My new blogging direction

Admitting that I have been negligent and too lazy to update my blog regularly, I promised myself again that at this time I will be more diligent on keeping up with my blog. And today, I thought about what kind of topics I should post to my blog, and this question then derived to what I want to do, what are my interests, and what I want to write. So here are the products of today's contemplation.

My main interests are cultures and societies in multi-dimension. By "multi-dimension" I mean in terms of time, regions, and individual. Therefore, cultures in dimension of time would be history, societies in different regions are countries and nations, and individuals are people from different backgrounds. I am also interested in connections of cultures and societies: transportation, human languages, internet, social network, etc. I like to study them, and I like to look into how we can improve them. How we can help people communicate each other without language and cultural barriers, how we can enhance transportation overhead between regions, how we can keep in touch from different part of world, are all my interesting problems. In a short sentence, as a software engineer, my goal is to solve those problems by use of technology.

So, my blog is going to be about my interests mentioned above. In my blog I will talk about how I would like to address those issues. I will sometimes find existing solutions, discuss what other problems the solutions still cannot solve, or I will sometimes bring my own solutions to the problems. I will also talk about my trips, memories with my friends, and encounters with awesome people that have happened, or will happen in my life. Meanwhile I will post technology issues as well that might somehow be related into what I addressed above.

Alright, let's begin..!

New Year

It's been a long time since I blogged last time.. Yes, I don't deny the fact that I was abundantly lazy and still have a lot of posts waiting as drafts to be posted..

But I finished my one-year internship in Japan on last August, came back to school to finish my undergrad, and also got a job; I am joining Yahoo! on May, 2009. I will be working on Yahoo! Search Technologies (YST). Until that, I am enjoying 4-month break at home, helping parents' business, etc.

While enjoying my free-time, I decided to start a little project. I am going to make a web browser plugin that collects the Japanese words that I do not know the meaning, automatically retrieves meanings from the online dictionary, saves them, and later I can re-practice my memory through online quiz.

For the target browser, I think I will make it for Safari because that's my default web browser, but eventually Firefox, as Firefox is more cross-platform that can run in all major operating systems (Windows, Linux, and Mac). 

Also, even though it starts as a Japanese word memorizer, I will generalize it as a memorizer to anything, such as English word memorizer, jargon memorizer, etc.

I will post more about this as I have some progress on the development, and also I will try to post all my pending drafts as I promised myself to be less lazy than last year...

辞書で使ってるNintendo DS

今日からときどき日本語でもブログを書くことに決めた。そんなことでもしたら、いつかは日本語を自由自在で駆使するそんな日が来ないかたい。
NDSを買ってから僕の生活が便利になった。前は辞書がなかったから知らない言葉があるとパソコンがなければ意味を分からなくて過ぎて行く時が頻繁だった。なおパソコンでも漢字を捜すときに画を数えて捜すから不便で時間もかかった。でもNDSに筆記認識機能があるから、漢字を捜すことが便利になって、何よりもパソコンがなくてもどこでも日本語単語の意味を捜せるから良い。今日は”Financial Japan"という日本経済雑誌を買って読んで見た。まだ読みにくいけど、前より読解速度がすごく早くなった。今まで言語障壁があるからよく英語である雑誌や新聞を読んだけど、そのほうは大部分外国人の観点から見渡した日本の姿だった。でも僕は日本人の観点から見渡した日本がもっと知りたいので、その雑誌はとてもおもしろかった。雇用問題、経済、女性と外国人問題、教育などの時事問題についての記事を読みながら日本人が考える日本に対して習ったから良かった。

Marco's Birthday

A picture from Italian restaurant to celebrate birth of "Uncle Marco". Happy birthday Uncle Marco..!

Japanese exhibit

I saw this in Saty today.. This costs 99800 yen, which is almost $1000. But it looks cool.

Valentine's Day

Everyone Happy Valentine's Day..!

Wendy's birthday and welcome party for Juan and Marco

It has been more than a month but I finally managed to upload photos for the night of Wendy's birthday and Juan and Marco's welcome party.

This year was special to me because I have lived in three different countries and made good friends. Even in Japan, the last four months have been great time because of friends I made here. My friends, let's also fill the next year with a lot of unforgettable and joyful memory.

Tomorrow, I will be gone on a 9-nights-10-days trip to Kansai and Chugoku region of Japan. Everyone, happy new year..!

Camera Phone

This is the picture of the camera phone while having lunch with Randy during one of those days...

Halloween parties

This Wednesday is the Halloween day. Well, the concept of Halloween as a party culture has arrived at Japan in recent years, and it was not hard to find the ads targeting the Halloween day since few weeks ago. I am not sure whether or not there will be kids asking around "trick or treat" at Wednesday night, but at least on the last weekend there were quite some parties and I went to the Gugenheim mafia Halloween party with Asahi-Kasei people. Gugenheim mafia is just the name of the bar. Most people there were all dressed up with costumes, except us from Asahi-Kasei. :P Well, at least I brought a mask.

I am the guy with a mask :) The party was really fun. I met some new people, had a chance to talk to other asahi-kasei people as well. We stayed there until 3:30AM, and went back home and blacked out.

Question: Who are non-Japanese people in this picture? Hint: There are 5 non-Japanese. It is not hard to find three white guys there. If you can find me there, then the real question is to find one more non-Japanese person unless you know Bert. :)

Next day I was supposed to go to Yamanote Halloween party with other people. Yamanote Halloween party was in Ikebukuro station in Tokyo. So, I had to take a train to go to the party. But because of the typhoon, we had to cancel the plan and decided to have a common room party instead with some horror movies, which were Evil Dead 1 and 3. For the sake of Halloween, those who had Halloween costumes were encouraged to wear them in our party. So the atmosphere looked somewhat like below:

It would not be hard to find me in this picture. :)

Anyways, so this weekend was quite fun because of Halloween.

Mount Fuji from Youth Heim

This Sunday, a night before that was a terrific typhoon that bombarded the entire area of where I am living. The weather was so bad that we had to cancel our plan to join Yamanote Halloween party in Ikebukuro, and went for an alternate plan of having a common room party with horror movies (which were Evil Dead 1, 3). Ironically, the typhoon also wiped off all the dusts in air out of the city, so this Sunday was one of the most beautiful weather I experienced in Japan. The weather was very clear that I was even able to see Mount Fuji from the roof of our building..! Here are some photos.