横浜豪州人

Just a mini-blog this time, I tend to forget to take photos of interesting things.
Just for those who don't know, my email address is cameron_en@hotmail.com, and to call me from Australia you can dial 0011-81-80-4088-4355, OR you can use skype (ID: cameron_en), it's free (http://www.skype.com).

~Minesawa Temple~

On the way down to Wadamachi we always walk past this little buddhist shrine, my friend and I decided to take a few photos.






cute little statues


Notice what looks like a Nazi symbol on the spiny wheel thing. There seems to be ancient Japanese written on it.


One minute you're in front of a quiet and peaceful buddhist temple, and the next you're on a busy main road. This road goes all the way to Yokohama City, I've walked the whole thing once and it took about an hour, kinda painful.

~Back to Minesawa (that's where I'm staying)~

When the weather is good (and the pollution in the air is low), you can see Mt. Fuji from my dorm. It's kind of nice, I hope I can actually go there one day.

farms

There are many suburban farms right next to where I'm staying, I'm surprised nobody ever steals their produce. We use this farm as a shortcut to the local convenience store.

~Sumo + Akihabara~

Mr. Ito (the head of the Mitsui V-net) offered to take some of us to a Sumo wrestling match today. In order to get there we all had to wake up at 4.30, but it was a good experience.





Mr. Ito explained to us that touching the butt on the sumo wrestler statue was supposed to bring good luck. So as you can see their butts look pretty greased up from all the hands which have slapped it. Mr. Ito slapped it a lot : )

Akihabara is a crazy place, I instantly recognised some of the buildings from a Japanese drama which I watched previously. There are electronics everywhere, as well as maid cafe`s. I felt like maid cafe`s were like prostitution; the maids stand on the street, trying to entice you to come to their cafe, it was like Shibuya all over again. So I didn't go to a maid cafe. I think I made Steven sad, sorry, steven.

I've sorta been looking at MP3 players for a while now, but I particularly needed something which would let me listen to the radio while I'm in Japan. The cheapest option I could think of was to grab something cheap and nasty off of ebay, so I did.


I'm not sure which model this is exactly, but you can pick them up from ebay anywhere between $15-$30 (Aussie dollars). The model I got was the 8GB one, which is more than enough to store all the songs I currently possess.


You can see it's quite small and it weighs almost nothing, I forget it's even in my pocket sometimes.


It comes with some white headphones which are pretty dodgy but you can use the included 2.5->3.5 adapter to use your own headphones.

In the picture above you can see the menu, from which you can navigate to:
- Music
- Movies
- Photos
- Games
- E-books
- Phone book
- Settings
..and maybe some other things I've forgotten


This is what the music section looks like, it has a little equalizer and is supposed to display the name of the current song in the ticker-bar. Unfortunately it seems to struggle with the IDv3 Japanese MP3 tags which most of my music has so it just appears as gibberish.

When I first opened the package, I uploaded my entire music collection onto the player (which you can easily do via USB on both mac and windows) but later realised that you can only put a maximum of 120 songs in each folder, otherwise this thing goes and does some freaky shit with your files leaving you with nothing to do but to reformat it. BUT, if you can split your songs into little folders then I guess it's not too bad.

One major downside to this application is that you can't view and select the song you wanna listen to from a list. Instead you just have to press next and hope it'll come on soon. It's kind of annoying, but if you stick to a pre-arranged playlist which you're happy with then it shouldn't be a big problem.


And to the main reason why I purchased this thing; the radio. I was easily able to pick up the 6 most popular stations in my state and add them to my favourites, the quality of the sound isn't bad, check out a sample of my favourite radio station here. I recorded it with my computer using the input from the player, but you can also record radio on the player itself.


A little plus for me is that it supports the Japanese Radio Band, which uses different frequencies to most other countries, so I feel happy knowing that it'll work while I'm living over in Japan.

The only other section worth mentioning is photos, I just uploaded photos of natsu on there to look at when I feel lonely... The quality isn't fantastic, but it's a nice feature to have.

Overall, this thing is kinda cool, I sort of recommend it (a little bit), especially to those who like to work out and not have a huge freaking brick attached to themselves, and also to those wishing to use radio to learn a foreign language (as I am doing). As I accidentally bought two, I'll be giving the other one to natsu when she comes to Adelaide.

: )

So I recently decided I wanted to make my page look a bit prettier. If you ever look at a Vietnamese person's My Opera page you'll notice it's most likely pimped out to the max, I wouldn't wanna go as far as they do, but I thought I'd share some CSS scripts I've been using. I'm not the best programmer either by the way, my methods are generally pretty sloppy.

Multilingual Opera Banner^*NEW*
An alternative option to the English-onl banner which is displayed in the sidebar. It contains English, Japanese and Korean. Of course you could just replace the image with whichever you choose.

#getopera {background: url(http://files.myopera.com/cameron_en/blog/dop.png);}
#getopera img {visibility: hidden;}

Search Bar in the menu bar script
This kind of pushes the search bar out of the way by sticking it next to the menu buttons rather than in your side panel. You should be able to see it on my page.

#blogsearch form {position: absolute; top: -25px; right: 0px;}
#blogsearch h2 {display: none;}

Compact friends section script
This will save some more space at the top of your sidebar by making the images a tiny bit smaller and compact and by removing borders and names. These can still be viewed on a mouse hover.

#friendz li, #friendz a:link, #friendz a:visited, #friendz a:active {
background: url(none);}
#friendz li {
float:left;
width:80;
height:60;
margin:0 0 0px 0px;}
#friendz a:link, #friendz a:visited, #friendz a:active {
display:block;
padding:0px;}
#friendz img {
margin:0 0 0px 0px;}
.block {display: none;}

Comic book style chat messages
Here's a script to make the chat messages in the sidebar look like comic book lettering:

blockquote {font-family:"Comic Sans Ms"; text-transform: uppercase; font-weight: bold;}

Image resizer on hover script
This one was just a bit of fun I guess, it enlarges certain images when you hover oven them so you can see them better. The following code should be placed in your custom CSS sheet:

#el:hover {width: 610;}

...and whenever you insert an image into your blog, add the ID of "el" to the ones you wish to apply the effect to:

<img id="el" src="http://files.myopera.com/cameron_en/blog/gogo.jpg" width="25%">

and it should work something like this:

So a lot's been happening since the last time I wrote a blog.

To start off with, after a long year of preparation and anxiety I received good news that I'd been accepted into 横浜国立大学, Yokohama National University. Unfortunately the news still hasn't sunk in, even though I should be hell excited... I think I may be in denial about it. I dunno why I always must assume the worst, a common thought of mine is that they're gonna change their mind and say I can't go anymore, so I guess I won't be able to relax until I set foot in Japan.

I received a scholarship too, it's a bit less than JASSO but it's still extremely helpful for me. Thank you, IDP Australia, I would be financially unable to go to Japan without the support I have been given. I'm still seeking additional support, the weak Australian dollar has made it a little painful for me money-wise.

In other news, I've had this name "カメロン" since I was a child. My Japanese teacher (an aussie) had given me that name when I was five years old and I just hung on to it for as long as I could. After high school I kinda changed it to 亀論, but that name is, well, kinda crap. It means "turtle theory", which is nothing special to me and just seems to make japanese people giggle. SO, I created a full new name for myself:
新留 亀倫It's read like にいる かめろん, which is a perfect transcription of my English name although the reading of the "倫" kanji isn't common, but atleast it's a legal kanji. The meanings for each of the characters have special meaning to me;
新 - I guess this could represent the fact that I'm a newcomer to Japan;
留 - I'll enter Japan as a 留学生, so I think this kanji has a significant personal meaning;
亀 - (カメ) was a nickname given to me by my first really close Japanese friend back in high school; and
倫 - (funky pronunciation ろん) Means ethical, moral, companion.. a much nicer meaning that "theory", eck. Some people have said this kanji suits me quite well, although I wouldn't say I'm a goodie goodie.

Has anyone else made themselves a kanji name?

Also notice the new banner up the top, I stole found a photo of Yokohama which looked really cool, you can see Fuji-san in the background. BTW, 豪州人 is an old fashioned way of saying "Australian", I just hate using katakana.