Greatly Reviewed!

Today’s quite a boring day. The Human Relation Department has only added one news into our news site. It means that I just have to translate one news. Yeah, you might find this situation agreeable. Yeah, me too, deep down inside. But for me, someone who pushes himself learning to write in English, this condition’s counterproductive. Yeah, nothing else I can do, though. I don’t hold the right to write my own news story.

I have tried various things so far. From posting job vacancy information, sharpening my sense of English through reading news from Times and New York Review of Books. Well, thank God the news from our Public Relation Department came and I directly delved into it. Continue reading »

What is very fascinating in being a webmaster is when you come up with ideas that you think will make your website more beneficial both for the readers and for the stakeholders (hehehe… actually I don’t like this too serious word “stakeholder”, but I find our news people use it very often these days in our campus news site, and I think it will make ‘em happy if they know me use their presently-favorite word, hehehe…). By stakeholders, I mean heads of units, institutes, programs or departments who need our official website to promote their institutions.

Today, my greatest idea is … ta-taaaaa … I suggest my manager to ask heads of departments that have not had their own websites to collect some major introductory data about their departments and then I will make special pages to post those information. That way, the fans of our website can get information about all programs in our university. Continue reading »

There’s time when you feel distressed as a university site webmaster. In my case, I feel very distressed once–so far. It happened several weeks ago. This goes the story:

Someone sent an email to the webmaster, to me, informing of a job vacancy in a company whose name he didn’t show and whose address he didn’t show. Well, because I had once received a complaint from our reader telling that there’s a fraudulent job vacancy information that we uploaded without ever knowing that it had been fraudulent, my spider sense reminded me to upload this job vacancy information from this alumnus. I replied him telling him that we could not post the vacancy due to certain reason (I told him the reason, we want our vacancy info giver to give the mailing address to show their being responsible for their vacancy information). You know what? He replied back saying: hey, we sent you the info because we don’t want our alumni become unemployed, btw, this company actually belongs to the head of alumni association of our campus.

He wrote the email in a–to me–very rude manner. Continue reading »

When Azadeh Moaveni , a Time Magazine journalist who seems to specialize in writing news stories about Iran and other Persian issues, lived in Iran in the early days of her career as a journalist, Iran was still under Khatami’s arms. While young people’s life seemed to be very depressed, very monotonous, very boring, the youngsters seem to always strive to take any chances to express themselves as soon as those chances approach. Well, you might say that Iranian young people wish to live like American youngsters they imagine.

In Lipstick Jihad Azadeh Moaveni records her life, which due to her living with them makes it possible for us to say that “she also records Iranian young people’s lifeâ€, during this phase. She records how, while out in the street they behave quite pious, nice, Moslem-clad, inside big houses where parties are held after paying some money to police officers they wear tank-tops that can only be seen once they enter the houses and throw their Islamic roopoosh (a kind of loose clothes worn by women in Iran) to jacket hangers. Continue reading »

The War Against Cliche is the kind of book I love re-re-re-reading. In it, you can find lots of reviews that Martin Amis wrote since the first days of his career as a literary reviewer until 2001. He mostly reviews literary works, ranging from popular novels to the canons, but you can also find several reviews on non-fiction non-literary works like Hillary Clinton’s book and Andy Warhol’s diary. All are reviewed in the holy Amisian way. They’re sharp, they’re to the point, they’re honestly admiring or denouncing.

For the ones on literary works, you can find how Amis repeatedly quotes sentences or words that highly show cliches. He gives sharp remarks as if addressed mainly to the author of those reviewed works. But, once he shows a huge interest in the book, he gladly and sincerely gives praises. Look at how he reviews Michael Chricton’s The Lost World, and compare it to his reviews on Vladimir Nabokov’s works. Continue reading »