![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
It's Sunday evening now, but I didn't update last night because I just kinda conked out from being tired.
In the morning at school yesterday I talked to one of Eri's students, who is an aerospace engineer. He's possibly moving down to the Tanegashima Space Center later this year because some of the things he's working on will be launching into space! So he came into my classroom and pointed it out to me on the map and we were talking about lots of different places near Kagoshima. (I was really happy he even said, "It's between Kagoshima and Okinawa" without me needing to prompt him). I'm excited for him, though it'll be tough for him to continue studying English if he does that.
In my 2-3pm Headways class I had a blast chatting with my student about software engineering and technical writing for almost two hours. His wife is a tech writer (in Japanese, but still) so we had this great discussion about active vs. passive writing, and word choices. Apparently, I didn't know this, but in Japanese to say to open a drawer you use the word 引く, to pull, instead of 開ける, to open. Akeru/hiraku are used more for "open a door, open a window, open a book" etc. But when you're doing stuff on a computer like opening a new window, or opening a file, or pulling something down from a menu, this all gets really confusing. And then there's all the stuff like "a new window is opened" vs "this opens a new window"...
So then I put up on the board a sentence like "The FooBar method is used to get a line of text from a file. If a valid file and number are given, the text string for the file line is returned."
And together with my student we rewrote this sentence to say "The FooBar method takes in a file name and a line number and opens the file and returns a string with the text on that line of the file. This method returns NULL if the file is not a text file, or if the line number is less than 0 or greater than the number of lines in the file."
He was telling me stories about how his wife apparently will go to designers and developers and yell at them for writing stupid specifications, and demands they change the interface or at least clarify their designs. He's like "They all hate her, but that's why I love her." Awwwww it reminds me of what I must have been like in a former life about 7 years ago.
I then had classes straight 4-5-6pm, because my flex student came in at 5. My 6pm student is going to Vancouver BC for the first two weeks of March! I'm really happy for him. He wants to visit Seattle too... not sure if he'll be able to do that. I should try to put together some stuff for him about the city, except of course, most of what I like in Vancouver is Japanese stuff. Which is silly to recommend to him! Shame it's not a month later, then I'd maybe be back in North America for a few days, but the school year here ends in February and starts in April, see.
T (one of our students) came in to talk to Eri in the evening about what classes he should take at GEOS starting in the summer. It seems like he's going to switch from her TOEIC class to my Sprint 6 / Mill B classes. That'll be interesting. Amazingly, Duane also stopped by to say hi (yaaaaaay!!!) so we all went out to dinner after we closed down GEOS a little after 8. Since T actually lives in Akabane we were like "dude, is there anywhere tasty and cheap near here that we can go to?" and he suggested pasta. So we went to this pasta place in La La Garden and it WAS cheap and tasty (seriously, I got a big plate of eggplant spaghetti for 661 yen which is like half of what it costs at the pasta place in the station) and they just let us hang out there forever. However, they had eggplant listed on their menu as "eggapple" in English which was... bizarre. Conversation was really funny too. Any time we were talking about normal things we'd slow down or switch into Japanese, any time we were talking about GEOS things we'd speed up in English. I felt really bad for T, but he kept making jokes about it so, hey, whatever. Duane and I also taught him very useful English idioms like "I'm going to KILL him!" :)
We ended up staying out until around 11pm, when the restaurant closed and they kicked us all out.
I went home and, oddly, after watching the sports news, I ended up playing Puzzle Pirates for about 2 hours. Not sure why, I just felt like it. I ended up going on an Atlantis mission for a bit... my FIRST Atlantis mission actually. We sank so we didn't get much of anything useful, though it was kind of cool to actually see the new stuff. Also for whatever reason the CO decided to make me a lazer-swordfighter so all I had to do was sit around and observe and swordfight when stuff came on board, and try Treasure Haul. So, I guess it was kind of cool.
And then I conked out. I mean, I had basically unfolded my futon and moved the laptop to the floor while playing PP anyway so I pretty much fell asleep on the laptop after logging out.
Like an idiot, I had left the stove burner on with my teapot on top of it all night... even though it was low heat, by the morning the water had all boiled out, and actually I didn't wake up until like 1pm so I'm not sure how long it was heating empty like that. Oops. At least my apartment didn't burn down, I guess, but I need to either get a waterheater or be more careful in the future.
I spent today mostly relaxing -- I did laundry, and I prepared some of the curry I bought the other night at Max Valu. This was middle-spicy chicken curry and it was REALLY tasty so I'll probly go for it again even though it was like 260 yen for the package. And... I don't know where the afternoon really went. I looked at some plane flight prices -- I really gotta buy plane tickets home for Carnival so I can really plan for it. But there's like ninety things I want to do in one week in America :(
I'm gonna head up to a movie theater in a bit to see Kagehinata no Saku, and then tomorrow I'll probly actually go into Tokyo for the afternoon, since I only know one movie theater near here showing Zenzen Daijoubu, and it's in Shibuya. And then my brain will explode from too much Japanese. But I'll also maybe stop by the Tokyo Dome and other stuff for the first time in ages, maybe. I'm a moron though and missed the Hoshino Japan exhibit at the Hall of Fame, and the new 1990's exhibit doesn't start until Tuesday so, whoops.
In the morning at school yesterday I talked to one of Eri's students, who is an aerospace engineer. He's possibly moving down to the Tanegashima Space Center later this year because some of the things he's working on will be launching into space! So he came into my classroom and pointed it out to me on the map and we were talking about lots of different places near Kagoshima. (I was really happy he even said, "It's between Kagoshima and Okinawa" without me needing to prompt him). I'm excited for him, though it'll be tough for him to continue studying English if he does that.
In my 2-3pm Headways class I had a blast chatting with my student about software engineering and technical writing for almost two hours. His wife is a tech writer (in Japanese, but still) so we had this great discussion about active vs. passive writing, and word choices. Apparently, I didn't know this, but in Japanese to say to open a drawer you use the word 引く, to pull, instead of 開ける, to open. Akeru/hiraku are used more for "open a door, open a window, open a book" etc. But when you're doing stuff on a computer like opening a new window, or opening a file, or pulling something down from a menu, this all gets really confusing. And then there's all the stuff like "a new window is opened" vs "this opens a new window"...
So then I put up on the board a sentence like "The FooBar method is used to get a line of text from a file. If a valid file and number are given, the text string for the file line is returned."
And together with my student we rewrote this sentence to say "The FooBar method takes in a file name and a line number and opens the file and returns a string with the text on that line of the file. This method returns NULL if the file is not a text file, or if the line number is less than 0 or greater than the number of lines in the file."
He was telling me stories about how his wife apparently will go to designers and developers and yell at them for writing stupid specifications, and demands they change the interface or at least clarify their designs. He's like "They all hate her, but that's why I love her." Awwwww it reminds me of what I must have been like in a former life about 7 years ago.
I then had classes straight 4-5-6pm, because my flex student came in at 5. My 6pm student is going to Vancouver BC for the first two weeks of March! I'm really happy for him. He wants to visit Seattle too... not sure if he'll be able to do that. I should try to put together some stuff for him about the city, except of course, most of what I like in Vancouver is Japanese stuff. Which is silly to recommend to him! Shame it's not a month later, then I'd maybe be back in North America for a few days, but the school year here ends in February and starts in April, see.
T (one of our students) came in to talk to Eri in the evening about what classes he should take at GEOS starting in the summer. It seems like he's going to switch from her TOEIC class to my Sprint 6 / Mill B classes. That'll be interesting. Amazingly, Duane also stopped by to say hi (yaaaaaay!!!) so we all went out to dinner after we closed down GEOS a little after 8. Since T actually lives in Akabane we were like "dude, is there anywhere tasty and cheap near here that we can go to?" and he suggested pasta. So we went to this pasta place in La La Garden and it WAS cheap and tasty (seriously, I got a big plate of eggplant spaghetti for 661 yen which is like half of what it costs at the pasta place in the station) and they just let us hang out there forever. However, they had eggplant listed on their menu as "eggapple" in English which was... bizarre. Conversation was really funny too. Any time we were talking about normal things we'd slow down or switch into Japanese, any time we were talking about GEOS things we'd speed up in English. I felt really bad for T, but he kept making jokes about it so, hey, whatever. Duane and I also taught him very useful English idioms like "I'm going to KILL him!" :)
We ended up staying out until around 11pm, when the restaurant closed and they kicked us all out.
I went home and, oddly, after watching the sports news, I ended up playing Puzzle Pirates for about 2 hours. Not sure why, I just felt like it. I ended up going on an Atlantis mission for a bit... my FIRST Atlantis mission actually. We sank so we didn't get much of anything useful, though it was kind of cool to actually see the new stuff. Also for whatever reason the CO decided to make me a lazer-swordfighter so all I had to do was sit around and observe and swordfight when stuff came on board, and try Treasure Haul. So, I guess it was kind of cool.
And then I conked out. I mean, I had basically unfolded my futon and moved the laptop to the floor while playing PP anyway so I pretty much fell asleep on the laptop after logging out.
Like an idiot, I had left the stove burner on with my teapot on top of it all night... even though it was low heat, by the morning the water had all boiled out, and actually I didn't wake up until like 1pm so I'm not sure how long it was heating empty like that. Oops. At least my apartment didn't burn down, I guess, but I need to either get a waterheater or be more careful in the future.
I spent today mostly relaxing -- I did laundry, and I prepared some of the curry I bought the other night at Max Valu. This was middle-spicy chicken curry and it was REALLY tasty so I'll probly go for it again even though it was like 260 yen for the package. And... I don't know where the afternoon really went. I looked at some plane flight prices -- I really gotta buy plane tickets home for Carnival so I can really plan for it. But there's like ninety things I want to do in one week in America :(
I'm gonna head up to a movie theater in a bit to see Kagehinata no Saku, and then tomorrow I'll probly actually go into Tokyo for the afternoon, since I only know one movie theater near here showing Zenzen Daijoubu, and it's in Shibuya. And then my brain will explode from too much Japanese. But I'll also maybe stop by the Tokyo Dome and other stuff for the first time in ages, maybe. I'm a moron though and missed the Hoshino Japan exhibit at the Hall of Fame, and the new 1990's exhibit doesn't start until Tuesday so, whoops.
