Recent happenings

Hello, anyone out there reading this. (Yukari, maybe some family members… not sure who else ;-)) This is a small update about recent happenings in my life.

I am still in Japan, but having reached the end of my teaching contract, I have moved to Osaka and am living there while searching for work. Also, rather than just finding more teaching jobs, I’m taking the much more difficult path of trying to return to my career of software development here in Japan, despite not having business-level Japanese skills. It is a challenge, and I’ve been learning a lot of Japanese lately and have, through much pain, got used to reading the Japanese job postings from Hello Work. But, it’s coming along! I’m seeing a number of possibilities, and hopefully I can find one which’ll pan out and which will accept my Japanese at a basic conversation level. I’m also trying to go to several different volunteer-taught Japanese classes in the evenings to improve my Japanese since that’ll undoubtedly help in job interviews and elsewhere.

Anyway, while I’m out of a job, my days consist of job hunting, Japanese studies, programming, and sometimes playing video games… well, maybe I play them more than I should, but I’ve already cancelled my WoW subscription after reactivating it for half a month, so I guess that shows for something. 🙂 I’ve been reading several books, specifically Al Gore’s “The Assault on Reason” and Donald Knuth’s “The Art of Computer Programming”. And when I do get around to programming, I’m working on the new dictionary core of J-Ben, which will be part of the upcoming (and elsewhere unmentioned) J-Ben 2.0.

So, even though I have no job, I’m definitely keeping busy. But it’s not all work. As I said, I have been playing some games, and although I’m cutting back I still am remembering to unwind a little at times. And I do have my wonderful girlfriend to talk to. 🙂 She’s really been supporting me through moving and getting all my insurance and unemployment stuff taken care of, and has even helped as an on-call translator in some cases. Other than that, we’ve spent a lot of time togI owe her a lot… Yukari, if you’re reading this: thanks as always 🙂 And I love you!! (*^-^*)

That’s all for now. Probably I’ll be working on the libraries for J-Ben 2 a bit tonight, and tomorrow I’m waking up bright and early for a bunch of job hunting related stuff. Anyway, until next time!

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