Sinoglot is getting another facelift. More on that later.

One of the things that we’re going to great pains to ensure is cross-everything compatibility. Unless you use Opera. More on that later too.

Part of this cross-browser, cross-system, cross-whatever-else compatibility is making sure everything is HTML5, CSS3 compliant. This in turn has had me poring over standards references to find the goodies that would make it all work regardless of the device the person reading the posts (you) was using.

W3C, in a reference dated November 2002 and re-done in 2009, provides a few nice ways to sort numbered lists. These include “cjk-ideographic” (一 二 三 四 五…), “japanese-formal,” “-informal” and a few other names which end up being “壹 貳 參 肆 伍 陸 柒 捌 玖…”. There’s also cjk-earthly-branch (子 丑 寅 卯 辰 巳 午 未 申 酉 戌 亥) and cjk-heavenly-stem (甲 乙 丙 丁 戊 己 庚 辛 壬 癸), which are nice to have.

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While cruising the iTunes app store for a good version of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms game, which by the way doesn’t exist, I ended up on KOEI’s page. In addition to a painfully mediocre version of my favourite childhood game, they have an app called “Kanji Shaker”. iPhones let you shake them to do stuff. It’s a safe bet that anything with “shake” in the name is based on a gimmick.

So I downloaded it.

Here’s the idea: Type in your name, push a button, and BAM! You now have a kanji name. Time to get a tattoo.

My name is apparently 気都冷ん. Ke to rei n. I don’t know where ‘to’ is coming from, and ん is hardly kanji, but I digress.

And in case you’re wondering about the shaking, it actually does nothing but make the kanji spin in place. Wee.

So what’s a Hanzi Shaker? Why, 震教徒, of course.

Even if you don’t drive yourself, in Beijing pretty soon you learn to spot the xīnshǒu (新手), literally the “new hands”, the greenhorns, the folks that made it through cryptic questions and an irrelevant “road” test and now possess that coveted, slightly-too-big-for-a-credit-card-slot, laminated green card that entitles them, for the next six years…

1. to drive around the 47 cars waiting in the left turn lane and position themselves in front of the first car, even if that means placing themselves in the middle of an intersection during a red light
2. to reverse for 500m in the right lane of the freeway after passing the exit ramp they decided was appropriate after stopping and deliberating (in lane) for several minutes
3. to maneuver their car through a 10-minute long, 17-point U-turn on a street hardly wide enough for bicycle traffic Continue reading