On the plane back to Japan last week I was able to watch a movie in Japanese without benefit of any subtitles, and today I began reading a book in Japanese.
The Movie was Departing Osaka at 0:00, the book is ダーリングは外国人.
I’m pretty pleased with that.
The results came in yesterday and, congratulations me, I passed the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, level 3.
What’s bothering me is that I just barely passed. 65% cumulative when I had been hoping and expecting to get closer to 75% or 80%. Essentially, after a full year of studying and working at the language, my test scores were up by 6%.
I don’t know quite how to feel about this other than to say that studying on my own just isn’t working. So now I’m thinking about hiring a Japanese teacher and getting deep into the books again, but I am frustrated.
Still, we soldier on, right?
During the past month I have successfully refurbished an older (2003) eMachines box. I removed Windows and installed “Gusty” Ubuntu Linux and assorted software to re-make the machine into a Linux powered media pc.
I am using Miro for television and video podcasts, Audacity for audio recording, Skype for phone calls, and Ubuntu’s native software for CD and Mp3 playback.
This is an easy, fun, project, and I have been enjoying the results so much that my next computer, someday, will be a linux box from the ground up (as in, I’ll build it myself). For anyone who is as sick and tired of Windows as I was, I highly recommend switching to Linux.
Next month, I may be inheriting an older Windows machine and I think I would like to set it up as a Linux media center.
I have been considering the various flavors of Linux and have yet to make a decision, but I have decided to go with a media-rich system. The only trouble is, I have very little experience playing with OSes. I have built websites and worked with a number of different kinds of programs, but this will be my first attempt at going into the guts of an OS to make it do exactly what I want.
I’m a bit nervous, but I’m also looking forward to it. Wish me luck.
Like so many other people, I studied Spanish in high school. I learned what I needed to pass and then promptly forgot it once out of school.
In the past few years though, I have begun studying again, for no real purpose other than I’d like to be able to speak the language well. My wife and I travel often and while in Spain recently, I was a bit embarrassed at how poor my Spanish ability is.
I have been using the Coffee Break Spanish (http://www.radiolingua.com/cbs/home.html) podcast for a few months now and have seen a dramatic increase in my listening ability and grammar comprehension and use. I would recommend this as a free resource for anyone with a casual or serious desire to learn the language.
Steve dragged me out of the factory where we worked before I could even finish clocking out properly. We climbed into his car and took off for Vista Del Mar before our co-workers even realized we were gone.
We hit the track like a couple of madmen, balancing burgers, paper cups of beer, racing forms all the while talking about how cool it was that those girls had flashed us from their truck out on the street. We found spots overlooking the track and went off one at a time to the betting box to make our wagers.
Of course, we knew absolutely nothing about horse racing and bet only on the horses whose names we liked. Our favorite for the day: Barking Shark.
Our horse came in for us on a win, place, or show bet, gaining us just enough cash to pay for the afternoon. We walked out of the park four hours later, bellies full, cash in hand, excited, and still talking about the girls who had flashed us.
It was one of the best days of my life.
Since then, I have made a thousand or more bets at all kinds of games, but always for low stakes. I am a very cautious gambler. I hedge my bets and play as intelligently as possible. But one day, someday, maybe, I am going to stop doing that.
I have seen or read or heard or imagined a thousand or more scenarios wherein our hero walks up to the box and bets it all on the long shot, or lets it ride, or pulls the the long odds and I so desperately want to do that.
I don’t know why. I don’t really care.
Perhaps it was born in all those Bukowski books, perhaps in that one afternoon in San Diego, perhaps it is just an innate part of my neurotic personality. It doesn’t matter.
One day, I am going to find myself at a park, and I am going to examine all the races and horses closely, then I will pick three to come in, in the correct order, and I will make a bet for an insane amount of money, and I will win the trifecta.
My wife and some friends went down to Tokyo several years ago to watch live Sumo. It was absolutely a great time. We cheered for our favorite rikishi, tried to figure out what various moves were called, drank a lot of beer, and ate squid jerky. Good times.
One highlight for my wife was getting to meet some of the wrestlers she had seen on t.v. when she was a girl. After retiring, the wrestlers stayed in the organization training younger guys and the like and if you go in early, you can often find them just hanging around and have a bit of a chat.
And make sure to get a handprint from the rikishi. They look great up on the wall.
Well, not really. After trying, for years, to find a good library program – one that would let me catalogue not only the physical media in my library but all the image files and mp3s as well – I gave up.
I decided that I would break the task into two parts. First, I would use a library program to build an index of all books, dvds, cds, games, etc. Second I would utilize standardized tags built into the file names of all my digital media for easy searching. Third, once finished, I would sacrifice a goat to the media gods in the hopes I would never have to do this again.
For the first, I purchased a copy of Delicious Library for the mac and a Cue Cat barcode scanner. These two products provided a quick and easy way to get all my media entered into the index. Once entered, DL is easy to search through and organize by whatever criteria you feel is most important.
For the second, well, that was a bit more tricky. First I brainstormed a few tags in a basic hierarchy. I decided to run with the following order for music files: Artist-Album-Song Name-Special-Format. (“Special” is used for tags like “live” or “acoustic” to differentiate various versions of one song by the same artist.) For photos, I opted for: Subject/event-place-date-format. The system has worked so far. I was able to dump all files into large folders labeled music and photos and then use various desktop searches or application searches to find what I was looking for.
It is not a perfect set-up and it has led me to notice that I have several copies of some photos and sometimes a mis-labeling or two, but it works for the most part. I still plan to tweak and fiddle with the system, but, in the meantime, at least I can find everything.
A former colleague recently sent me a photo of herself and her husband, and their alpacas. The photo is lovely. It shows the couple in the foreground, standing in front of a split log fence, with several animals in the middle ground behind them. Completing the picture is the open green and blue and white of New Zealand, filling up the background like a postcard from God.
I’m jealous.
When my friend had first told me of her plans to move to NZ and start, with her husband, an Alpaca farm, I was too ignorant to be incredulous. I found that I had to hit up Google for some knowledge before I could react in the manner she had expected, namely, shock and doubt.
However, she sat down with me and gave me several links to resources and explained what they had in mind, and now, a year later they’re actually doing it. They’ve got the farm and are slowly beginning to turn a profit, but more than that, they are enjoying the hell out of themselves, their lives, and each other.
Now, I know myself, and I’m not a farmboy. It’s too much like real work and I find that I’m mildly allergic to anything resembling heavy labor. However, I do think that this may be a great short-term, low-cost, low-risk investment.
The basic premise is that one buys an animal, pays to have it stabled and cared for and sheared twice a year. The hair is then collected for use in paintbrushes, coats, boots, etc. etc. Once the costs have been re-couped by the stable, profits are forwarded on to you. Bearing in mind that these profits may only run around a hundred dollars per year per animal, one can see why this may not be the best investment for everyone.
At the same time, it is a reasonably environmentally friendly way of earning a buck or two for minimal effort, just a bit of cash up front.
Of course, more honestly, and more personally, I just want one for the cocktail chatter. “My investments? Well, I’ve just funded my fourth Alpaca down in New Zealand and I expect them to be earning out any time now…” etc. etc.
Unfortunately, my wife knows this and thus, the title for this entry.
Hacking USB drives seems to be the in thing. Hot Wheels, PezDispensers, even Homer J. Simpson have gotten the hacker treatment. It seems to be a relatively simple and painless procedure. One just needs a Dremel (or Dremel-like) tool, an USB drive you’re not using, and some sort of toy or figurine.
Well, I want to play too. And it just so happens that I have the tools and the USB drive. Unfortunately, I have very little experience or technical know-how when it comes to electronics and / or hacking in general. But, still, you’ve got to start somewhere.
So, I’m just waiting until I find that perfect toy to tear apart and re-build in my own unique and configureable way, hopefully with the ability to read and write up to 256 MBs of data.
The hunt is on.
It’s in my desk. It’s buried in my closet. It’s in the glove box of my car. It’s even on my bookshelves. Media. I don’t even conciously collect the stuff, it just appears, day after day like it’s created it’s own gravity well and is now capable of dragging like matter in of its own accord.
I’ve tried various software database programs and filing schemes but nothing seems to help. The books, CDs, DVDs, photos, photo albums, CD-Roms, magazines, catalogs, old newspapers, posters, bookmarks, .avi and .mp3 files…it all just keeps adding up.
But I’m going to get it all organized and sorted through. Even if it kills me.
