Vacation

I haven't updated the blog in a long while. Never mind about that, I'm not going to start updating a lot now either, since it's time for summer vacation! I had the last exam on this week's Monday and was supposed to be going for Sapporo by bike to catch a ferry, but I didn't go. The reason - typhoon. Now that it finally reached here, it's been tamed by the mountain range west of Kitami and all that's left is a lot of rain. With any bad luck, the pipes in Kitami will be jammed again with dirt water.

I will definitely try to post updates from my holiday trip, since it's bound to be more interesting than whatever is happening here in Kitami. To put it short, nothing's been going on lately. I've been actually studying for my assignment at TUT every day for this week and the last, so there was nothing to write about them.

I did go cycling one time, to Tokoro, which is a small town by the sea. However, I deliberately chose not to cycle so that I could spare some time studying. After over 1100km on the road since May, I've seen a lot of Hokkaido, so I just haven't felt like going to take another look at some sights I've stumbled upon.

My holiday trip will be probably 1 month long, but I'm not at all sure yet. I think that's a pretty good estimate, though.

I'll post some computer-related stuff this time too. Ville, another exchange student from Finland, recommended this Firefox plugin called rikaichan to me. It is a Japanese dictionary for kanji and is really useful when browsing websites full of Japanese text.

Another thing worth noting is that since I own a MacBook due to my own stupidity or something, I'm using Windows now with Boot Camp, a program that Apple supplies. Of course, that software is beta right now and they don't have proper drivers for hardware of their own manufacture. So, for instance, the keyboard is recognized as "Apple keyboard" but it doesn't know that it's a Japanese model. In a Japanese keyboard, there's a couple of extra keys for writing katakana and hiragana more easily, as well as switching back to alphabet mode. These keys didn't work, which was a real problem for me.

I tried all kinds of things like updating the Boot Camp software to 1.3, which didn't work, testing Input Remapper which didn't solve the problem either and finally trying to install a new keyboard driver. So, Windows claimed I could install HID Keyboard driver, whatever that meant. That's what I tried first and it didn't work. Eventually, I just installed a 109-button driver for a Japanese USB keyboard. Windows screamed about incompatibilities but what do you know - it works better than the previous, "compatible" driver. For the record, this keyboard only has 80 buttons or something, and even now, some of the keys don't do anything, but it's still better than before. Thanks, Steve.