It was in the early '90s, sometime before South Korea broke out as a dominant economic force. Yes, I'm convinced he thought I was a western educated Korean brat prancing around in his shop and was having none of it. Looking back, I still feel a sense of relief I didn't get beaten up.
As a young man many years ago I happened to be in Seoul, in a shoe store. I was casually asking prices in English and noticed the salesman or owner was getting visibly angry with me. So much so that as I went around the corner of the store I clearly saw that he had begun advancing toward me, with every intention of physically attacking me. I put my hand forward to stop him and as I did, I shouted loudly, again in English, "Stop. Let me outta here!" To which he suddenly hesitated, stepped aside and let me go.
I wondered for years what I might have done to upset the bloke - he was a well built man and I did not want to fight him! It was only after the KAL crash and the coverage it gave the Korean focus on seniority and age that the penny dropped. He thought I was Korean - I do look very Korean (and Japanese and Chinese) - and was clearly offended by my not respecting his age.
At least that is what I would like to think. The alternative is that I was somehow very offensive anyway and I'd like not to think that.
It took me a long time to get there, but I eventually did - I agree with every one of things that you listed. Fortunately, I have also learned that there are a whole lot of things that you can do to overcome each of those challenges. It does require a good bit of time to research, understand and apply them - as well as some luck.
I had a slightly better experience. For the thrill of it, I spent hours preparing for a couple of test papers making a number of little cheat sheets in tiny handwriting. At the end of the exercise I found I didn't need the cheat sheets - the stuff had gone right into memory and I did quite well in the tests.
I don't think that is the case. I think it would have to take a deeper understanding of double-entry accounting to really appreciate its genius. The key lies in the double entry that is made for each transaction. While each entry is simple, the beauty lies in how it provides the basis for detecting errors even in very large datasets simply by comparing totals - they must balance. In this context negative numbers do not provide any meaningful information at all.
I tried using John Wiegley's Ledger, which uses negative numbers. Everything was great about Ledger except for that part - I just couldn't wrap my head around it.
I have always lamented the loss of the tail. Every time my dog, though almost entirely asleep, wags its tail to acknowledge my presence, I always say to myself "Now, THAT is efficiency."
I'm not a furry, but I'm open to the possibility of getting that back!
Sounds very useful to me. rsync is my go to tool - I use it to manually maintain versions of my workstation as I find it the most reliable and usable among all options I've tried.