I have watched every episode of Grand Designs and it's a show I really enjoy. It's basically about people building really fancy dream-houses. While watching I have discovered a small trend. The best houses are the ones that are designed by an architect. It is absolutely possible to design your own house from scratch and project manage or even build it by your own hands, the problem is that the result will suck and even the people who built it will realize it sucks once they fall out of that initial love (I have dealt with this problem many times when attempting to be a webdesigner). But if an architect does all the work, the customer is usually somewhat dissatisfied when everything is done because it's not their house, their identity is not in the house, it's the architects house. I want to solve that problem as well as provide entertainment to those that don't want to actually build their own house, but might fantasize about it. After watching like 13 seasons in a row of Grand Designs last year I wanted to play around with some house-designs myself so I downloaded ArchiCAD which is a professional architecture design-tool that's really quite complex. I followed some tutorials and stuff so I could do the basic things, spending about 15 hours or so in total to design my humble abode. That's clearly not for everyone. Especially if you don't want to break the law and download the software that would otherwise cost you about €2700 (took me like 30 minutes to finally find a retailer willing to actually give the price). Aside from my fascination with Grand Designs we can see that designing houses is obviously a popular trend, take The Sims for example. That game is just about as much about designing your house as it is to raise and control a family. And it's sold millions and millions of copies over the years. So we have a huge market of people who like to design houses, just for fun; not because they actually want to build the house and live in it. And we have a lot of people who actually want to build their own houses but don't have the competency to create and implement their own designs. But we don't have any software that will easily let you design something with some what I would call quality of design maintained. I think people are fascinated by potential, if they are going to thoroughly enjoy designing a house, they want to have the potential to turn it into something real in the future, that's what I mean by quality of design. You can't turn a Sims house into a real one because there are no real proportions, there are no real physical rules saying that a free roof span of 50 meters is impossible. Therefore, I propose building an architecture tool for the common people. Market it like a game, price it like a game – give the potential to turn the results of your gaming-hours into something real. Obviously it can't be a real architecture tool because it's way too complex and as I said earlier people designing their own houses without passing it through the filter of a real architect will produce something awful. It needs to be somewhere in between The Sims and ArchiCAD. It should have a magnificently large number of objects like wallpaper, chairs, lamps and so forth. This gives the player a way to fill the room and see if the size of the room is OK. There should even be people that you can steer around and make them sit and stand and everything so you can see how a human would interact with your design. This is very much like The Sims. The software should unlike The Sims feature more real construction-methods, options of building walls at angles and level-changes, the user shouldn't feel constrained with their designs. Most importantly it must feature real-life physics. There should be a very easy way to "box up" your rooms like in the sims, just draw walls and afterwards you can tweak things like wall-thickness, height and type of material. The physics engine will tell you if it's possible to build like you are doing and will suggest changes (like: put in a pillar between two walls if the distance becomes too long). Objects interacting with the walls should behave dynamically, a painting hanging from a wall should move with the wall if the height of the wall is increased. All things should be completely unobtrusive so you can design your house really quickly and get into the nitty-grittys later-on if you feel like tweaking. With a physics engine calculating to make sure that everything you've built is within a somewhat realistic range and with real materials being used in the drawings, you should be able to export a model of your home, send it to an architect and let them pretty up your design, move doors that are weirdly placed and increase or (more likely) decrease the size of certain rooms or wall-heights and such. Allowing your design to pass through the filter of a real architect with years of experience in how you build a pleasant living-environment but with the core and the heart of the design still representing yourself! For those not actually interested in talking with an architect, there should be a super-simple way to create a simulation of you walking through your house, showing off different features and doing fancy animations of walls disappearing to reveal a floor-plan and stuff like you see in Grand Designs. When you've finished your little video showing off your awesome creation, it is immediately uploaded to your YouTube or Facebook account, showing all your friends how creative you are. There is of course no limitation on space. When you're done with one house, you move the camera to an adjacent piece of land and start building there! Feel like designing a sky-scraper? Why not design a whole city? One building at a time.

Yesterday was my birthday! I usually don't make a big thing out of birthdays and I didn't yesterday either, but me and Emma went to a restaurant that's just around the corner that I've been wanting to go to. It was a really nice yaki-niku place. A place where you order in raw meats of different kinds and grill them yourself on a small grill in the middle of the table. One order is a pretty small amount of meat. The point is to order in small rounds of meat and slowly grill them while drinking beer and having a good time. On the first round we ordered in some pork and some really awesome beef. We also brought in some vegetables and a small bowl of rice for variation. When we had finished that round of meat and the first round of beers we ordered in some more beef because it was simply so awesomely delicious and some chicken. The chicken wasn't really like the rest of the meat that was nicely cut up for you, the chicken came like two filets in a jar that we used a pair of scissors to cut up into smaller pieces and then grill. Anyway the sauce the chicken was in was awesome so it tasted really good as well. And when we were done they removed the grill from the table and gave us some nice ice cream, on the house. And they didn't even know it was my birthday! So, all in all, totally awesome day. And to top it off we have a nice vacation next week, it's autumn vacation and we're planning on going to Kyoto for a couple of days and then just chill around in Tokyo and study a bit on the side.

Mind-clearing incoming. This week we've had three tests; listening, speaking and reading tests. I think I've done pretty well on them all, they're basically to assess your level of Japanese and to check that you're moving at the right pace and such. During the tests we've all been "judged" by the teachers in how good we are and about 3 or 4 in my class I think have been offered to move to another class that is further ahead. I was asked to move to a different class as well but I said no. Some reasons why: I haven't really studied any Japanese in Sweden, so the Japanese I know now is from what I've learned here. Moving to the other class would mean skipping about 4 chapters in the book and studying them on my own. I don't really see any reason to why it would be better to study them on my own and then just be 4 chapters ahead, 4 chapters is very little progress. The second problem I have is that the other class wouldn't move at a faster pace, they'd just be those 4 chapters ahead. Sure I could save about a month by studying that one month concentrated at home and maybe save another month during the next class upgrade or something and then when I get home I'd have studied the equivalent of a year and two or three months instead of just a year. I think I'd know those extra three months significantly less well at the end of everything though. It's not as though I can't continue to study at home, so I don't really think this would make any significant difference. What I actually DO want is to study at an overall faster pace. It's probably just because there's been sooo many tests lately that we've barely managed to learn anything new that I feel it's moving kind of slow right now. But yeah, I wouldn't really mind a little faster pace, I'm not exactly working my ass off at home every day. Tomorrow we are free from school, in a way. The entire school is going to the Zoo, so that might be fun, or it might be terribly boring, we'll see. Next week we have monday and thursday off because they're holidays over here, that is pretty kick-ass, I've been wanting some real slacking-time. Not sure what I'm gonna do with it yet though. Kind of interested in running some sort of puzzle-competition at school, but I'm not sure about the format yet. Aaanyway, over at my Japanese blog I've half-decided to upload a picture every day with some one sentence or something since I can't figure out what to do with it really. I'm usually too tired to sit down and write up something serious (it's still quite an effort to write a long piece of text in Japanese), so that's why I want to just like.. do something at least. And if there's pictures it might be interesting for those who don't know Japanese as well! The link again is http://nikkichou.com. Mind-clearing over.

A random assortment of some video I have filmed over the last couple of months, showing off bits and pieces of things I like in Tokyo.

We have been studying kanjis for 17 days now (excluding the weekends) and have in that time learned 102 Kanjis. As we study 6 new per day. First off maybe I should explain what a Kanji is. Kanjis are the characters in Japanese that are taken from Chinese. They are small pictures that represent words, basically. In Japanese however there really isn't much focus on what the Kanji actually means by itself (we only learn that for like half of them, the others we have no idea). What's important is how the character is pronounced, the pronunciation by itself or combined with the pronunciation of some other Kanji makes up a word. The really difficult thing is not to learn how to read and draw the Kanji or learn what the character itself means, but to learn the many different pronunciations that each character has. Some of them can be pronounced in 4 different ways depending on what other Kanjis it is stuck together with, and there is little to no system of which pronunciation comes when. But it is quite fun, it's fun to ride the train and be able to read more and more of the commercials each day. As a salute to the Kanjis we have learned so far I will post them all in the order we learned them here, and after that I will have a video of me drawing every one of them. It really doesn't look like it's a lot in that small little box above here, but I assure you learning them is the accumulation of many hours of practice. Note also that you have to learn to draw all the lines in the correct order. I forgot the order of some of the Kanjis which is why I redraw them in the video.

I just wanted to post a small update. School is rolling along, it's been kind of though week. We had a test on big kanji test on monday, a big "grammar test" on tuesday and then another medium-sized kanji test on wednesday. This says:

いつも　いつも×１００ とてもすばらしいです (^_^) 中国人より漢字がよく分かりますネ ずっといのまま。。。　m( _ _ )m

Which means:

Always always 100% Very magnificent You understand kanji better than chinese people don't you? [I don't really understand this]

We will have learned more than 100 kanji on tuesday next week so I will do a blog-post then to celebrate that! In other news, we got a bank-account yesterday. Most banks here require that you have been in Japan for 6 months but we managed to get an account with Shinsei Bank in Shinjuku. It's a really awesome bank, super-friendly and they spoke english well and everything. I didn't plan on opening a Japanese bank-account at first, I thought that my bank would just withdraw a €3 fee every time I withdrew money, but apparently they take a pretty high percentage on currency conversion as well! On top of that, you need a Japanese bank-account to get a gym-membership and a bunch of other stuff so it's just good to have. Cya around!