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.)

randomness 6 Comments

Facebook Is Evil.

Over Easter, I got talking about social networking sites with Aaron’s cousins. The consensus was that Facebook was better than MySpace. OK, I thought, but no one I know is on Facebook.

How could I have been so wrong?

After having Facebook scour my Gmail contacts for Facebook friends, then me perusing *their* friends for mutual friends, plus searching for random friends of my own, I’m discovering that I probably know just as many people on Facebook as on MySpace. Which still isn’t many in the grand scheme of things, but still. I’ve spent way, WAY too much time exploring Facebook in the past couple of days, instead of doing something more productive. Like finishing my freelance project.

Current count:
– Livejournal, 8 actual people-I-know friends.
– MySpace, 25 actual people-I-know friends.
– Facebook, 7 10 12 actual people-I-know friends (so far… some are pending)

Like I tell everyone who dogs on MySpace: I like to keep in touch with people. If everyone wrote their own blogs on blogspot or LJ or whatever, I’d go read them. Since so many people are all in one place, though, it’s easier to join up there and catch up with them all at once. Hooray to Facebook for letting me import my blog’s RSS feed, too. Makes my job easier. Don’t need the usual “I don’t post here b/c I have a blog” post.

And, with that, I’m done for the night. Nothing useful accomplished, except an attempt to book a ryokan room. And finding a few more long-lost friends.

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.

weight loss

Plateau? Smashie, Smashie!

Heck, yeah! Eat that, you damn one-month plateau! Ungh! *bitchslap*

*ahem* Sorry.

This week, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve been watching my carbohydrate intake more diligently. I’ve been shooting for 125g of carbs and at least 25g of fiber, for a total of 100g of net carbs (since fiber isn’t digestible, y’know). I’ve been going a little over, but it’s apparently the intent that counts. I’ve continued to track my food on SparkPeople, but I’ve been manually tabulating my sugar, as SparkPeople has issue with letting people see how much sugar they’ve eaten. Can’t have people avoiding fruit, after all, since fruit has sugar in it.

At any rate, I’ve kept my protein above 140g daily, my total carbohydrates below 160g, and my fiber above 23g (except yesterday, which only made it to 18g). My sugar intake has been pretty decent, too, staying in the 20g-30g range. Now, most hard-core low-carbers would scoff at these numbers, since Atkins Induction limits you to 20g of carbohydrate per day total, and NO sugar, period. All my sugars have been… let’s see… OK, one day I had some low-cal ice cream that had 16g of sugar, but the rest is mostly my organic breakfast cereal, South Beach Diet snack bars, Splenda Brown Sugar Blend, stuff like that. I feel pretty positive about my food intake, considering this week’s results.

Remember how I said I’d try this for a couple weeks, and see if I lost three pounds in two weeks?

I just lost four and a half pounds in one week.

I weigh 197.5 lbs this morning, in contrast to the 202 I weighed this past Sunday.

Tomorrow’s Easter in Westlake, with Aaron’s family, so I expect I won’t be monitoring my carbs quite as well as I have been. I’ll still make a concerted effort to be good, stock up on the meat, go easy on the starchy goodness, and only eat one small dessert. (Believe me, at Uncle Pete’s, dessert is a course unto itself. We’re responsible for bringing a cake, and I know Pete’s wife Dee will likely be making something scrumptious, too.) I may gain back a little weight, stabilize at a slightly higher number — and I’m OK with that.

I have no intention of getting back up to 200, though.