cat /proc/claus

I was supposed to go sleep early today, but I’m still up, at 1:30… I wonder if I should just stay awake through the eve.

Anyway, my vigil today is due to the private portuguese classes I’m giving as a part time job. I wanted to write some exercises to my student, so he would have something to do until the class next friday. But it happens that I couldn’t find a good encoding to save a text with both japanese and portuguese accented characters.

I tried saving it as utf-8, but emacs said it couldn’t store it safely, and suggested some very bright encodings, like korean and thai… It would save normally as ASCII with escape codes, and the file wouldn’t open properly as anything else. I couldn’t copy and paste the text into Openoffice, which dissapointed me greatly.

In the end, though, the solution was pretty simple. I saved it in the “ASCII with scape codes” format emacs gave me, put some html tags, and opened it through firefox… perfect! I sent my student the html… hope windows can deal with it in a sane manner.

(from some friends, it seems it can’t :-/)

Besides that, today began my classes. Taking classes in japanese is aways fun. In the graduate courses in my department, you can take any classes for two weeks, then you have to enroll in a few of them. I’m supposed to be taking three classes.

Today I took algorithm and semiconductor devices classes. I didn’t have any background on SD and, just like the Eletronic Devices class last term, I found myself completely lost in just a few minutes, understand less than 10% of the japanese being said.

I’m pretty sure the language didn’t change that much, but in the algorithm class, one that I have MUCH more familiarity with, I got more than 70% of the content. I could even catch a mistake of the teacher but, being this a japanese classroom, I kept it to myself.

Also, I found out that I HATE remote classes. I can’t “read” the teacher’s body language, which makes understanding him much more difficult.

Ok, let’s see what the night still has in store for me.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 18th, 2005 at 2:01 am and is filed under Interests, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.