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.

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.

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. :-)

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

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

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:

more...

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.

When it follows a commented-out line that ends in a backslash.

[this tip brought to you by OpenBSD’s ipsec.conf file, which considers the remaining partial record syntactically valid, triggering no warnings]

Over the past few years, the best hotel experiences I’ve had have come from Holiday Inn Express. Well-appointed rooms, comfortable beds with pillows in an assortment of firmnesses, towels that haven’t had all the softness laundered out of them, a desk I can work at, decent cable tv and a DVD player, and solid, free high-speed Internet access. Some of them also have a decent free breakfast.

Last weekend, I decided to spend Saturday up in San Francisco, before heading to a friend’s house in Campbell on Sunday, so I booked a room in Redwood City for two nights. I’ve stayed in that particular HIE before, and gotten good service.

Unfortunately, Saturday morning, there was no hot water anywhere in the hotel. They were sorry about it, and had it fixed by mid-day, but by that time I was already up in SF, enjoying the taiko drumming in SF Japantown (part of a film and cultural festival I hadn’t known about). [side note: pretty girls banging on big drums appeals to me…]

Last night, my mailbox contained a Starbucks gift card, the hotel manager’s business card, and a humble apology for their failure to provide perfect service.

[oh, and the Holiday Inn membership rewards system feeds directly into the JAL membership rewards system, building up miles for a seat upgrade on a future trip to Japan]

Safari 3.1 has added CSS downloadable font support, so I went looking for some decent fonts with less ambiguous availability than the often-linked hgrskp.ttf. To my surprise and delight, I found that Epson hosts a free download of a nice collection of fonts, including a Kaisho, a Kyoukasho, a Gyosho, a Mincho, and a Maru.

The only thing wrong with them is that the embedded font names are not encoded in Unicode (probably Shift-JIS), so the names show up as garbage in font menus. Easy fix with a font editor.

[Note: kanji fonts are in the neighborhood of 50 times larger than a standard font, and you really, really don’t want to embed them into a web page except as a test. There’s a reason Adobe PDF uses font subsetting, and I suspect people will insist on similar tools for web fonts, even the standard ones. Also, Safari 3.1 doesn’t cache downloaded fonts at all…]