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VANTAN.ORG: The Daily Weblog

Personal weblog of Vanessa Tan, devoted Netizen and musician, with a new-found desire to seek the truth.

American politics through a French lensAugust 23

To wrap up my French revision for the night, I went to Lemonde.fr to read a spot of news in the beautiful language.

Not surprisingly, the home page had a photo of Barack Obama and his newly-announced running mate Joe Biden. What was more interesting was that the headline said, “Biden, choix par défaut pour les blogueurs démocrates”.

That made me look a second time. Was this French newspaper reporting about what Democratic bloggers were saying? From what I could understand, Biden was the ‘least bad’ of all the choices, which was plausible since hardcore Democrats would probably know the candidates well enough. The article itself has a modified headline, saying Biden was the default choice.

Along the way the article referred to other American websites which were quite interesting and have now been added to my feedreader: The American Prospect and Talking Points Memo. I have also seen the video of Joe Biden tearing the President apart for screwing up the Iraq invasion and not supporting the troops enough.

Amusing phrases taken from another website, Simply Left Behind, and translated into French, lend

写中文August 23

大家好。我刚发现我的＂苹果＂手提电话可以用来写中文！太好了。

我知道我的华文不太好。但是，我还可以用汉语拼音！哈哈。。。

这是我第一次在博客上写中文。 请别嘲笑我！：）

Last week of respiteAugust 22

This is my last week before officially starting school. Apart from 2 meetups with friends that were made several weeks ago, all my time has been spent going for French classes every day, doing French homework, catching up with my pre-readings and in the last couple of days, meeting up with classmates.

I think I’m going to take it easy socially and see how it goes in the next two weeks. I hope life can be close to normal, but I’m really not too sure about that. Next week, I will also take my French test to see if it meets INSEAD’s third language requirements. Wish me luck!

Hacked againAugust 18

I learnt that over the past week, my church website was hacked with the image of a flaming monkey on the home page. That image was quickly removed.

This morning I was informed that our Joomla templates were messed with, and as a precaution we’ve taken the site down temporarily.

I’m not particularly upset that MY work was gone, because I believe it is just giving back to God what He has given to me. What I am sad about is that someone would decide to attack our site, and more than once.

We’re probably seen as target practice. We’re not a big, high-profile church. We’re not even the headquarters of our denomination. So the hacker obviously isn’t out to get major attention. I’m not even sure if it is the same hacker - maybe we’re just sitting ducks.

The hackings may happen more times but I pray that it won’t. This is a totally unnecessary act. I don’t know much about counter-hacking as I’m more a designer than developer, but I hope we can put up some safeguards to prevent this from happening again.

Spot the errors - FTAugust 16

Whenever I had the time to read the entire Straits Times from cover to cover I would occasionally chance upon a typo somewhere. However, I had much higher expectations of international and British newspapers. I was thus surprised to find TWO typos in yesterday’s Financial Times. Can you spot them?

First, a political piece:

And one about the Olympics:

Click on them to view the answers (on the Flickr page, hover over the image and you will see the wrong word marked out)