cat /proc/claus

Every two weeks or so, I have private japanese lessons with this volunteer japanese gentleman. Maybe “private lessons” is a stretch, since all we do is to pick some newspaper and then he helps me read some articles, explaining kanji use and grammar as we go along.

So today I have another of these meetings, and due to my completely fucked up schedule, I didn’t manage to buy a newspaper. So I decide to print some articles from the online versions of the main japanese newspapers.

However, when I go to the Asahi, Mainichi and Yomiuri pages, all that I can get are VERY brief one or two paragraph news summary - as opposed to more full fledge articles you would find in a journal. Since I’m not one to turn to “default” new sources, at first I imagined that all traditional newspapers were doing that now - putting crippled versions of news into their webpages.

So I went to check O Estado de Sao Paulo (Brazil), The New York Times (US) and The Herald (UK), and, sure enough, all of them gave me full fledged articles when I clicked in their main news.

Try it yourself! Click in the most proeminent headline of the above links, and see what you get!

This really sucks.

I must have blogged about this before, but for the sake of clarity, I’ll repeat it here. If you are, or plan to be a Monbukagakusho scholarship student in Japan, DO NOT take the chance of enrolling in mid-term (october).

Monbusho scholarships for graduate students (be they master or phd) are divided in two phases. At first, you study japanese, and for your entrance examination. Then, after you take the entrance examination, you’ll enroll in the master or phd course proper.

Most japanese entrance examinations happens in august. The normal period for classes is april, but some universities allow for the student to start their classes in october.

When I made my entrance examination, I was encouraged to start my course in october. Since my japanese was already functional, it was thought that I wouldn’t need another 6 months of studying japanese. Also, I could stop “goofing around”, and get right into the Real Work ™.

However, there are some caveats - enrolling in october isn’t normal in the educational system here. And in japan, not being normal is a VERY big liability. Today I had to fill the forms for my scholarship extension. My scholarship goes until april, and these forms are sent every end of year.

If I had enrolled in april last year, I could just ask for one more year extension, and then next year I could ask for another extension for my phd. However, since I enrolled in october, I’ll need to fill two forms, NOW - one to extend the scholarship until september next year (6 months), and another to extend it from semptember next year until the end of my phd.

The forms are actually identical, and I’ll have to fill most fields identically - with the exception of two fields, in 4 forms - anyone wanna bet on the chance of these two forms being messed up?

So when whe got to okayama station, leandro, whose house I was going to stay in, asked us to wait for him in the east exit. Okay, but which one is it? I decided to ask a girl in a nearby shop:

Claus (in japanese): Is this the east exit?

Girl: …

Claus: The east exit, is it here?

Girl: … Y-YES (like, in english)

So me and my friends decided to wait there. Of course, it turned out that we were waiting in the WEST exit. It might be possible that I spoke something wrong, but I thing the most probable is that the girl got scared by a gaijin asking her something at all.

This completely meaningless post was brought to you by asdfjkl;asdfjkl;

This is my first try at embedding a YouTube video into my blog. Yes, I have jumped into the bandwagon, but I think this video is worth it.

“Trusted Computing” is an initiative by the big players in the PC industry - it allies hardware and software technologies to protect your computer. Like the video says, to protect it from you :-/.

This is not supposed to be an in depth post about the matter. If you know about the TC issue, then there is nothing new here for you. If you have never heard about TC before, or heard about it, and doesn’t know what it means, this is a good starting point.

Cheers. (and hope the embed video works!)

Here are some sad news about terrorism: A researcher in the USA was forced to give up his research (visual system), because animal rights activists were threatening him. They tried to firebomb a colleague’s house (and almost hit a third party’s house by mistake).

I don’t even know where to begin with these news - if at the stupidity of people who defend “animal rights” by trying to kill people, if at the cowardice of those activists who go for the researchers because they know they can’t face big corporations, if at the hipocrisy of the USA government which meddles in international affairs in the name of terrorism while ignoring these homegrew lunatics.

Sheesh.