I consider myself lazy. I felt particularly lazy today. I still not have finished translating this week’s Ippo, and I’m not going to finish it tonight. About 60% of the episode is done. I will finish it tomorrow. For now, I need a good night’s sleep. Stress from work is really getting to me this weeks.
My days are so busy, the time is flying unbelievably fast. Which means that I’ll be flying to Japan before I know it. How exciting!
I got a question if I’ll be making posts from Japan as well. Yes. And here are some of the things you might be reading about:
Speaking of trains, I need to buy Japan Rail Pass soon. Without it, my trip to all those different places will be much more expensive.
Tuesdays usually are the days I translate Ippo. But it so happens that the raw is not available this week from our usual source. This is going to lead to couple days of delay for us. The team has found a raw I can use to translate. Translation will happen tomorrow. Oh, what a week to have this trouble…
Today, I switched to new monitors. I went from one 22-inch widescreen and one 19-inch square monitor, to two 23-inch widescreen. The desktop size went from 2960×1050 to 3840×1080. It feels really big. I love it, but I’m still not sure how to maximize this screen realestate yet. For casual PC users, I think this Samsung 2333SW would be plenty sufficient.
It was a very lazy Monday. I watched a whole bunch of Gundam W, finishing up to episode 20. I added Full Metal Alchemist episode 8 along the way, as well as finishing Final Fantaly 3 that I’ve been playing.
Then came release of Hajime no Ippo episode 20. Ippo’s battle just ended the last episode. Takamura’s match was supposed to follow immediately after that. But as I was reading the mang over and over, I couldn’t tell if the production team was going to cram the inter-game happenings in half of an episode, or stretch to a whole episode. But, man, what a way to handle that segment. I really can’t wait for the next episode!
Luckily enough, the next episode is coming tomorrow. Woo hoo!
There are times when I think living in a small town really limits my opportunities. One of those moments came when I attended the first annual Jiggle Jam, a kids’ music fest. They could pull it off in Kansas City with the right combnation of number of supporters, available venue, enough artists and such, and financial power to bring big name artists like They Might Be Giants.
Anyway. That’s where I was yesterday and today, which explains why I missed a post last night. It was pretty fun again this year. My daughter is already 10 years old, and she might be getting a bit too old for this kind of purely kid-centric activities. She’s coming to the age of hard-to-entertain. *sigh* (One good thing is that she’s become a big fan of Black Jack. I can keep her busy between the new volumes of manga and anime for a while.)
After being in the heat for two days and driving about 7 hours total, I’m pretty exhausted. I thought I might head straight to bed after releasing the latest Eden of the East… Until I started watching another Gundam series.
I’ve been going through a bit of a Gundam binge as of late. This year, I’ve watched Gundam OO, the original Gundam, Z, ZZ, Turn-A, X, V, Char’s Counter Attack… and now picking up W. I think I’m going to watch couple of more episodes before I go sleep…
It’s official now. I’m going home in Japan for 3 weeks this summer. The flight is only a month away. Man, the ticket price is really low right now. I really couldn’t pass up this opportunity. My employer’s having a 4-week furlough this summer, so I’ll have no job anyway. This is going to be a perfect vacation.
This is more of a note to self than anything else.
On my way to work, Handel’s Messiah was on the radio. I own couple different recordings of that. But this one was different. Boston Baroque and the group did another marvelous recording of this work. Other two recordings I have, one by Academy of Ancient Music, and the other by English Baroque Soloists (my first copy). But this one by Boston is still different, while keeping the Baroque style just like the other two. Very convincing, and powerful, but not heavy. I really want to check out the whole thing now, as I only heard the last 4 minutes of the entire set.
That’s what someone in IRC described of my day today. This week alone, I released 3 version 3s, and 9 version 2s. I hate releasing version 2, let alone any higher versions. That would give out impressions that we are just pumping out releases without care. And on my end, that’s what I did. When I was told that files were ready to go, I pushed them out without checking them. That’s the quality checkers’ job.
So, that’s got to change. I will have to come up with some kind of work flow for some quick checks of everything we release. We’ll see how that will turn out.
On the other front, I made another translation contribution – K-On! episode 8. The episode had another new insert song. Songs always give me good challenge to translate. Those are not my favorite.
Then, this week’s episode included 3 spots with Japanese word yoroshiku. Translating that one word gives me more headache than translating songs. Always. I got lazy (and frustrated from the other stuff going on) today, and I didn’t put any real, definitive translations. The team has relatively good comprehension of Japanese. With commonly used word like this, I hope the team will come up with something good.
Today, we talked about fonts. There was a section in Nodame episode 11 where one character (# character to indicate “sharp” note) looked ugly with the font we are using. We talked about how to come around this problem for a while… and we ended up with the solution of editing the font itself. Yeah, that’s possible. It’s actually quite easy.
There are bunch of font editors out there. The one I used today is called Font Forge. It was originally written for Linux. But thanks to cygwin, it runs on Windows as well. The result of this work should be out soon enough.
Oh, and I just received a word that the next two episodes of Black Jack are ready. By the time most of you read this post, it should be released. Happy watching.
4:30 – I leave work. Things are very hectic at work. The economic downturn has hit our work area very hard as well. I’m one of the lucky bastards, still surviving. The survivors have things tough as well – we need to manage all the same (or more) work as before with less people. So it’s rare that I get to leave work early. And today was one of those lucky days! Yay! So, I’m home by 5PM.
5:00 – Then, I realize that I left my house key in my desk drawer. I turn around, head back to work, and grab my key. A quick “hey, you’re working late tonight?” question to the next guy turns into a two-hour gripe session about the current work situation. So much for the lucky day of going home earyl.
7:00 – Finally home. Tuesday is my Ippo night. So, like any other real fansubber with absolutely no real life, I hit my desk as soon as I get home, only stopping by the kitchen long enough to set the rice cooker. I click the download button, then check on the IRC for any status updates for other projects before I begin my translation.
7:20 – A big realization. 11 episodes of Charady is ready for release. Ugh, that’s going to cut into my other work tonight for sure. I wanted to watch Full Metal Alchemist ep 7 tonight, but maybe it’ll have to wait until later.
7:30 – I receive a translation question for Ristorante Paradiso episode 4. It’s a tricky line. I start thinking what the best way to put that in English would be. More minutes pass by without me working on my main project of the night. I also fend off some questions of Black Jack episode 47. Yes, that’s some last minute things – episode 47 really should be out soon.
7:40 – Rice is done cooking. I head back to the kitchen to prepare the rest of supper. It’s going to be a simple one – quick sauteed zucchini and squash, fresh tofu with scallion (hiyayakko), miso soup, home made Japanese pickles (nukazuke)… It’s almost a vegetarian supper.
8:05 – Dinner is ready, and questions for other series are taken care of. In the mean time, I’ve been informed that 3rd episode of Sengoku Basara, along with version 2s of earlier episodes are ready for release as well. This is going to be a *massive* release night. Will I really be able to hit the bed by midnight? Now, I’m off to watching through the episode of Ippo.
8:35 – Done with the initial viewing, done with the supper, I’m off to the translation. This real time tracking will show exactly how long it usually takes for me to translate one episode of anything.
9:40 – About half way done with the episode. Phew. Time to take a break. I checked in with some people in the group. We might have some Ristorante Paradiso, Black Jack, and K-On! for release tomorrow. But we make no promise until they are really ready.
10:45 – Done with this episode of Ippo. 50 minutes later, I realized that I’ve been reading couple more episodes of Ippo manga. This is how I keep losing my sleep. It’s now 11:30. I really should go release those 17 files, and go to bed.
And that’s how my evening usually goes.
Update* – It’s now 1:00 AM, I’m still far from done releasing everything. Looks like Sengoku Basara will have to wait until tomorrow.