Perfect timing
Author: Dave
High on Life… and cough syrup…
Pros and cons of attempting to survive on maximum recommended dosage of Japanese cold medicine on a workday:
Pros: Finally answering the old nagging question of whether Vapnik–Chervonenkis dimension makes more sense on mushrooms (or any satisfyingly close approximation thereof).
Cons: The answer is: no, it definitely doesn’t.
Where is my Olympic Discipline?
Because Golden Week is no reason to slack off, this week program is centered around: 2 hours biking, 6 hours clubbing and 4 hours banging at a keyboard in some vague hope of finding a cancer cure by accident1hey! it worked for Fleming. I say it’s worth a shot.. Daily.
Day 2 (and counting) of that regimen and, beside symptoms of mild sleep deprivation, everything seems good.
Mami-chan
Testing new iPhone-upload system…
April Picture Backlog
Too many things, too little time. So, until I manage to get my new non-keitai to play nice with the Keitai Logs auto-post script, here is a small selection of Spring snaps.
Spring at Last…
You know you are at a Japanese free party when…
- … everybody is smiling, having a good time and randomly engaging in friendly conversations.
- … people you’ve never met spontaneously come up to you and offer you a beer (or a swig off whatever bottle of alcohol they are drinking from).
- … asking for a light gets you not only that, but also a brand new mini portable-ashtray as a gift (to you and surrounding Nature).
- … little kids and grandpas, dancing along with the rest of the hippie club kids, is the most natural sight in the world.
- … you are standing over the Kamogawa, surrounded by cherry blossoms, dancing to some of the funkiest, jazziest, house beats you’ve heard in a long while…
What a nice and unexpected way to cap a lovely hanami/easter picnic on a Sunday afternoon…
“Ah, you must be Mr Gaijin-san”
You know you are in Japan when…
you show up to renew your Kyodai ID and a staff you’ve never met before immediately pulls it out of a stack of 300 identical cards, before you had a chance to give your name.
Yea: not a lot of whities in my faculty.
Neverending Winter
Today is the 29th of March, sakuras are in full bloom and i am walking home under snow falling.
FML.
3 Apps to Turn your iPod into a Japanese Study Tool…
Strolling through Bic Camera the other day, I stopped in the handheld electronic Japanese dictionaries aisle and had a quick look at prices for a laugh.
Seriously, who still buys these things?
My guess is: people who also just purchased a brand new Sony Minidisc player1“fit up to twenty tracks in your pocket!” and/or will only use devices that bears the same comforting look as the pocket calculator they had back in High School.
I don’t see why else anybody would willingly spend up to twice the price of an iPod Touch on a tool that will, at best, do roughly what any iPod/iPhone does… minus the thousands of non-Japanese-related features.
Trust me, I am very receptive to the argument of the simple tool that does one thing and does it well, without the clutter and confusion of a myriad peripheral features… But if that’s what it takes, buy an iPod Touch, forget it can be a music player, a web browser or a gaming platform and use it solely as a Japanese study tool: you will still be getting a better deal than with one of these ridiculously overpriced/underfeatured denshi jisho.
In case you are considering such a purchase, or if you already own an iPhone/iPod Touch and wondered what apps you should get in order to turn it into the ultimate Japanese studying tool, here are my three picks:
My Cellphone is a Creepy Stalker…
The PoS cellphone I use when travelling abroad has the bad habit of accidentally triggering all sorts of functions when I forget to explicitly lock the keyboard (stupid brick-body designs). Instead of staying nicely asleep in my pocket, it will kill time by calling random contacts from my address book or navigate half a dozen menu down to some obscure settings…
Last week, upon glancing at my message logs by chance, I realised it decided to send half a dozen empty messages to the first contact in my address book. It then topped that series with an audio SMS: 30 seconds of muffled sounds from whatever crowded bar I must have been in, that night.
All that while using a throwaway number on a prepaid German SIM card (thus unknown from most of the people in my address book).
Meanwhile in Europe, my friend Abigail is probably ever so slightly worried by that mysterious German caller who sent her all these creepy empty messages.