n other interesting news from the week, I have applied to be a Tokyo Orientation Assistant at this year's JET Orientation, and I fixed a bit torrent problem that was really annoying me (yes, it's journal entry worthy, haha).

I'm pretty excited about the TOA position. Every JET can apply for it and it's very competitive, but I think I have a good chance. Hopefully, anyway. Okamoto-sensei handed me the form yesterday with the disclaimer that it was due by today. I've come to expect this for everything related to JET here in Japan, so I wasn't particularly worried, hehe. To weed out the people who just want to go for fun, CLAIR requires that applicants choose a seminar topic to present on at the orientation, and write a short outline for it. The topics were pretty limited, so it was pretty much either Independent Japanese Study or Thriving as a Rural JET for me. As 'inaka' as Ako is, it's massive compared to where a lot of JETs live, so I figured I should leave that to them. So I wrote up what I felt was a pretty good outline for a presentation on how to study Japanese independently. That's something I've done a lot of, thanks to all my free time at school!

Due to the fact it was all due today, my application had to be sent electronically. Which was a bit of a challenge, hehe. After quite a bit of effort, I managed to ask Kyoto-sensei to send my outline into CLAIR by email, and then got Okamoto-sensei to send my signed application form in by fax. I hope it all got to the right place! I'm sure it did, these things just seem to somehow magically work out in Japan :) So now it's just a waiting game until May, I guess. Almost as tough as the wait for the actual JET results, haha. I'm really excited though. As I said, I think I have a good chance of getting in. I had a lot of fun in Tokyo as a new JET, and the CLAIR seminars (one of which I'll be running if I go) were very useful. I'd like to live those few days again and really help the new JETs out by passing on what I've learnt.

On to the bit torrent problem, I've been finding recently that as soon as I open my bit torrent client, even if nothing is downloading or seeding, my net connection responsiveness drops massively. Like, I won't even be able to access web pages. It got to the stage where I'd have to close it if I wanted to browse. Not cool. So I was mucking around with my modem last night (all in Japanese, of course, haha) and noticed that NAT was turned on. I thought I'd turned it off in the past for this exact reason, but I think I may have somehow hard reset the modem and it got turned back on as a result. So I turned it off and hey presto - I could browse while using bit torrent again.

Still on bit torrent, I also set up some RSS torrent feeds. I'd known about these for a while and figured they were pretty interesting, but never got around to playing with them. I caught up with Phillip for dinner last week and he raved about them, so I set a few up when I got home. They seem to work nicely, so it'll be kinda fun to go home each night and see if any random files have been caught and downloaded from the RSS filters :) Wheee. Life is good.