New Job

Ok so after doing a little bit of research, I stumbled upon an in-progress translation for Jump Ultimate Stars that currently needs a lot of help in the translation department. A couple of the programmers changed the font so that it displays in half-width (8 pixels across instead of 16) instead of a true Variable Width Font. Subsequently after a little font hacking, the text looks really good compared to what it used to be. Anyhow, other people are going to be left to the graphic and programming hacking, while I will be the current lone translator on the project. Apparently all of the others lost interest and left. I also played around a little bit with the beta of the game and it seems that all of the main text is translated... But very badly. The grammar is pretty bad and there are spelling mistakes all over. I want to work on fixing that part up first, but the group leader is going to have me finish the parts still in Japanese. Cool. Introduction into the translation world!

In other news, I left my DS at home today. I don't know what I was thinking, but it must have been something along the lines of "Hey now that my camera is working, I'll take tons of pictures instead!!" Yeah, no. It didn't work out that way. I went to Anthro class in the morning which only had about half attendance because of Golden Week. It was also good because the class was only 2 hours long instead of the normal 3. For the rest of the time I chatted with Nick and "4 letter name guy" who let me join their group. After that I met Michael for the pizza buffet at Shakey's. For Japanese pizza it is pretty good. The price is especially good at lunch time, but way overpriced otherwise. I enjoyed probably 2 entire pizza's worth of food, along with 2 huge glasses of water, and many, many potato skins. Needless to say I walked out of there happy ^_^

We then planned on meeting Daniel and playing some DS when "OH NO!" I left mine at home... I instead exchanged money at the bank and went to the Igo club to ask about buying a board. Sadly the owner was not much help. He told me to ask the other club members. Gah! So Michael and I eventually met Daniel at Toyama Park and talked for a good 2 hours. At this point Michael decided to return home, I had some books to buy, and Daniel had different books to buy. We parted our separate ways.

So I finally got my Japanese books for this semester. One of them looks pretty decent. It is by the Japan Times entitled 中級から上級へ日本語 which means "from middle to high level Japanese." The other book is the continuation of the listening book which I absolutely loath. Maybe it will be better this semester.... Maybe.... After this I stopped by the local book off and picked up $20 worth of books (that's 20 books folks). Some of the notable ones were the original Japanese version of Haruki Murakami's "Dance Dance Dance" and "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World". I figure that since I have already read them in English, the Japanese version would be easier to read. On the way home I read a little bit of the first one, understood most of it, but there are still many kanji I do not know. Work work work right?

Oh yeah, yesterday I stayed home most of the day. My host family took me and Fabian out to sushi at this place that is apparently famous. It is called "Bidori Sushi" and I do not know the Kanji. It looked really expensive, but as expected was really really delicious!