The Road Less Traveled

Weighted Random in iTunes 8.1

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 by Matthew Lanigan | Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Let me start off by saying that this post isn’t about Japan, really, so if you’re not interested in iTunes or iPods, or my hobbies (:p), you can stop reading after this first paragraph. I am planning on writing up a post on my trip to Nara last weekend, but I haven’t quite gotten to it yet. Anyway, moving on.

As you may or may not know, I have had an iPod for a while now… and frankly, while I do feel overall satisfied with the level of quality that the iPod and iTunes provide, I’ve long had quite a few issues with how certain things are handled. I won’t get into most of them today, becuase they aren’t really relevant. Unlike most of my problems, which are differences between the iPod and iTunes itself (such as differences in sorting), this is an issue that I have with iTunes alone: weighted random in the iTunes DJ (Party Shuffle) feature.

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So yeah, I know, it’s been a while…

Sunday, May 3rd, 2009 by Matthew Lanigan | Uncategorized | 2 Comments

But I haven’t forgotten about my blog. To keep a long, boring, rather repetitive story short, I’ve basically been extremely busy with class. In between all of that, I’ve been studying (and playing) Go. I haven’t really done anything that interesting since my mom back in March. Today I participated in a Go ranking tournament at the Japanese Go Association in Nagoya, but I lost both of the first two rounds so I didn’t pass. Oh well. Next month I’ll pass.

Moving on, there are now under 100 days until I return to the States. Which of course means I’m planning for next school year, since registration starts in like 2 weeks. It is going to be an extremely hectic year. I had originally planned on staying an extra quarter into the 2010-2011 school year to finish up some random requirements, but honestly, I’ve gotten to the point where I just want to be done — unless all else fails, anyway.

So I figured out how I can graduate in 1 year, but it’s going to be a lot of work. Fall quarter, 21 credits. Winter quarter, 19 credits. Spring quarter, 19 credits. And then I’ll graduate, assuming I pass them all. (Which I probably will with flying colors, but that may just be my ego talking ;)).

Anyway, my schedule for fall quarter is going to look something like the picture below (at least, I hope so, because any other combination of those classes has overlaps in class times, and I absolutely need THOSE classes).

Yeah, this doesn't look very fun...

With Spring comes… broken things?

Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 by Matthew Lanigan | Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Well, it’s finally Spring, and everybody knows that that means a time of rebirth. Flowers are blooming (if you haven’t yet, take a look at the sakura pictures in the previous post), trees are getting their leaves back, and apparently, since it’s a time of rebirth and all, all my stuff seems to have decided that it needs to die so that it can be reborn.

My camera’s been dying for a long time, so I guess I had that one coming, but it finally happened definitively right before my mom came to Japan. Being Spring and all, I decided to splurge and buy a new one. I was kind of expecting to have to since December or so, anyway, so I was prepared for this one.

However, I wasn’t prepared for my laptop dying right after my mom left. It didn’t seem to care that I wasn’t prepared and just up and went on me anyway… at least, more or less. I’ve been having problems with my laptop for a long time now (so many that I’ll probably never buy a Gateway again), but most of them were relatively trivial to fix. This time, my battery is completely dead (from full charge to zero takes about ten minutes) and I’ve now gone through my sixth AC adapter. I decided it was probably just best to put it to its final rest, because I really don’t like having exposed wires out on my desk because its really not safe and it doesn’t work half the time even with them.

So as you may infer from the previous paragraph, I’ve now purchased a new laptop, and am currently posting from it. It’s pretty nice, and was relatively inexpensive, to boot. More than I wanted to pay ($0), I suppose, but you have to get back up and start going again even if you fall down, right?

One thing that I didn’t think about, though, when I purchased the laptop, was that, buying a Japanese model, it would have a Japanese keyboard. Well, it does. Luckily Japanese keyboards also have the English alphabet on them (in the same places, too!) or I would be pretty far up the creek. But in addition to the English letters, it also has Japanese characters on each key, with several additional keys for switching between the different Japanese input methods. Also, symbols are used differently in Japanese, so they’ve reordered them accordingly. Quotation marks and apostrophes aren’t used very often in Japanese, if at all, so they got relocated. The double quote is shift+2 (which you’ll notice is @ for you — that has its own key on my keyboard), and the single quote/apostrophe is shift+7 (which should be &, which is shift+6 for me). I had to look pretty hard for the + sign when writing that last bit, too.

So anyway, I’m planning on posting pictures of the new laptop here in a little bit, but I also need to finish setting it up, so I may not get around to it immediately. See you later!

Sakura Viewing

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 by Matthew Lanigan | Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Well, it’s the beginning of Spring, and in Japan that means pretty much one thing to the Japanese people: sakura. Sakura, if you aren’t aware, are Japanese flowering cherry trees, and they are generally in full bloom for a period of about two weeks in late March/early April. Unfortunately, my mom missed it all by about a week. She caught the very beginning of it, but it’s really most impressive right after the trees hit full bloom. Here’s an example from a picture I took out my window the other day!

Sakura tree outside my window

I don’t really know what else to say about this, so instead I’ll just go ahead and link, for your viewing pleasure, to the photo gallery of the pictures I’ve taken of the sakura. Without further ado, here’s the link: http://gallery.rintaun.net/thumbnails.php?album=4

Enjoy!

Note: Right before this, I finally finished posting my mom’s emails that she sent out while she was in Japan, and I don’t want you to miss them just because I put this up, too. So check them out!

Matthew’s Mama in Japan 3-15

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 by Carole Lanigan | Uncategorized | No Comments

Note: These are emails that my mother sent out each day of her trip here. I already posted the first two earlier, but was so busy during the trip (and have been so busy ever since!) that I never got around to posting the rest. Sorry it’s taken me so long! m(_ _)m Anyway, I’m going to post them all in one big chunk, so enjoy! Also, the first two I posted, I edited just a bit, but these ones are just going to be verbatim. –Matthew

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Matthew’s Mama in Japan 2

Sunday, March 15th, 2009 by Carole Lanigan | Uncategorized | No Comments

Note from Matthew: This was actually written Saturday night, so it references some of the same stuff as the previous entry.

Hi! Carole from Japan. This morning we got up and had breakfast in the hotel dining room-a nice combination of Japanese and western food. First we went to the Sensoji Temple. It’s a really cool and quite large temple in the middle of Tokyo. There is a huge archway at the entrance with a very large-maybe 20 foot- lantern hanging down. On the way down the walkway to the actual temple is a huge shopping area of many “streets”. We only did one street-very long. I bought some souvenirs and some papers for scrapbooking. The temple itself had much incense and many people lighting incense for prayers…also buying good luck charms.Then we went to the Tokyo Tower. It looks much like the Eiffel Tower but in red. We rode up to the top and you could see 360 degrees around the city. It was very beautiful up there. We are back at the hotel now and have ordered pizza.

Matthew’s Mama in Japan

Saturday, March 14th, 2009 by Carole Lanigan | Uncategorized | No Comments

Hi! Carole from Japan. Matthew and I met with ease. That 14 hour plane ride was really something. However, the food on Asiana Airlines was really wonderful. I met a couple of very nice Japanese ladies in the Korean airport. Retired grandmothers - we had much in common. Matthew and I rode several different trains. The last one was the bullet train to Tokyo. Two hours on the train. We found our hotel - lovely, big city hotel… It should be- $150 per night. We went out and got something to eat…rice with spiced beef and onions…very good…Gyuudon. Then just came back to the hotel and went to bed. I slept all night, even though my body clock said it was daytime at home. We had my big suitcase shipped from the local convenience store - strange, but it works. We ate breakfast in the hotel - nice mixture of Japanese and western foods.

Asuke, Part 6: Asuke Village & Finale

Friday, March 13th, 2009 by Matthew Lanigan | Uncategorized | No Comments

Continuation; 3rd post today. If you haven’t read the other two, please go back and read them first… unless you don’t want to!

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February 27th, 2009: Day 7 of Asuke
Today was a fun day. We stared off eating breakfast with the Kuratas, after which we headed to the Tourism Assc. From there we went to Asuke Yashiki, where we spent most of the day. We made sandals out of hay. which turned out rather well, and then I made some more postcards. We left there around 3pm (I think…) and went to the blacksmith, which Adam had requested to visit. He got to help make the head of a kama, which was pretty cool. Me, Thompson-sensei, Mike, James, and Daniel (again, I think…) went to the bookstore/cafe we’d visited before and had a nice, long conversation. Thompson-sensei described the Business Japanese class to us, which made me want to take it quite a bit.
From there, we headed over to Asuke Village where we’d be staying the night. It’s really cool; the buildings are like what a small family home would’ve been like. We ate dinner barbecue-style — it was awesome — and had a lot of fun.
I got to play Suzuki-san in Go finally. It turns out he’s a 3 dan. He pretty much destroyed me — really bad — with a 3 stone handicap. We were able to play again later with a 4 stone handicap, and it ended up at B54-W73. Still a loss, but not a horrible one. All in all, a great night.

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February 28th, 2009: Day 8 of Asuke
Well it’s the end of our next-to-last real day here. Everybody is tired and starting to get irritable, but it was a good day despite that.
We started off the day with a late breakfast — I (and apparently everyone else) forgot to set an alarm. Then we went to the bus at 9am and went to Kaji-san’s place to open the kiln and see the charcoal. After that we made bamboo dishes and ate lunch with them. It was sweet. After that we went up to a shrine in the middle of the mountains. It was really cool. We went back after a while and utilized the ashi-buro [Note: a hot-spring type bath for your feet].
When we finally returned home I played two games of Go with Suzuki-san. I lost both, but they were close, and I was very happy about the outcome. Result #1: B73-W79. Result #2: B81-W88. He complimented me afterward and encouraged me to keep playing, saying that I could reach shodan [Note: 1 dan] by August if I tried. He also invited me to come stay at his house sometime. I wonder, was he serious? [Note: it turns out, he was, as he invited me several more times after this entry, and mentioned it to several other people as well]. To Do: find a place in Kasugai to play Go. [Note: More or less done. Today I went with Mark to the Japanese Go Association in Nagoya... it was a lot of fun, but expensive. There are a couple closer places I've found since then, too.]

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March 1st, 2009: 9th (final) day of Asuke
Well, our last full day in Asuke has come and gone, and it has left me wanting more — but in a good way. The slow pace of life in Asuke compared with the bigger cities is rather refreshing. The skeptic inside me wonders just how much of it was put together specifically for our visit, however.
I learned a lot, I think, and it was a great experience. Hopefully as the days go on, what exactly I learned will become more clear.
Oh yeah, I played Suzuki-san in Go again after the farewell party. We were both exhausted. I resigned about 30 moves into the game. [Note: it was that bad.]

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Well, that’s all for Asuke. Later on I might post the reflective essay I wrote about the trip, but for now, it’s 4am and I need to sleep — my mom gets here in 7 hours! Good night!

Asuke, Part 5: The Kurata Family

Friday, March 13th, 2009 by Matthew Lanigan | Uncategorized | No Comments

This is the second post so far today; if you didn’t see the previous one, make sure to read it first! Anyway, continuing where we left off…

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February 25th, 2009: Day 5 of Asuke
Today we started the day off with a nice breakfast at Fujitani-sensei’s house. They liked our gifts, which was good. Fujitani-sensei took us to the Tourism Assc. and we said goodbye. Our first activity of the day was sumiyaki [Note: making charcoal]. We went and saw the kiln and then helped load it up. After that we went to Asuke Yashiki and I got umemitsu [Note: some kind of plum] juice. It was really good. Once Thompson-sensei came in, we had a lot of awesome conversation about Japanese ambiguity, relational structures, and other stuff. I loved it and wish I could do it more often. Seriously. Dinner at our new house was nice. It was Dad, Mom, daughter [Note: probably in her 30s], 5 friends, and us. The conversation was like watching a Japanese comedy show.

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February 26th, 2009: Day 6 of Asuke
Today we ate breakfast, didn’t talk much, and went over to the Tourism Assc. with Kurata-san. First we went to the middle school and participated in an English class with the first graders [Note: middle school first graders, so the equivalent of American seventh graders]. It was relatively fun. The kids knew a surprising amount of English, but my group was a bit shy. After the school, we went to Hyakunenso [Note: a very nice hotel in Asuke, pretty much run by the Tourism Assc.] and had a very good lunch and finally an interesting tour of the place. At last we went back to the Tourism Assc. until Kurata-san came to pick us up. We went back to the house and had dinner, this time with 5 gusts again. They seem to entertain quite a bit. One of the guests was an elementary schooler that didn’t say one word to us the entire time she was there — unless you count shouting “Goodbye!” after she was already outside with the door shut behind her. Te conversation tonight got more and more difficult as the night went on — as the guests got more and more drunk. I was able to learn a bit more about Mikawa-ben [Note: the local dialect of Japanese]. Now me and Mark are in our beds, but they’re still just out there talking loudly (it’s next door, too) [Note: paper doors. they keep sound out well. this is sarcasm.]

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More coming in a moment, woo!

Asuke, Part 4: The Fujitanis

Friday, March 13th, 2009 by Matthew Lanigan | Uncategorized | No Comments

Finally, the continuation of the Asuke story. I plan on posting the rest of it up tonight, so stay tuned.

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February 23rd, 2009: Day 3 of Asuke
Today we went to two elementary schools. Okura and Mikura if I remember correctly. They were very small. At the first one there were only 23 students. We split up into groups and did different things. My group played fruits basket [Note: a Japanese childrens game] and then jumped rope. [Note: Amazingly exciting isn't it?] My team got 2nd place. At the second school there were about 60-something students. Me and Leneskie were with the 7 4th graders, and participated in class with them. They were having Japanese class, and discussing a story called Gon-gitsune [Note: Gon the Fox]. It was a lot of fun and very interesting. After the schools, we went to Heishouji Temple and learned about, then practiced, Zazen. It was very interesting. The bell they use and the beginning and end [Note: of meditation] probably causes brainwave entrainment. After that we finally returned to the Tourism Assc. and were picked up by our 2nd host, Fujitani-sensei. His house in in the mountains completely separate from everything. We practiced gold and table tennis, then had temaki-zushi for dinner [Note: self-rolled sushi]. It was all very nice. After dinner, he gave us shodo [Note: calligraphy] lessons. It was frustrating because I suck (a lot) at it.

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February 24th, 2009: Day 4 of Asuke
Today me and Mark woke to a traditional Japanese breakfast — much better than the ones we get at the dorm. From there, we went to the Tourism Assc. We had a meeting about Japan’s forest and stuff that I 70% understood, but even understanding, it was pretty boring. But I was able to hold out and managed to stay awake — so did everybody else except one person. After that ordeal, we went into the forest to cut down trees. I was okay — it’s not like I haven’t cut trees down before. It was pretty fun, though. Being able to see your accomplishments like that is nice. We then went back to the place where the meeting earlier had been held. (Before this, I managed to procure two lengths of bamboo for walking stiks while my mom is here). We talked for a while until we went back to the Tourism Assc. We went home with Fujitani-sensei, and he informed us that we’d be going to an onsen [Note: hot spring] after a brief stop at the house. We did that, and I had my first experience with a Japanese public bath. It went surprisingly well. The place we went was called Sasayuri no Yu [Note: Literally "Hot water of the Lily"]. It was pretty nice, and very relaxing. After that, we went home and ate dinner. Fujitani-sensei let us know that he wouldn’t be at the farewell party, so we offered to sing the song we’d be singing at the party. We did so, and it turned out relatively well. Now we’re going to bed. Good night!

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Another post to follow shortly.