Notes

This is lunacy! Well, you know my views...

One of my co-workers, a certain Sato-san, is a graduate of none other than West Virginia University. He spent four whole years in scenic Morgantown, and professes his admiration for the natural beauty of the Wild and Wonderful state (you know, "Blue Ridge Mountains, the Shenandoah River?), but also admits to being pretty bored for about three years, 364 days, and--he supposes--about 23 and a half hours. He also refuses to watch "Deliverance", but he won't say why...

I had to sign approximately 27 (well, OK, more like five) birthday cards today. Apparently everyone in my office was born in January. My inscriptions for most were fairly prosaic, but when it came to the aforementioned Sato-san's card, I had to break creative. The Japanese version of "happy birthday" is 「誕生日おめでとうございます」 (tanjoubi omedetou gozaimasu), but I noticed that on the card, most of the ever context-sensitive Japanese had simply written 「おめでとうございます」 (omedetou gozaimasu), which means "congratulations"; since it was in a birthday card, the occasion for congratulations had already been established, you see.

In case you were wondering, Japanese is one of those languages where you are allowed to omit the subject when it is understood from context. In fact, you are encouraged to omit the subject except when it is introduced or changed, lest you emit stilted Foreign Devil-style Japanese. Yuck! In fact, you are also allowed to omit particles, verbs, any other word that is understood from context, and the ending phrases of many (most?) sentences? So you can convey an awful lot in Japanese without actually saying much.

In this spirit, I simply wrote:

お。ご。
ITのグラバー・ジョシュ

or, in the romaji:

o.go.
IT no Guraba- Joshu

which in English would be like writing:

H.B.
Josh Glover from IT

If you cannot figure out what that means, aks my dad! ;)

I have broken into the top 1000 Wiki contributors at work (I am actually number 738 as of the last time the statistics were generated; perhaps I will be higher next time the stats come out)! Hurrah!

This basically means that I write a lot of documentation. Which is A Good Thing(TM).