turned on

[chronovore]

At Lawson, a ubiquitous Japanese convenience store, the radio had a calm, smooth Japanese woman's measured tones announce "あなたのアクセスにお待ちしております" ([we are] waiting for you to access [us]) -- Am I the only one who finds this disturbingly stimulating?

Comments

[epiphaniesrus.livejournal.com]

Quite possibly yes... although my problem might just be that I'm distracted by attempting to read the Japanese. Speaking of which, how do you type in Japanese characters?

[chronovore.livejournal.com]

Windows: Install Microsoft's Global IME, a tasktray resident input-method-editor. It's either available on the Windows Update site, or via a search on their main site.

Mac OS X has something like 12 or 15 languages preinstalled and supports all of them system-wide. In the "International" pane of the System Preferences, choose which languages you wish to be available, and in which order they take precedence for menus, webpages, etc.

Linux: I have no idea.

[epiphaniesrus.livejournal.com]

For the record, if anyone else was curious, the process is hilariously different for different revs of windows. I did numerous searches for the global IME for Win2k... it's only in a little note at the bottom of the one for 95, 98, and NT4 that it mentions that Win2k comes with everything you need.

In Windows2000, you need to

1. Go into "Regional Options" in the control panel (why can't they just have a tab called "languages?"), add Japanese to the list of "Installed Input locales", which requires the Win2k CD.

2. Add a hotkey of either Alt + L-Shift or Ctrl + L-Shift, or manually switch it in the taskbar (wonder what happens if you attempt to ownz0r your prey sassily in UT2004 while strafing)

3. When you shift between languages, it only applies the language switch to the front application. At first I was annoyed about it, but after some thought it's preferrable. Don't know why don't make that a checkbox, tho.

Still don't quite have a hang of the auto-switch from hiragana to kanji... mostly because I can't read kanji. So at the moment my problem is limited to "please don't."

[chronovore.livejournal.com]

The big thing that is hard to adjust to is that it's a two-step input process, but English is only ever one step. We chord-keys to diff between uppercase and lowercase, but we don't have two discrete steps to "build" a word.

The trick to keeping everything in its phonetic base characters is to set your input style to /hiragana/ or /katakana/ as you want it. When you've got the word phonetically typed out how you want it, it still has that dotted-underline. That underline means you're in the phonetic character input mode, the first of two input steps. (At this point, you can hit F6 for all-hiragana and F7 for all-katakana in the currently-active term)

Next, instead of hitting "SPACE" triggers the "decide kanji" mode. If you don't want to select a kanji, instead of hitting SPACE, just hit RETURN and start your next word or phrase.

If you want more IME tips, Win2000-J uses the same input system, and I've become reasonably proficient in the past couple years. Starting off was a real bitch, but having it be necessary for work was sufficient incentive to suss out a number of problematic details.

[chronovore.livejournal.com]

I also recall having a LOT of problems finding the IME to re-install on English-language Windows machines, when I had to do a fresh OS install at work or home. It was like pulling teeth, trying to find it's hidden oceanside base within MS's web-compound.