Summer Log 2

Yay, more blogging. Well, continuing from where I left off, I've made awesome progress on my Japanese and can now read the whole Hiragana alphabet pretty well. Of course, I will need to practice until I stop second guessing what letter it is I'm reading, but at least I can start reading stuff. Next up is the Katakana alphabet, which is the exact same thing except it uses different symbols. I don't really get that, but whatever, it looks like I'll need it since sometimes when I'm reading different things I see there are symbols I run into that I don't recognize (and I don't mean the weirder, complex kind. They are just simple symbols I haven't learned yet). For instance, my name in Japanese would be pronounced: BU-RA-I-A-N which using Hiragana would come out to:

ぶらいあん

and in Katakana would look like:

ブライアン

(you might not see the above if your Windows doesn't have the Oriental text fonts installed).

Anyway, you can see they are quite different styles, with the first one leaning to what appears to be Chinese. Either way, I'm looking for programs to help me out with this. The best one I've found is this game for the DS called Japanese Training. It looks great and the exercises are fun, but the thing crashes very 5 minutes so it's VERY annoying.

Besides learning Japanese, I've also been learning another "language". Lua! This is a programming language used in a variety of different games and stuff, and in my case, is used in my regularly played Spring. The language is a LOT like Python, and has been pretty easy for me to catch on to. Unfortunately, in my adventure of making a "Ferry Widget" for the game, I've come across quite a lack of documentation on all the functions provided. This doesn't help since I'm stuck doing trial-and-error tests, and when I get stuck, no one helps me out, since most don't know Lua (on the Spring forums). The ones that do are to elite to talk to a noob like me I guess.

Also I've met a really cool client thanks to Scope who hired me to do a web template for him. I've done that work, and he was pleased, saying he'll contact me for future work too! So it's really cool that I'm finally starting up my business. Interestingly enough, it's this type of thing that makes me wonder why I'm going to college in the first place. I mean, am I not studying and paying vasts amount of money to eventually do what I am already doing? I mean, I won't even "learn" any computer stuff (be it web design, Photoshop, or whatever) until 4th semester, meaning I gotta wait another YEAR. Just watch, when that year rolls around, I'll probably end up correcting my teacher on faster methods to create this or that effect in Photoshop.

In other news, I bought Team Fortress 2, have been using Twhirl a lot, and didn't get to see Ghostbusters that last time. It was ending, and my sister just called me to hear the ending song apparently. Though I did get to see Jurassic Park (the first one) again the other day, and I think some friends are gonna go out to see Hancock on Thursday.