My Best Teaching Is One-on-One

一対一が僕のベスト

Of course, I team teach and do special lessons, etc.

当然、先生方と共同レッスンも、特別レッスンの指導もします。

But my best work in the classroom is after the lesson is over --
going one-on-one,
helping individual students with their assignments.

しかし、僕の一番意味あると思っている仕事は、講義が終わってから、
一対一と
個人的にその課題の勉強を応援することです。

It's kind of like with computer programs, walking the client through hands-on.
The job isn't really done until the customer is using the program.

まあ、コンピュータプログラムにすると、得意先の方に出来上がった製品を体験させるようなことと思います。
役に立たない製品はまだ製品になっていないと同様です。

Thursday, April 11, 2019

Green Teas vs. Black in Japan

I've been translating quite a bit of material for the tea market, in the mix of translation material that has been my means of trying to make a living lately.

In the process, I'm learning some things that reinforce my impressions about the differences between black and green teas.

I found a blog post (https://gjtea.org/the-history-of-japanese-black-tea-wakoucha/) written from the point of view of one who seems to think Japanese tea farmers should make more black teas, which blogpost contains a rather concise history of teas in Japan -- with a focus I really hadn't really seen before. It may explain why teas in Japan tend to be greener than black.

In the short version, teas in the first millennium ("Common Era") and the beginning of the second tended to be green, even in China. That was when tea was brought from China to Japan. Then Japan closed their borders for two centuries while Great Britain tried to take over the world. And Great Britain was fighting China with opium and other dirty tricks.

(Dirty tricks are dirty, even if the goal of opening China up could be viewed as somewhat noble, in case you need to be reminded about the dual consequences of European expansionism.)

So the Japanese tea market focused on, and developed an aesthetic around, green tea.

And Britain kind of helped move forward the trend in the rest of the world of focusing on the more intoxicating, more habit-forming black teas.

Japanese green tea, by the way, is generally prepared and consumed in processes that do not involve temperatures as high as with black tea, which is no small part of the reason that the beneficial chemicals in green tea tend to survive more and the toxic chemicals tend not to be produced as much.

So, I do not really recommend either black or green tea.

But I have been of the opinion that black teas tend to be worse for your health than green.

And now I have a bit more evidence of this concept.

FWIW.

Identify yourself!

Person with mail address pour_np3_liver@provider:
pour_np3_liver@provider というメールアドレスをお持ちの方、

I do not remember your mail address. I need more clues, or I must assume you are someone I don't need to talk with - a spammer or some such.
あなたのメールアドレスを特に覚えていません。ネタがないとあなたが会話の相手にする必要がないと推測するしかないのです。つまり要求なしの(たぶん不正な)行きなり連絡をバラ散らかすような人と思うべきだろうとのこと。

Which means I won't respond if you don't identify yourself.
したがって、どなただと教えていただけないとお返事はいたしません。

Tuesday, April 9, 2019

BIF-6809 Revived (near fig-Forth interpreter I put together in college)

I ported and modified a fig-Forth interpreter for a couple of my college courses about 30 years ago. It was for the classic 8-bit 6809 CPU, and I was not thinking clearly, so I mothballed it.

Twice.

Anyway, I took time out of my schedule, two and four hours at a time over the last couple of years to resuscitate it. It now seems to be more-or-less as it was before I mothballed it the second time. It functions, you can write and edit code and save it to disk and load it back again. And you can write in assembly language.

Picture of method of booting bif-6809 on an emulator
Booting and testing BIF-6809 on the XRoar Emulator running Disk Extended Color BASIC


It's a bit primitive. Raw disk, no file system. 

And the call protocol is a bit baroque, using the direct-page mode in a way that will conflict with more general uses. 

I hope I can find the time to rewrite it with a more conventional call protocol.

If you missed the link above, you can find it here: https://ja.osdn.net/projects/bif-6809/. (And here is a page for how to get started, and a page to help figure out what to do next.)

I would be happy to hear from anyone who successfully gets it to run on whatever they are running. (Contact me through the project page, please.)

Real Cocos or emulators, it should be just a matter of getting the disk image file bifsource.dsk in the second drive and tools.dsk in the first, and

LOADM "BIF6809.BIN:1"
EXEC &H1300

and, at the static white cursor, such things as

6 LOAD

followed by

0 QLIST

1 QLIST

etc., more in README.TXT and BIFDOC.TXT.

Note that a "Q" screen is a 256 byte sector, where a regular Forth screen is a 1024 block of 4 sectors sitting on a 1024 byte boundary:

Forth
SCREEN
Quick
SCReen
(decimal)
Quick
SCReen
(hex)
byte
offset
(hex)
byte
offset
(decimal)
0000 0 $0000 $0000 == 0

1 $0001 $0100 == 256

2 $0002 $0200 == 512

3 $0003 $0300 == 768
0001 4 $0004 $0400 == 1024

5 $0005 $0500 == 1280

6 $0006 $0600 == 1536

7 $0007 $0700 == 1792
0002 8 $0008 $0800 == 2048

9 $0009 $0900 == 2304

10 $000A $0A00 == 2560

11 $000B $0B00 == 2816
0003 12 $000C $0C00== 3072

13 $000D $0D00 == 3328

14 $000E $0E00 == 3584

15 $000F $0F00 == 3840