Today’s article is The Advantage Of Dual-Identities (A Case Study of Nabokov). The bottom line is “Pluralism is always practical”. I had hard time to read this article actually. Lots of unknown words for me. Some of them were obviously easy words but I didn’t remember. sigh… As it took very long time to read, I don’t have much time to write. Because it’s time to compose.

Anyway, I got two things from the article.

And I liked the article’s bottom line. I love pluralism, diversity, variety, mixture, uniqueness. 

I just started subscribing RSS feed of Scientific American, to improve my reading skill in English. It’s a part of preparation for TOEFL. Not only for the reason, but also there are a lot of interesting articles that I can enjoy and I’d like to introduce, so that I can improve writing skill as well. : ) Today’s topic I’m interested is about correlation between aerobic exercise and ability of memorization.

Aerobic exercise bulks up hippocampus, improving memory in older adults

According to this article, aerobic exercise improve an ability of memorization for old people. As aerobic exercise works in that way even for people in the late stage of their lives, I suppose it must work for young people as well. Recently I jog before school usually for a half hour, 3 miles. But not everyday. I am too lazy very often that I just skip jogging because of sleepiness. If aerobic exercise affects also young brains in the same way, it really motivates me to jog. I have plenty to memorize, Especially English vocabulary. I think I can be motivated enough by the fact you can improve healthiness AND memory by jogging. Does anybody know some article which shows some evidence that aerobic exercise improve memory even in younger people? By the way, you can observe my running activities here.

It’s been two weeks since this semester began. The 3rd week starts today. My schedule is super busy during this semester. Following one of my friends who are from Japan and studying out of Japan, I’d like to show you the list of my classes I’m taking this semester.

• Mon
  • Music History and Literature I
  • Classical Voice coaching
  • Chamber Music
• Tue
  • Current Musical Events
  • Intermediate Piano
  • Counterpoint I
• Wed
  • Music History and Literature I
  • Chamber Music
• Thu
  • Current Musical Events
  • Intermediate Piano
  • Counterpoint I
• Fri
  • Classical Voice II
  • Applied Music Master Class
  • Composition private lesson

Between the classes, I have shift of work. Since I practice piano or compose in a practice room while I don’t have classes or work shift, I am at school almost 9am-9pm through Mon-Wed, 9a-7p on Thu, 9a-4p on Fri. It is good for me to keep myself busy. At the end of this semester, I must feel it shorter than I think now. I want to make every single day productive and meaningful.

I went to sushi place in Pasadena today. What funny was that all the chefs and servers were chinese. Even the ladies sitting next to me at a counter were also chinese. I originally was a  chinese. No Japanese ppl in sushi place. lol It was kinda funny  I think more than half of sushi places in LA are owned by Korean or Chinese ppl, not Japanese ppl. haha. Sushi here in LA is very different than Japanese one. The place was very good, I enjoyed it anyway.

One of my friends in LA, who is American, told me that he had not known the difference between Japanese and Chinese till he went to high school. To say correctly, he thought there was no difference. Almost all the asian countries were the same culture-wise, he thought. surprisingly this may be not uncommon, but no wonder once you go to “chinese sushi restaurant” 

Wow, it’s been a week since the last post. Yes, I am 三日坊主. Anyway, I’m doing good. I’m keeping practicing piano Monday to Thursday. I’m not 三日坊主 at this point so far. But I have not composed any music during summer break. I know I should. I will… I can’t believe June is passing away in half hour…

It is easy to work out at your place for people like us, gymnasts. We use our own weight instead of dumbbells or something. Gymnasts must be better at doing self-weight training. My main list for upper body of recent days is like:

• straddle handstanding 5*3
• hands stand push up 10*3
• chinning exercise with backpack filled with books 10*4(concentrate on triceps*2, on broadest muscle of back *2)
• dips with the same backpack

I think it is more natural to train using your weight than using weights like dumbbells, you’ll get more useful muscles, don’t you think? Muscles trained by weight, machines or something like that tend to be showy but worthless. maybe… maybe. Additionally, some times you find people working out with dumbbells and machines look unnaturally built, don’t you?

I said that it’s easy to do self-weight training for gymnasts, but I didn’t say that it’s too difficult for not-gymnasts people really. Anybody can try that also. I wish everybody who wants to be in good shape will get natural healthy body. Summer is almost there! 

You can easily find how to do self-weight training. google it!

最近の日本の大学はどうなんだろう。自分が京教にいた頃はネットで成績確認とか出来なかったと思うんですが、もう出来たりするのかな？今通っているLos Angeles City Collegeでは授業の登録も支払いも成績の確認もネットでできて大変便利。さて、春セメスターのFinalが終わって10日ほど経過した今日、ようやく全てのクラスの成績が出揃いました。予想通りではありますが、オールAです。ｱﾋｬ。自慢ですみませんね

留学最初のセメスター、色々ありました。生まれて初めて舞台でのピアノ演奏やら、ソルフェージュの授業やら。ちゃんと音楽の基本的な訓練してこなかったので、とても有意義でした。あとは、初年度の学生のみが対象で一度しかチャンスの無いAlpert Scholarshipを一位で獲得したのは本当に嬉しい出来事でした。LACC Music Departmentで由緒ある奨学金です。1年間掲示板に貼られます（笑

まだ写真はありませんが、でかでかと写真が貼られるっぽい。

夏休みは2ヶ月半。日本には帰りません。有意義に過ごしたいものです。

A week ago, we finished 2010 spring semester at LACC. Music Department Office had been closed for a week from that. They resumed from today, and offer practice rooms. I went to school with gusto and practiced till noon. I’m planning to go to school everyday as possible and practice till noon, during summer.

I found this tumblr account “Safari extensions” just after the release of Safari 5. You can see that a lot of new extensions for safari 5 are being released. Some issue I had have been already resolved by them. What I needed the most was a function to restore the last session when Safari runs, and you can find a extension for that function. Still safari 5 + its extensions are missing very important function for me, which chrome + its extensions have, but it’s just a matter of time. It is somewhat easy to develop extensions for safari 5. and it seems to be similar to chrome extensions, so once Apple opens official gallery, it would be get up steam and much more number of extensions would be released.

Just started using Safari 5. There were so many reasons I want to use safari, or I don’t want to use safari. I used to use Opera, Safari, Firefox, Safari again, Chrome…. but I just decided that I’m gonna use Safari 5 as primary browser. It is really fast. Recently, chrome’s kept getting slow and use much more RAM. Somehow, load gets so high when I play flash video. Sometime, a process of a tab opening Gmail gets high load weirdly. Using safari 5, much much less load while playing youtube(what makes difference?) or anything, run quickly, no wait, much much less RAM use, benefit of Cocoa like “look up in Dictionary”. I know there are less extension for Safari, but you can find enough. you can use most Greasemonkey script, using GreaseKit. Good thing was you can use LastPass. so I don’t need to care about password thing because I was using it on Chrome also. Anyway, you should try Safari 5. You’ll be impressed about its speed. I hope a lot of good extensions for Safari will be released.

Most of SIMBL plugin works with Safari 4 seem to be compatible with safari 5, but some SIMBL plugin sometimes make safari 5 crash. I stopped using SafariTabConfig, SafariTabMemento. Also Glims behaves suspiciously, so cut. I want browser to re-open the last session when it runs, do you know the way to do that without Glims? I want a pin function like Chrome on Safari also…