I Am Completely Serious

A friend has asked me to translate a koseki page for someone who's having immigration problems, and I have no idea what's going on with some of the word usage here. Could anyone with experience reading these give me a hand, or point me to an example?

You are stupid.

So I wrote a script that just uses popen to access the Windows command-line. Works for Python 3.2 on Windows 7 with the UTF-8 version of MeCab installed. Is very ugly.

I am officially Intermediate in Japanese. There's a certificate saying so, so it must be true.

Perhaps relatedly, these have been the stupidest three days in the history of stupid days. Am considering hiding under the cats until the weekend. There are nearly enough of them.

I did poorly on the vocab section, I think okay on the grammar, and fine on the listening. (Is the listening always really easy compared to the other sections, or have my two tries at the test been anomalous? It's not just my troubled relationship with kanji; it seems to use less complex vocab and grammatical structures than the other sections.

Relatedly, people laughed at some of the wrong answers in the listening section. I feel like it's a design flaw in the test that this happens.)

This is the first time that I've taken it that there has not been snow, and the first time that I've actually made to the test site in which I have not wrecked the car. (Which is to say, it is the second time that I've actually made it to the test site.) It is also the first time that my car battery has ever died for reasons that were not my fault. It chose to do this in an expensive hotel garage.

I fortunately was staying at the hotel on the campus where the test was being held, so my morning plans weren't dependent upon having a working car. Also, I discovered the problem several hours before the test, not immediately afterwards. I thus had plenty of time to stop panicking before my attempt drive out of Washington, DC in the dark (for the first time, obviously). I meditated, ate oatmeal, etc.

After the test, I talked to the garage attendant, who asked a campus security officer to jump the battery for me. This took a while, and it was the security officer's opinion that I needed to get the engine checked. I left about an hour later than I'd wanted to, but I made it out of the DC traffic without dying, which was my real goal for the evening. At one point three deer nearly ran out in front of me, which was not what I expected my obligatory near-accident to be. DC's geography is very weird.

While I was there, I went over to Dupont Circle and gloated over the destruction of the world's most unpleasant tea shop, which has been replaced by both 1) a shoestore identical to another shoestore that's just across the street, and 2) a much nicer tea shop which was nonetheless still wayyy too expensive.

I took the drive in two stages, and thus slept Friday and Sunday nights on thegeekgene's couch, conveniently located almost precisely at the midpoint between home and DC. I don't know how she managed to do that. Good job on college selection, thegeekgene.

On Friday night, I mentioned my plans to cut all my hair off in the hearing of one of her roommates, who promptly asked if she could have the clippings. She performs in burlesque drag shows, and had apparently been wanting to make some facial hair out of actual hair; my hair's nearly the same color as hers. I told her I'd ask the stylist about this, which I did, but the stylist didn't like the idea, feeling that my hair was not long enough for it to be practical for her to try and save all the scraps.

So, I did not help someone prepare for their drag act on Saturday, making Saturday pretty much like every day.

Today after I left thegeekgene headed off to DC herself, to Occupy Washington for a bit. Dad blames this on me, presence in DC evidently being contagious. She called a while ago to explain that she has found a place to sleep, is aware of tomorrow's weather forecast (bad), and has her blanket, coat, etc. She doesn't have a placard yet. Mom told her not to get wet and to remember to use her emergency credit card if necessary. (Is it entirely appropriate to bring your emergency credit card to an Occupation, I wonder?)

I let Windows update itself last night, and all of a sudden EditPad and Notepad no longer display Japanese characters. OpenOffice is fine - it's only the programs that I actually voluntarily use that are broken. I don't want to translate crap in OpenOffice, it'll find some way to corrupt my hardcopies. I will look down at a volume of manga and it'll be all random Cyrillic characters.

Before I wade into stackoverflow with this, any suggestions? I'm trying to use the Japanese morphological analyzer MeCab in a C# program (Visual Studio 2010 Express, Windows 7), and something's going wrong with the encoding.

( cut for many details )

Solved! Thank you, Cryovat and Tim Gebhardt!

Capture2Text will run OCR on a selection of Japanese text in an image and copy the results to the clipboard.

The big caveat is that, as far as I can tell, it always reads horizontally, left-to-right-then-up-to-down, meaning that you have to select columns of up-to-down-then-right-to-left text one at a time. So you can't use it to dump a whole page of text, but it looks like it'd be useful for finding a few unknown kanji quickly.

(I acknowledge that this is mostly important to me because I'm terrible at getting the Windows IME Pad to recognize my handwriting. I usually end up using my DS dictionary.)

My virus scanner keeps complaining about it, but that appears to be a false positive.

This is the first of the three posts that went up April 1st. It's mainly promotional stuff for the Gaiden OVA.

In this one, I'm including small versions of the pictures she posted, mainly because I think the last one's funny.

( Cut for length and images. )

There are two other posts, but they're mainly promotional stuff, so I thought I should do this one first.

As always, stuff I wasn't sure of is in gray text; let me know if you have corrections.

The Pacific Coast Touhoku Earthquake (This post will stay at the top.)

To those who were affected by the Touhoku earthquake of March 11th, I want to extend my most earnest condolences. I pray every day that recovery can be quick.

When the manager of the cell phone site told me that people were worrying about me, I was embarrassed. My sense of balance was affected by the surgery on my head, so I was throwing up for three days after the major earthquake, but that passed and I'm fine.

...But more importantly, to those who lived in the seriously affected areas - I can't find the words. To people who are already desperately trying to keep things together, it seems unthinkable just to say something like, "Try your best!" Even though I'm a writer, I can't put together even an imperfect statement - I'm such a useless creature. It's pathetic.

I wish I could do something for those who haven't been able to get back to their normal lives because of the aftershocks, and those who are living in areas hit with nuclear problems - but in my condition I would only cause more trouble if I went to help. So for now I can only think of my readers and do my best at my own work.

There were a lot of Saiyuki and Bus Gamer towels sitting in a storehouse at work, which I got to send to a nearby relief warehouse. They may have been thinking, "Where did all these weird towels come from...?", but I won't feel embarrassed about it - if they get to people who need them, I'm happy.

- 2011-04-01 00:05