I think I may be beginning to understand the Japanese writing system. This worries me, because it's not the sort of thing you really expect to understand. Ever.
There's a bit of necessary background information: I have a Spaced Repetition System, that I use for memorizing vocabulary and stuff. I've had it for, oh, about a year now I guess.
The SRS is cool because it makes review automatic. How it works is, for every active card it tracks two things: when is it due to be looked at next (due date/time), and how long is that since the previous time (repetition interval). When you get a card right without any trouble and click the "Correct" button (after showing the answer to check yourself), it increases the interval geometrically and requeues the card based on the new interval. If you have trouble remembering but do get it, you can click "Difficult", and the interval stays about the same. If you don't quite get it, but almost, "Close" will shorten the interval a bit, and if you just plum forgot or missed outright, there's a button that will cut the interval down to a fraction of its former value. There's also an "Easy" button that increases the interval by a couple orders of magnitude. Anyway, the normal state of affairs, once you get your multipliers tweaked to match your personal learning rate, is that *most* of the time you remember the card and click the "Correct" button, with the result that the interval climbs from minutes to hours within the first couple of days, then from days to weeks, and it just keeps climbing from there. The better you know a card, the longer you can go and still know it.
New cards are introduced as necessary based on how far apart your active cards are spaced. You can also dequeue a new active card any time you want, if you just feel you're ready for a new one, and there's a review-only mode that never gives you any new ones. But usually I just let it give me new ones when it thinks I'm ready. Cards that aren't active yet have a "cue number" that controls the order in which they are introduced.
I've got a number of different kinds of things in the SRS: English words, Hebrew words, Japanese characters and words, Bible verses, geography, US Constitutional amendments, whatever I want to memorize that breaks up into bite-sized pieces. I spend roughly half an hour a day using it, broken up into 5-10 minute segments here and there.
So here's the story: months and months ago, I put the word 七曜表 into my SRS. Since I didn't yet know two of the three characters used to write it, I gave it a cue number higher than either of them. At the time I was putting in a bunch of words just so there'd be something there to dequeue whenever I needed it. I then promptly forgot about the word until it came up.
You also need to know that in the Japanese writing system, each character has multiple possible "readings" (pronunciations). There are also a couple of different major *kinds* of readings, "on" readings and "kun" readings being the important ones for most purposes. In my SRS, I always list on readings before kun readings, and they show up in a different color, so *hopefully* I'm getting at least a general sense of which is which. In my SRS I list the readings in kana (the portion of the Japanese writing system that's strictly phonetic in nature, which makes it perfect for pronunciation guides). Here, however, I shall attempt to render these pronunciations in a manner that will make sense for English speakers, on the theory that some of the people reading this might not know kana.
So anyway, as of a couple of days ago I've now reached the point where I've studied all three of the characters used to write this word. 七 can be pronounced either "she-chee" or "na-na" and means seven. 曜 is "yo" (with the o held for two beats; a rare character with only one major reading) and its basic meaning is day, as in day of the week. The third character, 表, is one that I only started studying a couple of days ago and am still reviewing multiple times per day. It has three major readings. The first one is unspellable in English; the traditional transliteration would be "hyo", but you're going to want to make that two syllables, and it's only one: the "hy" is a blend. (The y sound is pretty much the *only* blend-forming phoneme in the Japanese language. They don't really have l or r, and they don't form blends with s or z or w.) Oh, and the "o" is held for two beats. The character can also be read "oh-moe-tay" or "ah-dah-wah-sue". (That "d" is not exactly a normal d. It's a lateral alveolar flap consonant, often transliterated as "r". It sounds sort of like "l", only different. It's closer to d than r. If you know Spanish, it's said to be more like a Spanish r than it is like an English r.) This character carries the idea of displaying or showing or expressing something or making an annotation the concept of a surface or table. (Oops, got it mixed up with another character I'm still learning.)
So the card comes up, and I look at it, and I guess based on its structure that I should be using the on readings, so I come up with "she-chee-yo-hyo" (with each o held for two beats) as my best-guess pronunciation. Then I think about the meaning. Seven-day display? Showing seven days? What, a calendar or something?
And then I clicked the "show answer" button, and... wow. Both my pronunciation guess and my meaning guess were dead-on. That's... weird. Normally when a new card is first dequeued, I expect to get it at least partly wrong the first three or four times I see it, until I finally start getting it pounded into my thick skull. But this one... well, it just sort of made sense.
And that's a major milestone. Because when I first started studying the Japanese writing system, I did not think any part of it (well, other than the kana) would ever make any sense.
Beginning to Understand
Zeke
Someone asked to see a photo of Zeke (my mom's dog), so I'm posting up this one, which was taken a couple of months ago, when he was about a year old. The photo was taken by my sister.
A Screenshot for the UI Hall of Shame
Okay, I'm a reasonably intelligent guy, so I was able to figure out what I need to do, but one could be excused, upon a straightforward reading of these messages, from concluding that the goal is impossible to reach due to conflicting requirements. I can't install AD until after I run adprep, but I can't run adprep until after AD is installed (which is what will make this computer a domain controller). What? Gah.
Now working on a serif font design.
Actually, perhaps serif
is an inadequate term for this level of decoration.
Anyway, I was playing with design ideas for a serif typeface, and after a few rounds of messing around, this is where I landed for the first glyph, a lowercase a.
Update: After doing the next couple of characters, I realized that the a is too tall: I inadvertently designed it to the cap height. That probably means that the character would need to be redesigned if I decide to go ahead and finish the font.
Thoughts? Is this worth turning into an entire typeface?
Blooming Grove font picked up by dafont.com
A while ago I submitted a font I've been working on to dafont, a site that makes fonts freely available for download. They screen submissions before placing them on the site, so today I checked back to see if they'd accepted it. They have, and you can see it here.
The fonts on the site use a wide range of licenses, depending on the author, representing pretty much the full gamut of licenses that don't require payment up front. If you want to see ones you have to pay for, there are other sites, but dafont has the distinction of being the first result when you search for the word "font" on Google, so I thought that would make a good starting point for distribution.
In the case of Blooming Grove, I have released the font into the public domain. Personally I feel that this makes the font more useful, since it removes restrictions that might otherwise prevent it from being used in unanticipated ways. A lot of custom font licenses, for instance, are not compatible with @font-face embedding. In some cases (e.g., Larabie) that's a deliberate choice, which is the author's prerogative, but in other cases it's probably inadvertent. Jos Buivenga (of exljbris) has included special provisions in his license to allow @font-face embedding, which is very nice, but ultimately there's no telling what future use will come along...
Not wanting to face this issue with Blooming Grove, and particularly not wanting to potentially have to rewrite license terms as future needs arise, I have chosen to release it into the public domain, which should cover all the bases in one fell swoop. Need to add a cedilla so you can use the word "facade" in full-bore pretentious mode on your website and display it in a @font-face embedded slightly-modified version of the font with the little mark under the c? No problem. Need to bundle it with your application that uses the GPL version 4 with the anti-bundling clause? No problem. Currently, there's no GPL version 4, and even when there is, it very probably won't prohibit bundling with differently-licensed fonts. But you never know what the future holds. With public-domain material, it doesn't matter. You can use the font for whatever you need to use it for, no restrictions.
Oh, and I'm working on a bold variant, for which all of the main letters (both lower and upper case) are now complete. Once I get the numbers and the major symbols and punctuation done, I'll be putting it up alongside the regular weight.
And if the Open Font Library ever gets their upload facility working again, I'm going to put them there too.
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Canning Season
It's that time of year again.
First, you get a few bushels of these things. We used, when we lived in Canal Fulton and had a large back yard, to grow them ourselves (mainly the roma variety, which give a higher yield of thicker sauce per bushel). These days we buy them, usually from the Amish. Roma tomatoes are preferred, but romas cost 70% more per bushel this year, so we went with the regular kind. Romas are worth more, but not 70% more.
Oh, you'll also want some of these and some of these.
You wash the tomatoes, 
cut them up, 
put them in the hopper, turn the handle, 
and run them through. I put up a short video of this on YouTube.
Out comes the juice, 
which you boil down for a while.
At some point you cut up the onions and peppers, 
then put them through the blender, with a bit of the tomato juice just to make them blend easier. They then get added to the rest of the tomato juice (no photo of this step yet), along with possibly some tomato paste for added thickness. (The tomato paste isn't necessary if your tomatoes make a good thick juice in the first place, another reason the roma variety are preferred.)There are a couple of other ingredients as well. Maybe I'll post up our recipe at some point.
You put the sauce in jars (no photo of this step yet), then load them (again, no photo yet) into the
waterbath canner.Outcome:
beautiful, glorious canned spaghetti sauce. Server over vermicelli, with grated parmesan on the side. It's also good for rigatoni, lasagna, practically any pasta, really. We were almost out when the tomatoes came into season this year, so we hope to do seventy quarts or so. You can't buy this stuff at the store. I mean, you can buy stuff that says spaghetti sauceon the label, but you don't want it.
Oh, here's a photo of my mom's new wooden stirring spoon. The old one broke, so we got this one from that place in Winona Lake that sells wooden kitchen implements.