Spinning the flint with his thumb shot sparks onto the wick. What was just cold metal a few seconds ago
was now a column of dancing yellow-orange flame. He brought it towards his mouth and to the waiting tobacco. A deep drag on the cigarette brought a heat to his lungs and a greatly anticipated relief to his brain. He exhaled, blowing the out the smoke in a fast moving stream. It was then he noticed how windy it was here. The smoke had hardly left his mouth before the wind took it and threw it back at him.

He looked around himself and saw there were a lot of hills about and many trees. Being that it was autumn, all the trees were losing their leaves. The wind blew red, yellow, orange leaves every which way. The rider could see where various residents had attempted to corral the leaves into neat piles and show off their neatly trimmed lawn. The wind would have none of that though. If the wind wanted a Pollock on the ground, that’s what it got. From his vantage point at the top of the hill, he could look down and see the town below him. It was small, but a lot of the houses were large and it was obvious that this town was the place to live for the wealthy who worked in the city nearby. Given a cursory examination, the town didn’t stand out much from any of the other ones he had been through recently. Everyplace had its restaurants and shops and schools. This one was no different in that regard. The rider then saw something that made the town start to stand out in his mind. It was on top of one of the hills nearby. A single wind turbine, reaching to the sky. Why there was only one and not an entire farm of them was odd, but without an immediate clue as to the reason, he pushed it out of his mind.

Finding there was nothing left to get out of the cigarette, he tossed it to the road and ground it with his boot. It was time to get off this hill and start his search. The man he was looking for had eluded him thus far, but he was almost positive he was located in this town. There was no place else for him to be. It was a great place to hide and he appreciated the skill of his quarry. The hunt was about to end though. He felt it.

Kicking the starter on his motorcycle, the bike roared to life and he started his ride down the hill into town. As he passed it, he took one last gaze at the solitary turbine on the hill.

A while ago I was talking to a friend and she asked me if I knew how make it so she could type in Japanese. She had a penpal in Japan and wanted to write to him. I didn’t know off the top of my head so I did a quick Google search and told her what I found. She didn’t feel comfortable screwing around with settings on the family’s shared computer, so we looked around for a web based solution. All we could find was a simple website that would let you type in katakana and hiragana but not get the kanji she wanted. Only writing in hiragana makes you come off as unintelligent, not to mention using kanji really cuts down on the space used. We couldn’t find any other solutions than that, so she came up with a half analogue, half digital temporary solution.

I thought to myself, I could make an acceptable solution. A simple Web-based Japanese Keyboard (WebJaK). In general, it would work like this: User goes to a website and sees a keyboard and a text box. They can either click on the keys on their keyboard, or type on their own. The keyboard would have hiragana on it (or katakana if they held down shift) and they could type and the results would show up in the text box. This is no different than the website that was found earlier, except mine would have an extra functionality. One that would make it work more like a real keyboard setup. That thing was hiragana to kanji lookup. As you typed in words, the script would look to see if those characters corresponded to any readings of kanji and then give you the option of making a replacement.

I would need a few things though. First, a tutorial on how to get keyboard events in JavaScript. Second, a Japanese dictionary that contained hiragana to kanji lookups that would give me Unicode back. Third, a picture of a standard Japanese keyboard that would give me a reference to use when making the user interface.

Parts one and three were easy enough, Google helped again. Part two was a little trickier. I remembered one site that I’ve used before that was an online dictionary (see it here) and I looked back at it again and saw that it had a link to the dictionary it uses. It’s in XML format, but I figured I could easily parse out the tags for the hiragana <=> kanji pairs. Sure, that would be simple enough, until I looked at the file. It’s about 30MB. The number of lines was close to two million (1,806,833). Each line wasn’t a single entry though. Each entry didn’t have kanji attached to it, and each entry used about ten to fifteen lines to save all the data. I wanted to know how many kanji elements there were. How could I do that though? It’s probably not the most efficient way, but I went into the file with Vim and started attacking it with lines that looked like this - :s/someRegularExpression/d (search the file for lines that matched that regexp and then delete it). Soon, I was down to just kanji, and the results were around 10,000 lines.

That was the end of my development. That 10,000 entries is just too much. Sure, I can put them all into a database, but the lookups are going to kill performance.  A web based script just can’t deal with that many of them. This is probably why there are only kanji lookups on full programs. Does anybody have any suggestions?

“INSTANT NEON GARDEN”, the box had said. ‘Instant neon garden?’, she thought. She had no idea what that meant and there were no photos on the box to show her what was in there. It was sealed shut with those large staples that required the jaws of life to remove, so she couldn’t even consider sneaking a peak at it in the store.

Checking every side of the box, she found very little information. Just a repetition of, in a variety of languages, ‘Instant neon garden - Easy set up. Be the talk of the town, impress your friends!’

There was only one left on the shelf, so it must be a popular item she thought. Hefting it into her cart next to a bulk package of forty rolls of 2-ply thousand sheet toilet paper and a container of Kool-aid mix that could turn your entire swimming pool into a purple grape lagoon, she headed for the checkout. The boy at the register dutifully scanned her items, one by one. Watching her total go up and up, she realized she never looked for a price for her new garden. She thought she could just say she didn’t want it when it was scanned if it was too much. When the boy got to it, he aimed the barcode reader gun at the box and got nothing. Frowning, he pulled the trigger again. And again. Finally after hitting the gun against his palm a few times, the box scanned. She was relieved to see that it finally worked and that it was only $10.99. How these wholesale club stores got their prices so low would never cease to amaze her.

During the drive home she was, if anything, anxious. What did it look like? Would it really make her the talk of the town. She pulled into her driveway and took a deep breath. ‘Relax’, she told herself, ‘you’re getting too worked up over this. Wait until it’s nearly dark until you set it up’. It wouldn’t get dark for another few hours, but it would be a good exercise in patience. She placed the box near the backdoor and tried to find something to do for the next two hours.

She soon learned that patience wasn’t her strong suit. She would continually pace back and forth past the box, checking on it every five minutes, to make sure it was still there. She tried washing the dishes, but when she was drying one, she glanced at the clock and attempted to place the plate next to the sink at the same time. The results were less than optimal. Soon she found herself vacuuming the same piece of rug over and over in front of the clock.

It was finally time. The moment of truth was about the arrive. She brought the box outside and set it on the table. She didn’t want to break anything inside, so she first tried to delicately open the box. When the staples and corrugated cardboard resisted that, she went inside and came back with a box cutter. The cardboard fell to the wayside and the contents of the box were revealed.

She pulled them out, one by one and set them up around the yard. She plugged them all into the surge protector that came with her garden and set that near the outlet on the outside of her house that she never used. It was the moment of truth.

When the plug hit the outlet, the results were breathtaking. It was like Las Vegas had upped and moved to her tiny backyard. Begonias, hydrangeas, crocuses. Peony and dahlia on opposite sides of the yard pushed their light towards each other, each trying to out do the other. The instant neon garden was the beacon at the end of Daisy’s dock for her Gatsby.

…to not be continued…

I think I need a notebook. One that I can bring with me most places. One to put ideas in. Snippets of posts, plans for tomorrow. One for schematics and blue prints and facts I’ve picked up. Scribbles and rants. It can’t be too thick though, but still has to be able to hold up against the beating it will go through, being carried around and being taken in and out of bags and toss on desks or floors or where ever. I don’t think I could ever find a notebook that would be perfect. I don’t think they make them one third plain white paper, one third lined legal pad, one third green tinted graph paper.

I’d also need a pen for all this, one with some weight behind it, probably ball point as well. My handwriting is too messy for flowing ink. I use a pen like that for my work notebook and it’s hardly legible. I think the next time I’m out near office max I’ll go see what they have to offer.

Chances of me using the notebook for what I said? Slim to none.