“People who want to build from source should want to send me patches if they think something’s wrong. People who don’t want to do that should install binaries.”
— Jamie Zawinski, on the "hey I tried this and it didn't work, just thought you'd like to know" school of bug reporting
Powered by Amazon S3
I’ve been thinking of redoing my domains to cut down on hosting costs and bandwidth, and my back-of-the-envelope calculations for Amazon’s S3 storage service look pretty good. So, I’ve just moved my Japan vacation pictures and thumbnails over, and I’ll see what sort of bill it produces this month.
This has the side-effect of making my currently-photo-heavy site load a lot faster for everyone.
The novelty of bread
The Japanese still haven’t really figured out bread. They’re good at pastry, but rice is the grain that goes with meals, so breads tend to be snack foods, such as the ubiquitous melonpan, whose name comes from the melon-ish shape rather than the contents.
Speaking of shape, care to guess what kamelonpan looks like?
Retirement homes with style
I’d want to add indoor plumbing, a good HVAC system, and do something to keep away the tourists, but yeah, I can see why one of the Ashikaga Shoguns thought that Kyoto’s Golden Pavilion would make a nice little retirement shack. Even 600+ years later, it’s got a nice view.
Mind you, it’s impossible to do something original with one of the most-photographed objects in Japan, but this wasn’t a serious-photography trip. I was a tourist, and I did what tourists do. :-)
Cute girls in kimonos
Okay, only one, and she’s a very little girl, but you have to start somewhere…
What to do after two years of Japanese?
Unless your lifestyle allows you to get into a four-year college program, most available Japanese classes will dump you back into the world at the High Beginner level (JLPT level 4 would be easy, level 3 is quite possible with some study, but you’re in desperate need of real conversation practice, and functional literacy is waaaaaay out there in the distance).
One real frustration is the lack of good reading material. Things intended for Japanese kids will have the furigana you need, but assume a much larger working vocabulary, as well as cultural context that may turn a simple sentence into a half-hour Google search.
Late last year, Ask released a set of graded readers in four clearly-defined levels. I stumbled across them a few weeks before my trip to Japan, and picked up the level 3 edition. It was quite readable.
