Weird on Nanikore

Hard Road Bento

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 14:19:50 +0000

I needed to get a new bento box (that’s a Japanese lunch-box). Now, I’ve been here long enough to sort of filter out, or actually understand some of the interesting English language notes on some products, but this one kind of struck me as just being a little serious - it’s a hard road bento:

“The road of the life will become very hard. But we must overcome it.”

my bento box

That’s a pretty heavy message for reading over lunch.

Aptitude Tests

Mon, 08 May 2006 14:01:40 +0000

Right now, I’m doing lessons towards my 400cc motorbike license test, currently booked for the end of May. One part of the procedure is to do an ’ aptitude test’, which is a combination of several test sections. The first few are based on spotting patterns and odd ones out, with each section only taking a couple of minutes, and speed/number of responses also being a factor.

For example, in a left side column there may be the numbers 25367, on the right 25637, and you quickly see they’re different, so you put an ‘X’ between them; the next question may be two strings of kanji which are the same, so you put a circle next to them to say they’re ‘correct’.

This fits a test of speed of recognition and decision making. Most of the sections are based on this concept, such as one which tests mental arithmetic, and one which (odd as it may seem) measures how quickly and repeatably you can draw triangles within a square.

The last section is a personality profile section, with just over 50 questions you can answer true, not true, or ’ ?’.

Fortunately for me, for this last section, I was given English translations of the questions, as I’d still be sat there looking up kanji in my WordTank an hour later otherwise. Some of these questions were easy enough to see where the test was going: Have you ever fainted? Do you have problems sleeping away from home? Do you suffer from anxiety easily?

However, some of the questions had me a bit bemused:

Do you often hate the world and want to die?

Do you hear voices?

Even stranger (in some ways), the next question was:

Do you like children?

I have to say, if I was going to kill myself, would I a) write it down, and b) take the trouble to do my 400cc motorbike license first? I wonder what responses they get to this quiz, and what kind of students are in some of these classes.

Honestly Bad Coffee

Mon, 29 Aug 2005 05:18:27 +0000

Every now and then it’s good to try something you don’t often try. To be honest to yourself. However, a bad time for this is before a meeting at work, and a bad thing to try is a different variety of something you aren’t keen on anyway.

For me, this was a different type of canned cold coffee from the works fridge. Generally, I don’t drink these, but when one is called " Honesty" you have to at least give it a try right?

Wrong.

This was awful, vile, disgusting. If this coffee was a relative, you’d send it really nasty socks at Xmas. If you see this in the konbini, give it a miss. Honestly.

BBC RSS Strikethrough

Thu, 05 May 2005 10:57:34 +0000

Like many, I use RSS a lot. Really. Not as much as some, but more than most. It means I can browse the headlines of about 20 sites in the time it would take to looks at one of those site’s HTML pages. Most of these RSS feeds are auto-generated by the companies themselves, so I was curious to see this as part of the BBC feed today:

Er…looks like an editor changed the story there! No biggie. Out of curiosity, here’s how that story looked on the page:

Original Comments

Comments from the original WordPress blog post.

Ken Ming — 2005-05-05

haha.. really..? or is that just photoshop edited… :D

graham — 2005-05-07

Nah, that’s real. Actually, in the few days since I posted this I’ve noticed a few more examples in the BBC RSS feed. Ah, workflow systems, I know them well. Actually, I’ve seen documents from companies in Word format who have neglected to remove edits and revisions which make for some pretty ineresting reading.