This hundred-year-old book has the added attraction of being in English, which is a good thing when you consider the fiendish difficulty of this language:
If you've got this one bookmarked, change that bookmark. Or don't. When this thing disappears it'll get replaced by something to move you magically through the ether to the other place.
]]>Sakura is sick now. She has something called herpangina, which means blistering inside her mouth and throat. Makes it painful to swallow, so she's been very fussy during feedings. Megu took her to the hospital and get everything checked up, and we now have some medicine to give her. Should be all better within a week or so. Poor baby.
Speaking of baby (-ies), Adam has posted more photos of his. See them on his Flickr site. Unless he has them protected and visible only to family and registered friends or something, in which case enjoy the Flickr warning page.
I bought a black MacBook. Stuck 2GB of RAM in it and it works just fine. I got to do the Microsoft Office dance again, the one where I try to install Office 2004, which I bought as an upgrade, and it tells me I have to have an older version on the drive, so I have to track down the disk for Office 2001 or Office X or whatever, copy the Office folder from it to the drive, point 2004 to that copy, and then erase said copy. It's all so inefficient. This machine has a camera on it; I should be able to show 2004 that yes, here's my CD copy of your ancestor, now please allow me to view this .doc filled with client comments I will ignore! Seems like it should work.
I'm now translating an article on the scandal rocking Japan's pension system, in which the Social Insurance Agency accidentally misplaced records for some obscenely high percentage of the population, rendering them incapable of receiving payments. I can't say I'm too confident in my own chances at getting a piece of this pie, since by the time I'm old enough to claim some of the yen I'm paying into the system there will be 100 million people my age and several dozen workers trying frantically to prop the whole thing up. I don't think Social Security will do me much good either—hey, the money to pay for Dubya's Wild Middle Eastern Ride doesn't grow on trees, you know—but I am doing an end run around that whole mess by not living or working in America and paying into that system. I'm way ahead of the game here.
All right, I lied. Actually I'm now editing the new issue of Japanese Book News for a very finicky client. "Please translate these reviews in a more formal register. This is too casual." "But the new critic you people have writing them in Japanese is much more casual than the last guy; we're being faithful to the source here." "Well, we know that, but ignore his style and do that stiff, formal thing." Thanks for sharing this fundamental bit of editorial direction at the end of the process, rather than before translation began.
More random things to type: I'm playing with WordPress and considering making it the default thingy for the whole bloggish shebang. It's doing stupid things with dead links that I can't seem to make go away, though; probably some permissions deal that the WP folks expect everyone just to know offhand. "Oh, when you install that plug-in of course you're supposed to chmod everything to 666, except for file B, which is 755." Pure gibberish! It's arcane wizardry like this that drives people to use MySpace.
Last but not least, I added more shots to the set of photos from our honeymoon trip to Scandinavia, lo those many years ago. Nice place in October. Much cooler than Tokyo in July. Would my company let me telecommute from three months in the future and seven time zones away? I'll ask the boss.
]]>Japan is one of a small number of countries that have four distinctive seasons. Throughout history, the Japanese have learned to find beauty in seasonal changes and nurtured a culture of incorporating seasonal elements into daily life.
Japan is one of a vast number of countries located from subtropical to subarctic latitudes that have four seasons, and four words to describe them. We ignore the rainy season and the typhoon season and the Chinese yellow dust season and all weather above 2,000 meters' altitude, by the way. We have imported a poetic sensibility from China that forces us to cram all cultural artifacts into one of those four rigidly defined categories. We confuse this with enjoyment of a unique situation. Thank you for your understanding in this matter. P.S. Don't listen to those blasted Koreans when they tell you the exact same thing about their so-called four seasons. Pretenders.
]]>"The fact that Apple sees the iPhone as a hugely important platform for the future can be seen in the company's decision to give a top-of-the-line iPhone to every Apple employee, even part-timers. This is frigging brilliant. EVERY Apple employee becomes an iPhone evangelist. EVERY Apple employee participates in ongoing stress testing and customer feedback. You can bet that every technical problem will be addressed quickly, simply because the entire company will be experiencing these problems."
That just sounds cool for some reason. I do get the same sort of treatment from my company, but since we do publishing all this means is that I get copies of all our magazines and books and so on. And since I already read everything in them during the translation and editing stages, that somehow isn't as exciting as a slick new phone.
Maybe I should go work for Nissan. Ask for an Infiniti or something.
]]>I find this account a helpful one to follow: the Train Kanto Twitter stream lets me know which lines have run over somebody and are stopped as a result, so I can decide whether to go home or to stop by a Toranomon stand bar somewhere for a drink first. (Oh yeah, I guess this guy's stream is worth subscribing to as well, if you're on there.)
]]>This hundred-year-old book has the added attraction of being in English, which is a good thing when you consider the fiendish difficulty of this language:
Here is one: pdf-mags.com. Your one-stop shop for free PDF reading material. This place is worth exploring. When I was at Berkeley we had to read free newspapers filled with "Ernie Pook's Comeek" and other travesties in order to get a taste of innovative layout design from young designers; now, in the Web Age, this stuff can be sampled in the form of fashion mags from Thailand and illustrated journals from Germany and the like.
(Via Jean Snow.)
This page is another one offering a good list of links to free reading material online.
]]>One question to ask yourself, particularly when a baby has joined the family and given you a new birthday to remember, is this: Does the month of your birth affect your risk of mental illness? A quick look at the chart on that page tells me that I am on a steady keel, unless I came in a bit early for some alcoholic tendencies; my daughter, though, is looking at the same sort of schizophrenia that doubtless affects my wife. Oh noes!
]]>(Spotted on Mari's diary.)
]]>
Welcome to Luke and Anna Durfee. Sue is doing well and the babies are healthy (around 2,150–2,200 grams each) and ready to take on the world. Photos will go here (and elsewhere) when they become available, I suppose.
(This is sort of a duplicate post to one I made at Sakura's blog, which is where I mean to put all the baby pics and videos and my interminable yammerings about how cute she is and stuff.)
]]>
Tech #1: There. Translations are done. All nine languages.
Tech #2: That was fast. I didn't even know you spoke Arabic much less any of the others.
Tech #1: It's easy -- just highlight the text and change the font.
Tech #2: What?!
Tech #1: Yeah. We should hear back from the Army in a day or so. I went ahead and sent the new files off.
Tech #2: [Huge sigh.]
