Author: yonghokim

Online TV show closed captions seem to sit at a curious intersection between mid-English proficiency watchers (me), no-audio environments, and the hearing impaired. The first two.. or maybe just the first category doesn’t really need audio cues like “music is playing now”, but since the segment is small enough to lump all three together, we are here.

And that opens us to the seemingly little regulated field of closed captions for the hearing impaired. I have not seen enough shows to tell if this is a pattern over time, a studio-level policy variance or just preferences of individual caption makers, (I think it’s the latter) but some do put extra thought into how the captions could convey the full watching experience. This screenshot is one such example. [solemn string music] – with proper background knowledge, this is as close as it gets within the caption production budget. I think it shows some of the caption makers care about the viewing experience for the hearing impaired. And that’s a good thing.

Our office in Los Angeles was a residential/commercial mixed zoned space with office on the first floor and residential rooms upstairs, and I used to live in one of the rooms back in 2007. One day, I woke up around 7am on a Saturday with a police’s gun fairly close to my head (I don’t remember the exact details, but at least the officer’s gun was drawn out). He said that there was a 911 call from this location that had immediately got hung up, so he was surveying the area. I believe at the end there was nothing going on, so the police left. This kept happening about 3-4 times a year for the next 2-3 years. Once, the police arrived while our parking gates were locked and one of the people staying over was chilling in a chair in the parking lot, and he pointed the gun at her saying open the gates or something but she barely spoke any English. That incident felt particularly dangerous to us – she could have been shot if any misunderstandings flared up.

We tried to figure out what the heck was going on, but the closest people’s conclusions got to was that there was a poor phone wiring job and a landline call was triggering the wrong spot. Which begs the question – was a real 911 call happening elsewhere? And did those people turn up okay?

Eventually, the building was demolished for a new one, so we never got to know what the heck was wrong.

This 911 location story just brought out the memories of that.

When I read that Falcon Heavy reuses its main boosters to save costs, I thought they just dropped to an ocean location to get picked up and repaired. Then I saw the footage a week later – holy shit the rockets descend back to a pre-painted landing zone circle vertically? It’s hard enough to keep those things standing still, but you manage to land them like nothing as if it was a VTOL? Wow. Wow. It’s so ridiculous I can’t stop laughing.

meeting mom again gives me insights into my management style. i’ve been nagged into doing things to oblivion at home. may explain why i’m very hesitant to nag others to meet their deadlines and check-in on project progress, etc.

Im going to write a letter to Kim Jong-eun asking him to nuke Las Vegas first. So much stupid shit.

Im so gratefull for my current life, and all the daily experiences i get, where i dont have to deal with this garbage on a daily basis.

Lets all make a $20 donation to poor children of Nevada.

What? Was the handlebar easier to steal than the seat?

So, some forms of machine learning are like a brute force attack on the laws the logic?

(while rethinking this)

One unwelcome change in Win10 is how it implements languages and keyboard layouts. In Win7 and before, you could have Windows’s interface language in English but remove English Input Method Editor altogether, and just keep Spanish and Korean. Korean IME has a built-in English entry (using the right alt key), so English was not needed.

Win10 ties together default keyboard layout with OS display language, so in order to see the OS in English, I must have English IME. So now, instead of having two keyboard layouts, I have three.

Having two keyboard layouts means that the keyboard switching shortcut (Left Alt+Shift) acts as a on/off switch of sorts. I start typing thinking of typing Spanish and instead Korean comes out, no problemo I hit Alt+Shift without even looking at the taskbar and I will be on my desired IME, If what I see is not what I want, just hitting the shortcut switches the layout, which makes for very easy multilingual multitasking. However, if there’s three keyboard layouts in rotation, the alt+shift shortcut is no longer a on/off switch, it’s a cycle rotator. Now, if what I typed doesn’t come out as I intended, I can’t just mindlessly press the shortcut. if I do that, changes are I will do it a couple of times (like 4 or 5) without realizing that I “missed” the desired IME. So what used to be a “toggle” type shortcut now became a “cycle through” type shortcut. Now I need to look at the taskbar to see which is the current IME, then hit the shortcut, then look at the taskbar again because I don’t remember which IME comes in in the cycle order.

I wish it was like it was before. I don’t need the English IME.