The new balance

This is going to be one of those articles that will grow over time, as I start to chart the Esperanto communities, noosphere and online literature of cyberspace.

For those of you who like to plough through analyses and critiques (you know who you are), try these:

• Project Gutenberg's A Complete Grammar of Esperanto, by Ivy Kellerman
  I'm working my way through this and throughly enjoying it. No grammatical stone has been left unturned!


• The famous Learn Not To Speak Esperanto by Justin B Rye
  A great read, which didn't put me off the language at all, largely due to the fact that all languages have their problems, lexically, orthographically and phonetically. Esperanto's problems are probably born principally from its regularity: naturally there will be breakages and impossibilies as he describes, but very little that a linguist can't find his way around.

For those of you who enjoy a good community feel, even if a little artifical:

• Good ol' Lernu!
  Lovely folks. They even wish you happy birthday, and there's a small java chat applet at the bottom right hand corner where you can meet other Lernu surfers if you want. I've made contacts all over the place with this in the past. You could quite conceivably travel the world on a shoe-string budget on the strength of invites from other Esperantists on this site.

Lots of other places, which I'll add to here in due course. Gxis revido!

If anyone is a member of Orkut, would they consider inviting me to join? I'm just interested to know how that community is shaping up. It seems rather more gated than things like Bebo and the like, and has a developed Esperanto community (which I very much doubt Bebo will ever sport!

Cheers!

I suppose if this is going to be a blog, I've got to allow comments on everything, and that includes my own profile. Feel free to write in the virtual margins...
This list is not complete. I will get my CV up here at some stage. Maybe Kohera Limited can do some work for you? Maybe you'd like to get in touch to offer me some work?

The nice thing about this blog environment is that I can bring things up-to-date quite quickly, without having to do formal file transfers like I do when I'm building my own sites. Consequently, there are no good reasons why this stuff should ever really go out of date...

Believe it when you see it: I've yet to maintain jdv.hopto.org to this date. Let's hope I'm a little bit more committed with this system. Read More

Anyone who's had an e-mail address for any length of time will know that there are people out there that love to send around personality tests. There's nothing much wrong about these, but they don't even pretend to be anything but fun, and have very little practical application as far as personal development is concerned. The acceptions are probably the Jung Myers Briggs tests I've looked at before, and others where the questions and evalutions of the answers given produce empirically valuable assessments. The Brainbench site seems to offer quite a comprehensive one. I have included the full text of my report after the jump, not because of of any vain belief that you're even slightly interested, but because (if you know me, at least), you can decide whether you think it is accurate. Empowered with that knowledge, you may choose to go on and take such tests yourself. I happen to think this sums me up pretty accurately, although I was expecting a higher "abstraction" mark than I got! I also think the Introvertion score is more accurate than I've had from JMB tests I've tried. Read More

I subscribed today to Brainbench, a employability/skills testing site. I rather hoped it would be like an online version of the LPI examinations, but I don't think these results carry the weight that the LPI ones certainly do now. The format of the tests is 40 multiple choice questions with 5 or 6 possible answers depending on the test. Each question has a time limit of between 45 seconds and three minutes. You are allowed to use any textual resources to hand, but obviously the time limit procludes a huge amount of investigation. You are "honour bound" not to confer with others, as the company issues actual certificates to prove your ability, which are meant to be recognised by employers.

I'll go on to talk about the tests I took today after the jump. Read More