Joe Auricchio

Sharp’s new 904SH 3g phone has a VGA display

Yes, folks, VGA. As in 640×480 pixel. On a cellphone.

Mobile is truly coming. It’s already in Japan, it just hasn’t broken here yet. The technology is rapidly arriving, both in client capability and connections. We only need some decent business models to make the mobile internet explode. (I’ll probably write more about this soon)

We’ve come a long way in a short few years from my Treo’s 320×320 (which is unbearably painful for pretty much every site on the web except Google.com). 640×480 landscape will be quite nice.

Unfortunately, this means we web designers need to relearn all the old habits and forget the “everybody has 1024″ mindset of the last few years. While that’s true for most desktops, the world is changing, and desktops are no longer the only thing that matters.

<happysushi> because kim typed out the code given to us by the prof exactly and when she compiled that there were 40 errors
<happysushi> i mean warnings
<happysushi> not errors
<mind21_98> hm
<mind21_98> I totally read kim as kim jong il
<mind21_98> and was like "kji goes to ucsd?"
<happysushi> ??
<mind21_98> told you my reading comprehension needs help

I’m catching up on the contents of my camera.

A few weeks ago, they tore down the old Marine-base era buildings next to Price Center, and broke ground on the Expansion. It appears they had some minor technical difficulties with one of the backhoes… (click for larger)

But they’re the good kind of scary. Like, in Japan, we got the Emperor. But in Germany, we got Hitler. … There’s the good kind of scary, that brings good to the people, and then there’s killing millions of people, like woah.

Rushi on Google

Isn’t there a more Ruby way to do it? By the way, “Ruby” is now synonymous with “cool”.

Rushi on struct tm

Technically, I’m not going to consider myself a technical person until I know TeX.

Rushi on technical people

First of all, that doesn’t even make sense.

Second, that doesn’t. even. make. sense.

Rushi on sensibility

Thanks to StudyCard Studio, I did okay on the kanji. Ito-sensei must be lazy: the questions were taken directly from the workbook, but with answers and questions swapped. And I, lucky devil that I am, did those self-same exercises just half an hour before the midterm, with no idea how useful they would truly be. Fortune smiled on me today.

That was the kanji. On the listening, I lost bigtime. As expected.

However, I did get the chance to use the passive form we just learned in an away message:

???????????????????

nihongo no chuukanshiken ni watashi ga korosarete imasu.

I am being murdered by a Japanese midterm.

So will I learn from this experience, and not let myself fall behind anymore? Will I start taking Japanese seriously? Experience says no. Experience says I’ll delude myself into thinking it’ll work, with no real change to my habits. But, maybe this time, just maybe…

Once again, I’ve procrastinated myself into a terrible place. I have a Japanese midterm at 10am this morning, with part two on Tuesday afternoon. I’ve put maybe five hours of study into Japanese this quarter, four of them tonight.

I have to learn four grammatical constructs. Two of them—honorific language and humble language—are similar in mode of operation: modifications to verbs based on the subject’s relation to the speaker. The other two are also similar—postfixes to verbs with only one character difference between them. Speaking as a cognitive scientist in training, their similarity means it’s easy to confuse them without extensive practice. That means I’m screwed.

I have to learn a few dozen vocabulary words. We’ve had three vocab quizzes on subsets of the list. I missed one quiz outright. For the other two, I “studied” by cramming the night before and morning of the quizzes. Without repeated practice, I have no actual retention of the words. So I’m starting from scratch again now. After the midterm, I still won’t remember them, which will burn me again on the final, and burn the worst someday in the future when I have to actually use the words in conversation.

I have to learn thirty kanji: their pronunciation, words containing them, and their English meanings. Thanks to StudyCard Studio at least I can drill these easily. But twelve hours is just not enough time to learn.

Oh, and I have to do listening. This is probably my worst area. Since I rarely watch anime (FMA at Scott’s is the first I’ve seen in quantity since… May?), the only listening practice I have is an hour a day in class. Even then, I’ve noticed I’m no longer listening, I’m only hearing a few words and guessing at the meaning. I’m sure there are first-year Japanese students who can rock me at listening. Cogsci time again: listening and understanding a language is something only practice can bring. Unlike math, heroic mental effort will not help you. Knowledge of writing and reading will not help you—they are completely separate skills. The brain needs practice hearing and interpreting the language. Practice I lack.

I shouldn’t be in Japanese 20B. Christ, I never learned 10B properly. The difference is, the ten series was an easy A or a zero-work B. The twenty series is not kidding around anymore. It’s too late to switch to P/NP this quarter. I’m already down in points thanks to missing a quiz and a few lectures.

On top of all this, I don’t know if I can even go to Japan fourth year. I don’t know if I can even responsibly continue taking Japanese—I need all the classes I can take. I’m already looking at a solid six years. Japanese might mean a major sacrifice… such as a minor in CS (which I’m seriously considering). Perhaps I can’t do it at all. I need to figure this all out, and soon.

But instead of, gee, I don’t know, studying, I’m writing this blog post. I’m listening to the Lovedrug CD I got at the concert yesterday (I should have been studying last night, too). I’m fighting with AppleRecords.jar to download as much music as possible from shared iTunes. I’m talking with friends on Jabber.

God I’m an idiot.

Jump to Step 7 and run till completion.

blindekuh are two restaurants where patrons are served in the dark. The restaurants are located in Basel and Zürich, Switzerland. The name is derived from “Blinde Kuh” (blind cow), the German name for Blind man’s bluff.

No lights are allowed inside a blindekuh. Patrons are served by blind and visually impaired people. Both locations offer cultural events such as readings or concerts in the dark.

The dark restaurants are a project of the Blind-Liecht (blind-light) foundation. The foundation works to create employment opportunities for blind and visually impaired people. Their first venture, the blindekuh in Zürich, opened on September 17, 1999 and is claimed to be the world’s first dark restaurant. The second location opened in Spring 2005 in Basel.

blindekuh won several awards, among them the Social Innovations Award of the Institute for Social Innovations in London.

(From Wikipedia)