Takumi's Blog

Friends, they’re good to have. From not having any friends when I first came to the JMP, to having so many I forget that I had them… well, it’s a great feeling.
Love, it should be a simple thing. But it’s something that is hard to keep simple.

Relationships, they intertwine with friends and love. And they’re even more complicated.

Well, I guess that’s all I feel like saying now. Oh, and I’m going to miss everyone. And also, I have so many stories, I need to write them all down!

So, I don’t know whether my readers keep up with my Pages (the tabs at the top of the page), but I do update them!

Just now, I added a new one, it’s the “Things I Regret” page.

Sometimes in life you do things you regret, and I have those listed, and a main reason to why I regret them.

Yay, I finished another website today!

It’s for the Japanese Immersion Studies Program, lol, I think I like worked on it for 10 hours… Anyways, here’s the link to it: www.portlandjisp.org/

Comments and suggestions/recommendations are welcome (actually, I want to know how i could improve it more… I know my CSS is a little buggy… sorry about that)

Woah, remember that web 2.0 browser, Flock, that was based off of Firefox?

I tried it out for a while, but it was way too slow and crashed a lot.

I just tried it out again today, and it’s VERY snapy. It’s nice. I love it. I don’t know if I’d use all of the builtin blogging extensions it has, but it “feels” snappier than Firefox… although it uses Firefox.. how does that work huh?

I’m soo excited! I got accepted as a beta user for Google’s new hosted gmail service. Basically, i can get email at: admin [at] amarimono [dot] com and I can use Gmail for it!

Isn’t that awsome, so I can get email from takshimada [at] gmail [dot] com, or you can email me at admin [at] amarimiono [dot] com and I use the Gmail interface to read/write reponses!

Tri-Met is awsome, I love it. I wish that all the buses were the frequent ones so it has a 15 min wait instead of a 30 min wait though. The MAX comes every 10 min or so (the MAX is a light rail train type thing).
On my way home the driver of the bus I was riding was new and was training. It was fun to see new people drive the bus.

It kind of got me thinking about the Portland Public Schools. I mean, I’m not enrolled anymore but I thing Portland is a great place, and if they don’t invest in these kids, they’re going to have an even larger problem.

I see it as a downward spiral right now. The majority of the Oregonians don’t want to pay more taxes for school, (because they’re fucking lazy, fat, and complain like little kids).  School’s don’t get the funding they need, and then the kids who grew up in an environment that didn’t educate that well are uneducated. And then those adults now don’t want to pay taxes, etc.

The way I see it, it’s either take a hit now, or a bigger one later. Someone’s gotta step in, even if it’s the hard thing to do.

Wow, I just ran across this today, Google Finance.

It’s very in depth (compared to Yahoo!’s, and has no ads). I’ve been interested in stock lately, and I want to get some of Apple’s soon…
Well, I need to clean my stuff up since I’m moving, so that’s all for now.

EDIT: I guess I didn’t know what I was talking about, here’s an article that kinda talks about Google’s new Finance service: http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=16206

Summer is always a time for me to mature. I don’t know why, but it always happens. I thought I matured more than I did, which I didn’t. But I was still more mature than the kids in my classes. (I tend to be immature when I’m with my friends to “fit-in”, and at the same time I fit in just fine with 23 year olds).

It turned out that I did loose the friendship i used to have. All the parent’s had the impression I’m some bad trouble maker. My friendship with the seniors and juniors also helped, even though they were assholes sometimes, they didn’t treat me like my classmates did. They still gave me respect, just enough that it gave me self confidence, and it helped me through the year.

During the summer I visited Japan again, and I talked with my friend Rana Shimada (has no relation to me), who I hadn’t seen since Malaysia (which was 5 years ago!). She told me about the school I was accepted to a few weeks ago.

This year I have had the best classes. Although Mr. Ngyuen, my math teacher, did not have much influence on me, the class was a good place for me to see where I did not want to end up in my life. Mr. Anderson’s AP US History class was boring, but he was a great, interesting teacher. His quote of the day and friday stories were somtimes inspiring. Ms. Ames was my Biology teacher in freshman year, and I was her TA this year. Interesting times, and I realized how annoying freshman are.

Mrs. Page is my Japanese teacher for two periods. 4th and 7th. This is the class i probably pay the most attention to. Not only am i moving to Japan, but it’s also a fun class, and i definatelly feel like i’m learning something everyday (even the days where we get distracted). I always enjoy the class with the seniors and juniors, I feel like i fit in more, at the same time I don’t, because I don’t have the same friends all of them do. 5th Period is Mr. Leeman, my Journalistic Writing teacher. He’s awsome, an ex-military, ex-grant student. He can also be inspiring, though he can’t spell :P. 6th period is Mr. Kilkenny, and well, he just has hilarious jokes, which are very corny to everyone else.

So that gives you a brief summary of my classes this year. Now I’m moving to Japan because of the school I was accepted too. I’ve been wanting this for as long as I can remember, but at the same time, I love everyone here. I’ve made at least 30 friends, which is so nice for me. I will miss them all. I realized while talking to Shaun’s dad today. Last friday was the last day I would be a student at Grant high school. It brought me to tears, which I haven’t cried since i broke up with Jovan 2 years ago.

My story, my life, will continue.

7th grade I became friends with Alexys and Jasmine. Later on i became friends with my soon to be girlfriend, Jovan. It kinda went by quickly, a pretty eventless year. Although, during my time at Camp westwind, I made jovan cry. I thought it was, funny, when I also know I was just trying to get her attention (bad job at it huh?). CWW is a camp that the JMP reserves for one of the holidays (I forgot which one), and a lot of the families go there and hang out for 2-3 days.

8th grade was probably the most eventful year of my life. I went out with Jovan for about 3 1/2 months. I was blinded by love. I stopped talking to a lot of my friends, and everything was or had to be with or about Jovan. I know it was middle school, but it was still love. I remember towards the end I kept getting so jelious over all the guys she was flirting with, and she never let me kiss her.

The week before she broke up with me, my friend Samantha wanted to go out with me, and I was close, o so close to breaking up with Jovan at the time because of my frustration, but I didn’t. In the end she broke up with me anyways. Througout the relationship, I became good friends with her friends, and i still am to this day.

Samantha and i have had a weird relationship. We’re friends too, but we also have a record of asking each other out and denying each other. Currently it’s at she has asked me twice, and I have her 4 times… XD

After my relationship with Jovan, my life went in a downwards spiral really quickly. I got involved with some bad kids, and did some eventful things, and went through hard times. I started off freshman year thinking I had to re-create all my friends who i had not talked to in 3 months. I don’t regret what I did, because of those times, I am who I am today.

Note: now that I’m not at grant anymore, it makes it easier to post this to a place where all my classmates can read it too.

When I first came to Portland, OR, it was hard. I was moving away from a place I had lived for 8 years, where I was practically a spolied brat. I had lived in bliss, Nepal was a great place to be at the time. Now it’s a little fishy with the civil war, but then it was awsome. I was going to a private british school, with saturday japanese school. I had 3 maids, 1 driver, and a cook, and we had a guard man around our house.

That’s an experience I don’t know how to describe. Now that i look back, I think of them as family. But when I was a kid, I really didn’t know much. I was sheltered from like everything. So all I knew was I could generally ask them to do anything for me, and if it was something they needed an okay on, the would call my mom. My friends families were also the same.

At the same time, I was also very exposed to the Nepalese culture. I participated in all the ceremonies with my “dede’s” (nepalese for sister, pronounced deedee’s). Right now I remember some of them crystal clear, but I suck at explaining them.

So, anyways, there are so many more things I want to talk about Nepal, but I’ll save that for another time. My dad went to work in India when i was 7, and my mom wanted to move back to America. And that’s what happened. Sometime’s I still wonder if that was the best thing to do, or the worst (not that I can go back and change it, and not that i want to).

I remember my biggest worry was staying alone at home at night. My perception of America was this horrible country with murderers around the corner. I know, Portland’s pretty safe compared to other large cities, but I was still scared. When school first started everyone liked me. But… I know now that dies off quickly here, and I was labled as “gay” because I was so different from them.

I guess it was a culture shock for me, none of my friends in Nepal were as brutal as the kids here. Bullying started so quickly, and it lasted so long. I only had 3 friends up until 7th grade; Charlie, Hiroshi, and Shaun. In 5th grade, I left for a year to Malaysia, where I improved on my Japanese fluency, and made some good friends there.

Fun night, about, dunno, maybe 15 people came? Mr. Leeman came too, and gave me a Journal/Diary thing to write in, with a quote in it too… Ben and Nick-lee came, which kinda suprised me, I mean they are seniors, but this is what they were like “Takai, you’re leaving man”….

Ah, so… today was my last day at Grant high school (kinda). I need to come in early on Monday for like 30 min to “withdraw” from the school (stupid huh)… Well, it was a pretty good day. I can’t believe I’m leaving.

So, weekend is almost over, awww… school, ugh.

This weekend was filled with excitement. Kind of. On friday me and Sean stayed after school in my Japanese class and we watched a japanese comedy. It was pretty good, and we were there for 2 1/5 hours. Later on, we went over to Jessie’s house (guy) and did air soft and chatted about fun stories.

Then on Saturday I went back to my mom’s house, and I cleaned up my room, soon I will be needing to pack all my stuff for Japan.

Sunday was by far the best day of the weekend. I really didn’t work on some things for my mom, and I feel really bad about it. I told her i’d do it, and I didn’t end up doing it. And I feel really bad. I was supposed to make a 4×6 postcard for an invitation something for her work, and I was supposed to pack 1 suitcase. The other things I finished.

So, we renewed some domain names for my company (client’s ones), and got a couple new ones. My projects now are:

• www.gwb-international.org
• www.gwb-usa.org
• www.portlandjmp.org
• www.ventibrothers.com
• A postcard for the thing (I just called my mom so she can send me the info she wants on it)

And since I’m in love with drupal now, all of the sites i just mentioned are based off of it.

My friend Shaun and I are thinking about buying a server and colocating it. (Colocating it means sending the server to a data center, paying a certain amount of money a month, and then getting a dedicated line to the server for internet.)

I don’t know whether I want to get it, I need to get at least 10 customers who want to get a hosting account on it and have them pay like $20/mo. We’re discussing it now, so more later.

Okay, so here’s the deal.

I want one.

I want one badly.

I’ve looked around a LOT on the internet. Best deal for the moolah is www.calpop.com.

Anyone else know anything about ded. servers? I’m thinking of going half-c’s with my friend on buying a server and colo’ing it at CalPop…