Tag: english

Electronic

It’s funny. Really it is. For a long time (more or less my whole life up till June – this could be a sick allegory to Here comes the summer by the Fiery Furnaces) i considered electronic music something i can’t take. And that changed, quite suddenly when once we went clubbing in downtown Tokyo. Since i went to Japan i try to live a “yesman”-ish life—i didn’t go there to be low and lonely. Thus i went clubbing as well and i enjoyed it (though then i had to pay attention to keep the mood on), and so my view on electronic music has changed a lot. I checked at Ishkur’s guide which ones are those i can take (not all, as expected), and ended up with goa-psy-trance trio. And been listening to such music for days now and it feels just as natural background music as if it was some of my “native” genres, such as heavy metal or progressive rock. I don’t yet mix it with those genres though, but that time will come as well.

And thus i can say i got even more open musically (but sadly there are still hell a lot of those i can’t stand).


Ultimate

As for now.

There was never any good old days
They are today, they are tomorrow
It’s a stupid thing we say
Cursing tomorrow with sorrow

Gogol Bordello: Ultimate

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Yesterday in Shibuya we watched the sixth Harry Potter movie, and i must say that it was great. I wanted to watch it in japanese, because that’s very funny (i’ve seen the fifth in japanese and it was simply hilarious), but this one was the english original. I remembered most of the story, but i feel i’ll have to read the last two books a few more times. So, the story was great, the acting was great and everything just passed together. Also, it brings back a lot of memories.

I read about the actors since then, and i’m always surprised by these details. I knew that Alan Rickman was Hans Gruber in the first Die Hard, one of my great childhood movies, but i didn’t realise he was the wealthy and powerful lord from Perfume, and i really want to see both the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy in english and the Sweeney Todd movie, since he’s the voice actor of Marvin in the former and acts the villain judge in the latter. And he’ll be the Caterpillar in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. Same goes for the strangely familiar and scarily mad Bellatrix Lestrange from the movie, Helena Bonham Carter. She was the fantastic Marla Singer in the even more fantastic Fight Club, she was also in the Sweeney Todd movie and she’ll be the Red Queen in the same Alice in Wonderland.

After reading even more character summaries, i really feel like i have to read the last two books again. And again.


Naruto Shippuuden: Bonds

To be exact, 劇場版NARUTO−ナルト−疾風伝絆 (Gekijōban Naruto Shippūden Kizuna), the 2008 Naruto movie i just watched a few days ago. It was good… With fun parts. But with the followings, i will go into spoilers, so if you haven’t watched the movie yet, rather don’t read on. (It’s worth watching.) I had the Dattebayo subbed version.


Markup

I’ve been reading A List Apart since i woke up (two hours now, whoa) and started wondering again how a proper website should work. The three main fields: valid markup of the data, accessibility of the data and a nice design. Except for accessibility (which is a pain for me, because i’m not familiar with it) these are not too much trouble–at least in themselves. But they need to be put together…

Techniques worth considering: (at first) SVG, MathML, CSS @font-face. SVG is strange for me, because it’s XML markup of an image. Wikipedia has a couple of SVG pics, but i don’t really like them. The reason is simple: it takes ages to render a world map from SVG. On the one hand then, it’s small, because it’s just text, but on the other hand, it’s huge, because it burdens the user’s computer. Not to mention marking it up by hand seems to be troublesome (GIMP can’t save to SVG apparently, at least i couldn’t find it at first blick), and i can do well with PNG’s and JPG’s so far. For MathML: Firefox renders it correctly (been lazy to check on other browsers), so the only thing i’d leave it out is that i don’t need it. @font-face is very useful, for i could include my own fonts into the page with it, it seems to be supported (who cares about IE6 anymore), there’s only one issue with it: speed. I don’t mean rendering, that’s not a problem i think, but download. Since my pages are in multiple scripts, i need UTF8. And a more or less complete Unicode font is around 15 megs (just for japanese consider the roughly 3000 characters…) which takes time to download, even with a very fast connection. May be a short time, but it’s still annoying. The solution could be a flash-like “loading” animation with JavaScript, but this is still subject of consideration for now.

Furthermore, i’m considering doing the blog output in XML-XSLT-XHTML, since i’m (once again) reconsidering the working of the engine, as i think i finally grasped how i should work with OOP properly.


Part 1

Summer cleaning, part one, done. I could go now and jump around a place shouting やったぁ~ (Yattaa!) a’la Hiro from Heroes, but i’ll rather do that after part three will be finished as well. Today i fetched the vacuum cleaner, and cleaned the floor in the room everywhere, and the table as well. Part two will be tomorrow morning, when i’ll clean the bath and the sink. Part three will be the fridge. (That last, because i plan to turn it off, and until i have food in there i’d rather not do that.)

I also checked the Analytics after a long while, and was surprised that almost the whole globe is green now, meaning i got visitors from a lot of countries. A few countries in South America, most of Africa and the Middle-East is still white though. There’s always somewhere to improve…


Oyye

Now comes the really fun part: two days of studying. Actually, it will sum up to around one whole day, since today is a half, and so will be tomorrow. That’s how weekends go. But i really need to study, i have about 300 kanji to learn and 300 to review. (Memorizing the kanji just ten minutes before everyday’s tests now backfires, since i forgot most of them just ten minutes after the test.) I’ll just wash the dishes, and head down to the study room with all the necessary tools: books, dictionary, phone (for the dictionary), notes, pen.

Yesterday’s exams were interesting. The composition thingy, as expected, was something very [undefined] (to use JavaScript vocab): five topics given, all focusing on an experience since we came to Japan (good, bad, surprising, regrettable, and one more absolutely freely chosen). I wrote the good one (so did most of the others as well), but i made it up for the larger part… At least i could move my fantasy a bit. The economy basics exam was a joke. Not because it was so easy… First: numbers. Write the population, area and gdp of Japan and your country. Second, describe the connection of gdp and population, focusing on your country. Third, what’s the biggest difference between your country and Japan (not necessarily economy-wise).


Wud?

Half past seven? Since when? What’s going on here? This is scary. At least tomorrow is free, and i surely will study. Sadly, because of the exams on monday and the coming days, i’ll skip the weekend’s club activities. If i spent all saturday at the training and sunday at the club old boy’s meeting, then i surely won’t have any energy to learn all the kanji and words and grammar i haven’t yet. Vocab is usually not that very difficult, but everyone’s beloved maths is just crazy. So is the politics-economics stuff, but at least that’s not a hundred pages, just a topic to research (“the connection between the GDP and the population of your country”), though one freaky for sure, and i guess we’ll have to write about it or something like that. But for now, i think i’ll just play the guitar and chill out. Or something along those lines.


Crazy

My body went crazy, apparently. It’s one thing that i constantly feel a tension inside that is possibly anxiousness, just i don’t know its reason. I’ve never been anxious before even worse exams than that i’m facing in a week, nor do i consider this exam something difficult. Since it’s all spread over a week, i have time to study everything needed. Not grave, but still i couldn’t sleep last night, and that’s annoying. I got to bed around one… And i could feel my pulse speeding up instantly, though before that my brain was totally numb. After like ten minutes i decided that if i can’t sleep i’ll take the advice of one of the kaiwa: if you can’t sleep try reading something boring, and it’ll work. Since in the afternoon i constantly fell asleep over the grammar book, i started reading that, and indeed, my next memory is waking up in the morning (though i could have been kidnapped by the aliens to make a chair out of me (Amorf Ördögök – Asztalos ufók (video) reference), but then they also brainwashed me). Also, i made a coffee for myself in lunchtime, but forgot to drink it–yet my body reacted as if i drank it. Scary really, when you feel the effects of the coffee and then upon arriving home you realise that it’s still all there on the stove…


Happy

I’m happy. Simply and greatly happy. Today i did most of the stuff i really like, and that feels great. I woke up at noon. Because we were partying late till night, as i already wrote about that. Then i had table tennis training, which was good, i got my uniform, lost five games to Anthony in a row (his serves are simply crazy, at least until you figure out that it just seems to be crazy), then went with the club people to eat, ended up Sankichi (i haven’t eaten a bento in like two months or so), and then the terrace of the cafeteria. We were talking a lot, and i’ve got my first mosquito bites as well (probably because the yesterday rain, i’ve never seen or felt any of those here until now), then i got back to my room, practised some songs on the guitar (Nirvana’s Come as you are and Iron Maiden’s Fear of the dark and naturally Jingle bells) then picked up my stuff and the people as well for a “fruit party”. Since yesterday was a partyish party, i figured not many people would be in for another party tonight, so i picked the fruits i bought i Seiyu and it ended up great and fun. (Alcoholic melon was especially funny (funny melon), at least the others said it tasted like alcohol (i couldn’t feel that), probably because it wasn’t in the fridge, just where i keep my potatoes as well.) Then i watched the second new episode of the Haruhi series (check on Youtube), which was simply put great, i really want my summer vacation to have all that stuff. Then, i just realised that the third episode is out already as well, so i’m downloading. Talked with a friend, and now i think i’ll just take a shower and sleep. Oh, and happy birthday to the US, at least it was still its birthday here when i started typing this post. Tomorrow (today) i’ll have to study a lot. Oh, and ska-ish music feels great now.