It’s an amazing feeling, this literacy. I got some manga in Japanese off ebay and sometimes I can go pages without missing a kanji and my handwriting has improved a million times! People now say “it’s good… for a boy” instead of “it’s good… for a North American” !!!

In the mean time, I’ve forgotten most of my Japanese. But last summer I took a beginner Mandarin course at George Brown College, which restarted my learning of ‘kanji’. It was slow going, maybe 10-20 a week while I was in the course, and it was hard work! I’d beat them into my brain for hours at a time.

Eventually I thought I might as well refresh my Japanese while I’m at it, and looking around online, I found lots of people advocating this book Remembering the Kanji. So I picked it up without too much thought, and it turns out it’s strikingly different from any other way of learning Kanji.

First, it doesn’t teach them in any traditional order, like the order in which japanese school children first learn them, or the most common ones first. It teaches them in an order that takes most advantage of the psychological phemonemon known as chunking. It teaches a few primitive pieces at a time, and then all the characters from the list one can make from these pieces and ones already known. This order pays no regard to the usefulness of the character, but because you already know the pieces remembering the new ones is simpler. How obvious is that? Why shouldn’t adults approach things differently from children? At different ages we have completely different mental capabilities.

One really big caveat about the book though is that it does not teach you the pronunciation at the same time. Rather it associates each character to a keyword that supposedly is related to its primary meaning. So until you get through the course and start connecting the characters to your vocabulary, your new knowledge is useless for communication.

Still, in this way in the past 5 days I’ve gotten through the first 150 characters in the book, of which I already knew about 50. So I’ve learned 100 characters in less than a week, and it wasn’t even hard! We’ll see how it works out in the long run, but it’s already given me the most important learning tool: the belief that I can eventually become literate in Japanese and Chinese.

The only thing I’m going to leave out of this list is people, because I don’t think I can express how much I really appreciate the people in my life in just a sentence or two each.

So here they are in no particular order:

1. Jeeves and Wooster

   P.G. Wodehouse’s novels and their early 90′s BBC screen adaptation make me wish so much to be a 1920′s British dandy.

2. Breakfast of Champions

   by Kurt Vonnegut. Throws out traditional story telling for a more representative view of reality.

3. Snakes on a Plane

   Ridiculous.

4. Little Miss Sunshine

   Favourite movie of the year.

5. Scott Pilgrim

   Got me back in to comics, and made me start thinking about moving to Toronto.

6. CBC Radio 3

7. Ghost House

8. B.A. Johnston

   Ridiculous

9. R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet

   Finally got around to watching this. Pure genius!

10. Fark cliches

    “I’m in ur list, paddin ur numberz“

11. High-profile atheists – Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris

    Evidence based views of reality are just so hot right now!

12. Nature the journal.

    Work has a subscription, even though I’m pretty sure I’m the only person who reads it. Accessible news section at the front for keeping up, and journal papers at the back if you need to exercise the grey matter. Has spawned many interesting thoughts.

13. Zidane’s headbutt

    More entertaining than actual soccer.

14. Off-roading

    Kerry let me drive his truck on some snowy logging roads. Also, winch + dead tree = awesome.

15. Smash to Pass

    The second time we went, there was a fist fight on the track!

16. Tubing on the Cowichan river

17. Disc golf

    Victoria is severely lacking in this department. Vancouver is great though.

18. Nerdy board games – Settlers, Carcasonne, Betrayal at House on the Hill

19. Modded Xbox

    You can watch .avi movies on it, and connect it so your stereo to be your party juke box, and you can play SNES games on it! I don’t actually have any actual Xbox games, except for the next item. Thanks again CFlan for modding it for me.

20. DDR

    Gotten ostensibly because my aunt’s doctor said she needed more exercise. So fun to watch people play, although less fun than watching people play Wii.

21. Flying kites

    I want it to be summer again, so I can go to Clover Point and just sit their with a kite, and fend of friends who say I’ve had it long enough and that now it’s their turn.

    I got to fly Kerry’s kiteboard trainer too, which was pretty exciting.

22. Martinis

    “The breakfast of champions.” After an excitingly frivolous $20 martini at the Bengal Lounge, martini’s are back at the top of my favourite drinks.

23. Folk Fest Victoria

    Big shows this year. I saw K’naan, and Sam Roberts. I hear they are going to tone it down this year, but I won’t be here anyway.

24. Cycling

    Favourite mode of transportation in 2006.

25. Vancouver

    The occasional weekend jaunt and 2 weeks in the summer have made me love Van all the more, mostly because of my amazing friends there.

26. Words and Rhymes

    eg. Pachydermatous journalist.

27. Earl Grey tea

    Makes for a pleasant afternoon.

28. Pictures of food

    They are almost pornographic.

29. Airhogs

    Little remote control planes that you can fly around and knock people in the head with. An essential toy for the unemployed.

30. Tiny hats

    Smaller than regular hats.

31. Keytar

    I can now play selections from Double Dragon, Zelda and Punch-out on my Yamaha SHS-10.

32. Percocet

    Silver lining to getting my wisdom teeth out.

33. Dogs

34. WordPress

    My new favourite blogging platform

35. LiveJournal

    I love our little community.

36. Linux

    It’s been about 2 years now, and I’m never going back. I love the Ubuntu distro. It’s also really convenient having the same OS on my laptop as on my webserver.

37. Making Caps Lock another Ctrl key.

    Would totally have carpal tunnel x3 by now if I hadn’t done this at the start of last year. Bending your pinky down there to the regular ctrl is so painful, and moving your hand is so repetitive stressy. Oh so easy to do in linux, sort of easy to do in windows.

38. Vim

    The text editor. I should have listened to the TA in my first year comp. sci. lab who said learning Vim early would earn great returns later. I finally got around to it this year. Better late than never.

39. Free SkypeOut

    Free computer-to-phone long distance. No longer free in the coming year, but still pretty darn cheap.

40. Web2.0 – facebook, youtube, netvibes, del.icio.us, last.fm, reddit, digg, google maps, etc.

41. Python

    My favourite programming language. Java seems clumsy and weak in comparison.

42. No Fluff Just Stuff

    Software conference work sent me to in September. It showed me how little I really know about the field.

Of course we had to get some suckers… I mean friends over to try it out. So we had a party at me and Kerry’s place.

And you can even set it up so that only the fastest person *doesn’t* gets shocked.

Amazing! I can not praise Pat enough for finding this. Then to go along with the theme that had been laid out, we made some chocolates, some fraction of which were filled with chili seeds.

Amazing!

And a final idiosyncrasy was added at the last minute where everyone wore stickies listing things they dislike, so that people who didn’t know each other could be friends based on mutual dislike. You know. Things like ugly babies, getting electrocuted, drunk Pat, tact, Name tags, less than 5 part harmony, groin attacks, and those who snow fight without honour. So fun!

Seeing other people suffer minor unfortunate events is one of life’s simple pleasures, but never have we exploited it to this degree. Wish you could have been there.

One of the things I hadn’t managed to do in Van until last week was go shopping for comics and CDs on 4th. The comic shop on 4th and … Yew(?) is stocked! Then across the street is Zulu records, where me and JonF spent a good time with their 25 disc changers. The changer I was listening to was titled “Canadian and Local” which contained another band I like, You Say Party!, and stuff. In the end I got one called Ghost House, which I thought was pretty fun.

They’re right down my alley, being high energy and fun. Furthermore the lyrics were pretty much describing the time I was having with lines like ‘Fly by night on bicycles’ and ‘Midnight adventures in a drunken state.’

And it turns out this is one of these bands that lets you download the entire album online! which is good because I got the last copy at Zulu. Check it out. I think my favourite track is ‘Your Big Day.’