ICICLES IN MY HAIR

It had been drizzling all day, but a few minutes from my apartment it turned into a downpour, and then suddenly hail, coming horizontally from behind, like being hit in the back with birdshot. I immediately forgot where I was. I got my map out, and now the ink from the notes I made on it is running.

Though I spent most of my time in Tokyo being bludgeoned to death with textbooks with amusing names (Strategies in Speaking?), I did have a couple days to wander around and be touristy. I took a bunch of photos, but need to sort through them before I upload them. Never trust a cheap cameraphone to give photos logical filenames! My King Metal Slime pictures are all mixed up with my Imperial Palace pictures. I will try to post them here in the next couple days.

Oh, and I taught small children English all by myself. Assigned homework, even! The first three classes were fine. The last had a dreadful parent who made me quiz his son for a test way above his present level, thus rendering me complicit in the destruction of the child’s self-esteem. I did not assign this student homework. And I will kill his dad.

(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)

Also!

(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)

A conversation overheard on Friday:

English Teacher: What color? What color crayon? You already have the red. Purple? Peach?

Japanese Four-Year-Old: Hada! (Translation: skin.)

English Teacher: What? …No. This is peach. “Peach!”

Japanese Four-Year-Old (encouraged by Sensei’s wince): Hada hada hada hada!

English Teacher, patiently: No. Peach.

Japanese Four-Year-Old continues to chant “hada” for about thirty seconds before covering his dog picture with red, to indicate that it is bleeding, or possibly that it has eaten somebody.

So it turns out Japanese crayon boxes have/had the same racial issues as American ones. Good to know.

I’ve discovered the One Good Thing about Vista.

(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)

Its image management. The metadata for JPEGs includes tags. I can tag my photos offline! And Windows Photo Gallery Live allows you to upload to Flickr, and actually works right! (Flickr Uploadr doesn’t seem to work with Vista - I’ve been using jUploadr instead. The problem is probably Microsoft’s fault, but it’s nice that they’ve set up a work-around.)

Also, there’s a feature that allows you to offset the timestamps of a batch of images to correct for inaccurate timestamps. This is A Good Thing - I get this problem a lot due to my habit of switching time zones. (Japan is thirteen hours ahead of Kentucky. I live in the future. Thirteen hours in the future.)

However, as with all things Vista, there are caveats. Cut for caveats. (They’re long.)

( Read the rest of this entry » )