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Long CountdownNick Ramsay, blogging from Japan.
JapanSoc Blog- JapanSoc Development Update Oct. 2009
- Feeling Hungry? Hamburger Matsuri!
- Login Problems Fixed
- Login Problems
- Matsuri Schedule Updates
- Learning in Japan, a Blog Matsuri
- Not Too Late for a September Matsuri
- Unable to Moderate Submissions 9/3 ~ 9/7
- A Frugal Japan Blog Matsuri
- Registration, Logging In and Adding New Providers
- Hotaru Blog
Great post. If you’ve been in Japan for 10 years and studied hard for three, that sounds like you lost interest for the remaining seven. I’ve been studying hard for six years and I find that very understandable. It gets tiring.
Congratulations on the new status and that recognition!
Thanks for the comment.
I think they’ve changed the format now, but since I just scraped a pass on JLPT2 (61%), the jump to JLPT1 which needs double the kanji and vocab, and a 70% pass mark, was daunting enough to end my studies.
Indeed, it’s a funny grading system. A lot of people use the JLPT to set themselves targets and the first two are far too easy and the last one is a massive leap. I’ve heard that they’re putting a JLPT 1.5 or something in between levels 1 and 2. It makes sense.
Don’t know how serious you are about being daunted but I freely admit to being quite intimidated by level 1, especially when I was starting out. Funny thing is that I passed it last year and I still feel like there’s a lot more I want to do. I do enjoy it though.
The most daunting thing about the JLPT was knowing you could only sit it once a year, and if you failed, you’d be held back for a full year – quite a nightmare if you were counting on passing to change your job situation or even return home.
I think they’ve upped it to twice a year now which is much, much better.
Hmm … you can’t write something l ike インタネットタイクーン? That’s a shame.
Oh well, I guess now that you’re officially a programmer, you can demand a higher salary
An Internet Tycoon? Pah! Anyone can do that… apparently
But you’re right about a higher salary, come on Google, show me the money!
Congratulations on your new title Nick!
Good for you – you can call the last ten years a mid-career crisis
It’s onward and upward from here!
good luck with a quick approval! i got my spouse and PR visas pretty quickly. i think having three children, three and younger with me when i applied (for PR) helped me a lot! certainly very noisy when i was in the immigration office.
i cannot read well, either, though i love to study kanji. i haven’t been studying much lately, either. *sigh*
I still think you’re nuts for buying into this stuff, but I’m happy you don’t hate me for disagreeing with you! Ha ha. Having said that, I’m glad that even though your post today, September 11th, is about the truth movement, at least it is still about the attacks. I’m annoyed at the folks who are trying to co-opt it and turn it into an environmentalist green day. Sigh.
Always appreciate your comments on my annual 9/11 post, even if I do think you are completely balmy for accepting the Bin Laden box-cutter conspiracy theory! Perhaps if you read World Architecture News instead of Perez Hilton, you might change your tune.
If you still reject the “Active Thermite” evidence (which remains scientific fact until proven false) then answer me one question: Do you support the families, first responders and survivors of September 11 in their push for a real investigation, or not?
What the heck makes you think I read Perez Hilton? I can’t stand that jerk. That’s just insulting. You obviously have a lower view of me than I previously thought.
I’m not going to bother reading the linked articles, but I will say that while I could accept that there is a possibility that the CIA/FBI/whatever deliberately overlooked some intelligence, I do find the thermite/”pull it”/missile at the Pentagon stories batshit crazy, to use a technical term.
Look at Lockerbie – a total failure to frame two guys from a country we all love to hate when there is a lot of evidence to suggest a Syrian/Lebanon connection dating back from the mid-1990s, yet somehow I’m supposed to accept that with 10’s, if not 100’s or 1,000’s of US and UK citizens (the BBC/Building 9 not fallen bit gets shown as an implication the Beeb were in on the script) involved, nothing but rumour and theory has leaked out.
That says a lot. Ken, I’m not interested in what you are willing to accept and what you think is batshit crazy. As I posted above, it’s a scientific fact that nano-thermite was found in the WTC dust. Catch up, will you!
And rather than supporting a call for a new investigation, you post drivel about “Building 9″???
News just in:
(source)
Ricky boy is becoming a little man! Nice pics Nick!
Cheers Mike, he’s growing up quickly now that he goes to nursery school. He doesn’t even need his dummy anymore!
looks like a great place to visit
It is, but it won’t take you any longer than half an hour to look around. Fortunately, there are plenty of other sightseeing spots in the city to make a full day of it.
I would love to see this place with my own eyes, especially that one-man train! I also learned a new word, ちんちん電車, although I wonder why they call it that? It even says ちんちんビール電車, so I guess it was like… a beer delivery streetcar?^^
Wow, I used that train line during 97-99 while it was still running to visit Mino City. It still looks exactly the same. The last trainmaster must have just locked the door on his last day and left everything as it was. I remember arriving at the station thinking the stationmaster was an eccentric old pack-rat. Everyone was pretty much asleep (including trainmaster and staff) until 2 mins before the train took off. Oddly enough I vividly remember that mouse with the X X as the eyes… Great photos. Thanks for the Nostalgia.
That looks fun and it’s on a JR line I’ve not been on before! Sounds like a trip.
That looks like a really interesting place to visit, Nick. Ricky seems to be enjoying it. A great article.
Mum.
zOMG! WTF w/a ROFLCOPTER!
This just screams spam. Schemes like this have been around since the early days of letter mail. Nobody gets money for nothing, and anyone who puts such personal information online is just begging to get hammered with massive amounts of unsolicited garbage.
It’s reasons like this many people are now masking their home addresses when buying domain names and whatnot.
Hey, Nick, did you let this one through as a lead up for a post about old-fashioned scams being used on new-fashioned platforms?