| japan |
[28 Jan 2005|08:34pm] |
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holy crap, i just applied to the school and bought airline tickets.
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| it's an adventure! |
[28 Jan 2005|10:49am] |
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So, Trilogy has decided they're overstaffed again and offered people the chance to volunteer for severance or for the flex-leave program. I've decided to take flex-leave since I've been feeling like I really need a long vacation for a while now. What this means is that I'll get five months or so off work with benefits and a fraction of my pay, probably to start around the beginning of March.
I haven't totally decided what I'm going to do with it yet, but I'm looking now to spend a few months in Japan in a Japanese language school and then tourist around a bit. This only accounts for a maximum of three months (I'd need a visa to spend more than 90 days in Japan), so I don't know what else I'll be up to in this time. Probably some hot road-trip action. Who knows! I'm not going to decide yet.
I am excited and terrified. But I think that's good. My life has been too easy recently. Same ol' job, same ol' activities, same ol' people. Which is not to say that I don't love those people and those activities and (most of) that job. But it's time to shake things up a little and get a new perspective on them. What better way to appreciate them, ne? No time like the present, only live once, yadda yadda.
Anyway, I should wrap this up before my brain overdoses on cheap philosophizing. So, a quote I came across (via ![[info]](http://library.vu.edu.pk/cgi-bin/nph-proxy.cgi/000100A/http/web.archive.org/web/20050206202134im_/http:/=2fstat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) wintersweet) while researching Japanese language schools.
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
Mark Twain
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| untimely musing |
[16 Jan 2005|02:58pm] |
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music |
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Ron-E - Soulgate |
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on friday night, arwinday and i watched a movie made in France while enjoying a fine Californian wine and i was amused by the reversal.
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| raptor-children |
[03 Jan 2005|05:16pm] |
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music |
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The Funeral Orchestra - Feeding the Abyss |
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today at lunch, there was a baby sitting in a high-chair who screamed exactly like those raptors in Jurassic Park did.
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| in the absence of actual content, a meme |
[16 Dec 2004|08:42am] |
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Use what’s actually next to you.
えぐ.る【抉る】 木をのみで～った I gouged the wood out with a chisel.
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| bad traffic light! |
[02 Dec 2004|10:45am] |
this morning as i was driving in, one of the traffic lights on my commute (at 38th and Lamar) malfunctioned. the direction i was going never got a green light. after waiting through two complete cycles where the other four left turn directions each got to go and the other three straight directions got to go, people in front of me just started running the light. when i got up to the stop limit, i was half way through navigating the 311 phone tree to let someone know about the problem when the light decided it was finally time to turn green. go figure.
i've never seen anything like that happen before, it was really creepy.
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| cultural differences |
[11 Nov 2004|12:40pm] |
as far as i can tell, i am the only man in akron with long hair.
also, akron is not a bastion of vegetarianism.
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| whee |
[09 Nov 2004|10:13pm] |
hello from sunny akron, ohio! or, at least, it would be sunny, probably, if it were time for the sun to be up.
er, nothing much else to say. it's cold here. but it does make me faintly homesick for the east coast. there's a bit of autumn left, a nice nip in the breeze, and all the freeway interchanges work the way i grew up with, namely, with clover leaves and without frontage roads. there are Bob Evans restaurants every 5 miles along the interstates. some of the interstates charge tolls. my rental car came with an ice scraper.
i am sure the novelty will wear off when it's still cold tomorrow, i have to use the ice scraper, pay the toll on the way back to cleveland, and nearly have an accident on one of the interchanges with all the damned merging. and Bob Evans isn't actually all that good. i mean, better than Denny's, but does that really say much?
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| day of reckoning |
[02 Nov 2004|09:05am] |
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music |
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Windham Hell - Reflective Depths Imbibe |
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a few days ago, i saw a bumper sticker which read
VOTE DEMOCRAT
because who ever heard of a nice piece of elephant?
i also saw a sign by the side of the road which used to say "Remember what happened in Florida! Early voting at Fiesta on I-35" and had this morning been covered up with a big sign that said "DEMOCRATS LIE! Vote today!"
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| wow |
[18 Oct 2004|11:28pm] |
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tonight's steel drum class was visited by Ellie Mannette. Ellie Mannette invented the steel drum in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in the 1940s. he currently holds a position at West Virginia University where he teaches the art of steel drum tuning, apparently, largely for free. he also regularly gives lectures over the course of which he turns a blank steel barrel into a tuned instrument capable of sounding several notes. i'd love to attend one of those lectures someday.
i don't think i have the words to describe how cool it was to actually meet him in person in such a small group (there are only like six of us in the class). i'd compare it to something like having Joe Satriani drop in on your guitar lesson or Scott Joplin (assuming he was still alive, and not Zombie Joplin) show up for your piano lesson, except not only did Mannette write a lot of the music that defined steelband, but he created an entirely new instrument on which to do it. totally crazy.
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| oy |
[12 Oct 2004|11:41pm] |
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music |
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Shostakovich - Symphony No. 10 |
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japanese club was challenging this evening. of the seven of us, four were native speakers, one nearly fluent, one really good, and me. while it's great to have so many native speakers come, it also put my recent studies in stark perspective. questions i've been asked before in the past i could handle reasonably well, but it was difficult to keep up with what was going on. i spent most of the time there just listening trying to absorb wat i could. definitely running into my lack of confidence. i froze up several times when people directed questions at me... i need to make myself just say something (anything!) in these cases.
really, i just need to get to japan and stay there for like six months. i'm just not going to get comfortable with the language at this rate.
also, for n prime, 2^n = k*n + 2, for some k in Z. it was an amusing consequence of a probability problem a friend posed to me today. (the problem was: say you have an unfair coin which comes up heads with probability p (p is unknown to you). devise a way to use it to create fair single-zero roulette game (i.e. there are 37 possible outcomes, 0 - 36, which are uniformly distributed)).
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| woot! |
[28 Sep 2004|10:55am] |
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music |
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Dorn - Schatten der Vergangenheit |
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Teeth: Clean! No cavities!
DDR Extreme: Arrived! Is it time to go home yet?
Line terminators: Fixed! Stupid cygwin.
such a productive day, and it's not even 11 yet.
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| what's in the box? |
[15 Sep 2004|10:18am] |
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i finally capitalized on trilogy's sending me to los angeles for the past few weeks and had dinner with kilroi last night. after some aimless wandering, we ended up in downtown manhattan beach in a random little sushi place. we sat at the sushi bar, nibbled on sushi for a while, and just caught up for like two hours. overall, the restaurant was unremarkable, except with the bill we received an origami box filled with something when the guy brought us our check. "souvenir" he said as he dropped it off. it jingled. turns out it was filled with beer bottle caps. also turns out that the person seated next to us was discussing karate with the sushi chef. go figure.
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| ooooh |
[13 Sep 2004|10:41am] |
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from a weekend posting to the coldmeat mailing list:
BRIGHTER DEATH NOW
RAISON D'ÊTRE
DEUTSCH NEPAL
BOCKSHOLM
Invading
New York
Austin
San Francisco
weekend 21-24th October.
how austin gets into a short list with New York and San Francisco i'll never know, but i'll take it. never would've thought i'd get to see a dark ambient show without having to travel, probably to europe.
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| loyalty |
[27 Aug 2004|02:33pm] |
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i find it vaguely insulting that AT&T; Wireless keeps sending me offers to "reward my customer loyalty" that are conditioned on accepting a one or two year service contract (currently i am not under a contract).
next they will be telling me i should accept a service contract for my own protection.
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| huh |
[26 Aug 2004|11:43am] |
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this morning, i successfully navigated the help files for the MS Japanese IME (the input mode that allows me to type japanese characters on an english keyboard), which are written entirely in japanese with full kanji, to figure out how to enter a class of characters that had eluded me (小さいかな). it seems a silly thing to be proud of, perhaps, but i am nonetheless.
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| your steps are amazing! |
[26 Aug 2004|12:39am] |
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music |
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i'm the only one who can hear it |
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today ddrmax2 got owned when i passed maxx unlimited on heavy. i'm ready for the next edition to come out now.
maybe it's time to import a japanese playstation and the japanese ddr editions. i suppose that would unequivocally qualify me as an addict.
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| eep! |
[24 Aug 2004|01:16pm] |
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last night geoff delegated to me the sending of the weekly japanese club email, inviting everyone to come out to eat and talk in japanese. it ended up being way more stressful than i figured... i tried my best to write from memory (no dictionary!) for practice, but i was definitely worried about making mistakes. then, of course, the original version i sent out ended up going out without linebreaks at all. so i got to send it out again with an apology. and by the time i was done with all of that, my heart was racing and i was drenched in sweat. *phew* i think it might be different if i knew everyone the email was addressed to, but i've only met the maybe 10 people who've come to meetings that i've been to. it felt like the same kind of nerves i get when cold-calling someone. i also think it's the same social nervousness that keeps me from speaking up as much as i should at the japanese club meetings. and i really do need to force myself to just talk more, make mistakes, and learn from them. this was why i never learned to speak when i studied japanese before, despite being able to read and write pretty well.
also today, i changed my password at work and then promptly forgot it. of course, this happened during the weekly sysadmin team meeting, so there was no one for half an hour in the helpdesk office who could fix it for me.
nowhere to go but up, today!
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| symbolism |
[17 Aug 2004|01:19am] |
i discovered to my disappointment tonight that the graphics screens NBC uses in their olympic coverage when they switch sports do not display the English and Greek names of the sport being switched to, they display the English name and the English name in Symbol font. (e.g. SWIMMING - ΣΩIMMINΓ or FENCING - ΦENΧINΓ).
something about this strikes me as utterly retarded.
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