What is mochi?

Mochi is a snack of Japanese origin. It consists of rice which has been pounded into a gooey a ball with flavored center. The outer layer is often also flavoured to complement the inner flavor. My favorite verities are Green Tea and Taro. Brown Sugar flavor is nice too, Sesame seed not so much.

Awesome, why?

Taste and texture and it’s half healthy. I’m getting into personal taste territory here but bare with me.

Eating mochi is rather hard to explain and there isn’t an equivalent Western snack. Despite the snack’s medium size it gets eaten in quite a few bites. Like all properly designed snacks in each bite you’ll get some of the sweet insides and some of the lightly flavored outside. The inside will dissolve quickly in your mouth releasing its payload rapidly. The outer layer takes much longer to dissolve allowing you to grind it along the top of your mouth with your tongue, releasing yet more flavor directly into your taste buds.

Nutrition wise a single mochi will set you back ~10% of your daily carbohydrates and 120 calories. As far as candy goes this is effectively at guilt free dosage levels, a serving of juice will often do you worse. Compared to a chocolate bar, cookie or baked desert mochi looks like a saint. You’d have to eat the entire box to achieve the same Daily Recommended Intake destruction of a kit-kat. Bonus points: eating the entire box would take you a minimum of five minutes of continuous joy, mochi is not the kind of snack you’ll find yourself devouring.

Where can mochi be acquired from?

I’ve only ever seen mochi for sale in Loblaw’s Great Canadian Superstore chain of super markets where it’s kept in the Asian aisle .  For non-Canadians I suggest China towns or the Asian section of your super market.

First off I should mention that I red and am reviewing the 1984 edition of this book. No I didn’t find this at some used book store. Instead this book is a bit more of an heirloom. You see I am not the first one in my family to learn Japanese, both my Grandmother and Grandfather on my mother’s side learned a bit of it. This book was given to my grandfather for his birthday by one Mr. Suzuki, a retired engineer who for a period of time moved to my mother’s hometown in rural Alberta and taught Japanese as well as becoming friends with my grandfather.
At first I was a bit optimistic and expected something akin to Dr. Heisig’s work Remember the Kanji(RTK). While Len Walsh gets close his primary focus is on the character’s origin and how it was simplified from that, this is in contrast to RTK where primitive elements are the focus. Also unlike RTK, Read Japanese Today includes the readings. Since I have no intention to learn readings piece-meal I for the most part ignored them, had I not I see no way that someone would be able, as the book’s back claims, learn or even get through the book in “just a few hours” if they were to attempt to memorize ~500 random readings. Read Japanese Today appears to be trying to cover a bit of everything, including surnames. Quite a few surnames are included along with other words in a word list that comes ever so often after a new Kanji has been introduced.

One thing I did enjoy was the history provided, for instance Mr. Walsh mentions how some Kanji are undergoing a change at the time of printing, for instance ward(区) used to use the Kanji for goods(品) were as the modern version has a cross inside. In general he also gives other interesting facts such as why so many Japanese female names need in ko(子) or why ocean(洋) has a sheep in it.

I would actually not recommend this book to anyone seriously studying Japanese since there are so much better ways to learn what is covered in this book, ergo RTK+Sentences. With that said the student of Japanese is not really the target for this book, this piece of marketing reviles the truth well enough: “Make your stay in Japan more than just a superficial tour—READ JAPANESE TODAY!”(Source: Back of Read Japanese Today). With that in mind this book does what it was meant to, give the average tourist some basic knowledge of Japanese, an admirable goal. It may also find use as a tool to inform say a family member who is taking issue with your study or who just would like to know a bit more. One friend of our family has a son who is also planing to study Japanese and took note of this book after seeing it, the trivia aspect of it was her primary interest.

The promise of Suzumiya Haruhi the video game

The Promise of Haruhi Suzumiya (涼宮ハルヒの約束, Suzumiya Haruhi no Yakusoku) was the first Suzumiya Haruhi video game released for the PSP in December 2007. It is a fully voiced visual novel with exact Japanese subtitles. Like most visual novels the story does not require much interaction on the players part, it might as well be an anime in that regard. What really sets it apart from its anime counterpart is the easy at which one can study from it. When pressed the L shoulder button will bring up a history of everything said. Not only can you reread the text but you game will also repeat the audio.  This audio repeat can be done by pressing triangle from within the main game or by pressing the circle from the text history.

Altogether an excellent game for studying and enjoyment, mind you the level of Japanese required is not trivial, the subtitles do though open the possibility for using a dictionary.

Offical Website: http://b.bngi-channel.jp/psp-haruhi/

So why would you want to make windows transparent, well put simply productivity.  It works expecally well when viewing an image, be that photos or video, since the colours are less likely to blend with what you are doing on top.  With text it becomes a little harder although it is trivial to decrease the transparency which allows you to easily to which peice of text is on top.  Surprisingly this program is actually compatible with Windows Vista even though it was programmed for Windows 2000 and Windows XP .  Performance wise it runs well although this is to be expected since it was written with much weaker computers in find vesus what we have today. In fact it stays at around three percent of my AMD 940 and uses 1.6MB of RAM.  All together the productivity gains are comparable to getting a second monitor, if not a bit nicer since everything is kept in one field of view and Glass2K is free to boot!

chime.tv/products/glass2k

The USB connector

The unit itself shipped with the standard “2GB” holo sticker and box that you will find with just about any chinese mp3 player. The sticker came off easy and left just a bit of adhesive which came off well with a little rubbing.  Audio quality is no different as far as I can tell form my Zune and iPod Touch, although that is while using my own headphones, the ones it ships with are as to be expected, subpar.  As you can see it is quite nice with no nicks on the surface and feels very solid.

It is just a bit larger then the real iPod 3rd Generation Shuffle as you can see when compared to a skin for the genuine thing.

The knock off compared to a skin for the genuine

Although I did not let that stop me from using the skin.

It fits, kind of.

It is not without its faults though. For instance while the manufacturer claims that it will tell you what is playing I have not found this feature, and there are only two buttons.  The player also sadly only handles track order in the most basic way possible, it orders the songs, most likely alphabetically, then it plays from the top.  If you turn the unit off and on it will simply start from the beginning.  While I do not expect it to shuffle it would be nice if it remembered what it played last.  This might though be a plus for anyone wanting to make a playlist, all one would have to do is rename the first song “1″ and the second “2″.  The manual sheet of paper that it ships with is useless since it was printed for a second generation knock off,who knows maybe latter batches will fix this.  For those wondering here is a quick guide to this units control scheme.

• To change songs press either “-” or “+”
• To increase volume hold either “-” or “+”

All together it is a quite nice and small mp3 player.  In truth if I was given a choice between this or a Apple 3rd Generation Shuffle I would chose this one if only because I get to use my own headphones out of the box.  Of course it is also a lot cheaper, I got mine from Focalprice for 13.03 USD which is much better then the ~70USD asking price for the Apple version.