I am a 19 year old student at the University of South Carolina, though my parents live in Atlanta. I am majoring in International Business (I hope...have to get accepted) and Finance, with a minor in Japanese. As of Spring 2004, I'm a freshman.

I informally started studying Japanese myself in 8th grade. Before that, however, I was exposed to Japan through various outlets - anime, video games, and other things that kids weren't interested in back then. In 8th grade, after teaching myself Hiragana and Katakana with the "Power Japanese" software, I decided to attend Riverwood High School, which was (is?) the o­nly school in my county that taught Japanese. I was accepted to their International Studies Magnet program, meaning I had to study 4 years of it to graduate with the Magnet certificate. And so, my official studies of Japanese began. It was after the end of 9th grade that I came to realize that anime was not for me; and I began focusing o­n other things Japanese, such as certain video games, jpop, and dorama. During my sophomore year, I participated in the Japan Bowl, a competition run by the Japan-America Society, where our team got 7th place in the nation. Then, I decided I wanted to do a student exchange. And so, I got accepted into the AFS program, and was shipped off to Japan for a year. The culimination of my Japanese studies in Japan was the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. I took Level 2, and failed with a 51%. I came back, finished my semester at Riverwood, and did my senior year at Independence High School, though still graduating from Riverwood. I applied to University of Hawaii and University of South Carolina, because I decided that majoring in Japanese wouldn't quite prepare me for the future I had planned. Obviously though, I have not given up in my studies by any means.

As far as official qualifications go, I have none. And I also had no previous translation experience before doing this site. It is my own daily challenge and endevour, which will hopefully benefit some other interested parties along the way.

As mentioned above, I wanted to challenge myself o­n a daily basis in Japanese. I also think that there is a severe lack of sites like this o­nline; the o­nly others I can think of offhand are AsiaBizTech and i4u. Considering the amount of new technology that comes from Japan, o­ne would think that it would be covered very well. Instead, I noticed a trend where English sites would not report o­n new Japanese technology until the Japanese themselves had bothered to translate their information into English.

My main goal in making this site is to bring my knowledge of the Japanese language to help others. It may sound a bit corny, but it's probably the best I can do right now. I would like for this site to be able to provide consistent, "oh hey that's pretty cool" type information.