Jim Grisanzio

Some people have asked me what that says in the top right corner of my blog –  ジム　グリサンズィオ  サン · マイクロシステムズ

Well, it says “Jim Grisanzio, Sun Microsystems” (with a slightly different pronunciation) and links to my contact information and my tiny little bio. It’s written in katakana, which is one three writing systems used in Japanese. Katakana, hiragana, and kanji all combine to make Japanese writing. Katakana is used for foreign words, which my name certainly is since it’s attached to me and I’m American (half Italian and half Irish/Scottish/Ukrainian).

I can now pretty easily read and write the 46 characters in katakana and the corresponding 46 characters in hiragana, but I haven’t started on the thousands of kanji characters yet. And just because you can read some characters doesn’t mean you know what the word means (a 100k word vocabulary would come in handy right about now) or how the sentence is structured or what the situation is. So, I have a bit of work to do. Like years of work. No matter. I’m in this for the long run, and over time more and more of my blog will blend into Japanese.

It is truly sickening, though, how effortlessly my 18-month old kid is learning Japanese and English. It’s like it’s nothing at all to her. No big deal. A game. Whereas I feel like I’m rupturing brain cells. I’m still way ahead, though, and I still think I can take her.

For the last few weeks some of us have been talking about building language/country portals on opensolaris.org. Some of the conversation has been happening internally, but it’s moving externally now as well — pending community interest and consensus, obviously. The longest thread at present is on the Internationalization & Localization Community discuss list. As a result of these conversations, I put an OpenSolaris project proposal on the main OpenSolaris discuss list under the conveniently titled Project Proposal: Country/Language Portals for opensolaris.org. If you are interested in commenting or participating, please feel free to chime in on either thread. The formal project proposal thread only needs a "second" to be approved, but after that the conversation and implementation will continue within the Internationalization & Localization Community in collaboration with the OpenSolaris website infrastructure team. It will be interesting to work on this project and to see what regions around the OpenSolaris world translate the site.