Entries this day: Miki Money Work marble_track

Miki

11:06am JST Friday 8 December 2006 (day 13407)

Got a postcard from Miki in NC; she's been there two months and her bf will come back with her in January. I hope everything is working delightfully for them both.

Money

1:24pm JST Friday 8 December 2006 (day 13407)

Today is payday, because the 10th comes on Sunday. I've totally lived this month within financial means; my food spending plan, which I feared might be too small, was plenty to cover other plans in which I spent more than planned.

And getting sick didn't destroy my income though I was out for four days.

I've decided not to abbreviate this month's plan because I got paid early, but I'm going to get a head start on next month by paying Hitomi today.

Also,

My credit card account in the US was snarfed up by a big bank. The new web interface for my account is actually quite nice. They have an ingenious feature: a personalized image on their server which is served up when my computer's cookie is detected. A fake website can't realistically copy that image to fakingly get my password by setting up a phishing script. Even if they try to send the URL request to my bank, they can't get my cookie (?) to impersonate my computer.

Only thing is I wonder how everything will work if the cookie on my machine is erased. Perhaps I'll try and see.

Work

10:32pm JST Friday 8 December 2006 (day 13407)

Today my favorite Yuki showed me the paper we worked on together; I had been careful not to write the paper for her, but only to make changes that she could understand and recreate herself. Her instructor made several corrections which I transcribed for her in a legible manner (I'll email them to her).

She wasn't able to schedule a lesson with me for next week, but she'll be back to work on the next paper she has to write, discussing issues brought up in Dead Poets' Society, the movie they watched in class recently.

My favorite Ami didn't come today; I'm surprised, but I sorta know what happened. Last time (or so) we talked about cancellations and she learned that if she cancels on the day of the lesson, I still get paid. If she cancels a few days before, she gets the money back. So she cancelled on the day of the lesson.

Delightfully enough for me, another student filled in 40 minutes of the new 60 minute paid break, so I'll be paid for that time as well. Basically being paid double.

Miki, who came back to EV today for the first time since March, had an excellent technique for studying. She had a "book" on Mother Theresa (basically amounted to what could be a speech on MT's life) and had me read it so she could repeat it. I discovered how much she could capture and repeat at a time and extended a bit past that, and then a bit past that as well. She was able to repeat sentences like, "Agnes said goodbye to her friends and home, and then said goodbye to her family at the station." and "Classes started early each morning, but the nuns' days started earlier than that."

I quite appreciate her concentrated efforts for an hour, and hope they pay off well for her. She was quite an inspiration to my studying. Which, of course, explains why I'm writing this in English instead of Japanese.. oh wait. shit; I got it all backwards.

marble track

10:44pm JST Friday 8 December 2006 (day 13407)

The marble track didn't get squeals today, but was appreciated by one of my students; I forget who it was. I didn't add a whole lot to it today, but I built a "pre-fab" part that hopes to implement a suggestion by Ami a couple weeks ago for the big marbles to roll back and forth like a slalom skier. She wanted the slaloms to be really tight, but I explained basically it couldn't work that way because there was nothing to encourage the ball to switch directions. So the slaloms are bigger than would be totally cool, though I think it will be pretty cool when it's finished. It definitely will change the overall shape of the track.

Also, I'm pleased to have squeezed two more tracks into where I hadn't planned to have tracks before. I may have mentioned the one that looks like wooden wires made of toothpicks in the center. As of yesterday I used the third strangely-labeled long stirrer from Starbucks (?) to make an extra track for big marbles leading into the trough before the switch near the bottom.

If possible, that track will lead up between the as-yet-uninstalled slalom track and the recently finished wire toothpick track. It will be quite tight. Perhaps too tight for a big marble and will have to reserved for small ones. Or not used at all.

The top of the wire track curves over the default big marble landing area, and I'm not sure where to send it from there. It could continue to curve along the 180 degree big marble U-turn, but that will extend (again) the outer edges of the track. Have to decide if I wanna have even more fragile toothpicks defining the outer boundaries.