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The Cast of Kiminozo Answer My Question!
Anyhow, I've accomplished one of my last goals in fandom (which includes reading Japanese novels, playing games, etc...). I originally wanted to have a picture taken with a favorite seiyuu, or show up on a anime-related concert DVD. But this satisfies the goal and then some. Thank you staff and cast of Kimi ga Nozomu Eien. I've created a snippet from the radio program, so just click the icon above. Or, for this week only, you can hear it on the original broadcast (#6) at their homepage, http://kiminozo-radio.jp. It's about 11 minutes in on the first half of the show. So, translating this particular segment was tougher than I had expected. It's not as structured as prepared dialogue, so having people talk over people is a problem. Anyhow, it's below. I took some liberties but hopefully the overall meaning is the same. I'll correct it later if need be. Cast info: (Lead in from previous discussion) C: Well then. We have an overseas email from the state of California, from Jupiterstar-san: "Konnichiwa everyone! Thank you very much for the Kiminozo Web Radio program. Because I live in America, I could only hear the original radio broadcasts through CDs and the special recordings in the video games. It was always fun (to listen to), but was short and wasn't enough. But now, I look forward to it every week. Please let me ask a short question. In May, I will be attending my cousins wedding in Tokyo. However, because I was born and raised in the US, I've never experienced a Japanese wedding before. And so, please tell me any stories or points about the weddings you've all attended. By the way, are there bachelor parties or bachelorette parties in Japan, too? In America, this is the last wild party we give to the bride and groom individually a few days before the wedding. We go to clubs, hire strippers -- it's really incredible. Someday when I get married, I'll invite Taniyama-san and Joy-san to my bachelor party." K: (???) M: Don't know. C: Yeah K: What? Hey! What are you saying!? What are you saying!? Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait a second. C: The reason why is this. For example, if you partied too much and got terribly drunk and had to go to the hospital... M: And in the given situation... K: As for the letter, he's going to go to his first wedding in Tokyo. C: But you know, because it's his cousin, a blood relative, well... as along as he has well-wishes in his heart, that's should be enough. It doesn't matter what country you're from and shouldn't be something to worry about. K: And afterwards, try wearing and showing up with "Bunkin Takashima." (traditional female wedding hairstyle, usually a wig) K: Try re-enacting the movie "The Graduate." C: And now the last letter. |
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My 9/11 I wrote this a while ago and is also posted on my pretty much defunct personal site. It's here since 'scribbles does actually get updated. ----- I woke up that morning, late as usual. I had my "Programming Languages & Translator" class at 8:40am on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but woke up at 8:30am. My place is about a 20-30 minute commute by bus, but since it was the beginning of my first semester at Columbia, the only means of transportation I knew then was via the subways. I lived on 92nd on the Upper East Side and my subway route was from 86th Street south to Grand Central (42nd Street), then west to Times Square (also on 42nd street), and then north on the 1/9 train to Columbia on 116th. It made a "U" around Central Park. So, I left my place around 8:40am, no shower that morning, just the essentials. I was hoping to make it to class before it ended so at least I could sit in the lecture even for a just a few minutes. I got on the subway and proceeded to head to Grand Central. When I was almost to Grand Central, the subway stopped on the tracks between stops. I thought it was strange because it was the first time the subway had stopped on me before reaching a station (like I said, I was new in the city). So at that point, I kinda realized that I probably wouldn't make it on time for class to hear anything significant, so I planned to ditch class that morning and putz around until my next class at noon. The subway then started again, and I got to Grand Central and jumped on the "shuttle" subway to Times Square. In retrospect, if I had exited the subway station at Times Square, I would have saw what was happening in the southern tip of Manhattan on the large TV screens decorating Times Square, but instead, I just waited for the red subway going to Columbia (Note: this was about 9:15-9:30am). When I got 1/9 subway to go north, there was a African American there talking and had an audience in the subway car listening to him. I don't remember exactly what he said, but he was talking about and explosion and a fire at some building. Apparently, he didn't know how it happened, but he said he left (maybe asked to go or just fled) and was going home. My impression of it was that some apartment or building fire somewhere. No big deal, or so I thought. When I got to school, I decided to hit the library because it was already 9:40ish, and the class ends at 9:55. I had brought my laptop that day to use the school's public network connections and to also buy and install a wireless network card to use around campus (I didn't have my DSL at home until October). But before I went into the reading rooms where the ethernet connection was, I stopped by a public terminal and logged onto CNN.com because I hadn't read the morning news, which is usually CNN.com. The CNN.com site was moving very very slow though, and it seemed like the server was down. I kept on hitting refresh, and still, nothing showed up on screen. I then hopped to other news sites, like ABCNews.com, or whatnot, but none of them were working either. Something's fishy. I finally got a visual on the NYTimes.com page, and saw the picture of the holes in the WTC. Oh shit. I think it was also at this time that I read that G. Bush called it an act of terrorism. At first, I was cursing in my head at his statement because I never liked Bush, his decision for a missile defense system, and his stance on the threat of a war. I thought he was jumping to conclusions on this one, but I think I was the one who only had a few paragraphs from the NYTimes.com to read about the incident. I quickly went into the reading room and hooked up my computer to the network so I could scour the web for information to what has happened. The attempt was pretty futile with all the Internet traffic, so I packed up and walked around for a bit to collect my thoughts. The one thing I have to say is that you couldn't tell there was a disaster less than 5 miles south of where I was from looking at the campus. I then went to buy my wireless network card from the mini-J&R store on campus, as I had planned. While I usually would have been a little hesitant buying this piece of equipment (my conscience usually gets to me about spending so much money on non-vital computer equipment), I had no doubts then because that day was probably the best day to be wired to the constant flow of information from the Internet. I went into the store asking to purchase it and used my credit card to buy it. The clerk warned me that she didn't know if it would work because it contacted a bank somewhere in downtown Manhattan, but it did and I got my card. As I left the store (around 11am or so now), I called my parents back in California from my cell phone that I was okay. When I dialed, I could hear the special dial tone that indicated that I had a voice message, but I didn't bother checking it just then because having gone through emergencies before, I knew that the phone lines would be super-clogged and I just needed a minute's time to tell my parents were okay (later that day, I checked the message and sure enough, it was from my parents). After about 10 tries, I told them that I was safe and sound at school, which is a good ways away from the financial district (although still on Manhattan Island). The also told me that they were called by my relatives wondering if I was okay. After the conversation, I went back into the library to the same kiosk to read the news again. This time, my jaw dropped because the headline now said that the WTC were gone. I had to read that one several times just to make sure. Noon was quickly approaching and not knowing what I should do, I figured I should follow my routine of going to Japanese class. Outside the building, there were signs that said that classes were canceled, but I met with some of my classmates who knew how tough the language department was and wanted to check with the instructors directly. When we got to the office, the instructor didn't know that classes were canceled despite the tragedy so they went and checked with the main office of the Asian Languages department. Sure enough, class was canceled. As we were leaving the building, a classmate wondered whether we had homework and so we went back and checked. Some people are so paranoid (and no, we didn't have homework, just in case you're wondering)! At that point, I asked my classmates if they knew of a place on campus where there was a TV. None of them had a clue. So after some thinking, I figured that the business school must have TVs to watch stock tickers or something, like how it is at Cornell. Sure enough, they had it. I got a sandwich from the cafe there and sat in the TV room with a lot of other people watching the coverage on CNN. I think I sat in there for a total of 5 hours or so before I had returned home. About halfway through my stay, they brought in free pizza and sandwiches for us to eat. During my time there, I used my laptop and found a friend of mine, Eric, who was working in Midtown. He said he was okay, but didn't know if he was getting home since he lived in New Jersey. Anyway, I got home that night, just to sit in front of the tube watching CNN for another few hours until G. Bush's speech. The next morning, I got up nice and early to get a copy of the New York Times newspaper. While it's a respected paper, the coverage was pretty weak on the attacks. The New York Post had great articles and footage. In the days following Tuesday, I could tell that the city was in a state of sadness. The usually liveliness in the streets were gone and people on the subways were more somber than usual. I was starting to be affected by the mood. By Thursday night, the stench from the wreckage had come up to 92nd Street. At that point, I realized that I had to leave the city for the weekend and went back to Ithaca (Cornell) to escape. As a footnote, I was at the WTC on September 8th with friends John and Eric. They were showing me around the city and we had to go to the WTC to take the underwater subway to New Jersey where Eric lived. I took my digital camera along that day and was at the base of the WTC looking up and thinking "Wow, this would be an awesome picture." But it was a Saturday afternoon, and I didn't want to look like a tourist, so I thought, "I'll just come back next week, early in the morning. It's not like they're going to go anywhere in a week." Lesson: Don't let the fear of embarrassment or self-image stop you from doing what you want, because you'll never know if you are going to have that chance again. |
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Reviewing My Reviews If you find the reviews I have helpful, that's great. However, the stuff I've posted here are mostly for my benefit and I limit myself to a maximum of 20 minutes in writing every review. While I remember characters based on their appearance and voice, I usually have the darnest time trying to remember their names. And given that I'm reading so much, and watching so much, it's so easy for me to forget who's who. That's one of the reasons I decided to start writing them down. Once I have them down, I can briefly look over my own summaries rather than flipping through pages and pages to find names out. I may actually remember some of them if I take the time to spell them out too. Secondly, I limit myself to a maximum of 20 minutes per review, the shorter the better. The way I figure is that if it takes me longer to write a review than to actually read the book (or watch an episode), then I could have been using that time to read another book (given that I'm always backlogged). This doesn't give me a lot of time to write a complete summary or even how I feel about it during every stage of the story and so my reviews will be lacking to a large extent. However, again, it's because the primary audience is for my amnesic self. I also realize that I tend to give many more favorable ratings than the other way around. First, I buy everything that I read/watch/play, so I already have a vested interest in the series. It's a lot hard to be objective when you aren't indebited to the company selling the anime or your own wallet. Second, having been enjoying anime and such for a while now, I think I have pretty good instincts as to figuring out stuff I will like. Add that to what I read in magazines and recommendations, as well as going with familiar authors and such, I usually pretty consistent in picking out series that I will like. |
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The Theater
This is my "TV." I don't have live programming in my apartment, so all I have this for is DVDs and games. Getting an HDTV feed would be awesome, though. The screen measures a little bigger than 105" diagonal; it's about 5 feet high by 6.7 feet wide. Among the ranks of material and equipment, it's actually pretty cheap but there are some sacrifices. It's in a 4x3 layout rather than a widescreen format because most of the DVDs I have are in 4x3 (mostly TV shows). Behind the screen is my balcony. The sliding door and window that leads outside is as big as the screen itself. This poses a particular problem. With lower end projectors like the one I'm using, the room has to be pretty dark in order to get a good image, like how it is in a real movie theater. The solution was to get lots, around 8 yards if I remember correctly, of blackout cloth (which I got from Joann's at around $6 a yard). It's a type of specially treated cloth that blocks out light, completely. It also makes for a decent projection screen, as I've read from the people at AVSForum. So for me, it was a win-win situation. On one side it blocks out the sun (vampire-friendly environment), on the other, I use it as the projection screen. Because I have it free-hanging from the curtain rod, there are some wrinkles. However, it's pretty much invisible once the movie starts rolling. The borders (masking) I have are made of suede cloth. Velvet is the best material, but it costs $13.99 a yard or something like that. I got the suede cloth for about $1.99 a yard in the bargain bin of Joann's and it does pretty well for my purposes. The total cost for me was $50 for the cloth, $5 for the iron-on no-seam hemming material to combine pieces of blackout cloth, $20 for the black suede, $25 for the industrial strength velcro that I used to hang the cloth with, $20 for some rods to stretch out the cloth, $5 for the foam board that holds up the bottom of the masking, and of course some double-stick tape and binder clips for minor alterations. The system I have hooked up to project DVDs onto the screen is an Infocus X1 projector connected to a Panasonic XP-30 DVD player via component video (using DVD player's de-interlacing). It's also hooked up to my PS2 via component video (using projector's de-interlacing, which I believe is the same DCDi chip as the XP-30). The audio is fed through a Panasonic XR-45 receiver. It's the same slim size as my DVD player and has three optical inputs, one connected to the DVD player, one connected the PS2, and the other connected to a computer which pumps out music from my CD collection encoded in FLAC (80+ gigs of music in non-lossy format!). The video is accompanied by a 6.1 surround sound setup, which cost me the price of a center speaker. Everything else, the front speakers and the surrounds, I managed to "permanently borrow" from my parents. It's not a very high powered system either on the receiver side nor speaker side, but I live in an apartment complex so that's not a big deal. Despite that, I do have everything calibrated, so at least it'll sound balanced. |
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The Kotatsu
This is the table where I do most of my reading and writing. A Kotatsu (コタツ) is a Japanese style table with a heater attached to the bottom. You can optionally get a Kotatsu futon for the top which is almost like a blanket used to retain the heat and/or the bottom which makes the seat a little softer (I actually didn't need it as I have carpet underneath, but it was a matching set). The tabletop is a separate piece of wood and the futon/blanket is sandwiched between the bottom part of the table and the table top. The table is about a foot high off the ground, so it's not for the long-legged. I can manage to cross my legs under the table, but just barely. The heater underneath glows orange when it's on, but it's actually safe to touch. The grill surrounding the heater has some sort of fuzzy coating that feels soft and cool to the touch. Living in LA, I was able to procure my table from Marukai Forum, probably the largest Japanese supermarket chain in the US, even if there are only two. The table itself costs me $150 which is a lot cheaper than what you would find online. The futon set cost me around $80 and the two cushions I have cost me $10 a piece, although I'm thinking of getting new and softer (read: more expensive) cusions. There are also "chairs" for a kotatsu, which you can just imagine as a chair without legs. I opted with cushions as I can't imagine how I would get out of one. Of course, the question is: why do I need a heated table in hot hot LA? It's actually a bit chilly in my apartment, especially now in the winter. Plus, it feels good sitting under the kotatsu with shorts. I guess it's (still) a novelty to me. It would have been nice to have one when I was living in NYC! |
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Features of 'mo Lunar Scribbles It's been a month into re-starting my online journal, or I guess they're called blogs now. Much has progressed in terms of design, but I can finally say that I'm content with the current layout and features. If there's one thing I'm guilty of, it is that I've spent way to much time these past few weeks with the aesthetics rather than content, but I guess that's part of the fun. As of this writing, I will still update the side bars, both left and right, but I don't think they'll vary in appearance. Here's a feature overview of mo' Lunar Scribbles: 1. Fully Automated Mobile Blogging
0) A cronjob that runs a Perl program to check a specially assigned email box for new messages every 15 minutes. This email box is solely for the use of moblogs. 1) I take a picture with my cell phone and send it to the email address mentioned above. 2) The Perl program downloads the message and feeds it to the modified Python program, mail2entry. 3) The Python program parses out the message, separates image from text and assigns the title and appropriate subject. My modifications to it have it call ImageMagick, a image manipulating program, to make a copy of the image with the dimensions of 200x200 pixels in size, maximum while retaining proportions (so that's usually 200x150 for 4:3 images). It also generates even smaller thumbnails (80x80 max) to serve as the rollover images on the index page. The black and white image with noise that serves as the rollover image is also generated at this time. 4) With all that done, the Python script uploads the new entry to Moveabletype for posting. Upon upload, Moveabletype re-generates all the changed pages so that in the entry, there's a smaller image with a link to the larger image, as well as text for the entry. The index pages are regenerated with the new moblog entry and the appropriate rollover code is generated with the new image (this is actually done with PHP when you load the page, Moveabletype generates the PHP code). 2. Thumbnails of Reviews with Ratings
From there, the index pages load the generated thumbnails of the last XX entries and link them with their respective individual archive pages. When you load up the index pages, PHP is used to count and lay out the entires in a nice grid. For some entries, I use the full-size image (width 170px) for added effect. There's also the "Currently Enjoying" section where I have things I'm currently reading/watching/listening to, but haven't written a review yet. Those items are entries in Moveabletype, but are labeled as "Draft" so they don't show up in the archives. In order to pull them out of the database (Moveabletype usually hides "Draft" entries), I used the SQL plug-in. Other than that, they're identical to published entries and show up the same way. Another feature along with the thumbnails is the watermarked ratings on the thumnail images. Upon generation, the entrybody gets check for a "Ratings X/4" text and it grabs the "X" number. Using ImageMagick, it loads up a little sideways banner with stars (random color) and overlays it on top of the thumbnail. Values can go from 0-4, with 0 getting something more interesting than just a blank banner. 3. Moving and Blending
Using the AniMagic Layer Dreamweaver Extension, I made it so that it would move layers depending on which category you wanted to see filtered on the index page. Each entry is in it's own layer and when it's loaded, they're all stacked on top of each other because the browser hasn't determined the length of each entry. Once it has determined the length, the Javascript will stack them on top of each other as if they were cells in a table (that's why you first see garbage on the screen when you first load the page before everything flattens out). When you choose a category, the Javascript code will hide all the layers that are not in the category and perform the animation for the selected categories to stack up at the top of the screen. Another cosmetic touch is the blending of each day's entries. Each day is denoted by different color. There are 7 colors, and to get the color for a particular date, do a mod 7 on the day of month. Anyhow, a plain and boring way of laying it out is to make the entries look "boxy" with abrupt changes in colors between different days. But given that ImageMagick can do gradients, I decided to make it a smooth transition between colors instead. So, I pre-generated all possible combinations of color transitions (7x7 = 49). In the static index pages (non-moving), the appropriate transitions are generated by Moveabletype. In the moving index pages, they're first generated by Moveabletype, but when you choose a particular category to filter on, it will change the gradient to match the next entry. One last thing, I've made the layers emulate a table as much as possible. Layers usually don't resize according to your browser size, unlike tables, but that would lead to an inconsistent design. So I had the layers resize according to the width of your browser. So hopefully, you won't be able to tell the difference between the layer page (only the index page, and only with browsers IE6+ and Mozilla) and the tables page (the safe index page as well as all the archive pages). 4. Smart Media Listing
Now for the hard part. To do the filtering for a group of alphabets/kana, I had to create my own <MTEntries> tag, which I called MTEntriesJ because Japanese kana was my main reason for doing it. So the tag works like your regular MTEntries tag, except it had a few keywords, "filterstart" "filterend" "notwithin" and "excludeprefix" and "rowwidth." These work only on the titles of the entry and a special "sort" tag I have which I'll explain later. filterstart: The first letter, inclusive, of the grouping (case-insensitive). So for example, if I wanted all the entries that started between letter "A" and "E," but without letter "B," I would do: <MTEntriesJ filterstart="A" filterend="E" excludeprefix="B">blah blah blah...</MTEntriesJ> If I wanted all titles that didn't start with an alphabet letter, I would say: <MTEntriesJ filterstart="A" filterend="Z" notwithin="1"> This goes the same for Japanese kana, so for the か～こ (ka-ko) sequence, I would write: <MTEntriesJ filterstart="か" filterend="こ"> But for those who know Japanese, this poses a problem especially when dealing with Kanji. Kanji usually has multiple readings, so I can't rely on the title alone. So in addition, I have a <sort>blah blah blah</sort> tag that I put in the Extended Entry portion. I wrote a parser to parse the Extended Entry for that tag and use it as a key for sorting. The text in the <sort> tag is what's really being sorted on, regardless of the title. Well, actually no, it does two sorts. It sorts on the text within the sort tag first and then it sorts on the title (I just concatenate the sort string and the title to get the sort key). That way, I can guarantee the position of the sort. This doesn't help much in sorting English words, but is a lifesaver in the Japanese. Now what's up with the excludeprefix tag? Well, I needed something a little more fine-tuned. For my Japanese comic magazines, I wanted them to have their own section called "Magazines." But that posed a little problem. If I gave it a title name using any of the Japanese kana, it would fit in with the other books. If I put a non-kana character in the <sort> field, it would put it in the "others" location. Therefore, I needed to make a special exception in the "others" category not to absorb certain character prefixes. So my fix is that for all my magazine entries, I have a hyphen as the <sort>. In the magazine filtering section, I have "filterstart='-'" and "filterend='-'" And in my "others" section, I have an "excludeprefix='-'" And it all works out. 5. Calendar Icons
The "unique" part comes up because I have a few topics that share the same icon (as of today). For example, "Site Info" "Everyday Life" and "Work" all share the same pencil icon. However, if I wrote on those three categories in a single day, it should show up as three pencils in the calendar. IMO, that doesn't look right. So, my hacked MTEntries takes in a parameter for the max number of unique categories to show, and then another parameter for the grouping. I can specify a grouping of [Site Info, Everyday Life, Work] and what I get back from my MTEntries is just one icon to represent any of those three. 6. Random Email Addresses Not really a layout feature, but still helpful. I've documented how it works already, so I won't mention anymore about it. So in summary, this site is very automatic. It took a while to get everything up and running, but now that it is, the only thing I need to do is follow the instructions on the box: Just add words. A lot of these scripts were done in haste with poor poor software engineering practices of documenting and generalizing code (I do proper software coding at work, so give me a break!). I'm reluctant to put them out on display for that reason. However, if you're interested in what I have, I'll try to help you out with the franken-code that I have. |
Using 
Books, Movies, Manga, Anime, and Video Games all are checked for images. Upon generation, I have a Moveabletype plugin that extracts the first image from the entry (for the categories mentioned, the first image is always the cover). When it extracts this image, it checks to see if there's a thumbnail of it already generated. If not, it generates it.
One of the things I really dislike about web programming is client-side stuff. I despise it because there are too many variables to deal with, especially browser incompatiblity. So I first started out with an old-school tables driven page. But then I had this idea of being able to filter out the entries on the index page, so the moving layers idea was formed.
Let me tell you what a pain in ass this was, especially dealing with Unicode and Perl. The idea is to have a sensible listing of books, DVDs, and CDs rather than just having a long list. First off, I 
Each square in the calendar can hold up to 3 different category icons to show what was written that day. Getting the categories to show up isn't too bad, but I had to write another MTEntries routine to get "unique" category icons, and that was a little trick.
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