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!

First, I finished relocating my web site from GoDaddy to HostMonster. I believe I have successfully copied everything over, and just finished doing the blog today. My GoDaddy account is now officially cancelled.

Recent events have been around 3 main areas. First, as a challenge to myself, I decided to try to join Mensa. I took a test yesterday, which was not exactly as expected – it was actually easier than expected, but I spent too much time second-guessing myself and so I ran out of time. I won’t know my result for a few weeks, but I don’t think I made it. I think I’ll try again though – if the next test is anything like this one was, I think I can manage it now that I’ve tried it once before.

Second, I’ve been doing some job hunting related stuff as of late. Right now my job hunting is a little restricted, but as of July, after finals at the school I work at, I should be free to take paid leave to do interviews. This gives me a whopping one month to do what job hunting I can before I am officially unemployed. Not exactly the happiest situation… but at least I have a lot saved up, so I can survive. It also means I gotta clean this apartment up for the next person, and find a new place to live for myself so that I’m not on the street. Fun fun fun…

Finally, because I’ve discovered how abundant jobs are in the kansai area for people who don’t speak English well (or rather, the total lack outside of teaching English), I’ve been really focusing on getting my Japanese skill level up. As I mentioned before, I took the 2-kyuu last year. As I may or may not have mentioned on here, I did not pass it. So, now I am studying to get my level up to where it needs to be.

I’ve bought several more study books, and the most recent thing was copies of the 4-kyuu and 3-kyuu tests from last year. I figured I’d check the lower levels for any weak points, plus it also helps as a confidence boost since the only test I’ve actually passed is the 4-kyuu, many years ago. Anyway, my overall score on the 4-kyuu was 94.5%, the weak points being all in the grammar section. I’m taking the 3-kyuu now, and so far it’s in the 80%+ range – I haven’t taken the listening portion yet so I don’t have a final score, but I already know that I can definitely pass the 3-kyuu. I’ll be reviewing what I got wrong, and studying like mad out of the 2-kyuu books I’ve recently bought, both for the test coming in December and for use in job interviews coming up very, very soon.

This is why J-Ben has been lying stagnant. Believe me, I want to work on it and do some significant changes – both adding new features and rewriting the loading code so it doesn’t take so painfully long to start up. Frankly, it’s unacceptable how long it takes to load compared to JWPce, Gjiten, and others, even if it does have some extra features. However, that project takes a back seat to keeping a roof over my head. Once that has stabilized, I’ll get back to coding.

So, I’m working on integrating KanjiPad into J-Ben. Or rather, I’ve already completed it – I made a standalone wxKanjiPad program, and then I copied the objects I made there over to J-Ben and got them to work together. The problem right now regards some pretty significant graphical issues, especially under Windows. I’ll be talking over on the wxWidgets forum to see if I can get them resolved. Once this is taken care of, then we’ll have our first kanji input method for the program!