To the FutureApr 30, 2008
A voter's experience in the Burma's constitution referendum
A funny account of a voter's experience in the police state of Singapore. [a first-hand account in Burmese]Apr 25, 2008
Testing Burmese typing
I tried to type out the following text using Padauk Unicode font. It was from http://www.planet.com.mm forum. I thought it was a nice irony about Bagan for banning gtalk/gmail.
ဆိုဒ်တစ်ခု ကြိုက်လို့ငါ၀င် ရတ်ဂျစ်စတာ လုပ်ဖို့ငါပြင် တော့ ပေးစရာ မေးလ်မရှိ ဒီဒုက္ခ တော့ ပြေးစရာ နတ္ထိ ပါတကား။ စော်မကြည် ကျုပ်ဘ၀ ဆိုင်ဘာဂဲများနဲ့ စကောပြား စကားများပြောရအောင် အော် ဆရာသမား ဘန်းတာ တွေ ဖွင့်ပေးပါ ခင်ညား။ အနေဝေးကာနေ သူဇာပျို နိုင်ငံခြားမှာ တခြားသူလုမှာစိုးလို့ စကားများ ပြောရအောင် အော် ဆရာသမား ဘန်းတာ တွေ ဖွင့်ပေးပါ ခင်ညား။ သားတစ်ကောင် နိုင်ငံခြားက တစ်ပတ်ခြားတစ်ခါ ဂျီတော့မှာတွေ့ ရာက အခုတော့ ငါ့မှာလွမ်းရ အမယ်မင်း ငါ့သားတို့ရယ် အမေ့ကိုစာနာကြပါလား။ အများနာတကာနာကြားဖို့ တရားစာအုပ်များလဲတောင်းရအောင် ဟဲ့ ဒကာ ဒကာမများ ဂျီမေးလ်တော့ဖွင့်ကြပါလား။ အင်တာနက်သုံးနိုင်သော်ငြား ကောင်းတာမှန်ရင် ပိတ်ကာထားမှတော့ အို............ ဂေါတမဘုရား တပည့်တော်ခင်မျာ လူဖြစ် ရှူံးလူလုံးမလှ ခွေးလုံးလုံးဖြစ်နေရပါပြီလား။
Unicode Notes
Zawgyi, although widely used by many Burmese web sites, is sadly not compliant with the Unicode standard. Let's hope they will support Unicode 5.1 in their future version. This page from zawgyi.org describes which fonts are compatible with Unicode 5.1 standard.
The Burmese text above can be viewed by any of the standard-compliant Unicode fonts: Padauk, Parabaik, ParabaikSans, and Myanmar3. I have the download link for Padauk in the following list.
Here is the list of tools/software, which I used.
- Keyman 6.0.15 from Tavultesoft: Keyman Desktop is a keyboard mapping solution, designed with the user in mind.
- myWinE keyboard [Right click and "Save link as"] from thanlwinsoft.org and the layout: MyWinE is an extended keyboard implementing Myanmar and Sgaw Karen support in Unicode.
- Padauk: download
Apr 16, 2008
Politicizing Olympics
The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.
George Orwell said those words in his 1946 essay "Why I write."
Pro-Chinese governments, including Burma, and the Chinese government have been saying that olympics should not be politicized.
[Chinese] Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang says the Beijing Olympics is a grand event both for China and for the whole world, and that the Games should not be politicized.
The statement by Qin Gang is in itself a political one, describing a "grand event" showcasing the "rich and powerful" China. Olympics have long been used by various governments to promote their ideology. Hitler used the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany as a tool to promote Nazi ideology by allowing only members of the "Aryan race" to compete for Germany.
Looking as far back as ancient Olympics events, winning athletes were heroes who put their home towns on the map. Winning medals at the Olympics signify the wealth and power of a town. A young Athenian nobleman used the number of his entries in chariot-race in the Olympics to defend his political reputation. [From Tufts]
Therefore, as far as I am concerned, olympics is a sporting as well as political event. As much as the Chinese government has the right to make the "grand" event successful, activists around the world should also have the right to express their anger towards the Chinese government and its policy.
