It’s 5.1K one way and the green is up a massive hill. The loop around the moat is 1.7k and I’m going to cut it out for the first month.

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So, my rafting china friend has a new site. it’s called www.ThankSarah.com In his own words, “nothing up yet, but you will be able to pay a dollar or two for me to send a postcard to the RNC or Alaska governors mansion thanking Srah palin for sinking the GOP ticket and making barak obama president!

she was right , she could help bring the change washington needed, by being an obnoxious ass!

schadenfreude!!!”

Mmmm Salt in wounds

Note to any of you doppleganger Brian Schuchs out there. Please note that I’m joking.
Doppleganger.

The Real

Brian Schuch

So, I’m reading about Search Engine Optimozation (SEO for us in the biz) and I decide to see how I, Brian Schuch, rate. Well, There’s an upstart out there. I’m number one on Yahoo!, but I’ve been usurped by another Brian Schuch on Google! This can’t be. I don’t care how many online.coms you have after your name, Mr Schuch, that spot will be mine, Brian Schuch (I don’t need four names. Two is enough for me, Brian Schuch).

So, to try to increase my page ranking, I need some SEOs. One of those is to repeat your keyword, Brian Schuch, often. So, from now on, all of my posts (including the past ones) will be signed “Brian Schuch” and I might refer to myself in future ones like William Shatner on Boston Legal,Brian Schuch Danny Crane

Brian Schuch

Despite appearances, this is not a post about the Dance of the day. Tango (the a is pronounced like awning) means “word” in Japanese. So this is a post about the word of the day. A friend and I started a word of the day type thing to help us study Japanese. On Monday and Wednesday, she mails me five words (a verb, noun, adjective, adverb, and a freely chosen one), and on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I mail her five. On Friday, we agreed that it would be the test day. Originally, we had planned that we would send each other some of the words at random, but after considering this for awhile, I felt that it was ineffective.

First, we’d have to look at the words in order to decide which ones to send. Then, we’re not getting tested on all the words. Lastly, this is the day and age of web-assign! If I can do physics homework online, I can sure as hell write some simple crap code to spit out 20 words a week from a database and check if I can type the right word. So, I’ve been spending all of my free time lately writing up the code for tangodujour.com (no idea if that domain is even available). (The following is pretty geeky. Feel free to stop reading now unless you’re a computer science major. CS’ers I kindly ask that you read on to the end or at least the last paragraph)

While writing it, I thought of all the studying and money spending I did to prepare for this big Japanese proficiency test. I’d searched a couple of times on the web for websites that offered free study help and the things I found were rather lacking (I felt, I mean, they were nice, but just not quite enough, a little simplistic and didn’t really test your knowledge). So, while writing tangodujour.com I decided I’d like to expand it and in compass more than just the words of the day, I’d love for it to be everything I wanted out of studying for the test, not just multiple choice radio buttons, but do you really know it text fields.

One problem with that, though, is that when testing it, you’ve really go just a 1 to 1 relationship. Is A = B? Yes? Then Correct! No? Then wrong. But in going from language to language, there’s not really a 1 to 1 relationship, which is why the babelfish-esq translators fail so poorly. For example, I told you that “tango” means “word”. But think about the word “word”. How many uses does it have? I can tell you, you’d be surprised. I know I was when I kept saying “tango” in places where it wasn’t the right word and would get funny looks. “I love the written word.” In that case, “tango” is incorrect. And as far as words go, “word” is pretty simple.

I’ve tried to side step that problem by having the questions asked in English and the answers in Japanese, because it’s currently directed at English speakers and we can tell the nuances in our words but not so much with Japanese words that we’re just learning. (I’ve also got the database set up to hold an example sentence to help out with the nuances, but it’s currently not used) I’ve also got it set up to contain an alternative English meaning, but even that, I feel, wouldn’t be enough to catch all of the possible synonyms. I’m thinking now of feeding a lengthy list of synonyms separated by 0 and then exploding the 0 out.

Anyway, I’ve got the site running to the needs of my friend and myself, but I still would really like it to be utilized by anyone wanting a study aid for Japanese. I feel that I can reasonably code everything that I would need for it, however, I am not a comp sci major and know absolutely nothing about security. There’s probably 50million holes and potential errors due to poor coding, so I would like to ask one of my CS friends (that actually read this and has time) to help me and proof my code. I’m not asking for writing, just proofing and maybe a pointer or two (like wow, your code sucks). Anyway, if you don’t mind and can do it, send my a mail or an IM.

Brian Schuch

Sorry for the major downtime on updating my website. I’m currently computerless and very busy at school. Why am I computerless? Well, my laptop’s HD decided it likes to go click click click click instead of running properly (ie it died). I’ve ordered one of the new iMacs and was originally given the delevery time of early november and now I’ve got “mid-november”. Not too happy about that one. I wanted to order it fomr online because it’d give me a specific date, but apple doesn’t like people who live not in the country of their credit card.

Brian Schuch

So, I’ve decided in order to practice my Japanese, I wouldn’t follow the World Series through American websites, but solely through Japanese ones (as of today). I have a teacher at my school that loves to talk to me about baseball so I’ve gone out and learned how to say most things about baseball in Japanese so I can actually read and understand the articles (mostly).

It’s got me really wondering how Japanese feel about the fact that we call it the “World” Series despite the fact that only one team outside of the US is eligable to play in it. Last year I turned on the TV in late November to see David Ortiz playing in a game. I was quite sruprised to see him playing with an assortment of all-stars from different teams. I was also surprised to see that they were playing here in Japan against Japanese all-stars. After some serious digging on the mlb.com website (it wasn’t on the front page, or anywhere near the front page despite the fact that I was watching a game whilst searching), I found that it’s a bi-annual seires that’s been going on since 1986. Japan has only taken one series (1990) but it hasn’t always been a blow out for the US. See this site:here and this one for an interesting history of US-Japan baseball relations (scroll to the bottom to read about the 1990 series the US lost).

Now that I’ve bashed America about it’s baseball arrogence, let’s turn to Japan. I don’t know if you can call it arrogence or just nationalism, but the coverage of the Leauge Series is, well to put it nicely, non-existent. Today the White Sox and Angels played their first game and the coverage of it on Yahoo! Japan is about three paragraphs long. The White socks have a Japanese player on their team, Iguchi (I forget his first name and can’t read names for crap). I know in detail about how he did. I know he went 1 for 4 with a single in the third. I can also tell you exactly how he got out in those other three at bats. After that, some guy named Anderson hit some home runs and the Angles won or something, but hey! Taguchi’s Cardnals start their games tomorrow!

Here is a translation of the Yahoo! article:

[Chicago, October 11th] The America Professional League League Championship Series (best of seven) on the 11th the American League (White Sox vs Angels) had it’s first game. The Angels held on for a 3-2 win in the opener.
Infielder Iguchi of the White Sox (batting second, playing second) in the third inning of the opening game had a single to short center and was 1 for 4 in the game. In the first inning he flew out to first, flew out to left in the 5th and flew out to short in the 8th.
The Angels took a 3 run lead in the early innings off Anderson’s homerun and such. In each the third and fourth innings the White Soxs scored runs off Kreede’s homeruns and stuff. However hampered by the Angels’ relief pitching and defense, they couldn’t get one more run.
The National League series is the Cardinals, the team Taguchi is affiliated with, versus the Astros and starts on the 12th in St Louis.

Two things don’t get translated over. One is the cute way the teams are refered to after the first paragraph. The first time the teams are said, the full name is written out. Every other time it’s the first letter of the team plus the Japanese word for Army, so the Angels turn into the A-army and the White Sox turn into the Ho-army (going by the way “white” is writen in Japanese ho-wa-i-to). The other thing is, the way the last paragraph is writtenin Japanese, it makes Taguchi the more important part. I couldn’t cary it over to English without making it too alien to be understood (ie some bablefish translation). Taguchi, while having contributed a lot, is actually a bench player for the Cardinals.

Brian Schuch

Let it envelope your soul!

As of this posting, if you search for failure on goooooogle, it’s a biography for the worst president ever!

Actually, what I’m doing now is sort of how that works. It’s SEO. What I’m doing is just through my one site, this is a google bomb and not all that interesting anymore. Just a bunch of morons like me linking to the white house bio page with the word “faliure”. Bah.

Brian Schuch

it’s mine!

Brian Schuch

So, I’ve finally gotten off my lazy ass and setup my website. Why? I’m still asking my self that. It’s the age old question: If I update my website and no one knows to look at it, does it make a sound? Yes, it does. It sounds like dooo dii dooo dabudah dah dah dah bibi-bi-bi-boh eyah!

Brian Schuch