Today I played around with writing some XML parsing in PHP. For those of you (probably all of you that read this) that have no idea what that means, it’s just me playing with a couple of web-related technologies and seeing if I could make them play nice for a pet project of mine. In the end, yes, they play nice. I haven’t played around too much with what happens when you give it unexpected results… I expect it’ll explode rather heavily, but I’ll worry about that later. It was enough to know that I could do something useful with it.

I also updated my school results page, adding in my results from last semester, which I finally just got. Since it’s my first time getting grades using a Japanese system, I’ve just put in what I think are equivalent. I also added in my classes for this semester, although they’re noted as next year since they don’t finish until next year. My research continues to be… well, I have no idea, and that’s the problem. I need to just start working on something a bit more and trust that it will work out somehow.

Caught up a bit today with Dad on Skype, that was cool. He’s still busy with his PatronBase stuff over in the UK, although he’ll be heading back to NZ next month, I believe.

Not for the first time, I wonder whether or not I’ll be able to get a job here in Japan. I don’t mean teaching English, there are tons of jobs doing that but it isn’t something I especially want to do. I’d like to avoid it if possible, in fact. Particularly in the games industry, where I want to be… all the positions that I’ve seen advertised so far have been full-time, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to find a part-time job I can somehow upgrade to full-time after I graduate. I would still really like to work here for a little while after I graduate and since there’ll be some time before Anastasia starts her PhD, I figure it’s liable to be the best opportunity to do so. But, finding a job here (especially as a foreigner) is going to be rough. Basically I need to start looking now… and that just makes it harder, since I know at the very least my Japanese is going to be better in a year’s time when I’ll actually be starting work. Sigh. Ah well, life goes on.