Hi, I'm Deanna. I live in Kawaguchi, which is a city in the south end of Saitama, pretty close to Tokyo, Japan. Due to the weird geography of the area, my address is in Kawaguchi, but across the street from me is Warabi City, and I use the Warabi station on the Keihin-Tohoku line to get home. I even end up putting my recycled plastic bottles in the Warabi City bins all the time. Don't tell them.
I work in the north end of Tokyo, in Akabane. I'm an English teacher at GEOS. Before I moved to Japan I was a software engineer at General Electric (Healthcare division), "writing Perl code so people don't have to write Cobol". I lived in Seattle for five years, before moving to Japan in the summer of 2007. Before Seattle, I lived in Pittsburgh, and I'm originally from Philadelphia. I don't say "yinz" or "youse", but I do still say "iggles" and "stillers". I have a degree in Technical Writing and Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and my brain is full of random numbers. And kanji. LOTS of kanji.
At Carnegie Mellon, the old way they generated userids for the Andrew system was to take your initials and then add 2 more alphanumeric characters to the end. These were generated in the order userids were generated, so dr00 is the first person with the initals dr, and dr01, 02, down to 0a through 0z. Then 10, and so on. In other words, dr4a was generated before me, and dr4c afterwards. It was really fun to refer to people by their logins - "Hey, bc3p, go find mj2q, we need a fourth for bridge," and so on.
In the summer of 1995 they started using a "saner" system for userids, and allowed people with old ones to change it, but I didn't have anything to change it to, so I kept mine. Now it's way "oldskool", but on the other hand, it's a distinct identifier for me - nobody else is dr4b. But I am. And it's nice to meet you.
Well, these days I'm at work around 55 hours a week when it comes down to it. In my spare time I watch baseball games and travel to random places around the Tokyo area, exploring and seeing what's there. Alternately, I hang out with random friends in the Tokyo area and drag them along on my adventures. When the weather's nicer, I ride my bike around a lot. I'm an SLR camera junkie and I abuse my Nikon D200 much more than it deserves. I love books and baseball and board games and things like that. I studied Japanese in college for several semesters and passed the JLPT 3-kyuu in 2001, and plan to pass the 2-kyuu this year. Wish me luck.
Back in Seattle I used to play softball and volleyball all the time, and went ballroom dancing regularly. I had a great set of housemates and assorted friends, and we played boardgames and did all kinds of random stuff together. I miss them.
I'm left-handed. I suck at cooking Hiroshima-yaki, but it is one of my favorite foods. I have a pretty good memory for names and numbers and my brain is filled with baseball trivia. My favorite movie is Singin' in the Rain.
You can try emailing me, dr4b at hotmail dot com. Or you can walk around the Shibanakata area of Kawaguchi and look for the non-Japanese person living there.