This Casio dictionary has served me well for the past few years. It’s smaller than the comic books I use it on, and it’s still more convenient than any iPhone or Mac dictionary app. I still have so many Japanese comics to read, but I only tend to get through them when on vacation. For some reason I feel more like reading in English when I’m at home, and more like reading Japanese when I’m traveling. Maybe it’s because I have so many good memories of reading novels while curled up in bed at home, and so many good memories of reading comics while on trains around Tokyo and on planes to and from Japan.

We stayed in kind of a weird hotel. One of our engineers ended up calling the cops on some noisy people a few floors down, and on Twitter the next day it turned out to be the guy who makes NetNewsWire. Heh! On the wall of the lobby were these sinographs; I think they messed up their four-elements concept, because these say �water�, �fire�, �wind�, and �the planet Earth�. Whoops.