Tag: english

England

August 24, 2011
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The other day it started raining just when i was heading for the school grounds to run for half an hour. Not that it stopped me, but the cloudy, wet, grey weather reminded me of England. It reminded me of the few times i’d been there before, my short homestay in Devon, the few trips to London and south England…

It reminded me that it’d be a lovely place to live, and i don’t care about all the rioting and stuff – people usually riot for a reason. I’m not following the news, so don’t come at me with all your political rage.

It’d be great if i could manage to go there next summer for the Olympics, though whether i’ll have money and other such minor questions still remain. I’d want to check out that certain pub with the “other beer” in Winchester that a guy told me about last year in China (which means, a british guy told a hungarian guy living in Japan about a pub in England in a guesthouse in Beijing).

I just applied at a few jobs, i’ll have interviews in the coming two weeks, if i get a job then maybe my finance will stabilize and i’ll be able to do all the above. I’d love that. It’s really annoying to have a close-to-zero balance on my account by the middle of the month.

Fonts and webdesign and all that stuff

August 23, 2011
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Recently I’ve been working on making a valid, semantic and accessible HTML5+CSS3 page out of a bag I’d seen in a local supermarket). I’m using Chromium most of the time, because it updates often and has support for the most cutting-edge stuff as well.

The problem is, other browsers don’t. So even though it looks all nice and nifty on my screen, if i reboot and check it on Windows, the situation gets complicated. Luckily IE 9 supports everything i need for the design (more or less), except for the text-shadow property, but that’s just enough punishment for people using IE.

However, across browsers there’s this troubling thing with the included fonts, that they simply don’t switch to the japanese font for the japanese text, but instead use the system’s build-in (and in the context of this design, ugly) defaults. It’s especially annoying because i even define the Unicode range for the japanese font… I guess i should just do the same with Museo, the other font used. But it’s effort, because i’ve to look up exactly what character range is covered in it. I’m afraid it’s not even a simple range… But if not even that could make the browsers use the japanese font, i’ll be really lost for clues as for what hack to use… (I guess some fancy JavaScript solution with character range regexes could do the trick, but it’d be an ugly solution for sure.)

The ticket and whatnot

July 28, 2011
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So, we had this family plan for a while to go visit the relatives in America and stuff, and yesterday i looked into plane tickets, and found a quite charming choice. It’s not cheap, oh hell not, 130k yen (which is more than a month’s income for me), but if i could buy it i could spend two weeks in New York with my family than another eight days in California having youthful fun.

All that remains just a dream. I submitted the reservation online, which returned with an error saying that my credit card can’t pay for this transaction. I guess it’s because i was foolish enough not to change the default 100k limit to the 300k when i applied for the card. Anyway, i hoped i could do a revolving payment (or however it’s called in english) and pay the sum in two or three parts, so i opted to pay not online but at a local store that offers such services. But of course when i tried it turned out this kind of payment requires cash. Which is out of the question.

So i guess unless someone lets me use their credit card for this purpose i’m not going anywhere.

Starbucks Gazebo blend

July 27, 2011
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Since the exams got near (and started), i’ve been drinking a lot more coffee than usual. Which means that the 250g pack that’d usually last two weeks or more now runs out in five days. All of it was out of Starbucks’ limited edition Gazebo.

Considering the insane heat, i never drink it hot, just brew the whole load (roughly 2.5 litres) from half the pack in the evening, so that i can have a not-warm (i won’t say cold though) coffee in the morning.

The thing is, there is a reason that yesterday i bought the third pack of it in two weeks. Just as there’s an iced coffee blend which is balanced to be made into iced coffee, this Gazebo blend was called Summer blend in other lands in other times.

When i bought the first pack, the cashier girl seemed to have some idea of how to interact with customers (unlike most part-timers), and told me some details about the coffee (with a wide smile). Fruity, mostly blackcurrants. Sure you can say it has the citrus touch that the label claims to be so characteristic, but i think the slightly sour yet sweet flavor similar to blackcurrant and other berries is more obvious.

I think i’ll be drinking this blend till the end of the summer, because except the ice coffee blend, the other roasts are better hot.

I hate bugs

July 25, 2011
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I mean, i don’t care about bugs, i have no problem with a big spider sitting on the wall or a worm crawling on a tree or whatever, no problem so long they don’t violate my territory. I don’t even mind if spiders spin their webs in the ceiling corners of my room where i have no chance of accidentally touching them, but when bugs are running-flying-crawling around in my room, then they are dead.

It’s not much of a problem so long the bugs in question are tiny flies or mosquitoes (though mosquitoes are damn annoying) or smaller “crawlers”, but when it comes to bigger roaches and their like, it gets ugly. On the one hand, they are damn creepy. On the other, when i kill them they need cleaning up. Which is again creepy.

Now the question is where the hell are they getting in. Both my windows and the kitchen and bathroom fans have bugnets (and my computer is firewalled), i pretty much doubt any bug of that size could squeeze itself in under my door (it shuts quite tight), and the drain of the kitchen and bathroom sinks have these plastic nets to catch stuff that could clog the pipes so those are impregnable too for creatures of this size.

The only possibilities left are the toilet and the bathtub. I can’t really do anything about the former (other than pouring in significant amounts of chemicals which I’d prefer not to), but i’ll have to do something about the latter.

Peacocks are birds After All

July 23, 2011
radiátor
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The other album recommended to me during my rock’n’roll streak was the Peacocks’ album titled After All. For some mysterious reason during the week or so when i was only listening to 横浜銀蝿, Kings of Nuthin’, Elvis and this album, this album got the least listens even though i was playing on shuffle and it doesn’t have that much less songs compared to the Kings’ album (15 compared to 20). Either way, it’s definitely not because i didn’t like it, because like i did. A lot.

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Old habits die hard

July 21, 2011
radiátor
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Back in the first days of July, when i had my rock’n’roll only days, The Kings of Nuthin’, which i did. They are indeed very similar, though quite different in many ways from 横浜銀蝿, which is more… traditionally rock’n’roll.

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Gigs

July 20, 2011
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None of the artists in your Library are playing near you at the moment. Check back once you have more music in your Library.

Last.fm

You’re kidding me, right? Right? Right?!

Music piracy and stuff

July 19, 2011
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I had to write a report of roughly four-five pages for one of my english classes, and this is what i ended up with. The topic is as the title says, online music piracy and its supposed and real effects on the industry. I know it’s not such a great writing, but derp.

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Not tonight

July 18, 2011
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For some mysterious reason i couldn’t sleep tonight. At all. I was rolling around in my bed for two hours or more, and i could still feel that my breath and heartbeat was as fast as if i was at least running a marathon or something. I haven’t drunk a coffee that could keep me up for so long either. Maybe it was that i slept three hours in the evening?

Sure, there was a huge storm going on outside, the likes of which i haven’t seen since that typhoon last year in Okinawa (actually it seems that one of the first typhoons this season is touching Japan now, and that causes this lovely weather), but usually when there’s a storm going on outside i can sleep even better than in clear weather. Actually for a while in high school, i was sleeping with a thunderstorm soundscape playing.

But not tonight. Suddenly i even got hungry so i gave up, woke up, had my cornflakes breakfast roughly five hours earlier than usual (i usually wake up after ten am, today it was six), edited a translation and will check two more, then i’ll start with today’s studying. Yesterday i managed to finish most of the microeconomy notes, so i’ll only have to do the problems once i get them, until then i can get started with macro.