I'm sure this has been circulating on the internets for quite a while, but since I haven't been religiously following Barack Obama's every step from the senate to presidency, it took me by surprise when I saw a link to Obama City in Fukui Prefecture in my Google Reader shares.
This is a beautiful example of multiple readings of the same kanji. 小 (little, small) is usually "ko" but in names it can be pronounced as "o". And 浜 (port, beach) is though usually "hama" when in a compound it sometimes goes through a phenomenon called sequential voicing (連濁) adding a ten-ten to the first kana: "bama". Thus the compound reads: Obama.
I really really don't have time between exams, studies and work (and the occasional raid) to post. I'll tweet though and I've recently been playing a bit with blip.fm.
One of the guild members in pvc is studying films. He set out to make a movie, and just recently shared this teaser with us. I think it's quite epic. Only if I was his editor I'd change the taglines a bit. Nevertheless, pjn's pvc - return (teaser):
Sidenotes: That Patchwerk kill was quite epic, half the raid dead and Alice, our healer, moonfiring PW to death. And we worked quite hard to finally see Malygos drop to the void like that.
I was reluctant to write about how the TOEFL was before receiving the actual results. I have always prided myself in having exceptionally good English for a non-native, with a tint of an accent people never failed to point out. As a result anything less than a pretty high score on the test would have meant a failure, whereas a decent enough score wouldn't have indicated anything but meeting the lowest standards. A lose-lose situation really.
A score of 115 is not great but will have to suffice. As Norbi joked I probably doubled Japan's country statistic for a solid decade.
Anyway, my test took place at a test center close Shin-Osaka station. Kudos to the GPS in the iPhone I found it without complications, which is something considering the sheer size of the station. (At Shin-Osaka the shinkansen crosses tracks with the regular JR lines.)
I half-expected foreigners to handle the operations, but of course the test center was a purely Japanese-run facility. One of the girls doing the pre-test paperwork tried to converse with me in English but I had to stop her. She would have been easier to understand for me if she spoke Cantonese with a lisp. At least they had some instructions printed in English, not that those contained anything new.
Maybe it's an arrogance on my side, but I expected an international language test to be concluded in the target language from start to finish.
But I digress. TOEFL IBT, the newest internet-based test, is done entirely using a computer. As you could deduct from my results posted earlier it consists of four sections: reading, listening, speaking and writing. Each section is worth 30 points, with a grand total of 120. Obviously the sections themselves are graded differently and then the points are interpolated to the 0-30 range.
The test started with calibrating the microphone and headphones. The headphones were necessary for the listening and speaking parts and the microphone was used to record the examinees' replies during the speaking sections. No examiner was present, evaluation is done at the TOEFL center somewhere in the United States.
The calibration was fun in a way. To adjust the mic levels to every individual's voice a test question is asked: describe the city you live in. To my great astonishment almost everyone around me - instead of actually talking about their hometown - kept repeating the phrase: describe the city you live in, describe the city...
Yeah I could hear them all right. We were placed in booths but not even the headphones managed to completely filter out the outside noises, that is other examinees talking.
At least during the reading the place was silent enough. Some kind of a Java-based software was used to display the questions and the answers. Quite intuitive and easy to use, but I suppose someone who rarely uses computers might be frightened by it. Nevertheless this is the information age. If you can't use a scrollbar you might as well stop dreaming about university. (Don't forget, the main goal of TOEFL is to measure your knowledge of English to use in a typical North-American university environment.)
I clicked through the reading part quite fast. Reading has three sub-sections, 20, 40 and 40 minutes, containing 1, 2 and 2 texts respectively. Most questions took only a moment to answer, and the biggest issue I had to face was when more than one answer seemed plausible. Taking less time than available I had a head start for listening.
Listening was messier. Conversations and lectures were played, about either campus life or general university subjects. I could take notes while listening to them. However, everything was played only once, just like in real life. The questions themselves weren't hard, but it was easy enough to skip over that particular piece of information. The fact that I started to get bored with the whole shebang didn't help either.
Examinees could take a fifteen minute break between the listening and speaking sections so I stretched my legs a bit. I was the first to finish, even though we haven't all started at the same time.
Speaking without anyone there to speak to was weird. I skype and teamspeak a lot, granted. Nevertheless the lack of human contact was distracting. Speaking has really short reply times - mostly only a few minutes - so I couldn't unleash all my verbal mastery. Most of the time I was struggling to squeeze in as much information as I could during those minute speaking sessions.
Luckily for me other people only started speaking when I was almost finished with my section. It was quite bothersome listening to all that Engrish thrown around.
Finally during writing I was in my element. If blogging's good for anything it helps me write just about anything anytime in coherent sentences. I was very fast to finish too, giving me time to read though and polish my work. I spent the last minutes looking for synonyms and more sophisticated ways to express things. The results really reflect this attempt at perfection.
All in all, it was a tiring and at times a rather boring experience. And even though I am not entirely satisfied with my results, most universities require a score in the low nineties for Master's and something around a hundred for a PhD course. I should be fine. At least I still know something I like.
Coda.fm might have been born by the creators having full access to my dreams. A shockingly clear-cut site offering full album torrent downloads with promising WEB 2.0 integration.
So far there's no advertising. Users can register and upload their torrents. All Coda.fm does is tracking these and organising the uploaded materials in a very tasteful and user-friendly environment.
Legally Coda.fm cannot be held responsible for piracy. Torrent files themselves are not illegal, no matter how certain entities would like them to be. Nevertheless the site's activity can be perceived as aiding and abetting piracy. They will surely have a hard time with RIAA and alike. But everyone downloads things. Record companies have a better chance in turning back time than stopping downloading.
Anyway, Coda.fm - simple as it is - could do with a few advanced features, like a more extensive search: I'd love to be able to find all albums in a lossless format. Or a better Last.fm integration, letting users sign in with their Last.fm account and offering them albums based on their listening stats.
But so far so good, and since the site has only started a few days ago I am fairly certain new features will be added in the near future.
Stolen from Yummie. Ingenious way to show pictures of a trip. Everything's there, Narita, Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Miyajima, Tsukiji, and the list goes on. It kind of makes Japan look like a cool place.
I read about the installation process of Windows 7 and how the testers praised Microsoft for taking steps in further automatising the process. This reminded me of what my brother told me last weekend. We were playing Warcraft and meanwhile he was installing XP on his desktop. The PC needed a motherboard replacement and he took this opportunity to reinstall XP as well. However, he complained over Skype, compared to OS X there was quite a lot to do during the process: setting the time zone, choosing keyboard layout and language, setting up the network, etc.
Now I know XP is over seven years old now, and I suppose Vista and Windows 7 are much better at this and require less attention. Nevertheless I find it amusing how subjecting someone to OS X changes their view on operating systems and how things should work.
There seems to be a smog alert in Budapest. So the city council made a decision to restrict cars taking the Chinese example. Just like in Beijing before the Olympics people can only use cars within the city limits with license plates ending on an odd number on one day then even on the following until the air pollution normalises.
The only problem is, what might have worked in a much more obedient Asian country is surely bound to fail in Hungary. I'm going out on a limb here and predict without checking any statistics that most drivers won't give a flying fuck about what the mayor asks in the name of the community. Who the hell is the community anyway?
Should there be a smog alert in Tokyo with similar restrictions one would be hard pressed to find someone disobeying. Japanese may have an unhealthy devotion towards the greater good of the Land of the Rising Sun, but this actually comes in handy in such situations.
Of course I can't tell what I would do if I had a car, used to driving to work. Public transportation is not great at most areas, even though it's a lot better than people give credit for. And I have no idea why would anyone drive in the Budapest traffic.
Anyway until cheating taxes from the government is generally viewed as something to be proud of, until we judge people by their nationality and until we respect property so little that rioters can torch and destroy half the downtown of Budapest on every other national holiday we are not really Europe.
No really, there's this game - some might know it - called World of Warcraft. It is approaching 12 million subscribers. And just recently an expansion pack came out, which most of these people bought as soon as they could, the little addicts they are. And guess what, the servers actually stood the throng of people logging on at the same time. (I know this, because I was there on release day in Borean Tundra, the little addict I am.)
Now the creators of WoW might want to lend a hand to Microsoft. Because the so-called web launch of the public beta of Windows 7 was a fail of epic proportions. One would think that a company with a budget that of a medium country's could pull something off like this. But no, the servers hosting the beta sunk like a handleless hammer only to rise up again in a solid half a day. (I know this because I refreshed the error 403 a few times out of sheer curiosity.)
Also, a little while ago smart people have invited this truly great program called BitTorrent. It basically lets the users' computers do the heavy lifting instead of one file server crumbling under the load. Successful operating systems are distributed on it, like linux. Just saying.
Of course there's no such software as a Microsoft BitTorrent®, maybe that's the problem.
