After the promising Razor preview episode, I can't believe how lame season four has been. Just awful. Apparently the writers mistook the stage directions "WHINE HERE", "CRY HERE" and "IMPROVISE LENGTHY, ANNOYING/DRUNKEN/CRAZED ARGUMENT HERE" for character development. Here is the sum total of what I learned about BSG from season four: whenever anyone is drinking, or whenever Roslin or Thrace are onscreen, it's safe to listen for the first five seconds (to understand what they're going to improv-argue about for the next 10 minutes) and then just skip ahead until they're off screen. Of course, the episode is only 10 minutes long after you do that, so you can pretty much watch the whole season in about two hours.

Needless to say, I will not be watching whenever they decide to continue the rest of season four. POOP ON BSG I SAY!

Wednesday was the first day of my new class @ Concordia. The new teacher is pretty nice. The other students are recommitted because nobody is auditing this time (two of them were auditing the first class), so overall it should be a better experience.

I helped my mother-in-law buy an HDTV this week. We went to Best Buy so she could get a feel for what size to get, considering the different aspect ratio. She settled on 26", so I poked around a bit on teh internets and found a decent Westinghouse with inputs that are easy to access. Hopefully she'll be able to get good reception with a basic amplified indoor antenna.

I had two lesson tests and a kanji test in Japanese this week, and I did well on both. There's another lesson test and kanji test tomorrow, so I broke out my JLPT 4/3 kanji flash cards to study. I ended pulling out all of the kanji cards for my textbook and ordering them by lesson so I'll be able to add them to my "study deck" as the class progress through the book. I'm missing a couple because they're in the much larger (and more expensive) flash card sets for the harder JLPT level 2 and level 1 exams.

My rear tire finally gave up after ~4000 miles. I got a really bad flat riding home from school on Thursday and had to replace the whole thing. SAD! Not as sad as pushing my bike for a mile in 90 degree heat to the bike shop :( Also, my opinion of weather forecasters has suffered a lot this week. Just about every day we were supposed to have TStorms, so I only rode my bike on the three most promising days. I think it sprinkled once or twice all week. This week the forecast is clear, so I assume that means it will piss down rain on my head every single day ;) Commuting on the bike is going well so far, but I have used the car a few times. I still haven't filled up the tank, but it's now quite empty. I'll have to really be careful if I want to make it until Molly gets back before I fill it up again.

Went on a ~50mi ride with Zach through The Grand Rounds trail system in Minneapolis today. Very nice ride with good trail surfaces (many are new) all the way around. We began at finished at Minnehaha Park, although we did stop to eat near the U around 10. Here is a nice diagram of our route as captured by Zach's GPS.

If you have a tablet PC like I do, the recognizer pack adds handwriting input support for 9 additional languages, and speech recognition for 4. I installed the recognizer for Japanese handwriting support. I take all of my notes in Japanese class on my tablet in Windows Journal. Japanese handwriting recognition lets me turn my notes into useable, searchable text. I don't use the speech recognizers at all, but the handwriting recognizer is great. When I use proper stroke order, it even picks up the chicken scratches of my amateur Japanese handwriting. From the FAQ, the pack includes recognizers for English (US), English (UK), French (France), German (Germany), Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Taiwan), Chinese (PRC), and Spanish (International Sort) handwriting; as well as English (US), Japanese, Chinese (Taiwan), and Chinese (PRC) speech recognition.

Once installed, a language bar widget appears on any tablet PC ink input window. Switch to Japanese and start writing:

Included free: one sample of my chicken scratch! Sorry, I actually had to type that really quickly; the IME converts whatever you've written to text just as soon as you pause, like so:

My handwriting (bad as it was) converted to text, including detected kanji groupings for my hiragana characters. Pressing on that first one (the hiragana for 'Japanese language'), a candidate window appears so that I can convert it to kanji. THIS IS AWESOME!! Just like with any other tablet PC ink input, you press the Insert button or lift your pen to insert the recognized text in your application:

Text recognition for Japanese characters in Windows Journal is a snap, too. I wrote "class notes" at the top, with "Japanese is good" on the next line.

You just lasso the handwriting, click Actions, Convert Handwriting to Text..., and the text correction screen appears:

The really cool thing is that you can move the cursor around to see the handwriting that was used to generate each character in the Ink from note: window. This WILL help you increase the quality and consistency of your Japanese orthography.

It's nice to have the Windows input method editor installed on my PCs again! I can type Japanese whenever I want, and the keyboard shortcuts help to switch between input types really easily. For someone like me with a US keyboard, Japanese character input on Windows works by accepting the rōmaji (romanized) reading for a given Japanese syllable, which the IME translates hiragana or katakana, or from hiragana to kanji.

Once configured, the IME lets me produce 日本語はいいですね just by typing the letters 'nihongo[spacebar]haiidesune' on my US keyboard. Hitting spacebar after 'nihongo' converts the hiragana into kanji. This is a great tool for kanji exploration, particularly when you use it in combination with the translation features of Microsoft Word or an online translator like this one.

Installing the Japanese IME on Windows XP is a simple process. Navigate to the Regional and Language Options control panel:

[Note: if you're on a tablet PC, these screens will look a bit different] Click the Languages tab and click Details… under Text services and input languages:

Under Installed Services, click Add…:

Choose Japanese as the Input language, and make sure that Japanese Input System (MS-IME2002) is selected as the Keyboard layout/IME and click OK. Your Text Services and Input Languages dialog should now look like this:

Once you click OK Windows may prompt you to insert the OS CD. If it asks to copy files, don't try to skip the step--it needs the font and IME binary files or the IME won't work.

The next step is to configure the language bar. Language setting are program-specific. You can use the language bar to switch languages, or press ALT-SHIFT to cycle through all of the installed languages from any application. This is what the language bar looks like when docked on your taskbar:

To undock, right-click and press Restore the Language Bar. The undocked language bar is visible at all times, and has a much more detailed display than the default taskbar version. To change languages using the bar, choose an application that can accept text input (like Notepad or Word) and press the blue language button (which reads 'EN' in the following picture), then switch to Japanese:

Your computer is now in Japanese input mode! Just remember that your language settings are application-specific; if you switch to another program, the IME will switch to whatever language was last used in that application.

I've numbered the primary elements of the Japanese toolbar to describe what everything does:

1. If you have multiple keyboards available, you can switch between them here. This is handy if you attach a real Japanese keyboard.
2. This menu has some settings which are only important if you have that real Japanese keyboard I just mentioned
3. This is where you switch between character sets when you're typing Japanese. If you click this button, the following menu appears:
   
   Direct Input leaves your keyboard as US English, but selecting anything else shoots out the expected characters when you start typing.
4. When you use the spacebar to convert hiragana to kanji, this menu tells the IME how to bias that conversion. You can lean towards names, speech, leave it general, or disable kanji conversion altogether.
5. The IME pad lets you experiment with text input. There are a lot of things you can do with this…play around.
6. Tools and wizards for further configuring/personalizing the IME. Play around.
7. IME Help.
8. If you press CAPS, your English text will appear in all upper case. If you press KANA, your keyboard mapping will switch from US characters to direct Kana input, which means individual keys will spit out Japanese characters instead of converting to romaji. Unless you're fluent with a Japanese keyboard layout, you probably don’t want to do this ;)
9. The top widget will dock the language bar back onto your task bar. The down arrow-widget will let you choose language bar look-and-feel settings.

There are several keyboard shortcuts for the Language bar that work at any time. You can configure them back in the Regional and Language Options control panel, but here are the defaults:

When you're doing Japanese character input, the IME adds a visual element under your text to let you know that you're in 'composition' mode. If you type the letter 'k' in Word while in haragana mode, you get which obviously has a dashed line under it. If you type 'ka', you will end up with hiragana still with the dashed line. If you press the spacebar while this dashed line is present, the hiragana is converted to the first kanji reading of , now with a firm underline. If you press the spacebar again, the candidate window appears, which lets you select from all know kanji readings, or back to hiragana/katakana/alphanumeric.

When you are in composition mode, there are several keyboard shortcuts that can help you quickly convert to the correct format:

That's that. I leave my tablet PC in Japanese language mode all of the time, but in direct input mode. It's easy to toggle from direct input to hiragana/katakana by pressing ALT-~, and it has no other impact on my system. Since I'm currently doing the vast majority of my handwriting in Japanese, direct input Japanese mode means I don't have to type any extra buttons before doing Japanese handwriting on my tablet.

[Huge props to the Microsoft employees who wrote Globalization Step-by-Step - Input Language: Keyboards and IMEs, to which I referred extensively herein.]

Class is fun and the students are all very nice. There are a couple of older folks like me and even one PSEO student. It hasn't rained much in the last week, so I was able to ride my bike to class every day. I really like being able to bike ~20 miles a day as an exercise baseline. Exercise is a great way to start the day, and when it's also your transportation it's all the more convenient. I do get a little sweaty on the way there, so I bring a washcloth to clean up at school. After that, four solid hours (plus breaks) of Japanese instruction. There are usually 3 discussion sections and one lecture. Our homework is due in the morning and there is frequently a vocab quiz or short handwriting test. Since each summer term is only 5 weeks long I'm receiving the equivalent of 3 weeks of instruction and homework for every week of summer class. Between this and my Concordia classes I'm very busy, but I LOVE IT!

Professors Severin Borenstein and Jim Bushnell teach a class called "Energy and Environmental Markets at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. The have led students to test through computer simulations of the proposed cap-and-trade carbon credit system. Apparently it's not hard to game the system (e.g. buying a lot of credits and then refusing to sell some to drive up the cost of the rest), and "...hugely increased energy costs..." are a persistent simulated result. This leads back to an earlier entry I wrote where NPR talked to some young Carbon Turks sipping wine and waxing philosophical about how their sexy jobs save the environment. Hopefully "saving the environment" (and reducing carbon isn't the only way to do this) won't ruin the economy and result in a 1000 new Enrons scouring the world for cheap carbon credit potential in unflushed toilets and swamp land.

Class Tests Carbon Trading, With Troubling Results : NPR

Here are some photos and descriptions Molly sent along this week.

Hussein (foreground) and Iman (background) have found an old iron knife. Justin is digging in his trench. He has uncovered an amphora handle. The amphora probably held wine or oil, and was three feet tall. (L2R) Charlotte, Wafa, and Dan are Team Orange. Molly works most closely with them on the site. Tim and Lisa are Team Red. Their trench has a lot of food storage jars in it. Dan is holding a stadia rod to take an elevation. Nicole with the site (and Lebanon) in the background. Spatter is sleeping in the dresser in Molly and Charlotte's room. Random giant scary bug from the site #2 This is a photo of all the equipment that the group uses at the site. About half of it comes and goes with the team every day, but the other half stays on site. Sharon and Justin taking site photographs on a fruit ladder.

Amir is resting under the sun porch in a wheelbarrow. Get back to work! Fahar is an 83 year old farmer who works on the site. That's right, 83 and swinging a pickax all day long. Dang. (T2B) Amira, Debbie, and Henry are Team Manilla. They are working in a trench that has a lot of cool pottery in it. Justin and Nicole are Team White. Suzanne is one of the curators. She also maintains the dig diary on the official site. Sunrise over the Hula Valley. Team Orange's trench, aka The Black Pearl (their shades have seen better days). Charlotte and the puppy that the crew has adopted, named Spatter. Spatter is a type of pottery that is very hard to identify and nobody likes it. I'm sure it's nice to be loved. Random giant scary bug from the site. Random north-facing photo Random site lizard. Looks like a chameleon with those rotating eye bulbs, but nobody saw it change color. This is Tom from Team Yellow.

I'm crazy busy right now. Molly sent me a bunch of photos, but I haven't had time to put them up.

Japanese is 4hrs a day, and on Wednesdays (today) I have Concordia class for four hours. And I have a paper due that I haven't edited since the rough draft stage. Japanese is awesome. I scanned my Genki text book and work book, so I can do the whole class off my tablet PC in slate mode. It's so nice to only have to worry about bringing 3lbs of laptop to class instead of all the books and papers. I've ridden my bike every day so far, and if the weather holds I'll keep riding.

My friend Zach has been dropping some ultra-marathon science on my ass. First he hooked me up with the right shoes, now he's helping me to hydrate properly. He gave me some drink mix and electrolyte tablets from SUCCEED!, and it seems to be helping with recovery. More on all that later.

Molly is doing great in Israel. She has to work like a dog every day at the dig site, and she's really tired all of the time when we talk, but I get the sense that she's loving it. Here's a link to the dig blog:
http://sitemaker.umich.edu/kelseymuseum.digdiary/read_our_blog
Looks like they update it every week with news and pictures. Their internet connection is finally in a reliable state, so we can skype whenever we want. Here are a couple of photos she sent (click for larger views) hopefully more will arrive soon:

Standing on top of the tel (a man-made hill), looking down at the ruins of a roman temple below the site. In the background is the valley and Lebanon is just a bit farther North. There is part of a vineyard in the foreground behind the thistles, and more of the vineyard across the background.

This photo is facing the opposite direction toward Tel Aviv across the tel that the team is excavating. In this part of the site, three of the 37 rooms are visible; the team is standing in the 'administration room'. Starting on the left: Tom is in the orange shirt, Justin is standing on a wall, Nicole is leaning on a wall, Peter is holding buckets, and Charlotte is in the red shirt looking at a wall. They've cleared the thistles from the edge of the site, and everyone here is clearing weeds and plants that have grown in the site since the last visit.

"Today's report makes it more important than ever that we get past outdated, anachronistic views of marijuana," said John Walters, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Now, one might read this and then begin to thing that the Bush administration is contemplating an end to marijuana prohibition. I mean, we still sentence people to life for marijuana in this country, so the "anachronistic" remark could go either way, right? He continued:

"Marijuana potency has grown steeply over the past decade, with serious implications in particular for young people," Walters said. He cited the risk of psychological, cognitive and respiratory problems, and the potential for users to become dependent on drugs such as cocaine and heroin.

FYI, that non-sequitur into heroinville is a resounding "No!"

Study: Marijuana potency increases in 2007 - Yahoo! News