You are in a maze of twisted little Deanna Rubins, all the same.

Who are you?

Hi, I'm Deanna. I live in Akabane, in the north end of Tokyo. (It's so far north that most people actually think I live in Saitama, the prefecture north of here.) I'm an English teacher at a public junior high school in Arakawa, which is another part of the north ghetto of Tokyo. I spend most of my days making up games to trick Japanese teenagers into talking English, and most of my nights watching baseball games (during the appropriate time of year). During the winter my life is excruiciatingly boring.

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.

Ok, so why "dr4b"?

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.

At some point 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.

What sort of stuff do you do?

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.

Tell me something random about you.

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.

Hey, you seem interesting. How can I contact you?

You can try emailing me, deanna dot rubin at gmail dot com. Or you can walk around Akabane Nishi and look for the white girl with long brown hair.