The Day the Internet Died

So, this morning (last night for the USA), much of the internet was inaccessible worldwide. That was rather interesting, and though I could get to what I needed, my friends in the US were having a more difficult time. It turned out that two of the handful of large companies that control the internet backbone systems were knocked offline due to technical problems. One company was completely offline, bringing millions of websites and customers with it. A very bad few hous in the history of the internet.

In other news, I had my Friday Russian class today. It is sad to admit that I am not spending much time on my studying of Russian, and I am feeling the effects of this. I really do want to learn the language, but I know that if I want to acheive this goal, I must put much more effort into learning it. Languages are not learned by listening to people talk on the street or TV.

This week was the last week of my first term of classes. I have a few days off next week, which will be a nice break. Perhaps I can do some programming in my free time, as well as boning up on my Russian.

Speaking of Russian, I have become more and more interested in Linguistics in the last few months. A professor at WWC, Tamara Randolf, got me pretty interested in this discipline, which for me has been entirely self taught. I had the priviliage of sitting in on four Linugustics classes at Cornell last summer as well. I am very interested in studying the history and evolution of languages, as well as phonetics in general. I bought a book on the topic in London, and I am now teaching a small class on Phonetics and Pronunciation as a supplement to my English intruction here in Moscow. Unfortunately, my wonder university has one single class in lingustics which is offered every other year, which is pretty lame, especially for a $30k/yr. university. Perhaps I should think about graduate school if this field is so interesting. In the meantime, at least I have the internet.