I have a lot to do at work. A lot. Sometimes my brain hurts but I think it is from learning. So, when I feel discouraged, I just remember that day after day I gain experience bit by bit. I am overcoming the “this is too hard” freeze-up which feels really good.
Today I realized that it was time face character encoding hell. Making an application for Japanese mobile phones so it has to handle Japanese characters of course. This is not always so easy. It feels like it should almost be easy, but it is not completely. Many attempts result in screens showing mojibake. If you don’t know, mojibake is a term borrowed from Japanese to refer to garbled appearance of characters that your computer cannot support (or is not configured to support). Moji = character, bake = appear in disguise. I like it - mostly because before reading that bake is “to appear in disguise” roughly, I thought of bake as in baked, broken, toast, kaput.
After a day of surfing the Japanese Java forum, using rikaichan for rough translations, trying, testing and seeing a lot of mojibake and question marks, I finally added something to my database that phpMyAdmin showed as being really, truly, Japanese script. Yay! There is still the other half to deal with - assuring that I can retrieve text from the database and present it non-mojibaked but I don’t think that will be too hard.
Not much else going on but work. Yesterday was another intern’s birthday and a number of us went for supper in Yokohama followed by delicious delicious ice cream. This weekend I have work to do, and likely next weekend too, but sometime in November I will travel somewhere. Where, I don’t know yet.
Oh, and I think I might like earthquakes too much. Last weekend early Saturday morning we had one a bit bigger than the normal little ones. I woke up, felt it, had some half-asleep thoughts of my apartment building tumbling over, smiled, went back to sleep. Forgot about it until someone mentioned it later that day. I know earthquakes are scary, kill, cause damage, etc….but it just feels so incredible when something that seems so sure and constant (the earth below you) shakes. I might become an earthquake chaser. Like that movie…with the cyclones…but not them…
outta here!
