Category Archives: geekspeak

site-related techspeak, computer crap, other technical garble not of interest to the general populace.

webdesign 1 Comment

Productive

Finished the initial roll of film in the Brownie Starmite. Today was appropriately sunshiny, so I took identical photos to yesterday’s overcast ones, plus some others to pad out the roll. Wrote a check to Dwayne’s Photo for $14, packed up the film, and will be shipping it off tomorrow morning. I expect to have twelve 4″ x 4″ prints in my hot little hands by May 1st.

Put away the mess of clothes on the floor by the bed. Went into the small bedroom and arranged all of our board games on a small plastic shelving unit in the closet. (Damn, we have a lot of board games. Trivial Pursuit especially.) Moved my empty steamer trunk from the small bedroom to beside my nightstand. Sometime in the near future, I’ll be going through the linen closet and moving blankets into the trunk to make room for the new sheets I intend to purchase.

Submitted the new freelance site to Google for spidering and indexing. I’m planning to use a Google search for the site search, so a good spidering by Google would be a definite plus. Still have a lot to do… I’m not going to end up getting everything done this week that I told them I would. I knew I was giving myself a mighty tall order, what with the laundry list of stuff I had yet to do. Not to worry. It’ll get done well before the Japan trip. Hopefully by the end of April, if not sooner.

Paid my credit card bills. A simple task, but still one that makes me feel… satisfied? Relieved? Accomplished? Meh. It’s done, anyway.

Paying bills is going to get more interesting in July, when Sky changes over to Huntington’s payroll system. Bi-weekly instead of semi-monthly. This will take some getting used to, after being paid on the 15th and the last day of the month for the past 4½ years.

otaku

Hitting The Wall of Nihongo

It’s not that my brain is full. I’m still doing OK with picking up the grammar and vocabulary in the Pimsleur lessons, and the JPod101 Survival Phrases. Thing is, I’m not sure if they’ll be helpful, and if I’d be better served to spend all my Nihongo brainpower on the katakana studies that Erin suggested. Although that would be harder to study during my lunchtime walk.

Between what I learned from Josh in Japan (mainly just left/right and numbers) and my two other audio sources of Nihongo goodness, I can introduce myself, ask directions, ask if you understand English, be humble about my own knowledge of Japanese, ask you to repeat yourself slowly, be generally polite, make sure I get on and off the train at the right place, ask if you’d like something to eat or drink, ask how to say something in English, ask what something says in Japanese, and a few other parlor tricks. Most of the really useful stuff has come from the JPod101 Survival Phrases, though.

I’ve read that the Pimsleur lessons don’t give an accurate representation of native language speed or rhythm — which is daunting, but expected. I think I can get a better idea of the flow with a half-hour Pimsleur lesson than a 15-minute JPod101 lesson, though. I guess I’m just wondering if I should even keep bothering. I know I’m going to sound pretty idiotic saying stuff like… oh, I don’t know… OK, for example, I don’t think I’ll ever have occasion to say, “Ee, eigo ga yoku wakarimasu. Watashi wa amerikajin desu.” (“Yes, I understand English well. I am an American.” Well, hello, Captain Obvious! Was my god-awful accent the first giveaway?) I also don’t think I’ll ever have occasion to actually ask someone if they’d like to eat or drink something, and especially not at either my place or their place. (“Watashi no tokoro de?”)

I’ve read online that there’s an upcoming lesson that teaches how to count yen. I need some help with remembering numbers without counting on my fingers, so I’ll stick with it at least until that one. Listening and repeating also helps my recall of the previous lessons. I don’t think I’ll get need to use very much Japanese in Tokyo, but I’d like to at least sound like I’m trying my best when and if I do use it.

(The people at my work think I sound Japanese. I don’t think they’ve ever even watched anime.)

otaku 2 Comments

Nice Engrish

I just submitted a reservation for a ryokan (traditional Japanese inn) in Asakusa, Tokyo. Turns out there’s a festival going on while we’ll be in Japan! How cool. However, it makes our goal of staying in a ryokan a little more challenging, as the good ones in Tokyo all appear to be in Asakusa, and they’re probably all booked because of the HUGE festival.

Anyway, I just got the greatest confirmation message ever:

Thank you for an application.
I do the telephone of affirmation by return.
In addition, since there is also a case of a transmitting trouble, 2 and when you will carry out for three days and there is no reply, please ask by E-mail, telephone, etc.

o.O

I’d imagine the Japanese are probably too polite to nickname the hack-job that we gaijin do to THEIR language.

webdesign 1 Comment

One Week Till Relaunch?

Stayed up a little too late last night after getting home from Easter festivities in Cleveland. Woke up this morning, way late and bleary-eyed, and decided to use one of my personal days. After all, I need to get my freelance project done this week, and there are a few important parts that aren’t done yet. So, I stayed home, slept in a little, and worked for about four hours total on that.

I’m realizing that creating my own content management system (CMS) from a flat-file database is a little more challenging than I’d thought it would be. I thought it would be ridiculously simple, but it’s really not. I’d really rather use SQL, but enabling SQL on my client’s webhosting would cost them extra from their webhost. I’m highly tempted to just tell my client to edit the file themselves as needed, and upload it via FTP… but I know I should really afford them a way to edit their news and such in the browser itself.

I spent long enough figuring out how to check a username and password against a flat-file db, and remembering how to get PHP to remember that the user has logged in, via session variables. I finally had some ideas about how to edit and delete records after being flummoxed for quite some time… but I got sidetracked by Japan trip stuff, and never got back to coding, and now my brain’s winding down enough that I’m not going to attempt it now. Maybe tomorrow after work. I’m thinking about feeding the db into an array to display it, then editing the array and spitting the whole array back out into a new file, overwriting the old. Should work, right…?

Back to work tomorrow. Meh. I’m looking forward to finishing this freelance job so I can a.) invoice the client, and b.) finish up my resume and portfolio redux in preparation for the pre-Japan job-hunting blitz.

geekspeak 4 Comments

Plug Your Desk Hole With a USB Hub

I no longer have a desk to accomodate such a thing, but I so could have used this back when I worked at RCC.

It’s a USB hub that fits in the little 3-inch desk hole where your cables go. How cool is that. Belkin is apparently planning to release an iPod dock adapter along these same lines. OMGWTFBBQ. I <3 gadgetry... except when I currently have no earthly use for it. Maybe someday I'll reclaim sufficient geek status to work somewhere with a desk hole. *sigh* [via NOTCOT.ORG]