For a few years now there’s been a website in the Netherlands and Belgium that asks participants to fill out their details on a weekly basis with regard to cold and influenza symptoms.
After that there was a Portuguese site doing the same thing.
There is still not much known about migratory patterns and occurences of the flu within the world, these websites will help create more understanding, so please help them out. It will take a maximum of 5 minutes per week, but the information is very useful for scientists (virologists).
New Zealand starts its Haka ka mate but then get interrupted by Tonga with their Sipi tau. Every time I watch this my skin gets goosebumps. Quite powerful when you see them perform against each other like this.
So I was working with a Japanese .xla (Excel add-in) file. I needed to look at something in the source so I fired up the Visual Basic editor within Excel. Upon investigating the form and the various captions it turns out that the Visual Basic editor only displayed them in gibberish (typical decoding issues) or question marks (substituting the .notdef glyph for codepoints). So it seems the Visual Basic editor is either not multi-byte capable (typing directly a string in Japanese into the caption yielded question marks) or it is bound to the locale of the system.
I then remembered AppLocale and fired up Excel through it, setting it to think it is on a Japanese system. Then within Excel I proceeded to start the Visual Basic editor and, sure enough, the text was showing me the Japanese I needed.
I am not sure if I should find this lame or understandable.
Here in Rotterdam we have a Chinese supermarket called in Dutch phonetic Cantonese ‘Wah Nam Hong’, which in Jyutping (waa4 naam4 hong4) stands for the hanzi 華南行. Literally translated 華南 stands for South China and matches the obvious Cantonese heritage. The 行 stands for a profession or business line.
What is interesting to me is that in Japanese (日本語) you read 華南 as かなん and it means South China as well. However, 行 would be こう or ぎょう and has not retained the profession/business line meaning at all.
I recently started to try out Google Earth and I have to say that it really is a load of fun. The urge to experiment and dig deeper and try more is readily apparent when you start using this application.
It’s on my list of things to explore much more in-depth (as well as Google Analytics).
Not being a soccer fan at all I just had to laugh at the following:
Tokyo Verdy 1969 (東京ヴェルディ1969), who conceded 26 goals in six matches earlier this month, did the unthinkable Monday night by thumping Spanish giants Real Madrid 3-0 at Ajinomoto Stadium (味の素スタジアム).
Real Madrid, with very expensive players (including Ronaldo, David Beckham, Zinedine Zidane and Luis Figo, who all played) and a reputation from here to, literally, Tokyo, was beaten by some minor Japanese club.
Shows that zeal wins over routine if you really want to show what you got.