About Rick Noelle

This is the blog of Rick Noelle. My main interests are Japan and Japanese, Linux (primarily Fedora and Red Hat) and computer programming (mainly web development). I also enjoy maps of all kinds. I find that one great way to virtually explore Japan is through tools such as Google Maps Street View, Google Earth, Yahoo Maps, etc. Recently I've been having a great time checking out 3D buildings of Osaka in Google Earth modeled by contributor "SeaGate", for example. I also have started using Twitter quite a bit. You can find me on Twitter here.

I made my first trip to Japan in 1992. I stayed for two weeks and toured all over Kyoto and Tokyo. I then went back in 1993 as an exchange student for a year. I lived in Isahaya which is just outside of Nagasaki. Then I went back again in 1996 to work as an intern student for a year. This time around I lived in Sapporo and worked for the "Regional Science Institute of Japan". They were a GIS research facility that also hosted an Internet Service Provider. I was a system administrator for the ISP. I was using FreeBSD a little bit and also teaching myself Perl and CGI programming. It was about this time that I first heard about Linux and gave it a try. I bought my first Linux book "Running Linux" at Maruzen bookstore in Sapporo. Since then I have been back and forth to Japan a couple of times. Unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to go recently. I miss it and hope to go back again soon. To keep up with Japan I study Japanese in my spare time, work on jdictionary.com, read as much Japanese news as I can, study maps, rent a Slingbox hosted in Fukuoka so I can watch and record live Japanese TV, listen to Jpop, read manga that I get at a local Japanese grocery store (I am a fan of Kodansha's Morning モーニング), follow interesting Japanese people like SeaGate on Twitter and various other things. Part of the purpose of this blog is to document the things I do to "immerse" myself in Japan without actually living there.

This site used to be hosted on my home Linux server but I recently migrated it to DreamHost.  I work on the dictionary portion as often as I can. As a part of the migration to DreamHost I converted the base of the dictionary from Pylons to Catalyst (which basically means switching from Python to Perl). If you have any ideas or requests for the dictionary, please fee free to contact me. My goal is to make it extremely easy to use and "smart". I want it to figure out what you are searching for automatically. Kind of like Google seems to do with web searches. For example, I don't want you to have to specify that you have typed your entry in kanji and you want to search the "names" dictionary. It should just figure that out for you. At the same time, I want it to be fast and efficient and have a way for you to keep track of your searches and save them into study lists which you can share with other users or review later. I'm also interested in doing crazy things like have a twitter bot that sits and listens to tweets in designated areas of Japan and attempts to translate key words from them on the fly. Or have a news bot that is constantly scanning Japanese news and keeping tallies of the most popular words and kanji and flagging words that don't exist in the dictionary for entry. I don't have a lot of free time to work on all of these things but when I do, I plan to note the progress in this blog.

If you'd like to send me an email, I can be reached at rick (at mark) jdictionary (dot) com or find me on Twitter. Thanks for stopping by.