I saw these keys at a stand underground on Shinjuku this afternoon. Had never seen anything like this before, but in Japan’s cute-conscious market, this kind of product definitely makes sense.

Stumble it!

Sachi and I just now got back from the Teppan-yaki place (cooking “right before your eyes,” as the famous Engrish misquoted) Sachi took me to for my birthday. Wow, that stuff is good! We ordered filet steaks–I got the “special” (read: extra-fatty) version, and the entire course was fantastic. The appetizer was high-quality roast beef, followed by a fish course of cooked scallop (though I got a replacement dish of nama-hamu and fruit), followed by the main course. Like Benihana in the U.S., the cook prepares the whole meal in front of you. He started by cooking garlic slices (delicious–just like garlic crisps!), then prepared the filet steaks (medium-rare), slicing them into bite-sized pieces as he cooked them, followed by asparagus and sprouts, everything garnished with delicious onions, garnished with rock salt. There were three tasty sauces–apple-flavored, tomato sauce, and soy sauce with an original wasabi garnish, all to dip it into before eating.

We were served a bottle of wine (after three beers between us), so we got appreciably high during the meal. The problem was, they seemed to be waiting for us to finish our wine before they served dessert, and we were saving the last of our wine to have with dessert. So it was a good 40 minutes or so of waiting before we finally got the idea and told them to take the wine to the dessert table–where they had a nice birthday cake (white layer cake topped with whipped cream, laden with cherries, orange slice and kiwi-fruit) waiting for us.

The place is local (to Ikebukuro) and pretty expensive, but man that was good! We splurged on a taxi home (all of seven dollars and worth every penny, in our state), and somehow made it back in the door.

Would every birthday be so delicious and fun.

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Sachi got me a very nice Ralph Lauren suit for my birthday, and topped it off with a nice cotton shirt and matching tie this morning.

Why, what were you thinking the title meant?

Seriously though, I look like I’m running for office or something….

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If you’re in the mood for sleaze, check out a political ad run by a Republican candidate (and incumbent) for Congress. Basically, it attacks the Democratic candidate’s “San Francisco values,” demonstrating that by having three slutty-looking swingers partying it up, bumping and grinding. I’ve lived in San Francisco and grew up in the area, and this doesn’t come any closer to representing the values of the area than a seedy strip club in Missouri represents theirs. But apparently, this passes for kosher in conservative Missouri politics.

I reflected on how people would react if, say, a Massachusetts liberal were to put out an ad representing rural/heartland values by showing gun-toting redneck hicks drinking beer and picking their noses in front of a pickup truck with a Confederate flag on the side. Such a politician would instantly be excoriated, blasted out of the water as an “elitist.”

What it comes down to is the fact that not just ads showing such “San Francisco” values, but pretty much all criticisms of the same sort–attacking either urban/coastal or liberal values as “elitist”–this is in fact the true “elitism.” The same people who claim that liberals are prancing around thinking they are better than everyone else are themselves the ones with the superiority complex; they think that their values are better than those of others. The values I remember from the San Francisco area were pretty much respectful of a wide variety of views and beliefs; it is an accepting, big-tent culture, with “tolerance” being a major theme. I don’t see much tolerance or acceptance among the brand of people who complain about “San Francisco values.”

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A new study:

In the “first nationally representative survey of teachers concerning the teaching of evolution,” the authors show that one in eight high school biology teachers present creationism as a scientifically valid alternative to Darwinian evolution. While this number does not reflect public demand–38% of Americans would prefer that creationism to be taught instead of evolution–it does represent a disconnect between legal rulings, scientific consensus, and classroom education.

Before you think that one in eight is not bad, or even, “what’s wrong with introducing creationism alongside evolution,” consider that this is similar to one in eight Medical School teachers telling their students to consider prayer as a scientifically valid alternative to antibiotics. And then consider whether or not you’d want to be treated at the hospital staffed by graduates of those classes.

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Finally! Rumors of the iPhone coming out in Japan. The carrier: NTT DoCoMo, as I predicted. Apparently, all the attention crashed the Apple Insider web site, which I could not access as of this time. However, the rumors only say that Apple is “close to signing deals” with the Japanese and Korean carriers, and has no specifics about when the iPhone will be available–and Japan is rather infamous for getting stuff late.

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Uh oh. Conservatives are starting to talk about “character” again. I guess, after eight years, they must miss being able to use the word in public when referring to their candidate for president.

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From Virginia:

A federal appeals court panel in Richmond, Va., on Tuesday struck down a Virginia law that made it a crime for doctors to perform what the law called “partial birth infanticide.”

Good. “Partial birth abortion,” a political (not medical) term in this case escalated to “infanticide,” is nothing more than a manufactured straw man intended to stand in for abortion in general. The idea is to vilify the entire practice by choosing the least-commonly practiced (less than one-fifth of one percent of all abortions) but most-easily vilified form of abortion, and making a campaign of it, completely ignoring the medicine or the ethics involved in the process.

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Ewww. An off-duty Japanese railway worker was arrested for forcibly kissing a woman on a train right here in Ikebukuro. Reportedly, he was so drunk that he doesn’t remember what happened, which only makes the image worse. Imagine that guy sticking his tongue down your throat–or your wife’s. From the article:

His employer was apologetic about the incident. “We’re sorry about the case. We’ll improve our guidance of employees,” said a spokesman for Seibu Railway.

Yeah. Be sure to give those employee seminars about not to get completely smashed and sexually assault women. That oughta do it. I mean, such “guidance” is stupid: any employee who doesn’t know better shouldn’t be working there in the first place.

No word in the article about whether or not the guy would be fired.

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Right now, there’s one hell of a rain and wind storm out there. I have my exercise equipment on the balcony, and bought a motorcycle cover to protect it from the rain. Last night I draped it over my elliptical trainer, tied it down tight, and until a few minutes ago, it was doing just fine. Then I heard a few loud thunks during one of the wind howls, and saw that the machine was tipped over (it had been firmly set against a wall) and the cover gone.

It’s probably somewhere over Saitama Prefecture by now. I just hope the trainer is more resistant to rust than I imagine.

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It was almost exactly ten years ago that I first started working at Lakeland College, in our building on Shokuan Boulevard in north-eastern Shinjuku. The school had been there only a few years when I arrived; it was a building with a very small footprint, albeit nine stories tall, and served us well for those years.

But we found it necessary to move, and that process has just begun to end. After months of planning and working things out, the move was completed today; the new building stands full of bare-bones furniture nearly swamped in boxes that will have to be unpacked over the next week, as we make the new building home.

I had to do a lot of work on this myself, mostly in the form of planning the layout. Using Adobe InDesign, I made a to-scale map of the building and every component to be in it–I measured every nook and cranny of every room, along with every piece of furniture to bring it all together. Then I had to figure out other stuff, like how much room should each seat comfortably have for the occupants to work and still be able to push out from the desk, and have people walk behind them, while not taking up so much space as to fill up the building too soon. The color of flooring at the entrance, which furniture would go to which room, how to deal with a mold problem in the basement, and dozens of other issues had to be dealt with. Walls torn down, walls installed, wiring completed–it’s been a huge headache.

But it’s almost finished. We have worked on a tight budget, so we were not able to completely re-outfit everything; as raw as some parts of the building must be, we are getting it done. Our first semester may not look pretty, but it’ll work, while we get everything filled in and fixed up over time.

When I went in to work today, the old building was just an empty shell:

Since our old phone number remains active until tomorrow, we have had to keep a staff member in the empty room, answering phones left on a trolley cart. For some unknown reason, we were not able to keep our long-held phone numbers, despite only moving a kilometer away, and still in the same area code–hell, even the same neighborhood. But that’s the phone company for you.

I’d love to show off the new building, but it’s little more than a sea of boxes right now. Here are a few shots of the new faculty room.

A wider composite shot–I need to get a wider-angle lens for my camera… :

Tomorrow I go in to test computer networks and unpack boxes. Wheee!!

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Unless you’ve been living incommunicado for the past 24 hours, you likely know by now that author Arthur C. Clarke has passed away at the age of 90 in his home in Sri Lanka. The first to visualize geosynchronous satellites forming a world-spanning relay for communication, Clarke was a scientist with a flair for exquisitely elegant prose, authoring Childhood’s End, Songs of Distant Earth, and the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. While the concepts in his stories were deeper than the characters he crafted, the beauty of his words appealed to me the most. His death is a loss, but his life has been a wonderful gain for us all.

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Here we are, caught between the years. It’s not quite 2008 yet here in Menlo Park, but it’s already well into the afternoon of January 1st in Japan now.

Either way… Happy New Year!

Stumble it!

By this time, it was pretty much inevitable that I’d pop the question to Sachi. We’ve both been waiting for it for a while; I’ve been waiting for the right opportunity, and Sachi has been waiting for me to get around to it.

Actually, I have been planning this for a little while now, trying to get things set up–getting the ring selection lined up and doing my research in that area, getting the timing right so the event would be special, that kind of thing. I wanted to do it at Christmas, but Sachi’s work kept her from joining us for Christmas by a day, and because she would be too jet-lagged the first night, we arranged for a special family Christmas dinner on the 27th.

Certain coincidences have been happening lately as well. When Sachi’s flight was an hour from taking off from Narita, I wondered if maybe she had her cell phone with her, and decided to call her. When I started looking for for her cell number on my computer, just at that moment an email came in from her via her cell–she was asking what my family’s address in the U.S. was, as she had to put it on some form for the flight. The timing was within seconds.

When her plane arrived, I picked her up at the airport. Doing this is always a difficult affair–since parking both costs money but more importantly, represents a long walk with luggage, my family always tries to time the pickup at the arrivals lobby. But the timing is difficult–you never know how long immigration, baggage unloading, and customs checks will take. The person picking up always gets there x number of minutes early or late, and somebody has to wait. Usually we do it so the arriving person calls the driver from a public phone; if the person picking up gets there early, they loop around the airport until the call comes.

So I monitored her flight (three hours late! Poor Sachi!), and just after it arrived, I took off for the airport. Just as I pulled up to the arrivals lobby door, my cell phone rang–it was Sachi, and she had just come out to the lobby that moment. Again, spooky timing.

Then, the day I planned to propose to her, we were up in San Francisco doing some shopping. We visited several herbal shops (Sachi is into herbs now, and we got a ton for good prices here), and at one that had a new-age theme, Sachi found some tarot-like decks. One was called “Messages from Your Angels,” and Sachi shuffled the deck and pulled one card out at random. It read: “Daniel: I am the angel of Marriage, and I am assisting you right now.” She showed it to me, in our usual, “Hey, when are you gonna pop the question?” joshing manner. I thought, “Dangit, Daniel, you’re spoiling the surprise!” Of course, it didn’t spoil anything, but wrapped up a rather interesting string of timing coincidences.

So we came back from the city and picked up the presents we’d collected, went to the place where we’re staying (a family friend who very kindly allows us to stay in her home while she visits family for the holidays) and wrapped the presents, then returned to my folks’ home for Sachi’s Christmas dinner (goose with stuffing and various fixings–really good). After that, we exchanged gifts (I got Sachi a MacBook, natch), and then things settled down so it was just Sachi and I and my parents. I made an excuse via noting the songs I should put on Sachi’s new computer to start playing our favorite song (When You Taught Me How to Dance, from the Miss Potter soundtrack), and then I took the ring in its case out of hiding, and proposed.

When I asked Sachi if she would marry me, her response was priceless: as she cried and reached out to hug me, she said, “Why not?” We all loved that line—to me, it sounded like a line from a movie–but it was not exactly what she meant to say. She wanted to say, “Why would I not want to marry you?” as she later explained.

The ring I gave her, however, was not the actual engagement ring, as I explained as I gave it to her. In order to both have the ring be a surprise and to allow her to pick out her own, my sister kindly lent us her own engagement ring to use as a stand-in. Before Sachi came, I did some research with the help of a family friend who is also a gemologist to pick out a number of possible ring mountings and diamonds to go with it. We then went through the assortment, and Sachi chose the one that she liked best. We probably won’t be able to have it finished before we leave–New Year’s coming and all–but we’ll get it soon enough after we get back.

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I’ve been having a wee bit of trouble making some third-party purchases via Amazon this holiday season. The worst was in attempting to buy some SterlingTek batteries for the Rebel XTi. The low-priced ($10 vs. Canon’s $40) batteries come highly recommended by Canon users in a variety of forums, and I have noticed no enthusiasm for any other specific brand or seller.

So I decided to buy some, and instead of going through SterlingTek themselves, I tried to save a few bucks and instead go through the online store at the top of Amazon’s list, probably because of the low price. What happened was that I was most likely the victim of a little scam, else I was the victim of very poor services.

What I did not know at the time was that “SterlingTek” is not a brand name of battery per se, but rather a company that sells batteries of a certain quality. How other dealers sell “SterlingTek” batteries is somewhat of a mystery to me still–they’re probably just trying to feed off the name recognition.

But the seller Amazon had at the top of their list was a place run out of Oregon, called “TheMemStore.” I ordered the batteries and paid extra for “expedited” shipping, supposedly 1-3 days. The order was placed on December 17, the order processed December 18. The batteries were delivered on the 22nd. Not very expedited, if you ask me.

But that’s not the worst part. The order was for SterlingTek batteries. They sent me some other brand I’d never heard of, a brand which I could barely find on the Internet, and when I did, got poor reviews. (The brand is “MaximalPower,” and the SterlingTek guy said that that’s not a brand they use.) So, they sent me the wrong product, despite both my order and the packing list that came with the batteries clearly indicating “SterlingTek” products.

Worse, the store is closed weekends, so I was unable to get ahold of them until Monday. Then it all seemed fixed, when the sweet-talking operator kindly sympathized, apologized, and told me that she’d make sure the product I ordered would be sent off right away, with a package that I could send the wrong items back with. I emphasized that time was of the essence as I was leaving for Japan soon, and any delay could cause a delivery to arrive after I’d departed.

Today, two days later, instead of getting what I originally ordered, I got an email from TheMemStore, informing me that they did not have any of the item I originally ordered (it took them two days to check if an item was in stock?), and while I could return the batteries they sent me, everybody is happy with the other brand… making me think that probably they didn’t have it at all when I first ordered, and instead of postponing or canceling the order, they hoped I would just accept whatever they sent me. I have to wonder, how many people do that? Probably enough so they would do this kind of thing.

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Okay, I got the web site I was working on back up and running. As it turns out, the failure of the site was not as completely disastrous as I had feared, but it was still bad enough. It took more than two hours to get everything back up and running.

Here’s what it is: I teach a Computer Science class, a basic survey course entitled “Introduction to Computers.” For some time, I have used this site design, on my namesake domain, poza.net. It was good for my needs at the time, but I have been looking to redesign it for a few years now.

I had not planned on implementing the site until next semester, but a planned outage on poza.net which would hit smack in the middle of a lesson prompted me to open the site early. So far, only the main page and one section have been adapted to the new design; the rest of the site is simply the old web pages, grafted on to the new domain. You can check out the site at this address.

My main interest in creating the new site was to include a blog into the main page, as a way of contacting students at any time. As it is RSS and WordPress-powered, students can be contacted via an RSS reader or by email whenever there is a new message in the blog.

The blog is minimally viewable on a 1024-pixel-wide monitor as of this time (it can be viewed at lower resolutions, but the blog gets really squished), but is better suited for larger resolutions. The class sections are the big black buttons on the right (I have to size the buttons down, soon); only the section on Hardware (9 chapters) has been adapted to the new site design.

I have also changed things in that the old site was simply a directory on a site I use for various things, but the new site–www.lcjapan.com, a domain closely named after my college campus, is now to be dedicated to this one site for this course. I got the domain name for this site years ago, but never did much with it until now.

This is also why I have not been blogging on too much else; aside from my regular teaching duties, this has been taking up literally all of my time recently. I hope to get back to other things this weekend. Still, I need to update the Excel section of the web site to focus on the 2007 version; the current pages (not visible because they are out of date) focus on Excel 2000.

If you have any comments or suggestions for the site, please let me know.

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I’ve been a bit light on blogging today, for a good reason: it’s Arts Day Video time. Tomorrow, Monday, is the festival, and today was the deadline for getting everything done. And that’s what I got done: everything. The final video is a few seconds under 19 minutes long, and features bits on every performance group except one (I can’t edit in what my students don’t videotape….).

I’m very happy with this one. The opening parody bits came out better than I had hoped, and the opening and ending music pieces fell into place better than I thought they would. The pace of the whole piece is better than we’ve accomplished before; it flows pretty easily, and at the end, you don’t feel like 19 minutes has passed.

That said, as with past videos, if you’re not familiar with the school, some of the gags will pass right over your head. Nevertheless, I plan to post this video–and the past two years’ videos–on YouTube as soon as I find the time, probably by mid-this-week. My only concern is that they utilize copyrighted music pieces in some parts. I figure that if I password-protect the videos, as YouTube allows, that may keep that element from being a problem. I can make all non-copyrighted portions available generally.

But for now, with only hours to go before the festival begins, I have the video backed up enough. The original iMovie project, a raw Digital-Video version (as a QuickTime file), a disk image of the DVD, and three hard copies of the DVD, all ready to go.

My only worry: without the software having been re-installed in one and a half years, playback on my laptop is choppy at best. Should I risk installing Leopard on it tomorrow morning?

I’m too tired out from tonight’s effort to decide.

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Before it was the prospectus pamphlet. Now it’s my college’s Arts Day Festival video. Every year, I put together a video to kick off the festival, and it takes up all my free time for a few weeks. This year is no different.

Before, I tried posting these on my blog, but have since discovered how easy it is to use YouTube. So here are two small excerpts from the project. The first is for the Martial Arts Club:

The second is the “Wa-on” taiko drumming group:

Neither are completely finished, a few touches are left to put in, but it gives you an idea of what it’s been about. Editing videos is pretty darn easy in iMovie HD, but it’s still no easy task to collect hours of videotape and edit it down to 15-20 minutes of compact, well-edited video.

This is the 5th annual Arts Day Festival. I may or may not be able to stay for the whole thing this year, depending on how my (probable) herniated disc is doing by November 5th.

And after that? Installing Leopard!

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During the summer, my boss had to take a leave of absence, and as I had done his job before, I took over, in addition to continuing my own full-time duties (plus, I was moving house). So that kind of kept me busy through August.

But from August, a new job presented itself: creating a prospectus for my college. We recently got accreditation from the Japanese Ministry of Education (in addition to our two-decades-running accreditation from a U.S. agency), which means that we can sponsor student visas, and admit non-Japanese students. That means we need a new English-language prospectus. Our old one was about a decade out of date, and if we wanted to present ourselves well at college fairs and to international schools, we needed a new one.

Now, we’re a small branch campus, and often don’t have the major resources that universities can depend upon. We get a lot of stuff printed, but we didn’t have the budget for getting this one designed out-of-house. The faculty all were given assignments to collect and create the written text, and since I’m the most computer-savvy among the faculty, I was asked to do the layout and design. Sure, I thought–just give me the text, I’ll throw in some photos, and work out a design. No problem.

What a fool I was!

Creating a document like this is no small feat, and as I would soon find out, it was harder than I imagined, in several different ways. First off, the text that I was given was not in final form; since no one could predict the final layout, they could not produce exactly the text that was needed. That meant re-editing most of the text.

Second, the layout changed as we went. Pages got dropped, added, re-arranged, re-written… every week, there was something that had to be re-designed or completely redone.

Third, the photos weren’t as easy to plop in as I thought they would be. I had to sift through more than a few thousand images to find just the right ones, usually starting the process anew for each new photo that was needed (they were not catalogued or sorted even)… and often times, there were no appropriate images, and so I had to create them–go out and snap the images myself. And then I was often asked to change this photo to that one, and each new request meant reconsidering the entire page spread design.

And finally, I had to get everything right for the printers. All images had to be CMYK (Photoshop naturally does things in RGB, so every image had to be recast), with a resolution of 350 dpi. Two versions of each draft had to be done, one normally, and one where every text box was converted to outlines instead of being presented as text in a font face. All kinds of other small details, from the placement of staples to extending graphics beyond the edge of the page had to be painstakingly taken care of, page after page. Every photo had to get some adjustment to make the color, brightness, contrast, and association with nearby text and images just right.

All this had to be finished by early this month, so we could get it printed in time for a number of college fairs and international school presentations.

Well, we got it done. I even converted the thing into a PDF, in case you’re interested in reading it. To save on file size, I saved all images in relatively low quality–you can see them fine, but you can’t zoom in too closely or else they lose quality quickly.

Here’s a mini-sized sample of the cover and a few inside pages:

They used it at a college fair just today–by chance, held at Sunshine City’s Export Mart, just a few blocks away from where I live.

The thing took such a huge chunk of my time and work, it’s hard to just leave it behind. And I won’t be able to fully–we’re already more than halfway through using the initial 1000-copy printing, and already a few small errors have cropped up that need to be corrected for the next printing.

At least the hardest work is done, and from now on it’ll just be a job of reworking what’s there… but now, I am just a few weeks from having to present this year’s Arts Day video at the Arts Day Festival… and I’ve barely gotten started on that one. I look forward to November, when I will (hopefully) have no all-consuming projects left to eat up all my spare time.

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I went to another appointment with the eye specialist today (everything seems fine, they don’t think I need to go back again), and figured that since it was so close, I’d drop by Kasai Rinkai Park.

As it happened, there was not too much to see. It was high tide, so no shorebirds were at the choice viewing spot, and the second-best spot was filled with workers clearing brush. I spotted a few birds that looked interesting, but suffered the usual bird-stays-there-until-just-when-you-point-the-camera-at-it frustration.

Still, there were some good birds around. Right off the bat, I got a fair look at an Ootaka (Northern Goshawk); as it turned out, its head was partially hidden by the tree, but it was a pretty bird nonetheless.

Here’s an animated GIF of the bird eventually taking off, if you can view animated GIFs. It’s a big file, so you might not be able to view it well if you have a slow connection.

There were the usual Great Egrets…

This one got fairly close:

And there were some Azure-winged Magpies to add a bit of color.

Of course, it’s not quite yet birdwatching season; things should get better towards December… if I can find the time these days!

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Jeez. I bought a bike lock about 9 months ago. For most of that time, I didn’t even use it, and it never got left out in the rain, ever. I just started using the bike and its lock once or twice a week in the last month or two. And just a few days ago, I heard some rattling around in there.

Then yesterday, when I unlocked it, it literally came apart in my hands. That is, the guts spilled out of the keyhole. And this I bought in Inagi, where the round trip train fare alone would cost more than just buying a new lock.

Goes to show: you never can fully trust an unknown quantity, just ’cause it looks good on the shelf.

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Four years ago, I posted a gyoza (pot-sticker) recipe. Later that year, I posted an update–I had found out that adding Mozzarella cheese to the inside mix helped bind the filling and keep it moist.

Tonight, I made a new batch, and found out a few new improvements to the recipe. First, instead of using regular cabbage, you should use Chinese Cabbage (also called “bok choy,” or in Japanese, “hakusai,” or はくさい), and use more of the leafy parts and not really all of the heavy stem parts. Regular cabbage leaves too much bulk and hardness.

Leeks (nira, or にら) are still an integral part, but scale them down a bit, and fill in with “green onions” or “scallions” (negi, or ねぎ–not too heavy.

Also, drop the regular onions. Makes it too, well, oniony, too sharp. The scallions are enough to add flavor, along with the garlic.

Keep the Mozzarella cheese; as I said, it helps bind and moisten the interior.

I still prefer ground chicken to ground pork; chicken tends to be more moist and tasty a meat. You can even increase the proportion of chicken, unless you like more veggie and less meat.

Next–and this is important–if you can find more than one type of skin (wrapping), choose the thin type. That tastes much better than the thicker type.

And finally, I’ve been experimenting with adding cream cheese to the cooking process; for example, cooking chicken in stir-fry, cream cheese added to the final cooking stretch makes a big difference, and gives the chicken a rich, creamy overtone. Yo don’t need to use much, just a teaspoon or so, to add flavor. And I think it worked tonight with the gyoza. I added it soon after I poured water into the frying pan to cook the prepared gyoza dumplings, just a dab here and a dab there between the pieces, as there was still a good deal of water that had not boiled off. The cream cheese melts and joins with the water, and then slowly coats the gyoza as the water boils off, without becoming crusty or anything. It may even help maintain the moistness of the dumplings.

So follow the original recipe with those modifications. If you do, let me know your impressions!

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It’s pretty interesting that while we teach students a lot of things, one thing we tend not to teach is how to study. One would think that this would be a natural topic to cover, but as far as I can tell, it is not widely taught.

Just yesterday, we had the first day of classes in the new semester, and I went over this topic with my students. By chance, LifeHacker linked to a web site that touched on the same topic–how to raise your GPA. Now, such a list could relate tricks that are not necessarily related to study habits, but this list sticks to advice for actually learning. The problem is, I don’t think it’s a very well-put-together list.

A few points are rather obvious, so obvious that they don’t warrant mentioning: “Go to class,” “Sit in the front row,” “Don’t do group work with slackers,” and “Don’t slack off and then pull all-nighters.” These go along with a whole list of other obvious pieces of advice not on the list, such as “Pay attention in class,” “Get enough sleep,” and “Study hard.”

One point on the list is not stated clearly: “Take notes by hand.” By reading the details, one understands the author to mean that many teachers now supply PowerPoint summaries of their lectures which the students use in lieu of notes. The author says to take your own notes instead, but “by hand” is not clear; it seems to suggest writing with a pencil and paper instead of typing into a laptop. Taking notes is good advice in general, but does not go far enough; I will elaborate more below.

The two remaining suggestions are solid enough: “Do a weekly review” is not a bad idea, and “Go to office hours” is one that few people seem to take advantage of. Most times, as a college professor, I have office hours to myself; my students rarely come and take advantage, even though I remind them that they are getting free one-to-one tutoring from an experienced college professor; the equivalent at a language school is not cheap, and they have all this access just for the asking. Many schools also provide free tutoring, which is good to take advantage of.

But there are study techniques which are even better which I share with my students, and figure that it might not make a bad blog topic for the day. So here are my own tips for studying.

1. Read the assignment before the class. A surprising number of students prefer to do the reading for a chapter after they attend the lecture, not before.

The idea here is to maximize comprehension. If you go to a lecture first and read later, you will be ill-prepared. You won’t be ready to ask questions in the right places, or you might assume that things you don’t understand from the lecture will be made clear in the reading. But later, when you go through the reading, if there are things you don’t understand, you cannot ask the textbook questions, or request that it clarify.

If you read the assignment before going to the lecture, you can go at your own pace, take the time necessary for comprehension, get to know the terminology, and understand the subject matter fairly well. Anything you don’t understand, you add to a list of questions. Later, when you attend the lecture, the teacher will probably explain the subject matter you have questions about, and so you can cross those off your list. Whatever the teacher doesn’t cover, you can then ask about in class–just read the questions off your list, already prepared. If you need clarification, the teacher can provide it readily.

Furthermore, this allows you to ask questions intelligently and economically; if you don’t read beforehand, you could wind up asking a lot of questions that are made clear in the reading, thus wasting class time and annoying classmates.

Not to mention that you’ll be prepared for any pop quizzes the teacher springs on you!

One more benefit to reading ahead: it helps you cut down on lecture note-taking. If you know the information is in the textbook, you don’t have to include it in your lecture notes when the teacher covers it in the class.

2. Summarize your pre-class reading. This one may be hard to get used to; it may seem like a lot of extra work, but the payoff can be huge. In the reading assignment, every paragraph or set of paragraphs which encapsulate a concept or chunk of information should be written in your notes with a single sentence, more than one sentence if necessary. Do not simply copy down the topic sentences; re-express the information in your own words. In the end, you’ll wind up with a one-page summary of the entire assignment, written in a style native to yourself.

The first benefit is comprehension. Have you ever read ten pages of a textbook, and then realized that you do not recall or understand a single thing? Sometimes we can go through the mechanical process of reading, but somehow our retention just switches off. Summarizing forces you to focus on the meaning; you have to understand what is being expressed in order to re-word it coherently. It will also force you to learn better how to decode and comprehend the sometimes atrocious writing styles of many textbook authors, and better see the structure and substance of textbook writing.

Summarizing also benefits retention; you are far more likely to remember something you have thought about and written than something you just read as part of as large reading. And finally, at the end of the process, you have a great, concise summary of the reading which will help enormously when you need to study for the test.

3. Take lecture notes. An obvious point, granted, but it is surprising how many people don’t do this, or don’t do it well. You should always take lecture notes.

First, write down everything the teacher writes on the board, unless you observe that your teacher writes meaningless stuff all the time. Usually, teachers write information on the board which they feel is significant, that you should pay attention to–so pay attention to it.

Second, learn how to filter information in the lecture, and distinguish between note-worthy information and non-essential filler. If you try to write down everything the teacher says, you will fall so far behind that you won’t catch most of what the teacher is saying.

Third, develop a shorthand. Writing even just the high points out fully will again set you far back and make you miss subsequent information. Work out abbreviations, and decide on graphic representations of ideas and actions. An obvious example of the latter would be to use an arrow to represent cause and effect.

4. Type out your lecture notes after class. Here’s another thing most people don’t do, but should. When we take lecture notes, we often use shorthand devices that we make up on the spot; it’s hard to have a shorthand squiggle prepared for every eventuality. We can read our own lecture notes and understand them if we review them quickly, on the same day they were written. But come back to your lecture notes after a whole week, and you will find that a big chunk of what you wrote now appears as nonsense to you.

So as part of your daily ritual, sit down and type out in longhand everything you took notes on in class. In the end, you’ll have another set of clean, concise notes that will nicely complement your reading summary. Furthermore, re-typing (and having to translate from shorthand to longhand) again aids comprehension and retention.

You might think that all of this note-taking will be time-consuming. It may be so, but you will get a better payoff in terms of improved grades, and in the end, you might even wind up saving time otherwise spent re-reading the textbook or otherwise trying to understand something you missed because you didn’t take such notes. And with experience, the time needed to take notes will decrease as you become more efficient at both note-taking and at comprehension.

5. Join a study group. Again, it may seem obvious, but a lot of people don’t do this. You should have a study group for each class that requires you to acquire information. If possible, form a study group with people who share several common classes, so you can condense the sessions. Study groups should ideally be between three and six people. You should meet at least once a week, with perhaps special sessions before exams.

First, everyone in the study group should have enough copies of their reading and lecture notes to pass around to everyone. That way, you wind up with three to six sets of notes. Studying other people’s notes (if they are well-prepared) can reveal information you may have missed, and otherwise will offer a fresh perspective and style that may make reviewing more pleasant and informative.

Second, everyone should ask questions on points they still don’t understand, or which they don’t understand as well as they would like to. There will likely be someone in the group who knows the information and can explain it to you. Questions asked by others may highlight information you should know but had missed or neglected.

And third, everyone should close their notes and have one member of the group quiz everyone else, everyone taking turns. Each question should be targeted at a specific member of the group, else one or a few members will answer most of the questions and defeat the purpose for the slower members. When another person is asked a question, see if you can answer it in your head. If someone gets an answer wrong or doesn’t answer it fully, don’t put them down or blurt out the answer yourself. Instead, try to supportively prod them for the correct or full answer–but don’t push.

6. Don’t insist on studying with people who are smarter than you are. This is advice on study groups, but I feel it’s important enough to have its own header. When choosing your study group, you may feel like joining one that is populated entirely with people who are ahead of you in the class, thinking that their smarts will rub off on you. This is not necessarily true, and may backfire.

First, you may lose confidence; if everyone is way ahead of you , you might start to feel that there’s something wrong with you when nothing is wrong with you.

Second, you may miss information you need to know, if others in the group feel it is obvious or assumed as known by everyone else.

And third, you may find that it is far more beneficial and enlightening to answer questions than it is to ask them and have things explained to you. I found this out in my post-graduate studies at San Francisco State, where I formed study groups primarily with Japanese students, due to my background in Japan. Since they were non-native speakers, they naturally caught a lot less than I did, and during study group sessions, they peppered me with questions. I gradually discovered that explaining the information to the others led to much greater comprehension on my part. This is because explaining something forces you to organize and process the information in your own mind first–something you don’t usually do when it is simply explained to you. Being in the role of tutor also gives you motivation to study harder, knowing that others are depending on you. And finally, taking on the role of tutor to classmates gives you greater confidence and a sense of pride; your classmates will likely see you in a better light as well.

7. Set up a study schedule. I will freely admit that I was the kind of student who waited until Sunday evening at 11:00 pm to start working on assignments. Needless to say, this is not a good study technique, unless you perform exceptionally well only when under time pressure. The thing is, just saying “I have to start studying earlier” usually doesn’t do the trick; you have to have a method.

You should set aside times which are dedicated to study, and treat that schedule as seriously as you would a job or an assigned class. Work out a schedule which works best for you, depending on your personal habits and quirks. General scheduling advice might include points such as studying before meals rather than after them, when you are sated and more inclined to doze off. You might want to break up your study schedule into two-hour pieces, giving yourself intervals to rest, relax, and enjoy yourself so you can return to your study refreshed.

But the core idea here is to respect the schedule and stick to it religiously. Feel free to study longer than the schedule dictates, but never shorter, unless you are assured that all your work has been completed, and effectively so.

8. Finish assignments early so you can wait and then review. One of the biggest problems with completed assignments that I see as a teacher is the lack of proofreading and review. When you finish an essay or other assignment, you tend to be tired of it and eager to set it aside, without proofreading it. Even if you do take the time to proofread, you are probably “too close” to the work and will have difficulty seeing its flaws.

Make sure that you finish an assignment at least a day before it’s due, preferably two. Then set the assignment aside at least overnight, and then proofread it the next day. You will find that you have distanced yourself enough from the work that you can look at it more objectively, and note the errors in it.

Proofreading might seem like a pain sometimes, but it is probably one of the easiest ways to hike up the grades you receive.

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I hope that this list has helped you out some, if you’re a student. Even if you’re not a student, a lot of the principles here may help in other endeavors. Cheers.

Stumble it!

Last Sunday was the first anniversary of Sachi and I meeting. We took the morning off, and then celebrated in the evening.

I had been preparing for this for a while. Every three months since we met, I would get Sachi another three small stuffed dogs, from a line put out by a company that had a large variety of breeds, nicely crafted. So before this anniversary, she had nine little dogs. For this anniversary–a yearly thing instead of quarterly–I decided to go whole hog. I found stuffed dogs at several different places, finally having to go down to the Ginza to find one that I wanted to top things off.

Here’s how I arranged it: when Sachi and I left for dinner, I made an excuse to run back in to the apartment (I intentionally left a fan running so I could go back and turn it off). That gave me the chance to leave the first present out on the dining room table: a small basket with two tiny stuffed dogs in it. Each of these came with a card with a note inside. When we came back from dinner, Sachi found the first dogs, and the note told her that the dogs “bigger brothers and sisters” were hiding under the bed because they were afraid of the fireworks.

This worked out really well, in fact: we unexpectedly got treated to two fireworks shows at dinner. We ate at a restaurant on the 58th floor of the Sunshine 60 Building, the view out the window looking down on our own building. It’s a nice place, with multi-course dinners; reasonably priced, but food and service equivalent to a more expensive restaurant. We arrived at 6:30 and left at 8:30, which happens to be the time frame for fireworks in Japan during the summer. One show started to the northeast, relatively distant–but it was pretty big, and was nice to watch. But then another show started up a lot closer, and that was even nicer. Almost all the way through dinner we watched the shows. So when we came back, that first note “from” the two tiny puppies made sense in a way I had not intended.

In any case, the note with the first two puppies led Sachi to the drawer under the bed, where I had placed six stuffed dogs, of the same kind I had given her before (she now has 15 in total).

Their note gave clues as to where the next dog was “hiding,” a floppily-stuffed yellow lab about a foot long. His note led to the back of the top shelf where we keep the towels, where I’d stashed his “bigger brother,” a two-foot-long version of the same dog.

The note on that one led to their “even bigger brother,” who was “hanging out in the closet.” I had that rather large 3-foot stuffed dog–the biggest version of the same dog–suspended from the coat rack in a closet Sachi uses for winter-wear storage. That dog directed her to ask me for the final dog.

Sachi loves Shiba Inu dogs. They’re kind of like small versions of huskies, the most common type being light brown with white underneath and some spots of white on the face. But finding stuffed Shibas is very hard. In Japan, Shibas are popular, but for some reason they don’t make stuffed Shibas much–and when they do, they do them rather poorly. But at the Ginza store, I found a very nice stuffed Shiba puppy doll, which was perfect as the final gift.

The notes on each had more than just directions to the next dog, but that will remain private. Needless to say, Sachi enjoyed them thoroughly–but later, she mentioned that I had better stop getting her dogs, as we were quickly running out of places to put them.

The exercise also proved difficult in terms of setting it all up. The anniversary was Sunday evening, but after Friday afternoon I knew that Sachi and I would be together all the time–so I had to set them all up before then. The problem: we have a small apartment–not too many good hiding places–and they all had to be in places where Sachi would not find them by accident. I could not even steer her away from the hiding places all the time, because Saturday afternoon I was out for six hours at the graduation ceremony for my school, while Sachi relaxed at home. And even though I did find good places, it was almost undone when Sachi text-messaged me at the ceremony, asking where I had stored the ironing machine. I knew exactly where it was: right next to the medium-sized dog on the back of the top towel shelf. I had to tell her that she couldn’t iron anything that afternoon.

Not that she was surprised; she figured that there would be stuffed dogs involved, and I’ve done the treasure-hunt game before. She just didn’t know the extent I had gone to. As we went shopping before dinner, she speculated on how many dogs, what sizes, and so forth while I kept mum. She only guessed as high as three dogs, though–not twelve. I kept the secret pretty well.

Sachi, on the other hand, is not nearly as good at keeping secrets. Two of the three times she has gotten me gifts, she has accidentally blurted out what she got me. This time it was at Eddie Bauer, just before dinner, when we were looking at clothes I could buy. I mentioned that I should get some new short pants. Now, Sachi could have said something like, “the shirts you’re getting today are enough for now,” or “I know a better shop to go to for that,” or something else which would not have roused my suspicions. Instead, she blurted, “I got you a pair already!”–and then was instantly annoyed that I had “made her” tell me what (part of) her present was. She couldn’t be mad, of course, but for a while we had fun while I teased her about not being able to keep a secret well, while she just as kiddingly blamed me for tearing the secret out of her. (She told me lightheartedly that I was “ijiwaru,” or being mean.)

It was a fun evening.

Stumble it!

This one is a recipe that I remember from childhood. My mother used to make it for us, and I always liked it. Some years back, I got my mother to pass on the recipe to me, and figured that I might add it to the sparse number of recipes I’ve entered in this blog.

This dish basically makes a kind of salmon “cake,” about 1″ high in a 9″ x 9″ pan (I use a glass pan). It’s a bit bready, a bit cheesy, but with a salmon overtaste with the spices adding to it… It’s a delicious dish, hard to describe; you’ll have to make it and see for yourself.

Here are the ingredients:

1 lb. canned salmon (450 g)
1 egg (large)
3/4 cup milk
1 cup soft bread crumbs
1 cup shredded cheddar cheese
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon celery salt
1/2 teaspoon garlic salt
1/2 cup dry bread crumbs
2 tablespoons melted butter

(pre-heat oven to 350˚ F, or 180˚ C–but not until about 10-15 minutes before baking)

The hardest part of this recipe is handled first: cleaning the canned salmon and flaking it. I get three 180-gram cans (Akebono Salmon). Now, when you get canned tuna, it’s just the good part (as I recall). But canned salmon includes parts that some may find edible, but I certainly don’t, including bones and skin. So you have to empty the canned salmon into a bowl and then, by hand, pick out the skin and bones, leaving the good, flaky salmon ready to be added to the rest of the recipe.

In the image below, I start with the canned salmon (top), pick out the skin and bones (middle right), and end up with a bowl of nice, flaked salmon (bottom).

Next, you’ll want to measure out and set aside momentarily the soft bread crumbs and cheese. You’ll note that I did not use just cheddar–I used crumbled mozzarella as well. I also use a bit more cheese than the recipe calls for. The extra cheese and the mozzarella add to the spongy, springy taste, to my liking. Actually, I use a few more bread crumbs than the recipe calls for also, but just a bit. You should compress the crumbs when measuring the cupful, by the way.

Now, put the egg and 3/4 cup of milk on a largish mixing bowl:

Add the bread crumbs, and then mix together (you can mix the egg and milk first if you like):

After you have the bread-egg-milk mixture, drop onto it the flaked salmon and cheese. Then add the tablespoon of lemon juice and the spices:

Personally, I use Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing Mix powder instead of garlic salt. I never make dressing from it–I just use it as a spice. It’s mostly garlic and onion in a salt-powder mix anyway, and I like the taste better. I also use more than just a 1/2 teaspoon of it–usually a few teaspoons. It doesn’t overpower–in fact, you can just taste it a bit, not too much, even in large amounts–but you can taste it, and I like the difference.

After you add the salmon, cheese, lemon juice and spices, then you get your hands dirty: reach in there and knead it until it’s all spread around as well as you can get it. After this and the original cleaning, you’ll have fishy-smelling fingernails for a bit–part of the cost of making the dish.

Now you’re ready to prep the pan. I use a 9″-square glass pan myself–I don’t know if the glass part is important or not. Smear some butter, margarine, shortening, or other pan-geasing item to the bottom 1″ of the pan. It’s also at about this time that I start pre-heating the oven, by the way.

Now, put the mix into the pan, flattening it out so that it’s level, but don’t compress it too much.

Next, put two tablespoons of butter or margarine into a frying pan and melt it; add the 1/2 cup of dry bread crumbs, and cook them in the butter, until they become golden brown or darker. You can use more bread crumbs than 1/2 cup if you want.

Then scatter the bread crumbs on top of the mix in the pan, as evenly as you can get it.

If your oven is now at the right temperature or close to it, put the pan into the oven and set your timer for 30 minutes. In Japan, actual ovens are a rarity; however, you can use a microwave/convection oven–it will serve as a nuke wagon, but you can also bake stuff in it. Highly recommended for living and cooking in Japan.

After 30 minutes, take it out and leave it to cool a little. I like to serve it with mashed potatoes, with some negi (green onions) mixed in.

Makes enough for at least three people, four or more if you spread it around more thinly. Serve with salad and whatever else you like. Is good reheated the next day as leftovers as well. Enjoy!

Stumble it!