I went to the two opening social events of the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop on Friday night. I’m always surprised when pre-conference events are organised as I imagine that it’s the last thing the organisers want to be doing the evening before the conference begins.

The first event was hosted by Google. They had food, drink and a fairly pleasant room for everyone to meet in. Someone from the local Google office gave a quick talk on the cool things that Google were working in Pittsburgh and gave a very short pitch on encouraging people to apply for jobs at Google.

The second event was held at a local restaurant so people could go out and have a proper dinner if they needed one. I didn’t eat anything as I was having problems with timezones and jetlag and a lost appetite. But I did get to chat to some people I hadn’t met before and to catch up with some others.

Last night it took over three hours from the time the plane landed until I was checked into the airport hotel. I really wasn’t expecting that to happen and I am really glad I had decided to spend the night at the airport and didn’t try to connect on through to Pittsburgh.

It took me a while to work out where all the time went but I did spend more than an hour standing in a queue at immigration. And actually, for the first time ever, I saw someone being refused entry into the US. Thankfully I didn’t have any problems. After leaving immigration my bag was waiting and customs was really easy to get through.

I then tried to work out how to get to the hotel. None of the airport hotels are actually in the airport and it isn’t really possible to walk to them. I tried to find signs or someone to give me instructions on how to catch the shuttle to the hotel but failed. I then decided to get a taxi as that would be easy. But I really wasn’t expecting there to be no taxis at the airport. There was a queue of well over 100 people waiting on a taxi. They staff were calling for taxis but they were arriving really slowly and I think I waited over an hour to catch one.

What I didn’t know was that there had been serious flooding in that area and all domestic flights had been cancelled. With the roads being flooded taxis were having difficulty getting to the airport and lots of passengers had to try to find somewhere else to spend the night.

When I got to the hotel there was another large queue of people who had been sent there by various airlines. Thankfully I had a confirmed reservation.

There must be some way to feel comfortable when you travel but I haven’t worked out what it is yet. I am sitting in terminal 3 in London Heathrow and it’s really uncomfortable. I’m not really sure why but I think it’s a combination of it being too noisy, too hot and having very poor lighting. My back is also sore from carrying luggage up and down flights of stairs at the train stations I travelled through this morning.

It will probably be more comfortable on the plane but I will be too cold. An even though they provide blankets they won’t let me use one until the plane has taken off and the seat-belt sign has been switched off. I don’t know why they insist on handing these out when you get on the plane if they won’t actually let you use them at that point. Virgin Airlines obviously wants to taunt me with the possibility of being warmer.

I am impressed that I managed to understand the forms on the Japanese Amazon site and have gotten the author of Mastering Perl changed from Brian D. Fox to Brian D. Foy.  This isn’t the perfect way to present this name but “Foy” has to be better than “Fox”.

It took me a while to understand most of the email they sent me and I wasn’t completely sure that they were going to change the entry.  I used google translate on some of the bits I got stuck on and I’m still trying to work out why Amazon are going to ask “the fish” before the change would be made.   (I don’t know if you have ever tried using google translate for translating Japanese into English but it’s very clear that this is still in beta as it comes up with some very funny translations.)

I started checking through my travel arrangements this morning as this time next week I will be in Pittsburgh at the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop. Not only will this be my last Perl conference of the year but it should also be my last trip outside of Japan for a while.

I’ve travelled a lot this year and I am looking forward to a couple of months of just being in the one country.

Mint noticed that brian d foy’s name isn’t spelt correctly on the Japanese Amazon site. I wouldn’t have been surprised if this had been wrong in Japanese but it’s an English spelling of his name that’s wrong – he is listed as Brian D. Fox. This might make it a bit more difficult to find Mastering Perl on this site.

On Monday evening Marty and I went to the Shibuya.pm technical meeting. This exhausted me as my understanding of Japanese isn’t really up to two and a half hours of technical talks. I was thrilled that Gugod spoke in English as it was a relief to be able to understand something – although when he started I thought he was going to give his talk in Japanese. The only other talk I understood was the one Miyagawa gave. But I had heard an English version of this in Vienna and he used English slides on Monday night.

Marty briefly mentioned one of the differences between this and the European meetings we used to attend but there were quite a few others. The meeting was really structured. They used a bell to let people know when their time was nearly up and they stopped the talks at the end of the allocated time slot. In Europe talks tend to go over and people don’t really seem to mind. Mind you we would have been there all night if they had let this happen as there were 3 ten minute talks, 2 twenty minute talks and 12 lightening talks scheduled.

There was less banter and heckling from the audience (I am not sure that there was any during the talks). Actually there was a lot less noise in general. During the breaks people were fairly quiet. There were around 100 people at the meeting and I couldn’t work out how many of them actually knew each other.

It was noticeable that lots of the talks were on topics associated with the web. The words “mash-up”, “catalyst”, “javascript” and “jifty” occurred quite frequently. Two talks also mentioned “gungho” which I hadn’t heard of before. There was also a lightening talk on Gopher and one of testing and refactoring but these were the exceptions. The lightening talks were also serious and not the stand-up comedy these have become at the YAPC conferences.

Two of the talks had slides that contained pictures of half naked women. I can’t remember seeing this at a technical meeting before. I have no idea why this sort of picture appeared in a talk on Class::Component – but then that’s because my Japanese isn’t good enough. The second set of pictures appeared in a talk which I think was about creating a web-site with erotic content using Plagger and Catalyst. I also don’t know why the women’s nipples were covered with stars in both pictures – but I think I have a lot to learn.

I asked Marty to get me something fizzy to drink when he was out this evening. He came back with mystery fanta. It says on the bottle that it is flavoured with two different fruits and that I’m supposed to guess what they are! I haven’t been able to work out what flavour it is – though I think one of the fruits might be strawberry.

There is an English phrase that keeps appearing in my Japanese textbooks that drives me mad. And it came up again today. “I am a Japanese.” The first time I saw this I told my teacher I believed that it was wrong and that it should really be “I am Japanese“. She countered by saying “I am an American“. After a bit of thought, and chatting to some friends, I realised that the word “American” is both a noun and an adjective whereas I believed that the word “Japanese“, used in this context, is an adjective.

When we saw it again today, in a respected textbook, my teacher told me that she believed it was correct and that if a student writes “I am Japanese” in an exam it would be considered a wrong answer.

It is difficult for me to convince my teacher that I am correct about something in English. I don’t have any qualifications in the English Language and although I am well educated I am aware that I speak a dialect of English and that I could indeed be wrong about the use of a particular word. The other problem is that I rarely think of English sentences in grammatical terms and sometimes when I know that something is wrong I find it very hard to articulate why. So, we looked the word up in a dictionary and it said that “Japanese” is both a noun and an adjective. But since I wasn’t on the ball I didn’t quickly realise that the noun form means “the language of Japan” and may not refer to a native of Japan. I told my teacher that I would research it further.

Since I have just started studying for an English degree I have access to the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). What I discovered made me feel much better about the word. Japanese, meaning native of Japan, was formerly a noun but now it is used as an adjective. What I can’t find out is when it changed from being a noun. At least now I know that in modern English it is correct to say “I am Japanese“. What I don’t know is whether it is also correct to say “I am a Japanese“. The OED does not say that the noun is obsolete just that the use has changed and I don’t know the conventions of the dictionary well enough to know how long it takes an entry to move from former use to obsolete use.

However, it is not correct to say “I am an Irish.” as the word meaning native of Ireland is an adjective and I can’t find any reference of it ever having been a noun when used in that context.

There are days when I feel as if I don’t know any Japanese (these are usually Thursdays as that’s when I have my last lesson of the week). I just can’t understand the words that my teacher speaks to me. Having one to one classes means that I can’t hide – there is no getting away from the fact that I can’t think of a single thing in Japanese to say in response to a question. Today, I was expected to conjugate verbs to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”. I just smiled and pretended that I didn’t understand English at that point and then said that I wasn’t completely sure about the tune. My teacher doesn’t know the tune and I decided not to tell her that Yodobashi Camera use this as their main jingle.

I think I’m feeling down today as I thought I was nearly finished learning the kanji I need for the exam in December. But no, it seems I have lots more kanji to learn for this as about a third of the kanji I have learned so far won’t be on the test. I know that it’s more important to learn kanji than it is to learn a test syllabus but today that’s just head knowledge. It also explains why, when I tried to do a past paper, I knew so few of the words. I have been taught about nature and the countryside when the exam is full of things about shopping and travelling. I think I am being taught kanji in a similar way to school children and that some of the kanji are there because they’re used in family names. Why else would I need to know a variety of ways to describe fields, trees and rocks?