As you may have noticed, I haven’t been posting very much lately. The reason for this is that I’m graduating upper secondary school this week. I had finals during the past 2 weeks so I had to study for those (nailed them all by the way!). The coming week is my last week in upper secondary school so I won’t have much time to write anything. The good thing about this is that there won’t be anything stealing my free time after my graduation, well, at least for the next 2 or 3 months. I’ll be working but I’ll still have enough free time to do what I like. So if I don’t post very much or anything at all for a couple of days, don’t think that I’m abandoning my blog, cause I’m not. Anyway, I’m graduating on May 30, if you’re interested.
Now let’s talk about something else. I’ve been talking a lot about communities, or social networking sites if you will. I’ve let people know where they can find me but something I forgot to ask you all is where I can find you! So I will ask you this now, where can I find you on the web? Post links to your Twitter, Flickr, Last.fm, YouTube, or other places where you have an account. Here’s my list:
Just interested in knowing where my readers hang out, cheers!
It’s been confirmed! A Fuji TV drama called Code Blue: Doctor Heli Kinkyu Kyumei will air on Thursdays at 10:00 PM, starting sometime in July. Code Blue will star some of my favorite actors/actresses, namely Yamapi, Gakky and Toda. The story is based on Japan’s proposal for an emergency medical service using helicopters to quickly reach those in need. Yamapi, who’ll be the leading actor in this drama, plays a young apprentice of an experienced doctor. Apparently some scenes will be filmed with real helicopters to add some tension to the show.
Yamapi’s supporting cast includes Yui Aragaki, Erika Toda, Manami Higa, Yosuke Asari, Kiyoshi Kodama, Ryo, Tetta Sugimoto, Susumu Terajima, and Masanobu Katsumura.
It’s been a long time since I last watched a drama starring Horikita Maki, I think Hana Kimi was the last one, which was about 5 or 6 months ago. I still have some catching up to do, I still haven’t posted about Nobuta wo Produce yet, so more Horikitty goodness is on the way.
Deru Toko Demasho is about a high school girl called Shizuka Kamei who’s suffering from a family bankruptcy. Because of her father’s abrupt financial crash, her father decided to loan money from three loan sharks. As the family is unable to pay the money back, the father leaves to find a job and the rest of the family is forced to move. But the three loan sharks continues to chase the family and asking for money they don’t have, until Shizuka meets with a lawyer who’s now living in the family’s old house. The lawyer, who’s extremely perverted and has a thing for high school uniforms and anime figures, decides to hire Shizuka and help her family. Shizuka eventually discovers her heart of justice and continues to help people who’s having the same problems as she used to have.
From the plot it may sound like a serious drama, but it’s not. This drama is really funny, especially Horikitty, Tanihara Shosuke and Nukumizu Youichi are extremely funny! Nukumizu Youichi acts as a funny stereotypical Japanese man, he’s shy and sensitive and he really reminds me of Kohinata Fumiyo (which is great since I like Fumiyo a lot). I like Shosuke’s role cause it’s so random, you wouldn’t expect a lawyer to be a perverted otaku, it’s a weird twist.
- Title: 出るトコ出ましょ！
- Title (romaji): Deru Toko Demasho!
- Format: Tanpatsu
- Genre: Law, comedy
- Viewership ratings: 12.9
- Broadcast network: Fuji TV
- Broadcast date: 2007-Sept-22
- Air time: Saturday 21:00
This drama is definitely something you shouldn’t miss, I’m sure you’ll like it. The only downside is that it’s just a 2 hour special, I want more!
You can find the RAW rip of this drama on D-Addicts, if you can’t find the softsubs just let me know and I’ll send them to you.
I recently finished another Ueto Aya drama, this time an older drama called Hitonatsu no Papa e (Papa for One Summer). The first thing that almost scared me away was the quality of the videos, it’s from 2003 and Japanese dramas and movies that old tend to look older than they actually are. So that was something I had to get used to, but it wasn’t a big deal since it’s an Ueto Aya drama.
A high school student’s mother passes away leaving her alone with her grief. The girl, Marimo, discovers the name of a father she never knew. Marimo sets off to meet him, but is completely shocked when she finds someone very different from the father she envisioned. Her father, Shinpei, a 38-year-old would-be private detective, is shocked too, and doesn’t believe her until he sees the paperwork. With Marimo muttering “The worst father in the world”and Shinpei lamenting the loss of his freedom, these two are about to learn how difficult and rewarding a father/daughter relationship can be. – TBS
Despite the fact that it looked very old and almost scared me away because of that, I was surprised of how good it actually was. It was fun to see an older version of some really great actors like Matsushige Yutaka, Kitamura Kazuki, Sawajiri Erika, Kohinata Fumiyo and of course Ueto Aya, even though some of them haven’t changed a lot. Erika looks really different in this drama compared to how she looks in Taiyou no Uta and 1 Litre of Tears. But Hitonatsu no Papa e was her first drama and the other two are her latest so that’s something I shouldn’t be surprised of.
Since I knew most of the actors from other dramas I had pretty high expectations of this drama, and they managed to live up to them. The one who surprised me most was Kitamura Kazuki (Shinpei) who I’ve only seen in Akihabara@Deep before, where he plays a very weird role. His acting in Hitonatsu was great and with his looks it all felt very real, he really looks like a private detective. A funny thing I’ve realized is that Kohinata Fumiyo’s roles are always pretty similar to each other, he’s always somewhat shy, a bit weird and naive. I think it’s partially because of his looks, he looks like a kind and funny person and he really looks like a stereotypical Japanese man.
One of the reasons why I like dramas so much is because they’re almost always focusing on a small group of friends. I like that concept a lot because it’s something I want to have myself, I’d like to have a small group of really close friends instead of having a lot of not so close friends. This drama is a perfect example of this concept as it’s focusing on a group of close friends working in a pub, besides the actual story based on the immature father and his daughter of course.
Overall I think this was a good drama, it doesn’t quite make it to my top 5 but it’s definitely something I’d recommend. If you’re a fan of Aya it’s something you shouldn’t miss, and you’ll most definitely see someone you know from somewhere else. Good acting and good story so give it a try!
- Title: ひと夏のパパへ
- Title (romaji): Hitonatsu no Papa e
- Also known as: Papa for One Summer
- Episodes: 10
- Viewership ratings: 5.6
- Broadcast network: TBS
- Broadcast period: 2003-July-02 to 2003-Sept-03
- Air time: Wednesday 22:00
- Theme song: Kanshou by Ueto Aya
Before you leave, check out this post on Tofugu, it’s very interesting if you’re currently learning Japanese: Lang-8 Review: Quite Possibly the Best Way to Practice Your Japanese Writing
I’ve been using both Flickr and Picasa for some time now and I’ve finally decided on which one I’m going to use from now on. My decision was based on what you get for a subscription fee around $20-25, but I’m also going to talk about the free memberships and the uploading applications in this post.
So let’s start off with Picasa. I’ve been using Picasa for quite some time since this is a Blogger blog (all images uploaded on my blog are linked to my Picasa Gallery, or actually it’s the other way around). It works great for my blog but that’s where the lines goes. Picasa still feels a bit like a beta, it has potential but it’s just a little too buggy and the features are lacking compared to Flickr’s. Here’s a list of what I find negative about Picasa.
- Organizing photos. You can choose to organize your photos by date, filename or manually. However, ordering by date (which probably is the best way to organize photos) doesn’t really work at all. The first pictures I ever uploaded in one of the albums are in the middle of everything, when they should be either first or last depending on how I order them (ascending or descending). Oh, and it’s not even possible to choose if you want to have them in an ascending or descending order.
- Tagging pictures. Tagging is a pain on Picasa, you can’t tag a batch of photos, you have to tag them one by one. So tagging is really time consuming, and it’s really boring.
- No sub-albums. You can’t create sub-albums on Picasa, which means you have to use tags to organize your photos. And looking back at the previous point, tagging is nothing you want to do on Picasa.
- Browsing albums. Loading albums with many pictures can be slow since it has to load a lot of thumbnails.
But Picasa of course has it’s benefits. The slideshow feature is really neat, even the embed slideshow works really well and is probably a feature I’ll use on my blog in the future. The uploading software (for Mac) is good, you still can’t tag a batch of photos at the same time with it though. I also find Picasa to be a bit faster when it comes to uploading, Flickr is sometimes slow when processing the photos. Another positive thing about Picasa is that you don’t have to pay anything to be able to use all the features, on the other hand you only have 1024 MB free storage (upgradeable to 10 GB for $20/year).
So how about Flickr? Well, I haven’t really found a lot of downsides on Flickr, as a Pro member. Everything works fine, I only got an error message once when I tried to organize my photos, but refreshing the page fixed it. The real downside however is the free membership. The free membership is so limited that it doesn’t make any sense to use Flickr at all, for me at least. You can only upload 100 MB per month and others can’t access the original files unless you’re a Pro member. So if you’re not willing to pay, you’re probably better off on a free service like Photobucket. A positive thing about Flickr is that everyone’s there, just like on YouTube. If you want people to see your photos, Flickr is the way to go, it’s where the community is. On Flickr I can also easily set permissions on my uploads, that way I can upload my family photos and only show them to my family and/or friends.
Now I’ve finally decided on which one I’ll be using from now on. Flickr is the winner and the most important reasons are listed below.
- The community is at Flickr.
- For $25 you get unlimited space and all features you need, while you get 10 GB storage on Picasa for $20 and not all the features you might need.
- No sub-albums on Picasa, I want to be able to actually organize my photos.
So what do you think about Flickr and Picasa? Which is better? Where do you upload your photos? I’m interested in knowing so leave a comment!
Visit my Flickr page
I’m a laptop guy, I use my MacBook as my primary computer since I don’t really need more power in terms of graphics. One of the downsides of using a laptop as your primary computer is often that you don’t have enough USB ports. When you’re on the go it doesn’t really matter, as long as you have 2 ports so you can plug in a mouse and something else. But it can be annoying when you’re at home since that’s usually where you do most of your work. I only have 2 USB ports and when I’m home I’m always using both of them, which means I have to do a lot of switching, and doing that decreases the work flow a lot. I haven’t bought a USB hub yet, simply because I haven’t found one I like, except for the LowKey Stand for the iMac. But now I’ve finally found one I like!
This is the Elecom U2H-Z7S Series. It’s a 7-port USB hub and comes in 3 versions, black, silver and white. Depending on what and how many devices you’re planning to plug in, it can be run as a bus-powered USB hub, but it also comes with an AC adapter.
It weighs 66 grams and measures 23 mm in width and 144 mm in height. It’s compatible with Windows (Vista/XP/2000/Me/98) and Mac (both IntelMac and PowerPC-based Macs), the specifications doesn’t say anything about Linux, but that’s normal.
I especially like the design of this hub, it’s discrete and simple but still eye-catching. The space between the ports is big enough, you can definitely plug in 7 USB flash drives thanks to the smart designer.
I’m definitely gonna try to get my hands on one of these. The price is only ￥5,040 (approximately $50), hopefully it’ll be available on a site that provides international shipping in the near future.
As it seems, Japan is going to encourage foreign workers to stay in Japan long-term. As said earlier, foreigners with good knowledge in the Japanese language are from now on getting favorable treatment in visa applications. This time it’s better than that, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) wants to set up an immigration agency to help foreign workers, this includes providing language lessons for those who need it. They’re also going to renew the current training programmes so that employers can’t use that as an excuse for paying unfairly low wages.
We might see more news like this in the coming years since Japan’s birthrate is still dropping. Japan has the lowest ratio of children to the general population in the world with 13.5%, next is Germany and Italy with 14.1%. So if Japan doesn’t manage to increase it’s birthrate, Japan lies in the hands of foreign workers. However, Japan is not planning to allow a mass-scale immigration since that would most definitely lead to lower wages for Japanese workers and a higher crime rate. That’s a fact, take a look at my country (Sweden) for an example.
This is good news anyway, as long as they keep rejecting the idea of allowing a mass-scale immigration, Japan lies in the hands of the right foreigners. Meaning foreigners who actually have a good reason for coming to Japan.
Read the whole article from AFP
I haven’t posted in a while, I haven’t had anything interesting to write about lately. I do have some interesting subjects I’m going to write about sooner or later, I also have some unpublished content that I’m not completely satisfied with, but I might publish it sometime. I want to encourage everyone to use a feed reader, since you don’t have to visit my site all the time to see if I’ve updated or not using that. It saves you a lot of time!
Lately I’ve been trying out some new image hosting websites. I’ve been using Photobucket and ImageShack for quite some time, but I’m not really satisfied with them because of their limitations on file sizes and/or image resolutions. So I’ve been trying out Flickr and Picasa, which also have their limitations on certain things. Flickr is a good image host, but what I don’t like about it is that you can’t have more than 3 sets unless you pay a yearly fee of ~$25, you also need to pay that if you want to upload and share bigger photos. So Flickr is not good enough for me, which is why I’ve also tried Google’s Picasa. I like Picasa, I can have just as many albums as I want and I can upload files as big as 20 Mb. However, Picasa also has it’s downsides, for example linking to photos and tagging photos is a real pain. To link to a photo you can choose between using a direct link or a HTML link, but what I miss is a BBCode link for forums. Tagging photos is really time consuming since you have to tag your photos one by one, I at least haven’t found a way to tag more than one photo at once. I also just have 1 GB free storage on Picasa while I have 6.54 GB on Gmail, which is kind of strange, it should be the other way around. However, I think I’ll continue to use Picasa for a while, I’m a fan of Google so I guess I’ll learn to love it, just like I did with everything else.
Yesterday I got an email from a man called Andrew (also known as Cruxay) about a link exchange. This led to a new partnership which I’m looking forward to continue working on in the future. Feel free to take a look around on his new blog about Japan in general, it’s new but if you’re interested in dramas, the otaku culture and reading about various places in Japan you should definitely pay a visit.
If you’re interested in exchanging links or if you have anything else on your mind, feel free to contact me.
According to yesterday’s announcement by the Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura, foreigners with good knowledge in the Japanese language will be getting favorable treatment in Visa applications. This will make it easier for foreigners to apply for a longer-term visa, without any unfavorable treatment to foreigners with poor Japanese language skills.
This has been posted on several sites, but I want to make sure that no one miss this article, since it’s very good news for people interested in Japan.
Quoted from The Japan Times Online:
Looking to encourage Japanese language learning among foreigners, the government is set to submit a bill to the Diet next year designed to make it easier for those who demonstrate a certain level of language proficiency to get visas of up to five years, a government study group said Thursday in an interim report.
The current maximum limit is three years.
The government plans to submit a bill to revise the immigration system to an ordinary Diet session that convenes in January.
“(Foreign Minister Masahiko) Komura underscored that having a reasonable level of Japanese proficiency is vital for foreign nationals seeking long-term residency permits to adapt to Japanese society and lead a sound communal life in Japan,” a statement issued Thursday by the Foreign Ministry read.
Komura first floated the idea in January this year, sparking widespread concern among foreigners that the government may be tightening visa control over foreigners who do not speak the Japanese language.
But both Komura and other Foreign Ministry officials emphasized that the revision would only give more visa opportunities to foreigners with Japanese language skills who would, without the new system, find it difficult to acquire a longer-term visa.
“Even without any Japanese skills, there would be no trouble (applying for) the current three-year visa status,” Komura told reporters.
“This would go in the direction of deregulating visa status, not strengthening it,” he said.
Neither the level of language skill required nor how it would be tested have been determined yet.
The language test would not be compulsory, a ministry official in charge of the visa issue told a media briefing the same day.
According to ministry officials, the new system is aimed at encouraging non-Japanese to learn Japanese, particularly descendants of Japanese immigrants from South America, many of whom fail to master the language.
The new language-skill-based visas would benefit people in certain occupations such as interpreter, translator and flight attendant, the official added.
This is great news and it is nothing but fair. People with little knowledge in the Japanese language might argue against this, but in my opinion it’s better to give those who actually make an effort a better chance. It’s also good to know that you have the possibility to make a difference. Now I don’t speak Japanese but unlike some people, I don’t call this discrimination, that’s just ridiculous. However, I will be studying Japanese starting from September 1, if my university application is accepted that is, if not I’ll be self studying even more. Just knowing this makes me want to work harder.
Kudos to the Foreign Ministry of Japan!
