As much as I love my girlfriend, I’m glad I came back to the US early. If I was still in Japan, I don’t think I could have done all of the preperation that I’m currently doing. So far, I’ve applied for interviews with 14 compaines and I’ve heard back from 5, including Fujitsu (富士通) and Matsushita Electrical/Panasonic (松下電器). I’m really interested to see if I get a response from Toshiba (東芝) because I spent some time on their application and even wrote a half-page answer to one of their questions (in English).
Speaking of English, there is none… almost. All of the emails I get are in Japanese and all of the company profiles and information on the website are in Japanese. So far it hasn’t been too bad. I’ve started a list of words that I want to learn and I’m up to 44 so far.
Dad and Sis news: Currently they’re in Abilene, Texas. They changed their plans and decided to stay up north instead of going down south on interstate 10. So now, the new plan is to go from Abilene, Texas to Vicksburg, Mississippi (548 mi/882 km) tomorrow. From Vicksburg they’re head to Valdosta, Georgia (531 mi/855 km) on Wednesday, and then hopefully, Thursday they can drive from Valdosta to St. Petersburg, Florida (254 mi/409 km). So, if you’re keeping score, that’s another 1333 mi (2145 km) that they have to drive. And they’ve already driven 1253 mi (2016 km)!
Life
Hurricane Katrina is about to make landfall near New Orleans, LA. Currently it’s a category 5 with winds up to 160 mph (258 kph). Usually, I wouldn’t be blogging about something like this, but this time is a bit different. On Saturday my dad and my sister left for Florida, by car. Their plan was to drive across the bottom of the country and then down Florida to my sister’s college in St. Petersburg. Well, because of Katrina, that plan has changed a wee bit.
Right now, they’re in El Paso, Texas and the plan is to drive to San Antonio, Texas tomorrow (Monday) then on to New Orleans, Louisiana on Tuesday. However, with the hurricane, there may not be much left of New Orleans (pronouce it correctly: “naw’lins”). Anyway, right now they’re fine in El Paso but they may be holed up for a day or two in San Antonio waiting for things to clear out.
I say they should just drive right through the storm. My sister’s car is weighed down with so many boxes and clothes, I’m sure it won’t be blown away 
Life
Here are some things that probably no one cares about:
- I updated my English resume. You can view it on my resume page.
- I installed MediaWiki onto the server and you can access it here: Wiki. There’s not much in it right now and if you would like to mess around with it just send me an email and I will create you an account.
- I also installed the Zope framework along with the Plone content management system. You can’t access this right now because it’s running on a non-public port and frankly, I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it, but it’s there.
General
I thought about this topic a lot while I was in Japan and now I’m going to sit down and write down some thoughts. I’m going to use some quotes from Confucius Lives Next Door by T. R. Reid.
The Japanese have an indigenous alphabet with 47 characters - that is, one character for each of the 47 distinct sounds used in the Japanese language. Since each of the characters represents a whole syllable (ka, sa, ta, na, etc.), this collection is sometimes called a syllabary. But it works the same as any other phonetic alphabet. This Japanese syllabary would make for a simple and efficient writing system, because every word is spelled exactly as it sounds; there are no silent letters, no letters that change pronunciation from one word to another. You could write every word in Japanese with these 47 letters. But that would be too simple.
This first 47 letter alphabet is called ひらがな (hiragana). For example, か (ka), き (ki), く (ku), け (ke), こ (ko). Some of these letters can be changed to form different sounds, for example, か (ka) can be changed to が (ga) by adding the two ten marks. Similarly, た (ta) can be changed to だ (da) and は (ha) to ば (ba). However, with the h* sounds there’s a third change: は (ha) can be changed to ぱ (pa) by adding a maru (circle) mark. As Mr. Reid stated above, you can write every word in the Japanese language using hiragana, but that would be too easy.
Read more…
Life
I’ve uploaded the last of my Japan photos.
General
Just writing to let everyone know that I arrived safely back to the US. It’s now 4:30AM, my time, but I’m going to try my best to stay awake until it gets dark. I think I may go over to Starbucks and get some coffee
Life