I’m not dead

I am pleased to announce that no, I am not dead. It’s been nearly two months since my last substantive update; I’d like to blame school, or the weather, or communists, but mostly I’m just lazy.

I’ve had some interesting things going on lately:

• My computer was out of commission with a bad logic board for two weeks.
• I was flown to sunny California for a series of interviews with a certain semiconductor etch company.
• I got a request to interpret at a conference for a local company. Having never interpreted professionally, this was a major source of stress, but that mostly fell through.
• Most importantly, I got accepted to JET as a CIR. I don’t know where I’ll be placed yet.
• Oh yeah, and I got rejected by Starbucks for a summer job.

So my employment plate is pretty full, a state of being that is both reassuring and overwhelming for one with as short a work history as I.

Other things I’ve been doing are writing and drawing. It should be no surprise to people who know me well that I chose possibly the most inaccessible medium for my writing: Classical Japanese. I write tanka and add brief stories about them, in the vein of classics like Ise Monogatari.

I struggled with the best format for publishing the stories, and settled on this, for those of you who might be interested. I designed the whole thing from scratch (I even took the picture of the sakura used in the header) and I think it came out pretty damn good, if I do say so myself.

Incidentally, here’s how much of a nerd I am: You might notice that each each chapter in the table of contents is numbered with kanji numerals. I actually wrote a PHP function to convert standard Arabic numbers into kanji ones. Here’s the code:

function kanjiNumber($n) {
        $result = "";
        $units = array(
                "無量大数" => 1.0e68,
                "不可思議" => 1.0e64,
                "那由多" => 1.0e60,
                "阿僧祇" => 1.0e56,
                "恒河沙" => 1.0e52,
                "極" => 1.0e48,
                "載" => 1.0e44,
                "正" => 1.0e40,
                "澗" => 1.0e36,
                "溝" => 1.0e32,
                "穣" => 1.0e28,
                "杼" => 1.0e24,
                "垓" => 1.0e20,
                "京" => 1.0e16,
                "兆" => 1.0e12,
                "億" => 100000000,
                "万" => 10000,
                "千" => 1000,
                "百" => 100,
                "十" => 10,
                "" => 1);
        $integers = array(
                0 => "0",
                1 => "一",
                2 => "二",
                3 => "三",
                4 => "四",
                5 => "五",
                6 => "六",
                7 => "七",
                8 => "八",
                9 => "九");
        if ($n == 0) {
                return "零";
        }
        foreach ($units as $char => $value) {
                $append = floor($n / $value);
                if ($append > 0) {
                        if ($append > 9) {
                                $result = $result . Format::kanjiNumber($append);
                        }
                        if ($append != 1 || $value >= 10000 || $value == 1) {
                                $result = $result . $integers[$append];
                        }
                        $result = $result . $char;
                        $n = $n - ceil($append * $value);
                }
        }
        return $result;
}

The craziest part is that the Japanese language has names for numbers like 10⁶⁸. Of course when you get that high, you’ve blown past ints and gotten into doubles, so my function loses accuracy with extremely large numbers. I don’t think I can possibly write that much, though. Incidentally, to test this function just visit the URL http://www.amake.us/mita/?n=x where x is some number. The output will show in the page title.