Pixel Perfect Pumpkin Picture

This computer's slowness is something that takes a ton of getting used to. However, I finally completed my pumpkins. I find myself doing a lot of art.

I have both a version for drawing in and for writing in. I didn't draw the pumpkin, I stole it off the internet. But I combined and modified them so that counts for something. 

Here are the pumpkins I used:

Of course these aren't necessarily for my high schoolers. Another JET asked me to fill in for him teaching a class in my city. Why he, who does not live in my city, teaches this class instead of me in the first place is a mystery, but I accepted. He couldn't make it because he has to attend a speech contest (only later did I realize my own student's speech contest is this same speech contest so now I can't go). The students are primary school kids and their parents, so I figured coloring in pumpkins would be a good idea. I also stole and slightly recolored some crosswords and word searches I found online.

It's been an artsy week.

Also, there is a mysterious box of chocolates on my desk. It has a bow and everything. No one seems to know where it is from. My supervisor suggests it might be a bomb. If I die, I died doing what I loved: opening boxes.

Tourist Trap

So, I'm home from Korea! Finally. You could say I arrived a day late and a dollar short. Korea was fun and awesome, but mostly I'm posting this in the odd chance someone is Googling about the Kampu Ferry and wants to go to Busan from Shimonoseki.

BE EARLY!

So, the website lists the departure times, but not the check in times because that'd be helpful. Even though I have had the exact same experience last time I was trying to come from Busan by ferry, apparently I never learn. I arrived an hour before departure time, ticket in tow, after a grueling 5 hour train ride, to find out check in closes a whole 2.5 hours before.

CHECK IN ENDS 2.5 HOURS BEFORE DEPARTURE!

So be there on time if you want to go. I wasn't, had to miss the next day of work. Couldn't reach my boss either; had to use the wifi to contact another JET to have her call my boss and explain. Never mind the pay phones with the international country codes listed, because they can't make international calls. Go figure. Or maybe I was just doing it wrong...

I first suspected something was wrong when the ticket booth window was empty. I ran upstairs to try to board, but discovered my ticket was useless. Eventually, some lady found me before I left and told me I could change my ticket for the next day if I paid some fee, but warned me about if I were late a second time, I had to pay full price. She asked how much I had, and fortunately I found a stash of money that probably would have caused me to have taken the fast train and been early if I hadn't forgotten about it or hadn't stupidly stashed it so I could take pictures of all the money. She looked really concerned with how little money I had. I told her I could just sleep in the station or on the street, but this didn't comfort her. She kept asking if I would really be okay.

I ending up meeting an English teacher from Laos. He was also late for his own ferry to Fukuoka. We ended up finding a motel in what was called Chinatown but appeared to be Russiatown. I was excited to read all the signs, but my Russian at this point has devolved to "My father is a biologist. Where is the library?"

At least you can get spicy fried chicken.

And prostitutes. I think. Didn't confirm, much to my new friend's disappointment. "What are they doing here...? Ask them what they are doing here..." Unfortunately, during one quarter of Russian, I didn't learn the word for prostitute. We did get offered "boom boom" though from a small, middle-aged Korean lady.

Next day, I foolishly decided to walk up a mountain and see a temple. The temple is nice, if a bit under construction  but the walk takes a while and a lot of energy - an hour uphill.

So, I eventually got home, and was only 6 minutes late the next day. I was able to rush through the customs line as a Japanese citizen. I guess most people coming in were Koreans. They converted my one hour of vacation time to one day, and I seem to have no problems. I was really lucky that because of the holiday on Monday, my Tuesday school was running Monday's schedule, and I was scheduled to just sit around all day doing nothing, no classes.

CHECK IN EARLY!

The White Zone is for Loading and Unloading of Passengers Only

So, since I am starting this blog after my adventures already began, think of this as a flashback post. I don't plan to post about everything that happens here, just the more exciting or interesting stuff. And let me tell you, orientation was not one of those things.

However, I do feel like ranting about luggage! So, after a long and boring flight, it was time to board a bus to orientation and ship any extra luggage to our homes in our individual prefectures. I foolishly took the constant warnings of "Don't overpack" to mean I should underpack. Though later I realized though I was not missing anything I needed, I could have brought another 50lbs of free luggage instead of mailing it.

There I am, the only JET with one suitcase, one personal item thing, and one backpack. Everyone else is trugging (as an English teacher, I reserve the right to invent words) along the same things but with the addition of a whole 'nother suitcase. This apparently blows the minds of the people directing us to load our luggage. I try explaining over and over that I don't need to ship anything because I brought less than everyone. Everyone was supposed to ship their second suitcase, except they also had to pay for that shipping.

After fighting with the first guy for like ten minutes, they finally seemed to vaguely understand. To this day, I have not the slightest idea why it was so mindblowingly difficult for them to understand. I didn't get more than 20ft before the next person asked, "So what are you shipping?" After 10 minutes of arguing with them, I realized they must all be brain damaged and decided I might as well just ship my backpack since, presumably, nothing was in it.

You know - except all my money.

So I basically paid them to cause me problems because things like counting is beyond them. And not just one person, but two people could not figure out if I have no spare suitcase, I can't ship a spare suitcase.

Fortunately, the "you can't exchange money in Tokyo, there's no time" proved to be a lie (they exchange money in the hotel, and there was not even a line), but it was still very stressful, and it took a ton of effort and time to find an ATM that accepted my American card.

I finally got some money, I was able to eat and live long enough for my backpack to arrive.

Who gave these people college degrees?!

Word Endings Analysis

So I just got back from Korea, and that's a bit of a story, but more importantly, my program is complete!

(defun tokenizer (st)

  (let ((x 0) (total nil)) (while (< x (length st))

                                      (let ((y x))

                                        (while (and (< y (length st))

                                                    (not (eq (char st y) #\Newline))

                                                    (not (eq (char st y) #\Space)))

                                          (setq y (+ y 1)))

                                        (setq total (cons (subseq st x y) total))

                                        (setq x (+ 1 y))))

    (reverse total))

(defun tokenizer-reverse (st)

  (let ((x 0) (total nil)) (while (< x (length st))

                                      (let ((y x))

                                        (while (and (< y (length st))

                                                    (not (eq (char st y) #\Newline))

                                                    (not (eq (char st y) #\Space)))

                                          (setq y (+ y 1)))

                                        (setq total (cons (subseq st x y) total))

                                        (setq x (+ 1 y))))

(defun find-final (megalist str)

  (let ((n 0) (lis nil))

    (while (< n (length megalist))

      (if (equal str 

                 (subseq (nth n megalist) (- (length (nth n megalist)) (length str))

                         (length (nth n megalist))))

          (setq lis (cons (nth n megalist) lis)))

      (setq n (+ 1 n)))

    lis

    ))

It's a pretty simple and inefficient program, but I like it. It is apparently incapable of recognizing words that are exactly the searched phrase, but oh well. Update: the problem is case, not the length of the word, so "Ku" with a capital "K" is not equal to "ku" with a lower case "k". An easy fix, but oh well. The reverse version of the tokenizer function just leaves the list in reverse order, which is fine. Flipping it requires a ton of memory and time, so it is not worth it and doesn't help anything in this case.

I pulled a list of words from:
http://www.nicklea.com/articles/wordlist.txt
Some 78,205 words
Update: This list contains words and their conjugates, e.g. "run", "runs", and "running" and "aardvark", "aardvarks", and "aardvark's"; so that may slant the results a bit, depending on how you view conjugates.

Of course you're all thinking "but why?" The Japanese language has some rather restrictive phonetics. So, when a Japanese student tries to spell an English word, they tend to add in a bunch of extra vowels. After seeing my students write "Baraku Obama" and "ketchupu" or other u-ending variants, I got to thinking - how many words in the English language end in ku? or pu? or even u at all? The Japanese tend to us "to" or "do" for t/d-terminating words respectively, so I tried that, too.

78,205 words aren't all the words in the English language, but it probably covers almost all of what my students will be using in their lives.

The results:

Of the 81 words that end in u,

"adieu", "Ainu", "Baku", "Bantu", "bateau", "bayou", "beau", "Bissau", "bureau", "caribou",
 "chateau", "Chou", "coypu", "cpu", "du", "Fizeau", "flu", "Fontainebleau", "Frau", "Fujitsu",
 "gnu", "guru", "haiku", "Hindu", "Honolulu", "Honshu", "impromptu", "juju", "Juneau",
 "Katmandu", "Kikuyu", "kinkajou", "Kitakyushu", "kivu", "kombu", "Ku", "kudzu", "landau",
 "lieu", "Lou", "lulu", "Malibu", "Marceau", "Maseru", "Mathieu", "menu", "milieu", "mu",
 "Nassau", "Nehru", "nouveau", "nu", "Ouagadougou", "parvenu", "Peru", "plateau",
 "portmanteau", "Rousseau", "Shu", "situ", "snafu", "sou", "tableau", "tabu", "tau", "Thimbu",
 "Thoreau", "thou", "thru", "Thu," "tofu", "Trudeau", "Tsunematsu", "tutu", "u", "Urdu",
 "Vishnu", "Wausau", "Wu", "you", and "Zulu"

3 end in "ku" - "Baku", "haiku", "ku"
Baku, it turns out is a city in Azerbaijan, part of the old USSR
Haiku is cheating since that's obviously a loan word from Japanese
Ku doesn't show up in my dictionary and I have never used it, so it is not a particularly helpful word
But 670 end in "k"

2 end in "pu" - "coypu" and "cpu"
Coypus are large, South American, aquatic rodents
CPU is also cheating since it is an abbreviation
But 452 end in "p"

0 end in "gu"
But 6707 end in "g"

5 end in "ru" - "guru", "Maseru", "Nehru", "Peru", and "thru"
Guru is another loan word
The middle three are places
Thru is just a lazy way of spelling a real word
But 5939 end in "r"

3 end in "shu" - "Honshu", "Kitakyushu", and "Shu"
The first two are places in or parts of Japan (Honshu is one of the four main islands and Kitakyushu is a city)
Shu is the Confusian version of the Golden Rule or the Egyptian god of air
But 279 end in "sh"

1 ends in "ju" - "juju"
A loan word from Africa, something I doubt my students will ever learn, let alone use
Though to be fair, only 3 words end in "j"

0 end in "chu"
But 238 end in "ch"

1 ends in "yu" (which also covers all which might be "kyu", "gyu", "nyu", "myu", etc) - "Kikuyu"
A language and people from Kenya, probably not helpful to my students
Any word ending in y on its own would be transliterated to "i" or something probably, so I won't look up the comparison

1 ends in "hu" that doesn't end in "shu" - "Thu"
Thu does not even show up in the dictionary I am using, so I can guess not too useful of a word
But 912 end in "h"

2 end in "fu" (a more common way of transliterating "hu") - "tofu" and "snafu"
Tofu is another loan word
Snafu counts as a word I guess
But 173 words end in "f"

4 end in "bu" - "Thimbu", "tabu", "Malibu", and "kombu"
Thimbu and Malibu are places
Tabu is just a different (and less common) spelling of taboo
Kombu is another loan word from Japanese - a type of brown seaweed (also spelled konbu)
But 143 words end in "b"

2 end is either "tsu" or "su" (both "tsu") - "Tsunematsu" and "Fujitsu"
Both are presumably Japanese place names or surnames, even a Japanese teacher was not sure
But 24259 words end in "s", and of them, 1675 with "ts"

4 end in "du" (which is rarely used in Japanese and 'do' would probably be used before 'du') - "Urdu", "Katmandu", "Hindu", and "du"
Urdu is a language, and Hindu is a religion. They aren't native words, but they are somewhat common.
Katmandu is a city
Du is found in some French names or an abbreviation of Duke or Dutch
But 8734 end in "d"

1 ends in "zu" or "dzu" - "kudzu"
Kudzu is a type of Japanese and Chinese vine, so another loan word
But 82 end in "z", but of them, 0 end in "dz"- so there's one time a u-terminating word beats out the consonant version!

1 ends in "mu" - "mu"
Mu is a Greek letter and used as a coefficient of friction
or apparently a lost continent that sunk when Atlantis did
But 972 end in "m", though it would probably just be transliterated to "ん" anyway

If a word ends in n, the Japanese language can represent this like "m" as "ん", so I won't go through that list. The remaining words, too, cannot be directly transliterated or end in a vowel followed by "u" so you can look them up on your own if you care.

"to" and "do" are solutions to transliterating t/d-terminating English words into Japanese, and a lot more "to" and "do" words exist.

545 end in "o", of which 82 are "to" and 48 are "do", but 3542 end in "t" and 8734 end in "d".

Of the 670 words ending in "k", 287 end in "ck" and 162 end in "ke", but 1018 end in "c".

There are a bunch of other interesting phrases to look for, like "r" vs "l" or "y" vs "i", but this'll do for this post.

Update: I found myself curious about the distribution of final letters and have found these numbers:

Vowels - Of the 10,059 words that end in vowels, 
1,181 are "a",
7,999 are "e",
253 are "i",
545 are "o",
and of course,
81 are "u".

Here is the rest of the alphabet:

"a" - 1181
"b" - 143
"c" - 1,018
"d" - 8,734
"e" - 7,999
"f" - 173
"g" - 6,707
"h" - 912
"i" - 253
"j" - 3
"k" - 670
"l" - 2,108
"m" - 973
"n" - 4,506
"o" - 545
"p" - 452
"q" - 4
"r" - 5,939
"s" - 24,259
"t" - 3,542
"u" - 81
"v" - 25
"w" - 238
"x" - 172
"y" - 7,258
"z" - 82

Because of the conjugates (e.g. "aardvarks" and "aardvark's"), 
"s" comes way out on top with 24,259 words. 
("g" probably has so many results because of these conjugates, too (e.g. "running").)
"j" bottoms out the list at only 3 words, but
"q" is a close follower with only 4 words.
"j", "q", and "v" are the only letters less likely to end a word than "u", with
"z" only 1 word more likely.

The point of course is that almost no words end in "u" in English. Of the 81 words that do, only "you" and "thou" appear in the list of top 2,126 words used in American newspapers, and I had to look up almost all of the words from the list of 81 words that did end in "u". So if you're a Japanese student of English and find yourself wondering if you should end a word with "u", I think you can assume it doesn't.

Arbeit Macht Frei

I actually did work today! The whole day! I didn't even finish! Things are finally moving along. Spent the whole day grading, but it's a nice break from days of sleeping at my desk or reading Wikipedia or programming. (Still hard not to fall asleep at my desk though.)

Just finished some maps for giving directions for tomorrow's lesson. Used my campus map - DePaul Lincoln Park Campus. Hopefully it's not too hard. I have a backup map I can make quickly.

My lawn is going swimmingly. Today, there was a praying mantis chillin' and checkin' out my lawn. Just swaying in the wind.

I'll fill everyone in on all the details up 'till now in another post. Hopefully soon. Particularly the part about the lawn.

Whoops, forgot to hit publish.

PS, I made updated maps, not sure why I thought I would make 161 color maps, so these have no color:

UPDATE!

Here are the empty and full versions for if you want something to demonstrate with without revealing answers or want to use as an answer key. 

However, really, I wouldn't use these maps again. The initial start location is a bit unclear, you can really only go East, but it needs to be more clear anyway. And the blocks are uneven. In many, many places, the block length is different by which side of the street you are on and some places it is hard to tell if there is a new block or not. Also the word blanks appear to be buildings so, for example, when things should "be on your right", instead students think they are facing it. Also I didn't like the arrows. I really don't know why I didn't fix the first arrow when I didn't like it before I started copy-pasting it all over...

冒険だよ！

So so so! I finally got real internet! To mark this occasion, I have finally created a blog. It'll be full of potentially awesome ramblings perchance. As of now, there is already much to say: baggage problems, ex girlfriend reunions, missed welcome parties and contract signings, broken planes, lawns, festivals, flowers, fans, and fan-girls!

I'll get to posting what's happened up to now later, but so far it's been quite the adventure!