Last year one of the discount clothing chains here in Japan, had a series of t-shirts that made me smile every time I saw one. Solid-colour shirts with a few (or less) words printed across the chest:
Helvetical Narrow Condensed
Frutiger 66
Poplar
Ironwood
There were many more, each set in the named face. Browsing the rack was almost like flipping through an Adobe type catalogue. I should've bought a bunch, got my students to model them, and made a series of type specimen postcards. Oh, the joys of hindsight.
Though a quick search of their site turned up Eurostile for 500 yen, so maybe I still have a chance.
I'll add to the data in support of what Aconite said a few posts ago. In the part of the Canadian prairies I hail from, "First Nations" is the general and politically correct term, though there's a lot of variety. Some groups self-identify with tribal names or as Indian, Native, and so on. But people outside those groups are advised to stick with "First Nations" until they know which other terms are appropriate.
If you think "Indian" is ambiguous in North American usage, it's even more so for Japanese people. This photo is a case in point.
I'm a bit late for the math party, but the mentat wiki may be of interest to some. Climbing up the url trail to www.ludism.org revealsThe Center for Ludic Synergy exists to foster ludism, or philosophy as it applies to games and gaming.Both areas of the site seem a little sparse but I'm not a gamer nor am I especially in need of further developing my math skills. Memory however...
Paula, I completely agree about the sub-par performance of digicams for video. However, in a pinch...
As for food, my lack of skill with the Japanese language makes it so that I wouldn't know where to begin asking questions about where stuff comes from so I try not to look into it very deeply. But it's hard to ignore stuff like whale parts at the high-end grocery, or the sudden abundance of chicken meals at the school cafeteria around the time of the asian flu culls last year.
And then there was the ad I saw in the paper the other day for a travelling petting zoo with a baby tiger. But that's a digression better suited to a non-food thread.
Sorry to double post, but on third re-read, I realized that I wasn't completely clear about the "If the file start with…" part. By the start of the files, I mean the first characters in the file data, when opened in a text editor, as opposed to the file name. Follow the link for a more lucid explanation.
Clark,
If the files start with "IIXPR"—that's the letter I, not the numeral 1 at the beginning—or "MMXPR," they're QuarkXpress files. The former from the PC version, the latter Mac. Further details here, scroll down or search for "File Origin Code." I'm not sure what, if any, identifying headers the other publishing formats would have.
If they are indeed Quark files, you'll need to open them in Quark and export them for use in Word/rtf/choose your file format. InDesign is able to convert some Quark files. Adobe had a trial version available for download—probably long enough for you to export to your file format of choice if you want to avoid Quark. I'm a little rusty on my prepress formats as its been a few years since I escaped the trenches so there may be easier and/or more direct ways. Of course, this point is moot if they're not Quark files.
Note also that exporting text from a layout that was designed to suck in content rather than spit it out for revisions is often a royal pain in the behind.
Teresa, just adding my voice to the chorus of relieved readers.
Paula: if your digital camera has a movie/video mode, it can compensate for the lack of a camcorder. Mine has been invaluable.
Regarding all of the wonderful ideas for herbal sauces: I'm looking forward to easy, affordable access to fresh herbs upon my return to the Great White North this summer. I'm currently living in a large coastal city in western Japan, with easy access to seafood. Oddly, a lot of it seems to come from Norway, New Zealand, and/or Alaska. The fugu, however, is local. The proliferation of imported fish might also be that my brain filters out all of the local fish that are labelled purely in Japanese.
Fresh herbs are hard to come by. I've never seen fresh dill or cilantro here. The way fresh basil is priced, you'd think it was coca leaf. I was amazed yesterday to find that my local grocery store had changed their packaged spice line to one that included dill seed—the first time I've seen it—and have resorted to buying Indian spices and basmati rice from an online store based in Tokyo.
Lest this starts to sound too much like a rant, the sushi is excellent, as is the extensive selection of umeboshi. And edamame as a regulary-stocked item in the grocery store's freezer section is a dream come true. Now if only I could find someone to teach me how to properly sharpen my yanagi ba.
To give another take on the whole plagiarism issue, here in Japan my students—senior high school—are actively encouraged to copy from each other in English class. This is primarily due to two factors, which after rereading look like different aspects of the same issue:
First of all, the standardized-test–based education system rewards the ability to regurgitate memorized chunks of data rather than critical thinking and process. This means "writing" class consists almost exclusively of translating sentences from previous years' university entrance exams. As long as they memorize the appropriate data sets, no one asks about the process.
And secondly, the students don't have enough time to complete all of their homework so they've developed a system of distributed processing. An assignment of 20 single-sentence translation questions will be parceled out between 5-10 students, with the completed work units shared equally among the peers before class. Often there are one or two students who do error checking.
Admittedly, this is an oversimplification as there are other issues, including Japanese group dynamics and educational theory. But after a year-and-a-half, the copying still irks me. I've resigned myself to the system, but still give the students a good-natured teasing about it whenever I can. And the ones who work things out for themselves usually get less generic feedback. (Not because of favouritism, but because their translations are unique.)
Steve Eley said:
Will this ever happen? Probably not, unless they start losing market share over it. It seems to sell well enough to the people who buy from it, and those people probably don't care as much about audiobooks.
I'm going to echo Greg's sentiments about not wanting to start a religious war but this thread, especially Steve Eley's comment, makes me wonder if Apple has finally learned something from the OS wars: that 95% of users will put up with 70% of an interface.
Graydon, having grown up in a household where Taoist philosophy was discussed fairly often, I'd say that you did a pretty good rendering of the spirit of Chuang Tzu/Zhuangzi (I'm not sure what the current romanization is). In fact, that would've been my first guess if the mentions of Kant and Buddhism hadn't scared me off.
Sqwid: I missed that but it's been awhile since I've watched the Cowboy Bebop movie. It's not surprising that I missed it since I'm not terribly informed about architecture. Structures shaped like the Flatiron Building are pretty common here in Japan, though—partly due to the non-uniform lot shapes and sizes. I'll see if I can dig up some photos. But then I'll have to finish the config on my web server so that I can post them. After I re-read the motivation thread. And that link posted awhile back about procrastination. And…
Changing the subject entirely, I'm not a knitter nor do I live in NYC. Nevertheless these photos of a yarn shop on Sullivan are quite lovely.
I was making my way through the unusual articles section of Wikipedia this afternoon and stumbled upon the Sokal Affair, which has amusing parallels with the Atlanta Nights story:
In 1996 Professor Sokal, a physicist at New York University, submitted a deliberately pseudoscientific paper for publication in a post-modernist academic journal of cultural studies. The paper, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", published in the Spring/Summer 1996 issue of Social Text, was submitted to see if an academic journal would (in Sokal's words) "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."
I was going to suggest a Wikipedia entry for Atlanta Nights, then I found it. Perhaps mutual see also links would be in order.
Bob, thanks for the hamster-driven generator link. I mentioned it to a friend the other day, who pointed me to the Melonpool web comic, which is said to include a space ship powered by a 300-pound hamster in a similar device.
Sally, World Spice in Seattle has a wide selection of culinary treats, including chipotle. Here's the unframed page. To navigate to that page from the main site, click on the "Pure Chiles" link in the left-hand column and then on "Smoked Chipotle Morita" on the page that appears in the frame. World Spice does mail order though I don't know if they send to Australia. I've never ordered from them—I only discovered them after I came to Japan, and sometimes it's difficult or cost-prohibitive to find some of the ingredients I like to spice—they came to my attention via cooking tech guy Alton Brown.
If you enjoyed Ebert's glossary, you might like The Laws of Anime.
Here's a working link for the allmovie.com entry for Priscilla.
Julie L., you didn't happen to notice whether or not the designer of the Hugo Weaving plushies had any samples of him as Mitzi Del Bra in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert did you? I had a quick look but didn't see any.
xeger, it was actually me that clarified about iPhoto. As for my photos, I shoot at the highest quality and highest resolution on a 3.2 megapixel camera. The average file size is about 1.2Mb.
The reason the full library takes so much space has to do with the way iPhoto manages files when you edit images. It backs up the file to a subfolder called "Originals," so even when you so much as rotate an image 90 degrees, it creates a duplicate. (As an aside this is a good thing. If you're curious, read up on lossy/lossless JPEG rotation. As far as I know, iPhoto's rotate function is lossy.) I shoot a lot of portrait-oriented images—about a third—which means that when I use iPhoto my disk fills up about 35% faster with the changed files than if I simply add up the nominal file sizes of the originals.
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| 2005 | 23 |
| 2004 | 1 |
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