Category: general

My lack of “experience” has cost me more than one job I wanted. This last time it cost me the job I have dreamed about for two years.

How am I supposed to get “experience” in living in Japan?

Now that this job, which worked to my interests and skills, is unavailable, the only options are:

1. Sean getting a job (military?) in Japan.
2. Me teaching English in Japan.

This is because teaching English is probably the only thing I could easily get hired for, and because there are literally no other companies (that I’ve been able to find) that offer what the company I wanted to work for offers.

The thing is, being an English teacher does not pay well. Not enough to support two people, anyway. Sean could teach English privately to make up the difference–as he doesn’t have a degree, he is ineligible to be hired for one of the larger English teaching programs–but we would have to hope we could find that kind of position for him. It wouldn’t be a sure thing. And because it wouldn’t be a sure thing, Sean would never agree to it.

He’s making good enough money right now. Really, we’d like more. We certainly don’t want less. It costs more to live in Japan than here in Augusta, Georgia. You do the math!

Concerning Sean’s option of getting a military job in Japan…there is no base near the company I want to work for. So, assuming he did get a job there, we would not be living anywhere near the job I want. This means that if, later on, I decided to reapply and actually got accepted, Sean would have to quit his job so I could take the new one.

The chances of him getting a job in the private sector in Japan, whether for an American company or a Japanese one, are extremely low because he doesn’t have a degree.

How am I supposed to do this? How am I going to find a way to live my dream?

I’m dealing with my crushing disappointment by alternately allowing myself to mourn, and pushing it completely aside. In order to do the latter, I’m keeping my mind occupied with RSS feeds.

I wanted to point out yet again that I love Mark Liberman. Lately he has posted about the new grammar tests on the SAT, leading him to a more general discussion of the “theory of mind”, and then back to how current grammar tests are flawed.

Hell, I don’t know if he’s “brilliant” so much as he thinks like me, reacts like me, and writes like me. Regardless, indulging myself in his stuff always brings me a smile.

I’ve been signing some correspondence this morning at work. There’s a certain way I usually do it.

Today I can’t do it right at all.

My handwriting is too loose, too uncontrolled, too big, too curly. I try to get tight scribbles and instead end up with big loops. And they’re not even real loops, they’re more like shapeless curves. Big shapeless curves.

I applied for a job in Japan.

I didn’t want to tell anyone because I figured most people wouldn’t want me to go. You know, friends, family. I was superstitious about having negative energy directed towards the prospect.

It turns out that, as usual, I don’t have enough experience. This time, it’s a matter of not having enough experience living in Japan.

I was told that my cover letter was one of the better ones received in a long time, and that if I moved to Japan and stayed there for awhile I could reapply. They don’t want someone who will bail on them. I can understand that.

I worked hard in my cover letter to convey that living in Japan was what I wanted, but I guess that wasn’t enough.

If they could see my tears now, do you think they would reconsider?

So, overnight MSN seems to have updated their layout. It’s a little blockier, but it loads faster, and it’s just as easy to find things, so that’s cool.

A little pop-up window asked me if I wanted to take a survey, so I did. One of the questions cracked me up:

8. Please select the option below that most closely matches your opinion of the MSN.com homepage.

• Too conservative
• Too liberal
• About right for me
• No opinion

It’ll be interesting to see what people answered, assuming MSN makes the survey results public.

I’m not really sure how to answer it, myself. MSN/MSNBC seems to be incorporating news stories from the Washington Post, which I would describe as having something of a liberal bias, but I can’t say that about all of MSN’s stories. While the majority of them are cautious about saying anything nice about the president, I’ve grown to expect that from everyone. I’ll probably put “No opinion”…

There’s one nice thing about this page update. MSN’s old City Search was a useless piece of crap. It covered major cities only, so essentially it was irrelevant to a large portion of the population. (If I’m looking for a place to have dinner, I’m not going to drive two hours into Atlanta.) I remember sending MSN feedback about that a few months ago. Apparently others did too; now Citysearch is at least able to find restaurants in Augusta.

From the format of the data, I’d say they plucked it right out of the Yellow Pages. This is both interesting and annoying. Everyone seems to want to use Yellow Pages data rather than do their own legwork. It probably saves them money. But when you do that, what makes your service any better than just going to the Yellow Pages? (I was going to say that about the only reason I can think of to use someone else would be to avoid YP’s horrible popup and banner ads…but YP.com has been updated, and I don’t see those ads anymore.)

At any rate, Citysearch is still largely irrelevant, as its articles (Best Sushi, for example) again relate only to large cities. But it’s a start.

Going through the rest of the survey, I’ve come across a question that asks me whether or not I would recommend MSN to others based on

Unique content and information that you can’t get anywhere else

You know, I don’t think I would recommend any web portal at this point. They are all (essentially) the same. My coworker uses Comcast’s. I use MSN because it was set as the default homepage when I installed my browser. I’ve always kind of liked how it was set up. I don’t use it for news. Usually I read it when I’m bored; it has some interesting articles. Typically the news on MSN.com is dated. I’ve usually heard about something via my RSS feeds long before it shows up on MSN.

Speaking of RSS, why doesn’t MSN use it?

Wait a second…they do! But not the way I want. What they’ve done is added a tool to display RSS feeds on MyMSN. That is clever! It means people can route the news they want to one place, and it’ll appear next to news MSN wants them to see. I don’t think it will draw me away from Bloglines, but it’s an intriguing move for MSN.

In the comments/suggestions box, I put the following:

I would like RSS feeds for all information on the page. Just do snippets if you’re afraid of losing banner impressions. If the stories are good enough, people will follow the links and read them, and they will then see your ads.

Speaking of which…I got to answer questions about the ads.

12. How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with the following aspects of the MSN.com homepage?

I had to choose from “Very Dissatisfied, Dissatisfied, Neutral, Satisfied, Very Satisfied, Don’t Know”. Here are the actual items, and my responses:

• Amount of space for ads versus other information: Very Dissatisfied
• Can tell the ads apart from other information: Satisfied
• The relevancy of the ads to you: Dissatisfied
• The quality of the ads: Dissatisfied
• Ads that cover the page, then disappear: Very Dissatisfied
• Large, animating, graphical ad near the top: Very Dissatisfied

I hate animated ads, and I hate ads that cover the content I’m trying to read. Hate hate hate!

In all, I guess the updates make MSN a little better, but it’s nothing to get excited about. I was just happy for a chance to give them my feedback, especially concerning RSS and ads.

Clive Thompson at Slate has an interesting piece about why video games should not be like movies. From Oughtta Stay Out of Pictures:

Playing a game, any kind of game, is inherently open-ended and interactive. Whether you’re playing chess, Go, or Super Mario Bros., you don’t really know how things will wind up or what will happen along the way. Narrative, on the other hand, is neither open-ended nor interactive. When you’re watching a story, you surrender masochistically to the storyteller. The fun is in not having control, in sitting still and going “Yeah? And then what happened? And then?”

That’s why cut scenes are such a massive pain in the neck–they enforce passivity.

It sometimes happens that I read an article and feel that I could have made the author’s point better than he did. This is one of those times. Still, it’s a good read.

I was wondering why this article was in Yahoo! News’s “Oddly Enough” section, until I came to the very end of the piece.

The canned mackerel from the World Food Program was not to be distributed Monday, but put into storage. Crowds watched as boxes of food were shifted to trucks by local residents under the supervision of troops carrying automatic rifles.

Is it just me, or is that a little scary?

I understand not wanting people to riot and/or take all the food…but automatic rifles?

Here’s an article from Japan Today about the film.

“It was an exquisite journey making this film,” said [director Rob] Marshall [imdb entry]. “We had to film most of it in Los Angeles because we couldn’t find any places here that still looked like 1920s and 1930s Japan. We ended up building a little Japan in Ventura, California. For the final scenes, we filmed in Kyoto temples that had never allowed filming before.”

I remember when I mentioned Memoirs of a Geisha to my Japanese instructor. He was so angry that Arthur Golden, the book’s author, had betrayed the trust of the geisha whose story he’d rewritten for his novel. I had been wondering whether others in Japan shared his sentiments. If they do, I presume they swallowed their pride for the sake of good PR. The movie is sure to turn even more attention towards Japan, boosting tourism and trade. That would explain why a film whose beginnings were so controversial could ever be filmed in temples that had never before allowed filming.

I found this bit interesting:

“We talked with Rob in great detail about whether this would be a culturally and historically accurate film or a concept film,” [Ken] Watanabe [imdb entry] said. “Since it is a fantasy world, the details were not as important as they would have been in something like ‘The Last Samurai.'”

[Kaori] Momoi [imdb entry] was at first shocked when she found out the leads wouldn’t be Japanese actresses. “Then I realized that the book is told through the eyes of an American and for the film, further filtered through an American director’s lens,” she said. “I wanted to play up my nationality. There were some details that were wrong, such as the makeup wasn’t thick enough on the geisha, but in the end, I think this modern twist on geishas will appeal to younger audiences.”

Marshall hastened to add that he tried to pay great respect to Japanese culture.

Perhaps they’re going for an air of mystery and fantasy, claiming that no one will ever really know “The Secret Life of Geisha“. At this point, I’m just going to throw up my hands, and go see the movie.

It would be cool to see it in Japan, wouldn’t it?

Some handwriting analysts got a hold of a piece of paper that they thought was doodled on by British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Their analysis?

Experts who examined the tangle of boxes, circles, loops and notes on debt and trade variously described Blair as “struggling to concentrate” or “not a natural leader” and “stressed and tense”.

Too bad the scribbles weren’t written by Tony Blair! It turns out that Bill Gates was probably the person doodling on the paper.

“We look forward to psychologists reassessing their conclusions of how these characteristics ascribed to the Prime Minister equally apply to Mr Gates,” [a spokesman from Blair’s Downing Street office] said.

Indeed.

There’s a neat article on the Louisville Courier-Journal’s website.

Weird Kentucky: Here’s where to find the intriguing, the unusual and the just plain odd

A snippet, detailing two oddities listed in the Unusual Kentucky Compendium:

The Blue Grass Army Depot: This Madison County storage facility houses nerve gas and is a popular site for UFO sightings. Rumor has it an alien spacecraft was once stored here. The Nameless Grocery Store in Wildie, which doesn’t sell much of anything, and is very “Children of the Corn,” the site says — only “without the children. Or, the corn.”

Also mentioned in the article is Kentucky author Vince Staten, author of Unauthorized America: A Travel Guide to the Places the Chamber of Commerce Won’t Tell You About (1990).

…but I am working. Sort of.

I apparently left my key to the office at work on Thursday. I didn’t realize this until Saturday, and then I forgot to go get it. This morning, as I was tugging on my extra pairs of pants for the 33° bike ride, I suddenly realized that I would have no way of getting into the office, and I would have to bike all the way back.

So I took off the two extra pairs of pants, and settled in to work from home.

I’ve done pretty much everything I can do from here; now I’m just logged in to catch any phone calls that might come through. Robert should be up soon; hopefully he’ll get my email or head into the office within an hour or so and I can go in then. I suppose I’ll drive, though I haven’t really decided yet.

It’s been kind of neat to be at home for the sunrise. When I first got up it was completely dark, as usual. Slowly, the sky outside the curtains got lighter and lighter. I opened the blinds in the living room and shut off the lamp. In the office, I pulled the curtain up and hooked it over the rod, then stood for a moment gazing out at the new morning. A school bus coasted past the pond, yellow lights flashing. Out in the middle of the water, I saw a duckling submerge. I watched the area where he’d gone under for a long time, and he never resurfaced. When I started to wonder whether I’d really seen him go underwater or not, suddenly he popped back up again, a few feet away. I smiled.

It’s so nice here. Though we’re right next to Bobby Jones Expressway, you can’t hear too much of the highway noise because of the screen of trees. Right now I’m listening to quiet dappled with faint quacking. Ripples are moving lazily across the pond. The sky is frosted with flat clouds, and the trees, bent and broken from Saturday’s ice, hold their barren remaining limbs up into that mix of blue and white and pale grey. On the bank, ducks flap out of the water; a few yards away, other ducks plop back in, paddling across in lines.

Sometimes it’s nice to just sit back and appreciate the beauty you’ve been gifted with.

I rather suddenly just remembered what I dreamed last night. There was a weapon (probably an HPM ray, because I had just seen one in an episode of Lois & Clark) that was going to be used on cities in the world, and I was looking at some sort of screen that showed the primary possible targets.

#1 was Lexington, Kentucky. #2 was Louisville.

The screen zoomed in on a map of Kentucky and showed Lexington, then cut to live feed of a building that in my dream I recognized as being a tourist information building near the UK campus (but which actually doesn’t exist). The camera just stayed on the front of that building, as if it was the reason the city was targeted.

A voice-over was saying that while there are plenty of bigger targets to choose from, Lexington was the best choice because it was in the heartland, and because it was where the weapon was originally conceived.

I was just terrified.

I’ve had several strange dreams lately. The other day, I dreamed my period started up again (it just ended on Thursday), and it was too heavy to stop by normal means, so I was just bleeding all over the place. It was really upsetting; I actually woke up from that one.

I imagine these dreams are products of my subconscious nervousness. I’m waiting to hear word about something that’s very important to me (again, that thing I’ll tell you all about in due time). I want it so badly. The waiting is affecting every aspect of my life.

While the dreams are morbidly fascinating, I’ll be glad when my nights are peaceful again.

He’s ba-ack…!

I MADE IT WORK!!!!!

I yelled “Woo hoo!” so loudly that it scared Sean :>

I’ve got the comments attached to the proper posts, and the little delete thingy works wonders on the empty comments.

Of course, it’s never over…now I’ve noticed that it seems to be omitting some of the HTML in the comments (like <br /> tags). Now to figure out why it’s doing that…

When I finally get the kinks worked out of the system, I will still need to edit the export file so that I can have people’s posts be submitted under their actual names. Shouldn’t be too big of a problem, but I wanted to mention that it’s not over yet.

I now have it porting the correct information into the correct columns in the columns table. There are just two problems.

1. It is putting null information in as comments for posts that don’t have comments.
2. It still isn’t passing the post ID to comment_post_ID, so the comments are still floating in limbo instead of being associated with posts.

I’m trying to fix the second problem first, because it’s the most serious. I think I can solve the first problem with a workaround that already exists for deleting empty posts. Besides, that’s not really as big an issue to me as making the comments actually appear!