Holizz versus the Web

New personal best by 55 points! I shot 419 yesterday. The result is that I came third in the Bradford novice recurve team (made up of the three highest-scoring archers - Andrew, Oli, and me in this case). Since Bradford came third in the championship I got a medal.

This medal is the first thing I’ve won in archery, so I’m very pleased.

たんじょうびは日曜日ありました。2月19日です。

今に20年です。HeroScapeとMagic: The Gatheringがあります。そして好きだ。

今日は（こんにちは）

See? Who needs Ruby CSS when you can implement it with good old CSS2?

For those of you without adequite CSS support, the characters in parentheses would be above those before them, like real furigana.

Here’s the CSS I used: ruby.css. I found it the other week via Wikipedia:Ruby characters and immediately added it to my userContent.css.

やった！

There were some things in Debian that seemed near-impossible but just work in Gentoo. One of those things are IMEs.

An Input Method Editor is how one types something that a keyboard doesn’t have enough keys for (like Japanese). It lets me type densha<SPC><RET>otoko<SPC><RET> and have 電車男 appear.

I spent hours and hours working on it in Debian and all it took in Gentoo was emerge scim-uim canna-cannadic scim-canna im-canna (don’t forget to /etc/init.d/canna start && rc-update add canna default). And then a few lines in my .xinitrc:

export LC_ALL="en_GB.UTF-8"
export GTK_IM_MODULE=scim
export QT_IM_MODULE=scim
export XMODIFIERS="@im=SCIM"
scim -d

You may need to add some USE flags and update some packages, but if you’re interested in typing Japanese, you probably already had cjk canna unicode in there anyway.

Now I can switch between Dvorak and 日本語 by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Up (or Down).

Tonight I watched Memoirs of a Geisha. I must say that it’s the worst film I’ve seen in a long time.

The random interjections of Japanese amused me. I’m not entirely sure as to their purpose, but I understood most of it. I’m starting to understand the concept of categorising speech into understood and not understood.

Most of the time, Sayuri referred to Mameha as oneesan (literally, big sister), but once or twice she said honorable sister, which is a ridiculous mistranslation. In a sense the o of oneesan adds to the politeness of the word thus leading towards translating it as honorable, but then it’s the same o used in oyasumi (good night) – have an honorable sleep?

Most of the cast didn’t sound Japanese, nor did they look Japanese (since most of them aren’t Japanese). I doubt most people noticed, but it made me very aware that I was watching a movie shot almost exclusively in America. The book was so much more engaging.

Even bad films can at least engage me, but this really bored me near the end. I was tapping my geta and trying to remember some Japanese words I’d forgotten.

Sorry, it’s an unordered list. Recently, I have been:

• Installing Gentoo Linux twice. It’s rather educational. I’ve learnt a lot since installing it.
• Recompiling my kernel about ten times (before this week I had recompiled it unsuccessfully once, when I was still on SuSE – a long time ago).
• Finding a pretty, functional, and hasn’t-crashed-yet music player for *nix (that word looks like a pointer to my C-addled brain): amaroK. I’m impressed at how useful it is. Its only fault is that it’s yet another processor-sapping GUI application.
• Starting the long path of relearning C (although I must say I never learnt it very well the first time round). I wrote a simple linked list data type and a few functions to do things to it. C is pretty much useful only for writing kernels, things that need to be super-fast, and compilers; it’s important to know how C works though. Like Lisp, it’s a different way of doing things. Also, I’m becoming interested in compilers; kernels too, in fact.
• Getting a badge in archery for having a top score of over 300 – 320, which I shot last Saturday.
• Trying out fencing. It was enjoyable, but I already do hundred and one other things, so I’ve decided not to carry on with it.
• Discovering that making ALSA work was as simple as /etc/init.d/alsasound start.
• Completing the sai level 1 syllabus. I’ve almost completed the yellow belt syllabus too, but the rolls are a little tricky (I need to practice breaking ground strangles too). The grading is the fourth of March.