairly good but I still know very little vocabulary. The teacher has been giving me a ton of new vocabulary words as well as going over some of the basic Chinese grammar. Right now I can talk about my family and make a little small talk. I’ve been learning mostly pinyin (where the pronunciation of the Chinese characters is spelled out with English characters) and am picking up a few characters here and there.

If anyone is interested in taking online Chinese lessons, I’m using Learn Chinese Online and have been very pleased with them. If you decide to sign up with them, make sure you mention me so that I can get a discount on my lessons

Also, I found a uber cool Chinese tool called DimSum. It is written in Java and has a ton of useful tools like translating to and from chinese, viewing and hearing the pronunciation of words, seeing how to write Chinese characters, and a web browser that will allow you to hover over Chinese words in web pages to get the translation. In addition, it has flashcards to help teaching you new vocabulary words. It can even translate characters between traditional and simplified!

Have you ever wondered what operating system you are most like?

LOL, I didn’t think so. However, there is a fun quiz you can take that will (attempt to) match your personality with an operating system. Take the quiz and post what operating system you are. My quiz result was slackware linux

I especially liked the part: “…you are often mistaken as insane”

The quiz can be found on BBspot