the self-discovery adventure of Brett Taylor
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So I’ve got this goal of working in Japan for at least 6 months by 2014. That’s the big goal.
To take a big step like that is a bit much, so to break it down a little:
Not so bad a plan, eh? It’s quite flexible, and subject to change, but it’s the current target.
Why you might ask? Well, I’ve always wanted to learn a language, and the Japanese culture, history and lifestyle really interests me, and I’m single so I don’t have anyone holding me back.
So I’ve bought a book (Japanese Step by Step by Gene Nishi), and am keeping an eye out for beginner’s Japanese courses, so I can sign up for one that’s running at a good time for me.
I have a friendly workmate who spent a long time in Japan a few years ago who is encouraging me along. We go for lunch at Japanese restaraunts around town; he’s got many of us at work hooked on katsukari (pork fillet curry with rice)… mmm katsukari! Damn, I’m hungry now…
So I think in the short term, I’m pretty sussed. I’ll be signing up for a beginner’s Japanese course after September, and I’ve got a friend or two who I can practice with. Maybe I’ll make friends with some cute Japanese girls in Wellington, who knows? I’m pretty open minded about the whole thing.
What is kind of weird is being 26 right now, I’ll be 33 in 2014. But you’re as old as you feel, and with me, that currently can range from 21 to 35 right now, -_-;
Anyway, does anyone out there in the world wide tubes have any suggestions on learning Japanese? Tips and tricks? Must have resources? Must visit places?
Also, anyone know how to get my Mac so I could type katakana and hiragana with a Dvorak keyboard layout? It wants me to use QWERTY instead 
My biggest gripe I’ve ever had with my Mac experience has been with my favorite of applications: Firefox.
My place of employment, Natcoll, uses an internal proxy to ‘measure and protect’ bandwidth usage. Because I take my MacBook to and from work, I have to tell my mac to switch to my Natcoll network location, so that everything that needs to get online knows to use Natcoll’s proxy.
Doing that manually was a hassle, but now with Marco Polo 2.0.1 automatically changing my network locations better than ever, that’s been solved. I tried Marco Polo when it was 1.0 but it didn’t have all the evidence sources that I needed, but it’s all good now 
Even with Marco Polo to reconfigure my network settings for me, it wouldn’t affect Firefox — Firefox doesn’t look at the operating system’s settings, and just uses it’s own damn settings. This is true on all platforms. Camino for OS X watches Network Location, but Camino doesn’t have all the neat plugins that Firefox does.
Turns out my solution for this was… yet another Firefox plugin! Specifically, System Proxy, which gets Firefox to inspect OS X’s Network Location for proxy settings! Hooray! Firefox plugins, is there anything you can’t do?
So with Marco Polo and System Proxy, I can just pop my computer open at home and at the office and have it just connect, without me having to worry about it, which is the way these things are supposed to work, right?
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