Electronic dictionary recommendations

Electronic Japanese-English dictionaries are very popular among Japanese language learners, and the subject of which to buy is a perennial classic as there are constantly newer and better models coming out. Having been through this myself, I thought I’d weigh in.

The last electronic dictionary I had was a Seiko Japanese-English-Chinese one, probably an older version of this model. I tend to like Seikos in general, for no particularly good reason. Anything that has Kōjien (広辞苑, the standard Japanese-Japanese dictionary) and Kanjigen (漢字源, the standard kanji dictionary) is pretty much good enough in my book.

But when that Seiko inexplicably died after only 2 years and I was out ¥30,000 and left with no dictionary, I vowed never to buy another electronic dictionary again. I don’t need portability—pretty much the only time I need dictionaries these days is when I’m sitting at my computer. So I bought the PC version of Kōjien (also works natively on OS X, and on Linux via 3rd party software) and called it a day. Between Kōjien and the various other dictionaries available online, I find that I just don’t need a portable electronic dictionary.

Major dictionaries available online:

• Eijirō EJ/JE
• Daijirin and Daijisen JJ, Progressive EJ/JE, New Global EJ, New Century JE
• EDICT EJ/JE

Not online, but still very useful:

• The suite of JE/EJ, JJ, and thesauruses that come bundled with Mac OS X

I find that I don’t need much else these days, but if I need bigger and better dictionaries then I will likely invest in standalone PC or paper ones.

Ok, what if I needed portability? Here is what I would think about:

• Forget pen input entirely. It’s a waste of time for most kanji, especially if you don’t know the correct stroke orders. The fastest way to search for kanji is search by component name (部品読み検索). Of course this assumes that you know the names of kanji radicals. This assumption may not apply to you, but I recommend learning them if you’re serious about kanji proficiency.
• Kōjien and Kanjigen are the bare necessities for me. Some models substitute Daijirin (大辞林), which I find to be extremely limited in comparison.
• I don’t need color screens, 1-seg tuners, media readers, etc. If I was even remotely interested in that, I’d jump straight to a proper multimedia device like an iPod touch, an Eee PC, or something like that.
• “Bonus” dictionaries like English phrasebooks (とっさの英会話 or whatever), encyclopedias, etc. are also irrelevant to me.
• After considering the above items, the only other spec I really look at is the number of words in the English-Japanese and Japanese-English dictionaries. I don’t have a preference regarding Genius vs. Progressive vs. whatever, but some dictionaries are surprisingly limited.

So, those are my thoughts on electronic dictionaries. My needs are fairly different from the average language learner, but hopefully this will be useful to someone.

PS. I lied. I actually do use a dictionary on-the-go occasionally. It’s the crappy JJ one that came with my AU phone. But it often doesn’t have the words I’m looking for, so I wouldn’t recommend basing a cell phone purchase on this particular feature.

MacBook report

My new MacBook arrived last night, much to my relief. Even though people in Japan do it all the time, I don’t like carrying around huge amounts of cash.

After 24 hours, here are my gripes (because I’m much better at griping than just about anything else), both about Leopard and about the MacBook.

• Time Machine doesn’t like my external hard drive. I have a 320GB external FireWire hard drive with two partitions, one for data and one for backup. I successfully set Time Machine to use the backup partition, then let it go. It repeatedly stalls a couple gigs into the backup, then one-by-one system services start being flaky. Eventually everything stops responding and I have to force reboot. Boo. (Edit: This seems to be fixed in 10.5.1.)
• The 3D Dock style sucks. Luckily you can switch to 2D style by entering defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock in the Terminal.
• Displaying folder contents instead of folder icons in the Dock is the stupidest thing ever. (Edit: This was later made optional.)
• Stacks and Grid view are sort of ok, but I prefer the original behavior. Please give us the old behavior as an option! (Edit: This was sort of addressed eventually.)
• The menubar transparency is distracting. (Edit: This was later made optional.)
• The new scheme for specifying individual window view preferences is beyond stupid. I shouldn’t have to say “FTFF” 7 years after 10.0 was released.
• Front Row lets you browse your ~/Movies folder, which is great. It doesn’t, however, let you browse your ~/Pictures folder; instead you’re limited to viewing the contents of your iPhoto library. That seems like something of an oversight.
• While everything is much faster than my old iBook G4, the MacBook still chokes at things that it shouldn’t—switching between resource-intensive apps, for instance. Since I can see my CPU isn’t being pegged, I suppose that means it’s swapping RAM out (I can’t hear it because the hard drive is so quiet); the stock 1GB must not be enough (I’ve got 1GB of swap without having run anything particularly demanding), but that’s kind of annoying coming from my iBook where 1GB was enough.
• The USB ports are even closer together than the iBook’s, where things were already not quite fitting in. Now I can’t have my iPod and my Logitech mouse plugged in at the same time. Obnoxious.
• In general the machine is very quiet, but when the fans reach full speed (Spotlight indexing seems to be a major cause of this) they sound like jet engines.

I’m sure I’ll think of more stuff soon.

Edit: I can’t believe there’s no way to have Front Row run on an external display without either turning on mirroring or switching main screens. Very disappointing.

Edit: A new first: My keyboard stopped working. Entirely. Across the whole system. I didn’t install or run anything weird. Fixed by rebooting. (Edit: Fixed by a MacBook keyboard system update.)

To upgrade, or not to upgrade

Well, it finally happened: Leopard came out, and the MacBooks were updated. This is the exact time I vowed I would upgrade from my decrepit old iBook G4.

Back in high school I always had to have the newest gear. Now I just don’t care that much. The iBook is old. It’s damn slow for some things. It can’t run Leopard (it’s short exactly 67MHz). But do I really want to spend about $1,500? Now that it’s not my parents’ money, I don’t know anymore.

Am I becoming old and wise? Or just old and lame? Probably a little of both, but mostly the latter.

Update: I just ordered myself the white MacBook with SuperDrive. My Japanese credit card has too low a limit, so I had to choose cash on delivery. I guess I better be walking around with $1,500 in my pocket for a few days now. (Please don’t mug me.)

Fabulous Feisty Fawn

Sorry I haven’t been posting here much lately. While things were busted for a bit I started using my mixi diary, and it became a little bit habit-forming. Not that it’s all that amazing technologically, it’s just that my audience in Japan tends to only have internet access on their cell phones, and so have a hard time reading any blogs that aren’t specifically tuned to be viewed on devices with small screens and expensive bandwidth.

I’m going to go HyperNerd™ on you guys for a sec, so bear with me.

Windows 98

When I arrived in Ikata, my office computer was a PII running Win98 on an ISDN line. (Note: For those of you who don’t speak Nerd, that means “bad”.) It was practically unusable.

I bitched to the right person, and sat back while important people were consulted, budgets were calculated, palms were greased, consensus was built, clocks ticked, paint dried, empires rose and fell, etc. In the end, the enchanted accounting fairies granted me one (1) computer, for external use only.

After a month of taking bids from vendors, then waiting for the machine to arrive, it was promptly placed on my desk and immediately ignored. For another month.

A typical Monday morning in the office

Repeatedly sighing (not-so)-under-my-breath, my frustration again reached the ears of my guardian angel, who dragged the IT troll out of his cave up to set up my machine and plug me into the World Wide Cybermation Superspaceway.

I was on my way to productivity when I noticed that he had locked down Windows so tight that I couldn’t actually do my job. He wouldn’t let me install applications, despite the fact that the standard tools of office slavery are completely irrelevant to what I do. I practically had to torture him to get the proxy info so I could test the English website in Firefox.

So what did I do? I promptly slapped Ubuntu Linux on the other partition and mentally flipped the IT troll a nice big bird. As hard as I could.

But all was not happy in the land of Edgy Eft. My computer was too new (imagine that!) for the video drivers to work properly, so Google Earth wouldn’t work. And I couldn’t even see the networked printers, much less print to them. Thus began several long months of dual-booting, switching to Windows every time I had to print.

Until today. Today I finally upgraded to Ubuntu 7.04, née Funky Fink Fresh Fosbury Flapping Fanny Feisty Fawn, and now Google Earth works and I can see the printers and after a bit of finagling the poorly-packaged Canon printer drivers (though your execution sucks, thank you for making Linux drivers), I can now print!

The moral of the story: I win IT.

Me doing what I do best

Another ekiden failure

I ran another ekiden this past Sunday. It was the Seto Ekiden, a mostly local event with sections of pretty similar length to the one I ran previously. Since the beginning of the new year I’ve been training as regularly as my legs allow it, and so I was hoping to perform a little bit better this time. At the very least I wanted to be able to finish without slowing to a walk.

But, true to form, I of course failed spectacularly. Here’s how it happened:

First of all, my alarm clock failed to go off.

George

I’ll tell you what happened. I bet he got the AM/PM mixed-up.

Nope, it wasn’t the AM/PM since my alarm clock is my cell phone and it uses a 24h clock.

Jerry

My money’s on the snooze. I bet he hit the snooze for an extra 5 and it never came back on.

Nope, it wasn’t the snooze. I don’t think the snooze function ever gives up on my phone.

Jean-Paul

Man, it wasn’t the snooze. Most people think it was the snooze, but no, no snooze.

Jerry

AM/PM?

Jean-Paul

Man, it wasn’t the AM/PM. It was the volume.

Nope, the volume was set fine. The alarm is plenty loud even if the phone is in silent mode.

The problem was something that could really only happen on a device as complex and advanced as a Japanese cell phone: I figured I’d just get up at the same time I usually do for work, but I forgot that the “Work” alarm was set to only go off on weekdays.

So I woke up about 15 minutes before I had to meet the team, put on my running outfit, raced to Lawson to pick up some rice balls, and downed them as quickly as possible while walking to the meeting place.

Upon arriving I found that I had been moved from section 2, the flat part, to section 1, the hilly part. That also meant that I had about an hour less to digest.

The race started at 9:30 am in the bitter coastal winds. I was doing fine for about 10 minutes, then all of a sudden my stomach cramped up—the rice balls weren’t gone yet, and they were angry. I slowed to a walking pace, being passed by junior high and elementary school students, in front of the whole town which had for some reason turned out to watch.

Pathetically limping along, I was quite relieved to see the finish area—only to realize that it was the halfway finish area for the juvenile division (which runs the same full distance but divided among twice the runners). I got a good laugh from the crowd when I tried to pass my sash to my teammate who wasn’t there. The second half sucked about as much as the first.

Days later my stomach still feels weird, and I was really dogging it when I went running today. I suppose no matter how awesome the iPod + Nike exercise measurement system is, it doesn’t make you an athlete.

The soormentic wheeb

One of my least crappy classes is about the internet. Whoo, look at that! The intarweb! I’m gonna gigabyte myself an HTML of Google!

As stupid as such a class might sound, it has introduced me to another aspect of the “metadata everywhere” boom that actually started around 1996 but no one cared until MP3s needed tags and Spotlight put resource forks to good use again. I consider myself a pretty well-informed individual, but things like RDF, FOAF, Dublin Core, etc. still have me pretty confused. I’m trying to understand what good the semantic web is, and the best explanation I’ve found so far is, courtesy of an AC on Slashdot in a post entitled The semantic web, in a nutshell:

1. People like to masturbate.
2. Some people like to look at pictures of naked girls while masturbating.
3. Some people like to think about graph theory while masturbating.

The semantic web is the unfortunate result of #3.

In other words, I have no idea. Take a look at the best-looking RDF browser I’ve been able to find, Welkin. Now you see what the AC was talking about. The semantic web means about as much to me as the soormentic wheeb. Pretty much the only writings I’ve managed to find about it pooh-pooh it as a bunch of nonsense. Clearly these meta-utopia eggheads are in need of a good info-ninja attack.

But far be it for me to ignore another web trend standard. I’ve thus used the FOAF-a-Matic to create my PersonalProfileDocument. I have no idea what good this will do me, but here’s hoping.

If you have no idea what I’m babbling on about and just need something to laugh at, remember that you can do anything at Zombo.com. Anything at all.