lingqi's Journal: Feburary 15th, 2003

Feburary 15th, 2003 (4pm)

Wow, working on saturdays really suck. Not that it's a surprising fact or anything - but it sucks more than I thought it would. It's notable that back when I was still living in china I dealt with 6-workday weeks without much discomfort. But as I have remembered it, the process of becoming comfortable with a 5-workday week was a swift one.

I guess Japanese people arn't that into it either. From my section (five people including myself), two took vacation and my boss took an early leave to visit the dentist. The office seem to be filled about 1/3 - 1/2, parking lot revealing about the same.

I have been recently been given the responsibility of being sort of a "technical editor" for some internal training documents. The catch is, however, that the 155 page document is exclusively in Japanese. I secretly wonder if I will be laughed at if I attempt to correct the original author's grammar.

On the serious side, however, I am debating if it would be easier - or at least much more cost-effective (time and energy wise) if I simply translated the whole thing while looking for errors. Considering that I will nodoubtedly punch every word on the document into a dictionary at least three times - it's only minimally added effort to write down the results.

Besides this little development, not much has been happening. I did find out why horsemeat is considered a taboo in Russia. It's because Russia was a strongly christian / catholic country. Though horses are highly nutritious, since horse sacrifices (often associated with a meal made from the unfortunate animal) are very much associated with pagan rituals, the churches natually forbade anything to do with the horses.

Of course, a story is no fun without irony. It turns out that the sacrifice of horses are not as easy to stamp out as people were hoping, and some churches were christened* with horse sacrifices, perhaps secretly by the churches' builders.

*yes, indeed "sanctified" (and less so "consecrated") would fit much better here. ;-)

(The above information is by an article by Dr. David Anthony, from Newsletter #4 of Institute for Ancient Equestrian Studies, 1997)

During lunch today I took the liberty of taking a walk at lunch time around the company's property. To the east of the actual buildings, there is a huge piece of land - probably reserved for future development. The cool thing is that there is a lenghy trail around the entire area - perfect for running, and brisk walks. While it doesn't have the appeal of hamsters like a treadmill, at the end there there is a ascetic but tranquil garden. It is a terrible shame that I had not stumbled up on it earlier, It is a good place to lose oneself.

I dropped by a video-game store yesterday. While almost all other pre-order slips were in full capacity, Final Fantasy X-2 has already sold out, a month before it even hit the shelfs. Guess it's got a big crowd of fans here too.

Nothing much else today. For now.

hehe

[hfastedge]

hehehe, they probably made u editor of the internal docs to boost your japanese comprehension.

So assuming this, you're currently not as much of a hotshot as you thought. On the other hand, it means they do think you have potential and they'll need to rely on you more in the future.

Re:hehe

[lingqi]

hmm... no idea where you got the idea that I have an image of myself as a "hotshot," but you are probably right about the "boosting japanese skills."

The only thing I am concerned with is actually my ability in actually meeting the deadline on the thing. Translating, checking for techincal correctness, and trying to learn words from a document in a language I hardly understand is very time consuming.

I thought you worked in Shinjuku?

[greenwindow]

I thought you worked in Shinjuku? Where is the huge piece of company land that you refer to? I didn't think there was any free land in Shinjuku.