JapanesePod101.com Blog

Last Friday, March 17th, Sakura, Takase, Jonas, David and Peter gave a presentation at the Apple Store in Ginza for the Mac User Group, a great group of over acheivers! The presentation went extremely well as the Mac User Group went out of their way to make sure everything went off without a hitch. We would especially like to thank Bob-san (front row, red tie) for the invitation, as this forum provided us with an excellent chance to speak about what we are doing and meet some of our listeners! Quite a few showed up, including one from Florida!! (Although he was in town on family business, we like to think he came to see us!)
Afterwards we went to a nearby pub, and chatted the night away! For those interested in Mac, this is the group for you! Furthermore, if you’re just interested in meeting a great bunch of interesting people, this group is also for you! For more info: Mac User Group
Yoroshiku o-negai shimasu!よろしくおねがいします。

Please join me in thanking our good friend and devoted listener Athena-San (aka Athara) for taking the time out to register Japanesepod101 on Frappr. For those of you who are not familiar with it, Frapper, which stands for Friend Mapper, is an online tool that lets you map out the city where you live or work, share photos, and leave messages.

So put yourself on the map by clicking here.

Dear Listeners,

We would like to apologize in advance for any trouble experienced as a result of the major overhaul of our naming system. After the stark realization that our hybrid naming system based on the Dewey decimal system and the direction of the wind blowing on that particular day was not adequate to bring you the best possible product, we undertook the MAJOR task of renaming and standardizing our naming system. Thank you for your understanding.

We hope that our new naming system will reduce confusion and aid in the organization of our files. The change in file names should not impact your ability to download our daily podcasts. Please note that podcasts that you have already downloaded may appear as new files in iTunes, Yahoo, and various other podcast directories.

Please reference this example:

016_B12_010306_jpod101.mp3

“016″ stands for the 16th podcast that we released
“B12″ stands for the 12th podcast in category B
“010306″ is the date the podcast was released on (MM:DD:YY)

Here’s a list of podcast categories:

B = Beginner Lessons
I = Intermediate Lessons
J = Japanese Culture Classes
N = News
S = Survival Phrases

We KNOW that the new naming convention is an improvement over the old system, and although this may cause inconvenience, in the long run this should work out best for everyone.

All the best,

Tech Team

Last Friday, we received a visit from Favianna Rodriguez a talented and sucessful artist from the Bay Area (California)! Everyone at JapanesePod101.com was wowed by her energy level, personality and the fact that she brought us Ghirardelli Chocolates (Gone in 60 seconds)! We can’t thank her enough, as it was great meeting and getting to know her. You can find out more about the talented Favianna-san and her art work by clicking here.

Favianna-san managed to track down some more members of the JapanesePod101.com team. So, we would like to introduce you to Sasahara-sensei, Takase and Jonas.

Starting from the left: Kazunori (JPod101.com’s Alpha-male), Natsuko (holding the Japanese Journal Favianna’s art work appeared in), Favianna, Sasahara-sensei, Takase, Jonas, (kneeling) Sakura(holding half of the o-miyage (souvenir) from Favianna) and Peter(holding half of the o-miyage (souvenir) from Favianna). We hope you enjoy this.
Yoroshiku o-negai shimasu!よろしくおねがいします。

皆さん、(Mina-san) Apparently armadillos hold grudges!!!! The one that caused all the problems last week was not happy about the way he was roughly escorted off the premises, and he showed up again! And, this time with friends!! Due to the loss of natural predators, their population is uncharacteristically high! This fact combined with our light security crew led to us being overun quickly! The small pack of them did quite a number on us, until we apologized profusely!

The end result is that things should be much better now. If anyone is experiencing extremely slow download times with itunes please go to iTunes� –> podcasts, RIGHT click JapanesePod101.com and choose “Podcast Update”. This should return download speeds to normal.

We have had some reports of individuals seeing double entries in iTunes. This is a direct result of the “fix” and is normal. You can simply clear one of the episodes from your list by RIGHT clicking it and selecting “clear”.

For subscribers to other podcast grabbers and directories, please update the feed using according measures, and this should return the download speed to normal. You may still experience some sluggishness over the next 24 hours as our new feed propagates through the network.

Again, we would like to sincerely apologize to our all of our valued listeners for any inconvenience this may have caused! Please be assured we were doing everything in our power to get this issue resolved.

If you continue to experience download difficulties, please contact us immediately.

Thank you again.
JapanesePod101.com