David @ Tokyo

So I've been pretty quiet about everything (other than whaling) for the first month of 2006 - I guess I didn't have so much time after all the writing etc.

Today I put some contact lenses in for the first time since I arrived in Tokyo back in August 2003. My eyes didn't like the dry atmosphere when I first arrived, and it took until sometime during last year for my eyes to finally get adjusted. I've been wanting to wear contacts again lately, so I put them in for 3 hours today without any ill-effects. I'm going to see how they go again tomorrow at work - hopefully I won't get bloodshot.

I caught a pretty nasty bug in the start of January (around the time of my exchange with Greenpeace's IWC rep), must have been a strain of the flu I think, but unlike last year I was only out for 2 days this time - and it was actually really worth it! While laid up in bed feeling ill, I decided to watch some Japanese tv drama one night for a change - not something I've ever really gotten into at all, TBS was running the first episode of their "Byakuyakou" drama series, based on a novel from a few years back.
The story starts off with an 11 year old boy trying to win the heart of a young lady, but within the first episode, the story turns into a full blown double-murder story (the boy murders his own father! and the girl her mother!). It's pretty shocking stuff actually, but anyway I was so impressed by the show that I immediately got the urge to start reading some Japanese again (haven't been reading the newspaper for ages now), so I picked up a copy of the novel shortly after. It's about 900 pages, and so far I've made may way through the first 130. It's pretty gripping stuff, so I'll probably be spending lots of time reading that over the next month or two.

In some of my extra time, I've been doing some more things for the Enlightenment project. I just plugged some small memory leaks today, and I've also been adding in some internationalization infrastructure for modules (like the moon module I made). Until now they have all been English-only - users using Enlightenment in non-English languages had no way of getting the interfaces for the add-on modules in their own language. I wrote a proof-of-concept about internationalization using the moon module as an example here a while back, and have been helping put similar changes in place for various other modules that others have been making. It's all lots of fun!

That's about it for my January 2006.