I could not improve my previous score of 128.

Frame: 7/2 -/2 3/X 3/2 8/- -/6 1/7 3/5 3/X 5/2
Score:   9  11  24  29  37  43  51  59  74  81

Frame: 9/- 8/X 7/2 8/-  XX  XX 7/1 -/9 8/- 9/-
Score:   9  26  35  43  70  88  96 105 113 122   

Movie tickets in Japan go for 1,800 yen (1,500 if you are a student) at the box office, which is quite pricey. But you almost never have to pay the full price. First of all, there is the monthly Movie Day. Currently on the first day of every month, you can see movies for only 1,000 yen. In addition to that, most theatres have a Ladies' Day, usually every Wednesday, when tickets for girls also go for 1,000 yen. The next option are the so-called Road Shows. These are advance screenings of movies, tickets sell at 1,200 yen and come with a small present, such as a commemorative pin. If all this fails, you should try to get advance tickets, which are sold in shops all over town (but not at the theaters themselves). Advance tickets do not really have to be bought in advance (10 minutes before the screening works fine), have the movie's poster printed on them (which makes them a nice souvenir as well), are available in massive quantities (so they are very unlikely to be sold out), and cost 1,300 yen. Since they work at almost all cinemas in your area and on any day, they also make nice presents. You can also buy advance tickets through the ticket machines in convenience stores, but then at least one day ahead of time and only for a specific day and theatre.

Jim Carrey complains about God failing him, which results in Morgan Freeman bestowing all his powers upon him.

6 points

I started to work on an automated web server log file scanner. It is taking a look at the access log every five minutes and extracts some site usage statistics. While it is still work in progress, it is already producing useful reports. At the moment I am mainly interested in how people find the T-Files on search engines. There are not many such hits right now. It used to be more before I moved to the new server. I suppose it will take some time for the search engines to pick up the new URL. Another thing I plan to do is supporting trackback, so that when someone links to one of my articles, it would automagically be picked up and linked back, thus making up for the current lack of a commenting system.

An increasing number of people is spelling Cissy as Cizzy, especially on postcards. That is so wrong.

Japan being a pagan nation, Christmas is not a holiday here. In addition to that, it is quite warm, no snow anywhere (which of course is a good thing). While the department stores are trying to make the best of it (same as all over the world), it does not bear any religious meaning and the general public seems not to take much notice of it. If anything, it is kind of a winter edition of Valentine's Day. The event for Japanese families is New Year's Day, when everyone returns to their country-side home towns and Tokyo empties.

Anyway, I wish everyone a Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year.

Today is the Japanese emperor's 70th birthday. It is a national holiday and we went to the palace, which is open to the public just twice a year, to hear his speech and see him wave at us. We were given little paper flags, so we could wave back. He appeared with his wife, their three children, and one of the princesses for about five minutes in a balcony above a surprisingly small crowd. Afterwards we presented our business cards to his attendants, who placed them into a special box.

Sumo is a very traditional affair. It was probably a big shock to the Sumo officials when the native Hawaiian Akebono became the first foreign-born wrestler to reach tthe highest rank (Yokozuna) in this ancient Japanese sport. That was ten years ago. And now, three years after retiring from active fighting, he has an even bigger shocker in store: On New Year's Eve Yokozuna Akebono will take on Bob the Beast Sapp, the most prominent figure in the no-holds-barred K-1 free-style fighting league. This might very well end with a literal punch to the face of sumo.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Ebisu is currently showing an exhibition celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the Nintendo Entertainment System video game console. It has a lots of exhibits (also about the other consoles), and some of those are playable. The exhibition is called Level X and is open until February, 8th. Go there if you have a chance.

If you are shopping for books in Tokyo, you should take a look at Book Town Kanda. Along Yasukuni-Dori (closer to Suidobashi or Ochanomizu station rather than to Kanda, actually) there are countless stores where you can find all things printed. Old books, new books, second-hand books, antique books, special interest magazines, foreign magazines, back issues, you name it.

Just like JavaScript, Flash is a technology that I did not fancy in the past, but that is beginning to grow on me. Flash seems to deliver what Java applets were supposed to do. And last week I discovered Ming, an open-source C library to create Flash movies, which also has a Perl interface. Using this module you can create Flash programmatically. Included in the Ming examples is a PHP script Flashdot that turns an RSS newsfeed into a (clickable !) animation. It was trivial to port it to Perl:

I finally got myself a rented dedicated server. I am not really sure what I want to do with it, but it seems like a good thing to have since playing around with the Internet has become my main hobby. The first thing that I will move here are the T-Files (and this article is already being delivered from there). The server also came with a free domain name, so the new official URL is http://files.thilosophy.com/.

Ai-yah! A great many things happened in China during the twentieth century and this gripping autobiography has it all: Warlords, concubines, bound feet, Chinese sayings (both traditional and revolutionary), harsh climate, government officials, arranged marriages, traditional medicine, opium, family ties, suicides, mobbing, Japanese occupation, underground resistance, festivals, Kuomintang, Russian soldiers, corruption, communists, the Long March, miscarriages, Party membership, capital punishment, funerals, denunciation, detention, Mao Zedong, the Great Leap Forward, steel furnaces, famine, little red books, Cultural Revolution, long-distance travels, the Gang of Four, Thought Reform Through Labor, mass relocation, mental illness, barefoot doctors, Deng Xiaoping (and his stepmother), university life, classroom excursions, foreign visitors, and emigration.

I just got an invoice (two invoices actually) from my university dormitory in Darmstadt, where I lived from March 1997 to May 2002. They are asking me to pay 35 Euro building maintenance cost for the first half of 2002. It has been 18 months since I moved out there. I wonder how many of the former students they are still able to reach with this kind of late billing.

The JLPT is the official Japanese language test. The exams are conducted only once a year on the first Sunday in December with identical questions world-wide (a good example of Japanese organizational perfection). There are four levels, the highest level (Level One) is required to enroll as a regular student in Japanese universities. Level Two certifies a level of competence that can be included as Business Japanese in a professional resume. The gap to Level Three (which is not all that useful) is enormous and separates real language students from people who just managed to pick up a few phrases. Level Four acts as an entry level to give some motivation for beginning students (especially from Western countries, Asians usually go straight for Level One).

Level 1

The examinee has mastered grammar to a high level, knows around 2,000 kanji and 10,000 words, and has an integrated command of the language sufficient for life in Japanese society.

Level 2

The examinee has mastered grammar to a relatively high level, knows around 1,000 kanji and 6,000 words, and has the ability to converse, read, and write about matters of a general nature.

Level 3

The examinee has mastered grammar to a limited level, knows around 300 kanji and 1,500 words, has the ability to take part in everyday conversation and read and write simple sentences.

Level 4

The examinee has mastered the basic elements of grammar, knows around 100 kanji and 800 words, has the ability to engage in simple conversation and read and write short, simple sentences.

I did Level Three last December, and Level Four the year before. I am staying at home today. Back in June, my teacher shared my assessment that it would be impossible to reach Level Two at my current rate of progress with the Japanese language (I sometimes think I am already forgetting more than I am learning).

<html xmlns:tal="http://purl.org/petal/1.0/">
    <body>
    This is the variable 'my_var' : 
    <span tal:replace="my_var">Hola, Mundo!</span>.
    </body>
</html>

In my never-ending quest for the ultimate templating system, I stumbled upon Petal, which is a Perl implementation of large parts of TAL, TALES and METAL, which are used by the Python-powered Zope web application server. It seems to be limited to producing XML output (including XHTML), so in order to use it one would have to clean up his HTML (not a bad idea anyway). But it has all the features I am missing in HTML::Template, such as accessing complex data structures, and integrating better with WYSIWYG editors. The main idea is that it does not use any special tags, but is completely controlled by attributes assigned to existing tags. I have seen (and wanted) that before, but Petal seems much more mature than for example HTML::Seamstress.