DocFugu’s blog. Fighting games in Japan.
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Praise for Portal
About two weeks ago, I decided to buy Valve’s Portal. Now, generally I don’t play many games, but I have been reading two blogs that focus on games which have both been giving high praise for Portal. The first, Shamus Young’s Twenty Sided has a lot of gaming (both pen-and-paper RPG and computer type) information, […]
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The 2007 Japanese New Word / Buzzword / Hot Phrase Prize
I woke up this morning and was surprised to see on the news that there is a yearly Japanese new word / hot phrase prize awarded. It looks like this prize is sponsored by a publishing company, and has been awarded annually since 1984. You can check their yearly archive to see who won the […]
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Bad Omens
Today started off with a bad omen: I slept in for an entire hour. Usually I’m very good about getting up on time, but I was up a bit late last night. Even though I went home early (home by about 7:45pm) I logged on to some machines at work, and (slowly, while watching House) […]
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Fedora Core / RHEL don’t seem to come with up-to-date versions of Scalar::Util
I ran into this problem once before on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux machine, and now I am having the same problem on my Fedora Core (7 I think) machine. The problem is that CPAN is unable to install various things, in particular Bundle::CPAN, because: You don’t have the XS version of Scalar::Util I have […]
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SELinux Problems, solutions
In general, I really like the idea of SELinux. It conceptually allows you to specify users, roles, and types for files and then checks against those conditions when something tries to access the files. It will only allow users that match the user condition, roles that match the role condition, and types that match the […]
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Using the Gimp to automate “cleaning” of scanned B&W images
Sometimes I play around with translating manga for fun. It doesn’t really seem to get me much of anything except for lots of requests from punks to translate their favorite naruto doujinshi, but it is fun and relaxing with the bonus that I learn some cool casual Japanese. I like to translate with a program […]
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Spectating the New York Marathon
Las Diablas, with sign Larry the Lighthouse Lots of runners By a surprising coincidence I was in New York at the same time my twin sister ran the New York Marathon. This really wasn’t planned, and just happened: I am in the US to attend the TREC conference in Washington DC and before the conference […]
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Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
(Beware, spoilers may follow.) Since I came to Japan I have not been reading too many English books. I really enjoy trying to read novels in Japanese, and am currently (slowly) fighting my way through Haruki Murakami’s “Kafka by the Sea.” I leave English books, which I devour, as fodder for passing time on the […]
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Overheard at the bar
When she said priori probability, I think she meant a-priori probability … Of course, I have to admit that this bar is the one in the hotel where many attendees of the TREC conference are staying, but still, I think it is a very funny bit of overheard conversation. I kind of like the idea […]
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Catching up on Music
Lately I haven’t been listening to very much music. I’ve been busy with work, then last week I caught a cold and was sick all week. I still came into work, but left pretty early and slept a lot. I’m finally just about over that, but work has gotten busy again as I have to […]
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One week with Papa and Daughter (パパとムスメの七日間)
On Saturday I was working at the computer with the TV on, and came across a re-broadcast of the first two episodes of パパとムスメの七日間, a Japanese weekend drama that was on a while back. I usually don’t watch Japanese TV since it consists of essentially talentless タレント芸の人 (celebrities) on quiz shows, or possibly cooking shows, […]
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On the outside looking in
A quick post. Today has been a peaceful Saturday, where I woke up early, did some housework, cleaned up around the place, and caught up on casual website reading. I also enjoyed my traditional hour or two at the local coffee shop reading my Japanese book – I will eventually finish this thing, but it […]
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