音時雨 ～Regentropfen～

Flickr.com, I guess there are tons of fans of that website. As a amateur photo-taker, I ever would like to have a flickr account and to share my own stuff.

However, every time I ended up with deleting my flickr account with few photos uploaded--for most of times, I deleted my account before uploading anything!

The reason was simply: I don’t like the style of yahoo accounts. Plain ugly.

However, once and once again, I still imagined to own a flickr and share with others--though I’m a real google picasa user, I would like an unlimited uploading space--on that point, I think I won’t mind the monthly limited space.

So this morning, I stepped onto that website again, for no reason, or maybe just got bored from during work.

Ohh, what I saw? Sign in with your google account! Does it mean my previous active yahoo account is rubbish now? Sounds exciting enough and I signed in with my primary google account, got a new username called “harvetasya”--don’t ask me why, you’re supposed to know what I like! :P

While enjoying figuring out my new flickr profile, filling all blanks and changing the settings, I came to the page where you can change the accessibility.

And the problem came.

None (include I myself) can get the access to the original photo, because I’m a free user.

What?! That’s darn stupid! Who would like to pay ~$25 each year and enabling some pointless extra features? There are people doing that, but just not me! Comparing with it, get 20GB by $5 each year at google storage is such a luck.

I was very annoyed. Eventually, what I really enjoyed about this morning’s working was only the username. People have their own preference, I can comment nothing on that, but for me, flickr is just way too stupid and very unfriendly. I was planning to share my single photos onto flicker and use picasa mainly for batch uploading, but now, hmm fine, good-bye flickr; I won’t be back to flickr, this time, for real.

I've been switching to use google Japanese IME for several months, and I really love it. Though it does not have the function which I need most, which is to switch among Latin letters, numbers and kana (mainly because my laptop doesn't have a standard Japanese keyboard), I still love it and had never wanted to use MS IME again. Almost all Google products favored me—well, I can't refuse the fact that I prefer OPERA than Chrome, yet I do use the two browsers when Opera comes to an incompatible issue. ^^;

Google Japanese IME has a similar interface to MS IME, but it gives you a tinier, faster, and neater interface. Based on the huge web information, g-IME has integrated much, much more Japanese vocabularies that you may not find from a traditional dictionary—yet it doesn't require an Internet-based environment, the dictionary has been built in the IME itself, which is awesome.

It also has its own memory, which means, it can learn your typing habit and makes your typing easier and faster. I love its typing suggestion too; I save much of time on that point. Moreover, like what google stated, it's very stable, I only had a few crashes caused by unknown problems, well, forgive that, g-IME is still in Beta!!

This IME is really awesome. I was reading the developing comic about it in early of this day, which was the really reason inspired me to write about it.

By chance, I clicked the link to their developing comic. You can find it here: http://www.google.co.jp/ime/comic/
It's in Japanese, I won't translate it, cause I know people who would like to read about it must somehow know some Japanese, and probably someone has translated it… I guess… ^^

I know the Japanese is good at making the sense of humor, yet I never knew their humor is everywhere. Like a short video clip, this comic introduced us into the whole developing story of google Japanese IME; it told you from the very beginning, and described several very technical points in an easy-to-get way. I don't think I could even laugh if that was an official developing diary or blog—they are way too formal. Here, in the form of comic, everything was described well, decent, delightful, and of course, funny.

Just one page from the entire comic, which is describing things about converting romaji to kana and selecting a user-preferred key-bind:

See, the robot is knocking the kana out from a big romaji, instead of the converting, and in the bottom, the robot are taking lots of key-binds, ohh, there are so many choices for the users if you use the google IME! Likewise, the comic is all saying things like this, in the simple way.

This product was made from their huge sense of humor; I can feel it very much.

Here, I'm going to crack some nuts I've been keeping for these days.

[Nut No.1]
Thursday, regularly, we had a lab meeting this afternoon, began at 2PM.

Went into the room, our boss and a few others were already in there. Instead of having a seat, he was like doing something with the tables.

The table in the room was not the common one which is just one big thick board, it had an irregular shape and actually contains several pieces – more accurately, 4 pieces in center and another 4 pieces were beside the two ends of it.

Seemed our boss was not comfortable with the arrangement of the sided 4 pieces. I mean, the central 4 pieces could fit perfectly with others and thus the 4 pieces formed a large table surface, but the other sided 4 pieces could not. They were putting there, seemed to be fine, but they did not look being in harmony with the central ones.

"Maybe these two pieces" – our boss looked at the 2 beside him – "are actually fitting with the other side." So he moved one of the 2 pieces to the other side.

But the piece was just not fitting.

"Maybe you can try to rotate it by 90 degrees." said one.

Still did not work.

"Well…" he moved that piece back. Meanwhile, we were going to ignore the table pieces and to have our seats. Yet, our boss was still figuring out how to arrange them.

We had to follow his enthusiasm – to figure out arranging the pieces!!

Yet, eventually, our conclusion was, the 4 side pieces did not fit the central table actually and thus can only form another separate table.

[Nut No.2]
Continuing to where I stopped for [No.1], it was about today's 2 hours and 30 minutes long lab meeting!

2 hours and 30 minutes!!!
It was the second time we had such a long meeting since I came in this lab.

In today's meeting, one was talking about her project. If it was in a seminar-like way, she could have finished within 40 minutes. Sadly, I have to say, our boss was asking all the time, and that was why it lasted so long.

During it, I was even drooping off, lol

When she finally finished the main part, it was 10 to 4. However, she did have something new and our boss would like to see them, orz.

What I remembered clearly was that, our boss looked at his watch and said, "heck, maybe I could just have to shut up."

Yes, YOU COULD HAVE… -___-

I also remember once when it was another one's turn to show the lab a published research paper, he printed out the copies and handed out to each of us.

"Nice paper!" immediately got the paper, one exclaimed.

Indeed, that paper contained only 3 pages, including the reference!

See, lab meetings are absolutely rubbish! :P

[Nut No.3]
I was on strike in the last week.

I was in berserk mode to translate KOKIA's blog posts for her 2010 Europe tour.

Ohh, she wrote too much!!!

But there were a lot of beautiful photos, I was very, very satisfied!

Until October 18, I had a seminar, so I was busy preparing for that, and did not do too much for the translation work. When I finally ended the seminar, and checked my rss reader again…

Man, she posted around 10 new posts!!!

Thus, I was in berserk mode. XD

To be honest, I did this translation work JUST FOR FUN…

When I finished those new posts, and took a free weekend, I found there were another 8 new posts waiting for me…

Hmm, okay, I'll just be in berserk mode again, and here came her end of this year's Europe tour, so I would not face more posts from this series. Yet, I was really willing to do the work, superb~

[Nut No.4]
It was snowing on Monday!!! And I saw a pair of hare, fatties! I love winter!! :3

[Nut No.5]
I was talking about the song "Afezeria HARVESTASYA." and its context with a friend till 1:30AM and we had not finished yet. So we continued our discussion in the next morning, for another 3 hours…

During that, I read the lyrics and the story again and again… had never been so crazy before!! XD

[Nut No.6]
I registered on a website called "National Novel Writing Month", and was going to do it in November. Ohh, but my current planning novel should be longer than that, as far as I know…

But I will just try. Good chance to push my pending-yearly novel a little bit!

And now, with the last a few days of October, I gotta get rid off all other trivia!!!!!

[Nut No.7]
As what I said in last post, my google talk was dead. I could log in with a green dot beside my name, but I could not see anyone in my list. I could not search for any of my contacts either. More weird, if I log in with another account, it worked fine, but I could see my dead account online!!!! orz

I know it must be because the plugin I used for foobar to display track information into google talk; every time such thing happens, the plugin was in use. I had deleted that and promised not use it anymore.

My google talk revived 2 days later… bad luck, do not want to mention this anymore… x__x

[Nut No.8]
I think I have been nuts for a long time, and I will see how nuts I can be in future.

Moreover, this blog post itself is nuts enough already. X3