We went into Akihabara today to try out the Burger King near the station. It was pretty good! Got some sweet coupons as well that we'll probably use tomorrow when we go to Shinjuku to pay our rent. I'm pretty sure there's a Burger King there.

I need to start considering presents and such for the people back home. I know Izumi wants random convenience store stuff, Nicole wants some nori or something (can't remember exactly) and Mika wants... Something. She was non-specific. I'm thinking of getting a big bag of Umaibo for Izumi, but I'm not sure if she likes them... My mum will want shoes, that's for sure. I'll probably pick up some weird Nintendo stuff for Tim and Deb, they'll appreciate that. Weird candy too. I can't think of anyone else I need to get things for off the top of my head, but I'm sure things will spring to mind when I'm looking around.

In other news, I'm kind of considering studying Japanese in a more full-time fashion. I think I might have actually found something I'd enjoy studying at university. I could even see myself being a language teacher in the future if I manage to stick to it. It seems like something I could study for a long time and still be learning every day; not to mention that I simply find the language really interesting.

First I want to improve my general skills, however, so I've written a little memory game to help with memorising various things. Right now I've got it set up to have Hiragana/Romaji content, but the same code could be used for Katakana/Romaji, Kanji/Hiragana, Japanese/English words, etc. It works great on my touch screen laptop, but not so great on my phone. In writing the application, I found that making games is actually pretty fun! I'll have to play a bit more in that area in the future.

My brother and I went to our local shrine this evening to take in the celebrations. It was pretty cool, we were the only non-Japanese people there I think, heh. Using my rudimentary Japanese skills, I had a bit of a chat with the security guard and he was a pretty cool guy (eh chats to gaijins and doesn't afraid of anything).

Tomorrow we'll be heading into 明治神宮 (Meiji Jingu), which is a well known and very well trafficked shrine in Harajuku. Hopefully we'll kill two birds with one stone by visiting the Burger King nearby.

I've done pretty much nothing for the last couple of days. I think I'll watch TV. SIGH.

Hooray, Christmas! My brother has a bit of a flu, so we're postponing some of the celebration until this evening. Hopefully he clears up a bit by then!

Damn you, router.

I was really hoping the "creation date" field in .torrent files would be relatively reliable. I've been sorely disappointed. It's nearly always present, but often it's completely incorrect. Basically stupid Windows users are failing at timezones. A particularly bad case is that of Zero-Raws - they seem to have their clock set to 3 hours or so in the future. I'm not really a fan of arbitrarily creating data, so I suppose I'll have to architect this torrent index to not sort on the time. I wonder what other metrics I can sort on...