So this morning I ventured out in search of breakfast. It was cold and a few people were setting up shops and stuff. Everything seems to open a little later in the morning, it was nearly 9am and most stores were closed.
Yesterday we did a big walk around Osaka, from our hotel, up past Tennoji Park, and through Shin-Sekai to Namba. The first thing you notice around is how incredibly dense the city is. Every street and alley is packed with shops. Noodle bars, Cafes, and Pachinko. There are pachinko places just everywhere, it’s crazy. Most of the pachinko places have arcades too, and seem to have a bunch of people in there pretty much all the time. The arcade games are about 50円 or 100円 to play, which is fairly cheap.
Last night we arrived in Osaka, about 8pm. Getting out of immigration and customs was a pretty painless process. The airport was fairly quiet and coming outside it was a nice, cool, 4C. Yay! After a few warm and humid nights in Brisbane this was a welcome change.
I’ll try and write more about the process of actually preparing for, and travelling to Japan, for those who might be curious. Prior to leaving, all that is basically required is getting a new passport, plane tickets, and a Working Holiday Visa, which is a fairly straightforward process — although it takes a couple of weeks to process, so be sure to start sorting it out at least 3 months prior to departure!
You need a flight booking to get the Visa, and you need a Passport for a flight booking, so all 3 elements are non-parallelisable, which makes things a bit slower.
I’ll write more shortly about the exciting part of discarding everything you own, and fitting your whole life in a suitcase and a backpack. Hooray!
Well, it’s time to write a post, now that I have free time, and no job, since my workplace liquidated.
I’ve been spending lots of time studying Kanji and Japanese Grammar. Using a DS for Kanji study is excellent, my game of choice is Nazotte Oboeru Otona no Kanji Renshuu ) (なぞって覚える大人の漢字練習).
The hardest thing about Kanji practice is that most of the words have no conceptual attachment. Even if you understand one of the Kanji, having context of the sample sentence or word is necessary to help memorize the different readings of the Kanji. Since most of the DS games are made for native Japanese speakers, this is a problem for non-natives using it for study.
Still, digging through it with a dictionary at hand is pretty good, and you expand your vocabulary while memorizing the readings of the Kanji. There seems to be a lot of transformations of the pronunciations of a Kanji that are not actually listed in the dictionary, but where the pronunciation changes due to surrounding sounds — this is probably much easier if you can find and learn the linguistic-based reasons for these changes.
Why is it so difficult to keep blogging?
It seems like the worth of rambling upon a given topic is too low at most times, and not worth the effort. However, I’m sure blogging provides and requires momentum, thus, it’s time for a new post.
So I’ll be heading to Japan early next year, that should be interesting. There will probably be lots of neat (crazy?) stuff to blog about… it seems like quite a unique place. I’m excited to see the level of tech around, it seems so high, and so much further ahead for mobile computing devices.
It’s interesting to think that Japan after WW2 was in the sort of position that China is in now, being a source of cheap labour for other countries. After seeing how Japan has progressed to now, I wonder where China will be in the next 50 years. A country the size of China, with a rate of advancement like that of modern Japan would be pretty enormous in the scale of things. Huge amounts of awesome research and technology progress, moving us humans towards redundancy much faster. Fun times!
So there was a nice link on slashdot today, where Trent Reznor was telling people to steal his music because the media corporation that owned it were charging excessively high prices in australia. It’s in the first few minutes of this video.
I’ve noticed that video games are also becoming excessively expensive in australia, it seems that although the value of the US dollar is plummeting faster than a bad analogy, the prices for products from there seem to stay the same here. Typically you can buy a video game for roughly 50USD (65AUD~) and yet it is 100AUD in EB stores around here. What a rip-off. It’s still cheaper for me to import Wii games from the UK (by about 10-15AUD, even after shipping) because of a similar excessive pricing — and all without having to even get up and go to the store. Yay internets.
The most awesomely named wii game is being developed: Ninjabread Man. So awesome. Seems like the game was out on PC in 2005, but the wii version will no doubt be more cool. There’s a lack of cool sword games on the Wii, and definitely a lack of light saber games. I’d still love to play Bleach, but thanks to region locking *shakes fist*, that won’t be happening for a while, until the mod community can free my console. If you buy a wii now, I recommend purchasing an NTSC region wii from the US or Japan, and modding that, because it will be able to play PAL games. Purchasing a PAL Wii and modding it will get approximately 70% compatibility with NTSC region games. Blech.
Ninja Gaiden DS looks extremely impressive, this gametrailer video on kotaku has some footage of the fighting.. it looks quite like the XBox1 version of Ninja Gaiden, which was awesome to the max.
Lots of EB and Harvey Norman stores seem to have fury stands, keep an eye out!
Well, now that a blog is up and running, it would seem the appropriate thing to do is to write a post.
Wordpress software seems pretty nice, the post editor reminds me of the zoho editor.
So studying php is interesting; the language is quite simple and allows fast development, but I’m sure the horrors of php code written by novices is far worse than other languages. The language is not very solid, and it seems very special-case’ish in it’s handling of everything, for example: array(...)[key] is not valid — array(...) is not really a proper expression as it would be in other languages. Ack. I wonder how much value there is in just hacking things up in php, rather than following more correct software development procedures.
The wordpress interface allows you to edit posts in a ‘visual’ mode. It seems a little dodgy, for example, if you put a link, it gets the cursor stuck within the contents of the anchor tag. Writing code to handle style chunks like that in an editor is quite tricky. I once did something similar in Fury — how do you determine where a cursor is sitting, between two blocks of ’styles’ which contain no text? It is not really feasible to allow editing with such free style blocks, there is no way for a user to manipulate the cursor across those boundaries.
