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I've always loved anime, and I've picked up a couple of Japanese words from watching. Then I got Obenkyo for Android, to help me learn the hiragana and katakana. (Seriously, folks, Obenkyo is awesome.) Now I can read Japanese, but not understand it; nevertheless, it's always interesting to find the hidden English words in Japanese videos.

Six months ago or so, my parents found a Pimsleur Japanese CD set laying around, and brought it over for me.

Today (see how my spare time goes?) I started listening to it, with my daughter, on the way to the grocery store.

It's pretty neat. The only problem is that you're getting actual native speakers, so sometimes what you hear is different from what you're supposed to hear.

For instance, "English" sounds like "Eigo" on the tape. But later, when they introduce "Japanese" (Nihongo), the narrator talks about the "ng" sound. Then he asks if you heard it in "Eigo".

Well, no. No, I didn't. But now I think I do! Is it there or not?

It seems I'm climbing down the prestige vehicle ladder: electric car, gas car, scooter, and now bicycle. I was having real problems with... ummm... how to put it delicately?... the bicycle saddle. Yeah.

I just spent a week traveling for work, and it's done me a world of good. I could barely even feel the saddle when I climbed on the bike this morning, and I was still in pretty good shape when I got to work.

I think I may be insufficiently hydrated, though: my heart rate kept rocketing up. At least that's a lot easier to fix than a bicycle saddle!

I found a web-based tool for trying Starcraft 2 builds. It's fully Javascript, and a little unintuitive, but once you get the hang of it, it's worthwhile.

On my Vista system, both Firefox and IE9 don't update the URL as you build. Chrome works, though. Then you can save links like this: SC2Planner 4-gate.

After riding the scooter for 8 trips, it's quit on me. It's been going so well, too! It started so easily, and worked so well. Now it stalls whenever I try to accelerate. I can even sit on it, hold it back with my feet on the ground, and stall it by applying some throttle.

I asked the Honda Spree scooter forums what was going wrong; they told me to clean the carburetor. So this weekend I took it apart and checked on some other problems I had, too.

I've been riding The Red Devil to work for almost two weeks now.

While I hear lots of talk about scooters and motorcycles being invisible to normal drivers, I've had very little trouble. Almost everybody notices me and gives me safe space.

Oddly, all the problems I've had have been with giant trucks and SUVs. In the scariest incident, I was going 30 in a 25mph zone; the giant black SUV behind me wanted to go 40, and decided he could share the lane with me while he roared up to the red light. Doofus.