I recommend 'Sin and Punishment' on Wii VC. It says it's an import, but the dialog is really all in english. You'll need a classic controller or a gamecube controller.

The very definition: http://cubo.cc/

Just broke 400 in Remembering the Kanji. I'm now well into new territory, not just review. The latest one, frame 404, has the keyword of "first time": 初. I've been doing reviews in the morning, with the wonderful http://kanji.koohii.com. In the evening, I've been reviewing those I missed in the morning and then adding about 10 more. I only did 8 today though, since it's getting late and I didn't want to start into a new primitive halfway. Thus far may recall rate is usually between 80-90%, which I think is pretty good. There's usually some dumb mistakes of old ones in there, as well as complete blanks on new ones I didn't learn well enough.

Also: last week I started a Skype conversation exchange with a Japanese guy. Due to the time difference (17 hours!), we've been meeting at 6am on monday and wednesday. So I've been getting up at 5:30, which sucks. But it's good practice. We do an hour total, half english and half japanese. It seems like we're at about the same level overall - his vocabulary is strong where mine is weak, but I seem to have more conversational fluency. Perhaps all the anime has paid off!

WWWJDIC is an online Japanese dictionary which has a concordancing feature, which is a fancy linguist way of saying that it gives you example sentences. I was looking at examples for the verb 'todoku' (to arrive or reach) and stumbled across the following:

明かり窓に届かない。
I can't reach the transom.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/163856011

This looks like it doesn't suck. Recommendations and ratings work, and they'll actually be used because they've already established a rating ecosystem. Not clear if the 'lists' feature will support it, but I don't see why not.

And NO DRM!

If they get label adoption, this will spell serious danger for iTunes.

http://mullr.wordpress.com is being updated again with techie stuff. If you're, y'know, in to that kind of thing.

In software, there are poets and there are engineers.

Engineers are those who style themselves after 'real' engineers and try to plan for every eventuality. They ask themselves questions such as 'what if I what to change this sometime?" and "what if I want to sell this component separately?." They use rigorous processes to be sure that the requirements put forth by marketing are exactly met and that there is no ambiguity.

Poets are more concerned with the aesthetics of writing software. To a poet, the best program is the shortest one that both solves the problem and eloquently expresses the way it was solved.

Engineers are likely to use C++ or Java. Poets are likely to prefer Lisp, or maybe ruby.

When a poet and an engineer get together, they have conversations like this:
Engineer: "We should abstract this component behind an interface and use a plugin mechanism to dynamically load it."
Poet: "Why?"
Engineer: "Because we might have to change it someday."
Poet: "It's the bloody logger, are you mad?"

This is, admittedly, an extreme example. Though sadly not fictitious.

The ultimate goal for a poet of words is to create a work that is profound, something that reaches the reader in the most direct possible way. Something with no part that's unnecessary. This is also the goal for a poet of software - the smallest possible program that conveys the intent both to the machine and to the reader. Profound code.

As you may have imagined, I style myself more a poet than an engineer. I find unnecessary abstraction distasteful and, for that reason alone, strive to eliminate it. I won't say that I *am* a poet, but I definitely am leaning that direction. An apprentice, perhaps.

Have I written any code that's profound? I'm not sure that I have. I know I've moved in that direction at times by replacing entire subsystems with single, small, chunks of code. I feel very much as though my current weapon of requirement (not choice), cannot properly encode things in the the right way. C# just isn't a very expressive language - it's hard to be profound in a for loop.

So we're browsing the real estate listings, looking at house photos. Pretty bland, until...this.

Music: the brilliant green
I listened to them I little bit a few years ago but nothing ever stuck. But when hitchm was here, I got one track from him which I fell in love with. Unfortunately the group is dispanded. I recommend "The Winter Album" - it's really just poppy rock, but the melodies are killer and the sound is great.

Anime: Lovely Complex
Cheezy school romance story that's VERY well done. Check out crunchyroll for a streaming version.

Game: Golden Sun 2 for the GBA. Highly recommended, probably cheap nowadays.

Book: A History of the Engish Speaking Peoples by Winston Churchill
I'm really trying to like history. It's interesting to me, but the presentation is... well, I'm coming away with the impression that Sir Winston was kind of a jackass. *sigh*

Jaci think I should become president of the US just so we can get a free kotatsu from Japan.

me: That sounds like an awful lot of trouble...
Jaci: You won't think so when you get under it. You'll think "man, that was so worth it!"

I used to want to work for google. They treat engineers like executive VPs there. They have free sushi for lunch. They have a model of "don't be evil." Did I mention the sushi?

But I have come to realize that google is in the advertising business. Which is, by definition, kind of an evil thing to be doing. Buying youtube - strike one. That's buying out your competitors, kind of an evil thing to do. And they haven't even done anything with it. Buying doubleclick - strike two. Does nobody else remember all the crap they used to pull? Doubleclick was the beginning of the end of internet anonymity. Its only redeeming feature is that it's easy to block all of their urls.

And now doing business with ClearChannel - strikes 3 and 4. This is the company that has subsumed and turned to vanilla most of the american broadcast market. They are the very definition of big corporate media, something which I think is inherently "evil."

I'm still going to use the search engine, though, because it's the best one out there. Does that make me a hypocrite?

for those who are interested: http://adventuremulls.blogspot.com

I know it's a tusday la times puzzle, but still, I'm pretty proud of that. Two months ago that would have been 45 minutes and I wouldn't have completely finished.

Just went to LA and back today to get work permits / entry clearance stuff cleared up. I got my work permit yesterday, at 3pm, at which point I found out that Jaci needs a visa in order to come with me. Somehow nobody bothered to mention this before. So we got on an airplane and got her one, and me too for good measure. It was actually much less scary than I anticipated it would be, there was no trouble at all. And now we have these cool visas in our passports. woohoo! We get on the plane to London tomorrow morning.

Lyndon Johnson, on J. Edgar Hoover:

"It’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in."

Just now, while packing a bunch of sheet music and fake books into a box, I finished and said「かんぺきだ」("kanpeki da"). Thinking I was saying "perfect!" I then realized that I didn't actually know what that means. I know I didn't explicitly learn it anywhere. Looking in the mother of all japanese dictionaries, I found out: I was right! This is a validation of my study method: watch sickening amounts of anime and hope something sticks. I am proud to report that, after approximately two years of using this method have learned one word. かんぺきだ！