“Dis iz de greatest ting sinz sliced schtupid people on toast!!”

— Warlike Martian Babes, from Xxxenophile

With little effort, one can manage to enumerate no less than three levels


In deference to Brian’s delicate sensibilities, I will not use the phrase “…on SO many levels”.

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I know what you're thinking, Aya, ...


… “why oh why didn’t I take the blue pill?”.

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Slight change to the site...


So, the downside to adding jquery to all my pages is that, with my carefully throttled bandwidth, it ended up adding significantly more time to the page load than you’d expect. This was recently explained very clearly over on Surfin’ Safari.

As a result, I moved all the JS libraries over to Amazon S3, where I’m already hosting my pictures. This turned out to be a bad idea, because while their service is very quick, every once in a while it fails to deliver a page. And if the jquery library doesn’t get loaded, my comment-spam trap becomes lethal.

The system I came up with a while ago, that has proven to be 100% effective, is to set the form-submission URL to “imacommentspammer”, and use JavaScript to replace it with the real URL once the page finishes loading. My log-scanning script checks the Apache logs for this and other “interesting” URLs, and immediately adds the associated IP address to the firewall’s block list. Spammers that scan the static HTML pages never see the correct URL, so into the trap they go.

The unfortunate side-effect was that if S3 failed to deliver the jquery library, any attempt to post a comment resulted in my site vanishing from your view of the Internet. That’s a little extreme even for me, so I added a second step: the form submit button is disabled in the HTML, and enabled by the same script that fixes the URL.

[I noticed this because the script tried to ban me; fortunately, I have a whitelist for just such occasions.]

Merosu, Serinuntiusu, and Dionisu-ou in Shirakusu


I’ve now read all ten of the books in level 3 of Ask’s graded readers, and six of the ten books in level 4. I’ve also discovered (by reading the front cover…) that they didn’t just record audio for some of the stories; they did it for everything, but the ones that were too long were left off the CD and put online as MP3 files. That gives me a total of eight hours of professionally-recorded audio of stories that I’ve read and understood.

Mostly understood, anyway. I had a little trouble with the basic premise of 野菊の墓, which is that Our Hero’s first love can never be his, because she’s two years his senior. It’s possible Ask’s version has been over-simplified a tad, so I’m going to attempt to read the real thing at Aozora Bunko, a free online library of Japanese literature.

Another one I had some trouble with was called 走れメロス, not so much because of the story as the basic problem of figuring out who the heck these people are in this tale of ancient Girishia. Quite literally, it’s all Greek to me.

One thing I found interesting at Aozora Bunko was their method of encoding furigana in a text file. A string of kanji characters is glossed by following it with hiragana surrounded by double angle brackets. If the glossed word immediately follows another kanji that isn’t covered by the furigana, a vertical-bar character is added to separate it.

So, the title of the first story would be rendered as 「野菊《のぎく》の墓《はか》」, and if I only wanted to add furigana to a single word in an all-kanji phrase, it would look like this: 「東京|特許《とっきょ》許可局」. They also include annotations of the form [#whatever] (mostly for rare kanji and special formatting). All of the characters are full-width forms that line up neatly with kanji, but aren’t otherwise used in Japanese prose. I don’t know if this is a common standard, but it seems to be sufficient for most uses.

Autumn-colored canal in Kyoto


(all vacation entries)

I was playing with the new version of Aperture today, flipping through the pictures from my Japan trip, and noticed something unusual. See if you can spot it.

Autumn colors spreading across a canal in the Gion district, Kyoto, Japan

The return of Sqyntz


The best damn sour candy in the world disappeared from every store in my area quite a while ago. Then their web site went offline. Last week, on a whim, I googled, and found that their online store was back. There are a number of error pages where they’ve deleted part of their product line but left the links in place, so I’m guessing they’re adjusting to the consequences of expanding their line without adequate distribution.

Naturally I ordered 5 display cases, for a total of 30 tins of concentrated, sugar-free joy. That should last me a few weeks, unless I share (“Hi, David!”).

Note: ordered on the 19th, arrived with free shipping on the 22nd. Good thing they didn’t show up in the morning, or I’d have had to share them with my friends. :-)

Dear Ai Suma,


You’re a fresh, pretty young girl, and I’m sure you have a bright career ahead of you in the idol business.

Ai Suma, Hello!Project Kansai

Seriously, if you weren’t still on the dangerous side of sixteen, you’d already be breaking my heart.

Ai Suma, Hello!Project Kansai

However, there’s something very important that you need to know about your career: you work for Hello!Project, and where other talent agencies are content with using up fresh, pretty young girls as if they were tissue paper, H!P takes a more comprehensive approach to destroying souls. Just ask fellow member Risa Niigaki:

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Oh, dear ghod, no


Just got an invite in the email:

What's Pulse?
It's the first networking tool to span professional and personal life.

Blech. No thank you.

“Need a clue, take a clue,
 got a clue, leave a clue”