It seems that Seiya has a lot more time on his hands than I do. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt his personal sanity by saying that he probably did the translation of Wednesday's comic for practice. :) Anyhoo, I thought it would be fun to actually draw up the strip in Japanese - so that's what I did.

Technically, there are a few other things I should do. I should change the format so that the entire comic reads from top to bottom, as opposed to our '4 square' format. Secondly, the text should run vertically - where you read it top-down, right-left... but that was going to be more work than I wanted to do this weekend ^_^ (well, not TOO much, but i did this fairly quickly). It's pretty cute, actually - thanks Seiya! (I'm too lazy to actually translate this stuff :P)

Ok, I *know* people will ask me this question - "how did you get the Japanese text and fonts to work?" Simple, really. Remember that hard drive failure i mentioned a few days ago? Well, I had to move everything over to my Jwin98 machine. So, now I am running jwin98 full time - which has its benefits and its problems.

Jwin98 doesn't like Illustrator that much, and it seems to have a personal vendetta against mIRC and ICQ. As with any M$oft product, it's just a question of learning how to deal with all the things you can and can't do, and remembering to reboot often. -_-

The benefit to running Jwin98 all the time is I can play games anytime I want without firing up the jwin box (this could be considered bad - I lost a lot of time to 'Air' this weekend). It's easy to rummage thru the graphics in the games (another time consuming activity). Finally, having Japanese true type fonts available in a native environment is NICE. ^_^ It was actually pretty simple to type the Japanese text into Illustrator. Er, well, the first time i tried it, it crashed so hard that i had to unplug the CPU to get it to reboot, but after that it worked fine. ^^;;

I've been hearing from a few people who have received their shirts, and it seems that they really look nice. Dave Park, my pal over at sazan.net and keeper of the 3x3 Eyes Digest was good enough to send me some pics of his shirt, front and back. Looks pretty good - i just wish mine would get here. ^^;;

My luck with anything technical this week continues to go downhill. I have had an ongoing battle with Ameritech (arguably THE worst telco in the states, hands down) regarding my phone line. When I moved in, it took 4 weeks (yes, four weeks) to get my phone line activated. Last month, the static on my line started to get so bad that i could barely understand anyone. When I called Ameritech, they told me that the line tested fine, and that it was my phone that needed replacement. This, of course, wasn't true, because i tested the line with a number of different phones. I was then told it would cost 50 bucks for a service call, even if it wasn't broke - and that would be about a week before they would come. Thursday night the line went 100% dead. Frustrated beyond belief, i went out and purchased a cell phone and then canceled my Ameritech line once and for all. What's scary is that my cell phone bill will be less than the Ameritech bill too. And the cell phone is clearer too. :) Gee, it's nice to have choices.

And finally, to add insult to injury: around 8:00 last night i discovered that I have no hot water in the apartment. It's Sunday afternoon and it's still out. God knows when that's gonna get repaired. Too bad the apartment complex won't return my calls...(sigh)