Lately I’ve felt pretty unmotivated to do any programming. A couple of weeks ago I felt like I could code everything, and now I barely have the motivation to finish my Quod Libet plugins. I’ve also been thinking of what type of programming interests me the most. I’m not really sure, I guess web programming is the most interesting right now.
Since I haven’t really been doing any programming I’ve tried to spend more time studying Kanji and brushing up on my Japanese. I really wish I could find someone to practice with over here in Puerto Rico. I heard long ago that the University of Puerto Rico has a Japanese club/class that meets once a week. I should ask Ms. Quesada where I can find them.
I ordered my new laptop from Sharp yesterday, The Actius MM20. It’s really small (10.4″) and light, and I ordered the 9 hour battery too. It has a Transmeta processor at 1GHz and 512 MB of RAM, 20GB HD, and integrated wireless. A nice step-up from my current laptop (PII 300MHz, 288 MB RAM, 6GB HD.) Online I found that it’ll run just fine with a slightly modified kernel. I hope I can manage without a custom kernel because keeping track of kernel security fixes on one’s own is a pain. I’m still not sure what kind of Internet connection I can expect at my host family’s house. Doug is convinced every person in Japan has direct 1-10mbps connections to the Internet. I hear that in Japan you have to pay per minute no matter what call it is, even local so It’d make sense if everyone in Japan had DSL/Cable. Even if there’s no Internet in my host family’s house, there should be at the school.
I recommend http://athome.nime.ac.jp/ to everyone going to do a home-stay in Japan. Especially part 3 with the journals. I hope I learn enough that I can avoid a couple of mistakes.