HowManyOfMe.com

There are 0 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

This site does acknowledge the existence of one person running around with the name “Jay Greely”. I know from experience that he lives in Boca Raton, Florida…

[my father and brother are a bit less unique; I still remember the day I was shocked to hear a familiar name announced on the news as a wanted criminal in a nearby county]

More adventures in context. I was working through the 熟語 drills in Kakitorikun, grade by grade, and found a real stumper: 百出.

I knew the two characters well (“hundred” and “to leave”, respectively), and could guess the correct reading, but I’d never seen the compound, and my WordTank didn’t have a J-E entry for it. Neither did Kanji Sonomama. Neither did Kodansha’s Furigana Japanese Dictionary, nor several other printed dictionaries that usually gather dust at home. My WordTank had a J-J entry for it, but it read 「種々さまざまに数多く現れ出ること」, and my attempt to work through this word-by-word did not produce much enlightenment.

It certainly didn’t produce “arise in great numbers” (courtesy of The Compact Nelson, although Edict also has it). More significantly, I was still in the dark as to why a word that young kids are expected to know isn’t considered common enough to put into a variety of J-E dictionaries.

The answer seems to be 議論百出, which is a saying with the rough translation “diverse arguments arising in great numbers”. I’m not entirely sure what it means, but I’m satisfied with its presence in the drills now. There are a lot of four-character compounds that would be well-known to someone growing up in Japan, but that wouldn’t come up often in translation.

My latest Amazon order included the Duran Duran Greatest Hits DVD, which includes uncensored versions of several of their classic videos, including the not-safe-for-work Girls On Film. The menu system is a mess, which makes it all the more satisfying to rip the individual titles with Handbrake.

As one of the four different copies of Girls On Film ends, the camera pans up from the topless mud-wrestling scene to reveal this:

more...

Thanks for pretending that I eagerly signed up to get email about the iPhone. This is, of course, a lie.

From: News@InsideApple.Apple.com
Subject: Thank you for your interest in iPhone.
Date: May 16, 2007 3:06:48 PM PDT

Talk to you soon.

Thanks for signing up. You'll be the first to hear the latest about iPhone--coming this June. That gives you just enough time to think of ways to break the news to your current phone.

...

The feature set of the Nintendo DS makes it very attractive for educational software that’s actually useful. The one drawback is that it’s all intended for local audiences, much like the Canon Wordtank and other portable electronic dictionaries.

A lot of it is intended for kids, so the language barrier isn’t too high, and over the past few weeks I’ve picked up three useful cartridges for my new DS Lite, all of which make excellent use of the touch-screen:

• 財団法人日本漢字能力検定協会公式ソフト 200万人の漢検 とことん漢字脳 -- drill software for the Kanji Kentei exam
• 漢字そのまま -- Japanese dictionary with direct kanji input
• 正しい漢字かきとりくん -- drill software for learning the 1006 grade-school kanji

The first one is excellent for reviewing kanji you already know and can read and write quickly and reliably. If you’re relatively confident in your ability, you’ve been learning kanji in the standard school order, and you have a decent vocabulary, it’s quite useful. The one downside is that the kanji recognizer is very forgiving, allowing you to use both common abbreviations and incorrect stroke orders. In some cases, it’s a little too forgiving: I can’t write 言 correctly and have it accepted; I either have to write it on the left as if it were the radical, or abbreviate strokes two through four into a “Z”.

Kanji Sonomama has a less comprehensive dictionary than a WordTank, but the kanji recognizer is both good and patient, allowing you to look up unfamiliar words that you come across while reading. With a WordTank, I often can’t look up an unfamiliar word unless it has furigana. I know there are some high-end models that support direct kanji input now, but they cost a lot more than a DS and a copy of Kanji Sonomama.

The third one is the best kanji training software I’ve found so far. Reading and writing are in separate modules, so you don’t have the correct readings in front of you while you’re practicing shape and stroke order, but it has traceable sample characters and stroke-order animations,and will even animate your most recent attempt side-by-side with the correct version.

The only downside so far is that a few of the sample sentences require cultural context that stumps me. Here’s a simple example:

この◯◯◯には、◯◯が◯こある。
　　五円玉　　　文字　九　　　　

Since this was a first-grade drill, I knew what all of the characters had to be, but I couldn’t figure out what the sentence was supposed to mean. The grammar was simple, but what in the hell was a five-yen ball, and why would it have nine characters in it?

[pause for laughter]

This would have made a lot more sense if I’d ever been to Japan and seen a five-yen coin, which does in fact have nine kanji written on one side. If it weren’t for Google, I’d still be wondering about that one.

[note for people in the San Francisco Bay Area: all three of these cartridges are available at the San Jose User’s Side store.]

Please stop embedding Reader in my browsers; it’s a horribly bloated application that renders PDF files a dozen times more slowly than Preview.app, and frequently manages to peg the CPU and lock up my browser while failing to render a document.

When Adobe released the CS suite, they added a revision control system called Version Cue. I had mixed feelings about it, but at least it was off by default.

When they released the CS2 suite, they turned it on by default, without any regard for security. I was less than thrilled:

The only nice thing I can say about it is that it doesn’t add a new rule to the built-in Mac OS X firewall to open up the ports it uses.

Care to guess what CS3 does? If you guessed “adds a new firewall rule”, you’d only be half right. It adds a new firewall rule, and then turns off the firewall. That part’s a mistake, obviously, but silently modifying your firewall settings to turn on an unsecured file server is unforgivable.

[Update: Adobe acknowledges their mistake in turning off the firewall, but does not apologize for silently turning your machine into a server and sharing your documents]

Harry Dresden is a rather unconventional wizard, in a rather decent set of urban fantasy/detective novels. He has no significant connection to Japan, and indeed his magic is very strongly Western in origin.

So where did the glowing runes on his staff come from?

The paperback edition of Dead Beat doesn’t seem to name the cover artist anywhere, but whoever it was decided that the English loanword マトリックス (“matrix”) made a dandy set of runes.

[oh, and I just noticed that Amazon has a new “Amapedia” site…]