Coming back to Duolingo
Duolingo is an app designed to help people learn the basics of languages. Currently, the app offers 35 different courses taught in English. Some of the courses include Latin, Esperanto, Klingon, K’iche’ (available in Spanish only), Bokmål, Swahili, Irish, and Scottish Gaelig. My initial criticism When I first used...
I published with The Myanmar Times again
The Myanmar Times, a privately-owned newspaper based out of Yangon, published a version of my blog post detailing how I can’t learn Urdu, due to COVID-19. The editorial was published in the weekend edition and was edited by Dr. Andrew King. It can be read HERE....
Lack of integrity or apprehensiveness about dignity?
I’ve not lived in Myanmar as long as some and I can’t say that I’ve seen it all. One thing I do catch myself doing, however, is defaulting to my Western worldview every time I find myself in an unfamiliar situation. In fact, that is one piece of wisdom...
So long, Ubuntu 20.04. Hello, 18.04
Well, I had to finally throw in the towel. The unfortunate problem of the black screen after booting didn’t seem to go away. In fact, it seemed to be a fluke of the graphics card “co-operating,” when it did work. Otherwise, I lost all hardware acceleration and could only...
Challenges of installing Ubuntu 20.04 on my new work computer
Why get a work computer? I would first like to say that I believe separating work life from home life is a good thing. However, that has become a bit obfuscated, due to everyone having to work from home, essentially. I spend a lot of free time on the...
Removing watermarks from PDFs with pdftk!
The issue at hand Many PDFs that I download have watermarks on them. The watermarks being there isn’t always bothersome, but many of them either obstruct important text or they end up making me use more ink when I print. So, through my tinkering, I found a way to...
I have a persistence problem
Since I started this website a little over a week and a half ago, I’ve been expanding on it bit-by-bit. I intentionally decided to purchase a plan through DigitalOcean, costing around $5.00 USD a month. The hosting plan may seem like a bit much to those who have their...
Why are the Mormons teaching English in Yangon?
One topic that I’ve wanted to touch on for a while now is the presence of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) in Burma. I would like to say up front that I am not an expert researcher on matters of LDS church governance...
The disappointing reality of not needing to speak Burmese to make it big in Burma (MM)
When I first learned Burmese, I didn’t know exactly to what end I would be learning it. I figured I’d learn it to a high degree of fluency (at least B2) and then go into the academic field of Linguistics as a professor. I never actually thought I would...
American education and how I learned about “tracking”
Yesterday (it’s past-midnight here, as I start writing this) I watched a documentary called “Waiting For Superman” by Davis Guggenheim. The documentary talks about issues in the American school system and how children are waiting for a Superman-like savior figure to rescue them from it. What is this so-called...