It’s end of the year. It’s the end of another anime season. We completed another series with a decent success. But that’s not difficult to do. The note-worthy event of the day is my translation #783. I just finished translation of Black Jack episode 61. What’s more, I only translated episode 58 only two days ago – well after the release of 57. And 58 is progressing so well that it’ll probably be released by Christmas. The whole team is pumped right now to finish the series this year. We have nine days left. Isn’t that exciting?
Actually, the timing really doesn’t matter to me. It just feels so good to have it done. It took us 3 and a half years to release 63 episodes. That’s less than 20 episodes per year. It was a slow going project. Sure, we took some detours – 17 episodes of Black Jack 21, a movie, and 13 episodes of RAY (just because BJ made cameo appearances in 2 episodes)… And this project always got put in the back burner of the whole team. There were painful moments.
It wasn’t too long ago that I wrote about my translation #750. Then I meant to make a post the day I did my 777th. I missed that mark a while ago… I just realized I finished my 782nd today. Anyway.
What I just found is this – the blog entry from the day I completed my 300th translation way back in March of 2005. I sure have been at this for a long time. And it sure takes long time to translate 500 episodes of stuff.
I just ran into another instance of an atonal music. It is amazingly common throughout the world. And surprisingly pleasing to both the performers and audience. Actually, the performers far outnumber the audience. It’s not 12 tone or microtonal or any specific type. Perhaps it can be considered a parallelophonic. (Yeah, I just made that up.)
“Happy Birthday” – everyone knows that song. And everyone sings in different keys when they sing. It’s pretty amazing.
When we computer users need to use language that has more glyphs than what’s available on the keyboard (Chinese, Japanese and Korean are very notorious about that), we rely on a software called Input Method Editor – IME. Google just released the Japanese version of their IME today. I always love to try out these new products that I might use. So like hundreds of people out there, I jumped on this case as well.
My first trouble was it defaults to Qwerty layout. The fix was somewhat easy, since I had to make the same fix for MS-IME. On Windows XP, find the location HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layouts\E0200411, and change the value for Layout File from Kbdjpn.dll to Kbddv.dll, then reboot. Exact same thing as the fix for MS-IME except for the lowest part of the location difference of E0010411 and E0200411.
Apparently it doesn’t work on 64-bit version of Windows yet. They’re already working on it – I sure hope it’ll come out soon, since I just recently installed Windows7 64-bit on this PC. (It’s currently set up to do dual-boot between XP 32-bit and Win7 64-bit.)
Otherwise, I don’t have much to talk about the actual product yet – I haven’t used it enough to do the full evaluation. That will have to wait for later date.
update Jan 6: It took Google only couple of weeks before they released the 64-bit version. Yes, it’s now working smoothly on my Windows 7 64-bit.
I have such an uneventful life coupled with happy-in-general character, I cannot find all that many things to rant about. There are minor stuff, like how World Series is going, or how people are still asking when the next episode is coming, or if some show is dropped, or how my dentist visit made my iPhone dirty…
So, what the heck, here’s a little bit of what’s going on in Sylf’s life lately.
Last night, I finished translation of 57th episode of Black Jack. 4 more episodes left on that series. I’m going to be lost as to how to fill that void after that. Do I dare pick up another Tezuka series? Or do I pick up another old series? Or pick up mini series or OVA? I really haven’t decided. For each of those categories, I have at least 1 title. Then, there’s the other option – be lazy and do nothing. I really don’t know what I’ll end up doing.
Episode 57 was mostly easy to work on, except for the brief moment when her health condition deteriorates. Things can get ugly pretty fast, and all kinds of big medical terms starts to come out of BJ’s mouth for the reasons… you know why. (If you don’t go back and watch episode 44 again.) With help of online dictionaries (my 2 choices being Yahoo JP and Space Alc), Google, and Wikipedia, and with the closed captions from the DVD, looking up the terms in itself isn’t too difficult. But with these terms that I’ve never even heard of, who knows if I used them in the way that actually make sense… >_<
And a bit of a story about dentist and iPhone. Perhaps this happens more often than I imagine. I come out of dentist with very numb lips. They were very behind their schedule, and it was toward the end of lunch hour by the time I was freed. (Now you see where this is going.) Since I needed to get back to work, I made a quick stop at a fast food place, and ate while driving. Not realizing I was spilling some food into the chest pocket, where I had my phone. It was a little gross when I got my phone out of the pocket after I reached my desk, but I had no idea what happened, until I reached deeper into the pocket and found a tiny piece of lettuce covered in mayonnaise. *sigh*
The good thing is, with such paranoia coming from the seasonal flu and swine flu, the office building has abundance of alcohol-based hand cleaners. Cleaning the phone was pretty easy, thanks to the crazy flu season.
It’s funny how all these totally unrelated things come in to play together.
[Mon 19:14] Frostii, I must know, is this screenshote reall: http://www.ggkthx.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/frostii-quality.png
If you really, really need to know, yes, it’s real. It’s en episode 9 of Nodame Cantabile Paris Chapter, at around 5:50.
I’m not proud of it. I know it’s going to haunt frostii forever. I can’t believe nobody caught it before we released it. It’s humiliating to continue receiving these questions, so here it is. Now, stop disturbing the dead horse.
Once again, I attended our local orchestra, Wichita Symphony‘s subscription concert today. They really have pretty good sets coming up, and I’m really eager for them. A already wrote about my excitement about Rachmaninoff’s concerto from their last performance. Looking into their future concert… The next concert features our next music director (his last performance here, performing Respighi’s Pines of Rome was seriously awesome). The one after that is Mahler’s symphony, my favorite classical composer. Then they do Chopin’s piano concerto, which is Nodame’s orchestra debut piece. Etc. What a schedule.
Today’s concert started with Berlioz’s little concert overture, Le Corsair. I didn’t know this piece before today. I still don’t remember this piece all that well. It gave me pretty small impact to me. This piece actually had the largest ensemble of all the pieces performed today. That tuba player must have packed up and left the venue right after playing this 10-minute(?) piece. What a gig.
Next up was Paganini’s Violin Concerto No. 1, featuring violinist Ryu Goto. He’s the younger sister of Midori, and is equally amazing, IMO. And to know that he first performed this piece at age of seven? Simply unbelievable. But I didn’t know any of that before the performance of this piece. I was just amazed at his skill and the overall performance. I really couldn’t dig the piece itself, though. I love orchestral pieces. I love good orchestra writing. This piece did not have much of that. It really is a violin showcase piece. It’s a good piece for that purpose.
Nonetheless, the performance was amazing, and he was awarded with a big standing ovation. And he gave us a small encore piece – Paganini’s theme and variation on God Save the King. This was even more of a jaw dropper. I’m so glad I went to this concert, just to witness this performance. Right after this piece, someone behind me appropriately said “I didn’t know such thing was humanly possible.” I thought Ryu’s performance was even better than the guy in the YouTube I linked above, not forgetting to show some humor in different spots. Well done, bravo.
The concert concluded with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7—another piece featured in Nodame. I was pretty thrilled about this piece. After the concert, I’m more excited about Ryu’s performance than this one. It was pretty well executed. But I wasn’t 100% happy. Compared to the sample below, it was far more refined, but with less force. I don’t know what it was… but it wasn’t as exciting as I wanted it to be. It was still good to be able to hear this piece live.
We all know that there was no Lupin special this year. It probably didn’t bother too many of us because of Lupin vs Conan special that aired this spring. But the annual summer special lasted for the past 20 years. I know there are many people who look forward to it. But this one blog quotes some inside source that the 2008 special was the last one. He lists low viewership, bad reviews and lack of script writer / director who were willing to take it on. What a shame this is.
But then again… this gives me a perfect opportunity to catch up with some of the older specials.
And for those eager Lupin fans – no, I won’t be working on them any time soon.
