(warning: particularly old content) I don't ask for it to make sense

5/31/03

Layne's down as I write this, and will be for another couple days at least. It's very strange to be doing the sort of write-them-now-post-them-later entry I would normally be doing on vacation... at my own computer. I studied today, went to a class party, did some webpage stuff... I think, as per usual, if I'd written something before I stayed up late to dissolve my brain, I'd... um... have something more to say. Andrew may have something there with his "eat right, sleep right, fuck school" mentality.

5/30/03

Whoo-whee, is my hair short. I suppose that's what I get for distracting my (super cute) sylist by talking about Axims (we both have one) and Japan (we've both been and are going again). It is just barely long enough to get in a ponytail, albeit a small one, which meets my basic requirements. Still feels a little weird when I lose about a pound of hair, though.

In other picture related news, I finally figured out where I'd stashed those Thanksgiving pictures. I will kill you and my brother and I are cool.

Oh, and Chris is moving for a few days, so the site will be down Saturdayish to Tuesdayish. Probably for the best, considering how much crapping around on it I've been doing on it lately instead of studying.

5/29/03

Project for later tonight... update my links page. I've finally got an agenda for doing it, and it seems like a good finals project. But before that, I feel compelled to actually link to something outside of the page that no one reads... on the page that like five people read. I've mentioned kindofcrap.com to several people already and don't know (except for Zach, heh) if anyone has actually read it. But for all that has resonated, I finally hit a particular entry in Galvin's notblog that I feel... well, I said before, compelled. Here's the dance steps : go to his Feb 2003 entry, and do a <ctrl>F for "anime" (and then read the next couple paragraphs). I can never express myself quite right on this issue, so I shall use the almighty powers of the INTERWEB to make him do it for me.

Anyone noticed that the finals tone has crept in? I didn't, nope, not at all. Side note for anyone who may look at this page in the next day or so... what do you think a) of the fact that I've enlarged the font size on the site overall (yeah, remember, there's more than the supremely (cough) awesome Thoughts pages), and b) of the idea of using the same font in Thoughts as in everything?

5/28/03

You know, I'm not all that generally productive normally, which causes it to be all the more astounding when I shift into profound nonproductivity around finals time. Really, one might think I'm doing something backwards. If you can do nothing backwards.

I devoted quite a bit of time today to actually looking forward to how much crap I'll have to write here in a few weeks. Of course, every fourth sentence until September will probably be something about it being frigging hot as hell. Until then, when I sit in my room and cry in my loneliness (heh), posts will continue in the vein that has sadly become normal... I think I'll call it... "boring." I suppose there's something to be said for longevity (there were Web logs for a couple years before mine, but I was ahead of the general acceptance curve and have outlasted many others... out of sheer stubborness more than anything else). Over four years of extremely unprofound crap has spewed forth from this page, and to the dedicated four people who still for some reason read... thank you? Or I'm sorry? Not sure which. Perhaps both.

5/27/03

Temporary reprieve of a night of vivid but unthreatening dreams... but right back to plane crashes and forgetting my passport last night. I feel like I took no more than a nap.

In other news, Adam and Dr. Drew just instinctively reacted to a 5'6" woman weighing 135 with "you're fat!" I do think that my 5'3" fatass shall now cry. That was all the encouragement about myself I needed before embarking on a nightlong push to have my speech ready for tomorrow.

Wah.

5/25/03

The anxiety dreams continue; one more day of this and I'll start wondering if I'm meant to be tortured all the way up to when I go. This time, Rena, Erin, and I were all going to fly to Hawaii for a vacation, but we got to the airport and couldn't for the life of us find the correct counter to get our boarding passes. Bother.

5/24/03

Slept over twelve hours last night. Guh. Two really disturbing dreams... one, I somehow managed to totally forget a final on one day and didn't remember until I was one hour into forgetting another final the next day. Two, I decided I was going to go back to my old summer camp... as a camper. I was trying to blend in with a bunch of 16 and 17 year olds, unsure if I was supposed to be hanging out with them or the counselors... It was all very surreal and tinged with uneasiness, like I knew how weird it was, even in the dream. The fact that they'd started singing psalms before dinner was also really upsetting.

5/22/03

Always a little funny feeling, when you're looking through someone else's space, stuff, etc., and suddenly realize that they're into it too.

5/21/03

Eternal puzzlement... why I can spend all day on a task and get nowhere (where you goin'? You goin' NOWHERE!) and then in a sudden spurt of activity (usually post-midnight) I can suddenly get more done than I did in the previous full day. I mean, even when I try really really hard to be "normally" productive, it just doesn't work. Note to self : look up adrenaline addiciton.

5/20/03

Very very tired, and very tired of being sick, and having so much shit to do at the same time as being sick.

But happy birthday anyway. Sorry so cranky and stuff.

5/19/03

Most ironically, my mother brought me back a beautiful glass apple as a souvenir from her trip. A golden apple of discord, to be specific. She even made reference to it, jokingly... "now, I don't want to bring any discord, but I thought you'd like it anyway."

Frank Sinatra torturing me on the way to the bus: "Can't have one/without the other."

And then the first song on the radio when I turned it on on the bus... "if I'm not meant for you then why does my heart tell me that I am?"

Fucking hate the universe.

5/18/03

Well, I guess it's something to have it decided and all that. Something, all right.

5/17/03

Well, I am satisfied with the Matrix. It was no worse than I figured it would be, and I got my dosage of really flipping cool fight scenes, which really was all I had hoped for. It's rather depressing that we seem to no longer be able (if we ever were?) to create decent sequels that rival or surpass their predecessor. But I suppose I'll take what I can get. Especially if it's in the form of the damn cool "evil preacher" coat. Other Matrix-related bit floating through my brain :

Ian : "You see? In the future, the superhero will be the mild mannered programmer by day."

Me : "If programming been the geeky profession in the 40s and 50s that it is now, most famous superheroes would have been programmers, too."

5/16/03

We are revising the status on that cold to an SI, do you copy? Yes, SI. We are at full sinus infection alert, people. Antibiotics are on their way.

Stupid fucking once-a-year sinus infections. Piss.

5/15/03

One of my biggest objections to taking drugs when I'm sick is a really really stupid one. This is my stupid stupid thought process : I rarely recieve pity. I want pity no other time more than when I'm sick. If I'm not visibly sick, I don't recieve my pity. I guess I just want to revel in being weak every now and again.

Tall one, cute one, mysterious one. Ones that are not cold, but definitely ones.

5/14/03

She llliiiiivvvveeeesssss! And is Japanified and backupable to boot. Lessons learned : (a) do not change the default input method and then soft reset or suffer a fatal crash, (b) change the regional settings to US before backing up, (c) CorporateSync 1.0 sucks and fatally crashes when uninstalled but CorporateSync 3.0 works like a charm, and (d) perseverance pays off. One of those "I rule" moments. Of course, the paper I need to write for tomorrow still isn't written, and I goofed off for a long time this afternoon at school at a LUG meeting and with Andrew instead of studying... but I still rule. Shut up.

5/13/03

Well, I've identified two things that nuke the Axim. Perhaps I won't do them anymore. :o

5/12/03

(scrubbing eyes) I dont' know when I thought I was going to get any studying done with this Axim debacle going on. My favorite was when it crashed again (on the same thing as last night, at least it's consistent) and then refused to restore from the backup I had made two hours before ("This backup file was created by an unknown, invalid device."). Yeah. Quiz tomorrow. I haven't looked at the vocab since Saturday and it's 12:07 now. Interesting that I switched away from a personal pronoun in my frustration... I just noticed that.

5/11/03

Sayuri having the bad taste to have her first total crash and burn be at 2 am on Sunday night is not so appreciated. Especially since it was over something as stupid as uninstalling a program! Bah! Of course, I really wouldn't mind so much if I hadn't stupidly set her to restore... which'll take like an hour. Grumble. I guess I can try to sleep with Yoshiko on, but her fans are ridiculously loud.

5/10/03

I like occurences that play into imagination. Mmmm.

5/09/03

Job descriptions that make me less pessimistic about my future:

Description: Publishes technical documentation primarily to support SDK releases targeted for software licensees and developers. Responsible for accuracy and quality of technical documentation localized from Japanese to English and English to Japanese. Researches and originates technical information for publication. Responsible for project planning and coordination with internal software support and development groups. Initiates new publishing and localization procedures that improve current methodologies. Maintains software version control updates and documentation revision history. Supports other technical writing, translation and localization projects as required. Initiates communication and acts as liaison with NCL-Engineering staff on localization issues.
Requirements: BA/BS in English/Journalism, Technical Communication or related field. Minimum 5-7 years translation experience, technical writing or editing experience. Fluency in English and Japanese languages. Strong writing skills, in-depth knowledge of English and Japanese language, grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Ability to ascertain and formulate information needed to complete localization of technical publications and content required to support E-J and J-E translations. Must have good understanding of programming concepts; ability to produce technical documents in printed and web-ready document formats. Must have excellent organizational and project management skills; ability to work independently with minimal supervision. Experience using various document publishing software such as Microsoft Word, Adobe Framemaker, Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Visio, Webworks Publisher, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, RoboHelp Office. Familiar with Agile and translation memory tools such as Trados. Three years experience writing technical publications in an electronics or software development environment.

May there still be jobs like this circulating in Dec 2004 / Jan 2005.

5/07/03

And the apartment hunting has begun, with preliminary findings pointing to not finding anything decent. Sigh.

It's been a while since I had a vocab quiz... silly Japanese word of the next test I'm studying for!

kokufuku - subjugation

5/06/03

Man, my favorite days EVER are when I oversleep and then think I have a quiz so I drive to school in an adrenaline rush and then find out that there's no quiz.

Bah humbug.

5/05/03

I've been pulling my hair out over Japanese handheld stuff the last couple weeks. All I really really want is for Microsoft to have provided an IME and the shift-jis/euc/etc. codecs for Pocket IE in Pocket PC 2002. Or for some nice company to have provided it for free or not too expensive. I still balk at hacking the registry for something like this, given that if I totally fuck poor Sayuri up, I don't have anything but an ActiveSync backup to fall back on (I'm not sure that would recover registry and ROM hacks). This will be written down nicer somewhere once things have been ironed out, but here's the summary for my memory:

• Mactiontech Monster Chinese - includes a Chinese-localized notepad clone (and file browser and tasker), but more importantly, DID install the codecs for shift-jis/euc/etc. so that Pocket IE would view web pages. Unfortunately, it's like a 40$ program, and something in me really rebels at the idea of paying 40$ for something (shift-jis support) that should have just been in PPC 2002 by default. There's supposedly an input system (Monster SIP), but I have never (in over a month) been able to download it successfully, and Mactiontech sez it wouldn't do kana anyway.
• Timespace Effy OpenEyes - input system based on the ones used on Japanese cell phones. SUPER COOL THING: If you get the full set (with fonts and language encoding), it installs the Japanese regional settings and the Japanese/Korean/Chinese codecs for PIE! It does wipe the European settings out of PIE, but I wasn't using Baltic and all that crap anyway. Totally worth the 14$ for that alone, even if the input system isn't that shnazzy.
• Ectaco Partner J-E E-J Dictionary - installed MS Gothic, has a funny input system only really useable within the program. Main usefulness is that you can use it (somewhat clumsily) to look up kanji by radicals. Was 20$ and I don't begrudge it TOO much. I dislike the fact that if you try to look up anything in Japanese, you HAVE to use their input system (English > Japanese lookup works just fine with any input, including my external kb).
• Umeda Toshiyuki's TextViewer - can view shift-jis/euc/etc files, but is a really hacky freeware program, and doesn't install the codecs generally so that other programs (PIE PIE PIE) could use them.
• JWPC - The old standby Japanese word processor workhorse isn't really meant to work on ARM/XScale Pocket PC devices, and you can really tell. It's free and it installs a dictionary, but the Axim really really didn't like it. Because it's not actually designed to run in the PPC OS, you can't use ActiveSync stuff to install/uninstall it.
• Createch CSJDic J-E E-J Dictionary - decent dictionary. Cheaper than the Ectaco (15$), but you can't use it for kanji (I already have a decent denshi jisho, so it's the kanji lookup that's important).
• Decuma Japanese Handwriting Recognition - would be SO DAMN SWEET if it weren't ONLY a vendor-side product (HP users can get it... sigh).
• CJ Reader - A viewer for Chinese/Japanese (15$). Claims it can display HTML, but it was displaying it like text (i.e., it wasn't interpreting the HTML at all). No codecs, input, or dictionary = worthless.
• CE Star Suite - another Chinese thing that happens to give up the Japanese goodness... for like 40$. Installs Chinese codecs for PIE, as well as six (SIX!) PIE Japanese codecs. Includes a file converter and kanji HANDWRITING RECOGNITION system that can handle hiragana... CLUMSILY. So far as I can tell (given that I can't understand the Chinese help files), you have to do input character by character, manually selecting each one?? It'd probably work better if I understood Chinese, sigh. Doesn't do nice IME-style kanji selection for romaji input or anything. Because it's not actually designed to run in the PPC OS, you can't use ActiveSync stuff to install/uninstall it (it does come with its own working uninstaller).

5/04/03

(sigh) Well that's it then. Time for Brandon and I to start looking for a 1 bedroom or studio that we can switch off on for June to March. What a fucking pain in the ass moving is.

5/03/03

Not much to say; I studied Japanese and computational linguistics for 6 straight hours today and then saw X2. It was exactly what I wanted out of it, and that's what I have to say about today, because the whole studying binge mushed my brain.

5/01/03

Wow, I managed to go from good mood (at about 2:35) to horribly depressed mood (at about 3:15) in forty minutes flat. I'm so incredibly talented.