My mother requested that I get some (inexpensive!) fish from work. She really liked the Yellowfin Tuna I brought back before, so this time I got six pounds of it. That's a whole goddamned lot of sashimi. I think she's planning some sort of sushi party today.
Also, her friend Joyce wanted to get some Hamachi, so I found a nice little frozen three pound loin package that should suit her well. It was either that or getting an entire fresh fillet (Ooburi) weighting at least five pounds(!)
I brought them home after work, and now they're both sittin' pretty in the refrigerator waiting to be spiced and sashimicated.
At long freakin' last: I can input Japanese in Linux! There are so much scattered documentation on the web on how to get it working, and most of it seems to be in Japanese. And, well, I'm still largely a Nihon-go illiterate. So many of the results I was getting from google weren't helping me too much (well, I could still pretend to try to read some forum posts by guessing what certain Kanjis meant).
Watch out world! I can e-mail in multiple languages now!
I'll probably put up a small tutorial of the steps I took to finally get it working soon.
There's word on the down low that I'm going to be getting an elevated income (aka, a raise) soon. I recently confronted my supervisor about the situation I'm in: the pay they're giving me isn't worth it to me if I have to drive over an hour in traffic for 40 miles consuming gas and having to pay toll. I think I may have been a bit too up-front and the company's paranoid that I'll just get up and leave.
There is also most likely some culture clash issues going on here, since the company is, after all, a Japanese company. I let them know that I felt like they were constantly emphasizing mistakes I'd made and that I got hardly any kind of praise for the (sometimes impossible) work they gave me. I basically let them know that they should be nice to me: an occasional 'please' or 'onegai shimasu' can go a long way!
I'd like to, now, however, talk about fish.
My company sells what's more commonly referred to here as 'Yellow Tail.' Many customers, because they're Japanese, call it 'Hamachi.' However, we've got another item: the Hamachi fillet which is called 'Ooburi.' Those are just the fresh items. We've also got the 'Hamachi Fillet Frozen' and 'Hamachi 3-Year' which are kind of like the frozen equivalents of 'Ooburi' and 'Hamachi' fresh items respectively. So, we've basically got four kinds of Yellow Tail. Now, it can get kind of frustrating when a customer just says "I'll have one piece Hamachi," and I have no clue which one they want. At least in Japanese, I can kind of distinguish a bit when they say
'ichi-mae' or 'ippon.'
Of course, it all gets muddled up when the sushi chef calls when they're tired and drunk after work.
That's just one example of the fun stuff I get to do at work. :)
This past Wednesday, some of the Kanji Bushi crew managed to trick me into taking the day off work for a day at the park watching the A's play the Rangers. It was a great day at the park: it wasn't too particularly cold, and the game was absolutely awesome with the A's winning in overtime. Hatteberg freakin' rocked!
I was also stoked since I've just recently started playing Fantasy Baseball at Yahoo Sports. Keith Foulke is on my team, and he ended up closing that night for the win. Also, the night before, Ichiro, who's also on my team, was 4 for 4 which included 2 homeruns. Yum!
I'm set to hit the game this coming Saturday at the Coliseum versus San Francisco. Hudson's on my team, and it looks like he's the starter (hmm, he hasn't been doing too well this season, though). It should be an awesome game!
This past Saturday, I took a day trip to Napa with Jon, Krystal, and Krystal's friend Audrey. Jon has a friend, Jen, who grew up in the valley, so she showed us around. Hmm, that makes it sound a little dull. Well, let's say that we got to ride in Jen's 1963 Buick Skylark convertible.
Ah, the wind flying through our hair in our cool shades--inebriated and suntanned. It was a perfect day!
We went to 4 or 5 wineries, but that didn't matter to me. By the time we hit the third one, I was already quite red and flustered.
Jon took the wheel for me on the ride back to the Bay Area, and we slid into a BBQ at Jen's old roommate's house in Berkeley. There was this absolutely adorable little girl named Ruby, a super-shy dog, and an overly friendly cat at the party. With no disrespect to any of them, I said, "This party sure has a lot of critters roaming around." I was, of course, thinking of the critters in the sense of the cute creatures that roam around in Blizzard's Starcraft and Warcraft games.
One Slashdot reader pointed out that SCO is still running Linux with Apache. I find that funny.
Andrew e-mailed me a response to my ramble about anti-smoking devices:
[Tobacco's] customers have all been dying away from heart disease and lung cancer, but they still don't seem to be doing so bad after all these years. So the supply must be pretty limitless. In fact, those anti smoking things actually help them because it'll help them stop for a little while, but I'm sure quite a few of them come back. And since those people took a break and cleared up their lungs a little bit, they can now smoke a little more longer than they would have if they just kept smoking to their graves.
More than 70 percent of the 50 million smokers in the United States today have made at least one prior quit attempt, and approximately 46 percent try to quit each year. Most smokers make several quit attempts before they successfully kick the habit.
Word on the street is that there's gonna be a live action Transformers movie. Fanatics like my brother are going to be in bliss.
Speaking of changes, I've gotten a little time to do some twiddling with the site again. So, I might be popping in once in a while to make the site work a little more like I want it to.
Because I'm both a longtime user and fan of Linux (and the Open Source movement), I've been keeping up with the SCO controversy. I do get kind of annoyed at reading the same rehashed arguments over and over again, however. There are way too many overzealous pubescent over-caffeinated kids with not enough time away from the computer voicing their (cliched) opinions. Sure, SCO is acting like a childish doofbag; they're likely distorting or hiding something, but I find them humorous like a clumsy bully throwing blind punches after being poked in the eyes. I'm anxious to see what'll happen when IBM's deadline is up and the real fight begins. Then it'll be time for us to see how Linux's changelogs (and fully documented open source) can putteth the smakketch downeth. :)
On a different note, I was thinking about smoking. No, not like that. I was stuck in traffic (actually, I was getting on an on-ramp), and I thought about all these products to help stop people from smoking. So, what's supposed to happen when so many people stop smoking that people won't need these quit-smoking products anymore? It reminds me of something my friend had at Pitzer--it was a "club" consisting of single males, and its goal was to try to get its members girlfriends. Basically, the goal of the club was the elimination of the club.
Now, conspiracy theorists might think that members of the tobacco industry are actually behind these quit-smoking products. Oh, that'd be a sneaky tactic indeed: profitting off of the anti-smokers. That way, they can make money from the people who are getting off of their products too. There is, however, the problem of how to leech off more of people's money once they're done with both the cigarettes and the patches. Hmm...
Then, I have my thoughts about multi-national corporations--but that's a topic for another day.
Somewhat-sorta-not-so-recently, I got my first cellphone. In March, I'd borrowed the family's free-for-all phone; it had an old plan on it with 15 minutes each month and rollover minutes. That thing was rollin' over minutes for something like two years! Well, after March was over, it turns out I'd used over 300 minutes on the phone; I'd basically sucked up all the rollover minutes saved up on it!
So, I decided it was high-time I got my own thingamabobber. Since I'll be going to Kyoto in the fall, I figured it wouldn't be practical to get a contract plan. After researching and doing a little math to find out what a rip-off prepaid phones are, I found MetroPCS which gives me unlimited minutes at a flat rate. Oh, what yumminess!
Oh, but wait, there's more. I parted with some more of my Benjamins when I finally got myself a Canon S200. I've been wanting that baby for a while, and I saw a great deal posted by the ferengi on FatWallet. It still doesn't snap as fast as I wish it would, but I'm not one to complain (too much). It's taken a slew of
good pictures, and I love doing black and white and daytime "flower" pictures. I'm still having a few difficulties with dark settings
and indoor shots... I think that's because I'm just sort of a bad photographer. There's still more that this young grasshopper must learn.
I keep saying I'm going to get myself an Apple iBook before I go to Japan; a geek like me needs his own computer! I mean, what if I suddenly get those old 3am code cravings again? Also, it should be fun to goof off with in on the long plane ride there. I need to watch my budget, though, since I still have to reserve money for actually living in Japan. Oh, but Small Dog's cheap prices make it oh-so tempting.
Moreover, in preparation for that great journey over the ocean, I've also been reading a couple blogs to try to gain some more knowledge to my ever-expanding cranium of conundrums. First, there's a certain gai-jin girl named Kristen
who lives and works in Tokyo who gives tidbits and tips on living in Japan. She also makes certain observations that I find funny. And then there's an actual Japanese girl named Norry whose English is not-quite perfect and subtly amusing. I think it's great that I can read her thoughts about her daily life: thank goodness it's in English!
Ah, I love technology. :)
Last night, I went to go see Wicked at the Curran Theater. It's great how they were able to integrate things from the original movie into the show. Sure, it was all a little hokey, but it was still loads of fun. Maybe I'll finally feast my eyes on Phantom of the Opera when it comes to SF in July.
That cool cat Carol's cookin' up craziness at CalShakes again this summer, and *gasp* I've never gotten a chance to go check it out. So, I've sworn to finally get my first viewings of that.
Oh, look at me, being all sophisticated and classy. Let me take another sip of my Sauvignon.
