Dave Brown

Signs from God

I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in God. But sometimes certain things happen that require me to take a certain course of action. I call those signs from God. He doesn’t need me to believe in him for him to send me calls to action.

For instance, I’d always wanted an excuse to move to Japan. When I was working at a marketing company in Vancouver, I managed to acquire a Japanese girlfriend who wanted to move back home. And then I learned that I still qualified for a working-holiday visa. And then I was laid off from the job at the marketing company (mainly for political reasons). That amounted to a sign from God saying “Move to Japan already”.

On a more minor note, I really like Chucks because they’re the most comfortable shoes I own, but I’ve wanted a pair of basic black Chucks for a while, because while having them in lots of colors is cool and all, sometimes you just want a default pair of shoes. I strolled by ABC-Mart today, and discovered that they not only had basic black Chucks on sale for really cheap, but they also had my size (which is unusually large, and generally unavailable in Japan). God mandated that I buy a new pair of shoes, which is just what I did.

I’ve been sort of undecided about upgrading my restricted-to-400cc-motorbikes licence to an unrestricted license for a while. I sort of wanted an unrestricted license, but it’d always seemed like too much trouble to me to actually get one.

Then I received a note in the mail last week from the driving school that I got my restricted license at, proudly announcing that they were introducing their new unrestricted license lessons. This was God tapping me on the shoulder saying, “Hey! You should be getting on with this!”

So, just in the spirit of Checking Things Out, I hopped onto my bike and headed over to the school just to have a look at the bikes they were using for this, and to ask about what sort of discount they’d be offering for their unrestricted-motorcycle-license course.

The discount was significant. That made me more interested right off the bat. Then I wandered out to have a look at the larger bike they were using to teach the course.

They’d gotten a shipment in of Harley Davidson Sportster 883s.

Well, this was tantamount to God clapping me on the back and saying, “GO!” I’d fully expected them to have gotten a few Honda CB750s, which would have been a semi-incentive. But really, I couldn’t possibly give up the chance to ride such an impractical, overweight, sluggish bike for several hours, end up with an unrestricted license at the end of it, and, best of all, not have to keep the bike.

So now I’m enrolled in the Large Motorcycle Driver’s License course at the local driving school. I’ll be spending a couple of hours each week for the next few weekends riding around on a six-hundred-pound Harley. You bet I’m looking forward to it.

In which the gods contribute to my indecision

This morning, I woke up feeling cold and unmotivated, and not feeling like taking the train to work. So I decided that I would ride my bike instead, because that always cheers me up and stuff. You know that you’re sick of trains when the prospect of Tokyo traffic makes you feel better.

So I checked the weather forecast just to make sure it’d be safe, and that I wouldn’t freeze to death or anything. Gah! It said it would rain this afternoon! I switched back to taking the train.

I got to the station and discovered that the train that I could have taken to get to work quickly wasn’t running (due to a suicide somewhere between Ikebukuro and Akabane apparently). It goes to Shinjuku, though, which is the busiest train station in the entire world—everyone goes there. That means that it’s overcrowded all the time and I generally don’t ride it. Instead I duck around to Ueno and then take regular trains or subways from there, and generally have a nice comfy seat. Unfortunately, what with trains to Shinjuku not running, all of the Shinjuku-bound salarymen had gotten onto the Ueno-bound train, stuffing it to amazing levels. After two trains packed so full they were visibly bulging went past, both without me on them, I realized that my first instinct, after all else, was the correct one anyway. I went back home and grabbed my bike.

More pictures

The new camera is nice. Wow. Here, have a few more pictures I shot today wandering around Shibuya.

Crowds of people crossing at the famous scramble crossing in front of Shibuya Station.

A bank of vending machines. I actually think the colours in this came out a bit oversaturated.

This my place of work. Of course, this being Tokyo, there is construction nearby. See also, lens distortion.

I've always been a the-poor-workman-blames-his-tools kind of guy, but man, the pictures that this camera takes are seriously pretty.

New toy!

Yes, yes, here I am posting about things again. Because lord knows you can’t have enough stuff.

Anyway, it was my birthday recently (thanks livejournal for reminding me of that; I would have forgotten otherwise), and Chie asked me if there was anything particularly that I wanted. It took me a bit of hemming and hawing and thinking, because I’m one of those infuriating people who, when they want something and can afford it, goes out and buys it, and when they don’t or can’t, just doesn’t do anything.

I mentioned that my little Casio digicam had recently died, and she said, “Fine. I’ll get you a new camera.” Well, that was a bit of a shock.

So about a week beforehand, she marched me into Yodobashi Camera and picked one. Japanese camera stores are not the sort of place where you pick the best of the three cameras available. The selection tends more towards an embarassment of riches. They had everything from little cheap toy cameras, to actual Polaroid-type instant cameras, to 35mm SLRs, to digital point-and-shoot cameras, to HD video cameras, to DSLRs.

I decided some time ago that I wanted to try and improve my photography skills, especially after seeing some of the wonderful photos that some of my friends take. So I wanted a camera that I could actually learn with—a DSLR, or at least something with a big enough lens that I could take reasonable pictures.

The result of her marching me into Yodobashi Camera, however, was more bafflement than anything else. The selection of cameras was so vast that it didn’t take me very long at all to go into information overload. So I begged off and asked her for some time to do some homework.

I accomplished that on the Saturday after my birthday by trolling around all the local electronics stores and seeing if there were any particular bargains I could find.

Often, I’ve found that when shopping for something I want, there’s one thing that just leaps out at me—for instance, I once went to a shoe store in Saskatoon and the staff asked me if there was anything I was looking for. “No,” I told the guy, “just looking to see if there’s anything that jumps out.” After a bit, I found an awesome pair of boat shoes with a checkerboard design. “You know how I said I was looking for something that jumps out?” I said to the staffer, “Well, it just did.”

So after walking around Bic Camera in Omiya for a bit without anything particularly jumping out at me (although the Pentax K-x did tempt me—but at its price tag, not so much), I tried another store: Sofmap. Turns out that Sofmap is just a subsidiary of Bic Camera these days, but on the other hand, I went in and had a look around, and once again Pentax leapt out at me: the Pentax K-m, known in other parts as the K2000. Which they had on clearance for ¥38,400. So that was what I’d decided on—only a little more expensive than a point-and-shoot, but it actually takes 35mm lenses. Granted, it’s only a 10-megapixel camera and newer cameras are 12 megapixels, but really, once the megapixel race went past 7, there isn’t really anyone save an obsessive poster printer who would notice the difference. And the obsessive poster printer probably makes his living from photography, so it’s worth it to get a really high-resolution camera.

So the next day I went back there with her this time, and with a sad trombone noise, I learned that the clearance units had sold out and the display unit was the only one left—and they’d jacked up the price because the normal retail price was greatly in excess of their clearance price. After a bit of hemming and hawing, Chie agreed to my proposal that I could pay half the cost of it. Then we went to bargain with the sales guy anyway, because hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

He originally wouldn’t budge, but when putting the kit together and reconstituting the original retail package, it turned out the lens cap had gone missing. The salesman was inconsolate—convinced he’d completely lost the sale merely over a lens cap. We suggested that maybe a bit of a discount could make up for the devastating loss, and he went to talk to his manager, and came back with the offer: ¥38,400. There was something a little familiar about that number, but there was no way we would turn down a ¥11,600 discount merely for the lack of a ¥300 part.

Which is how I now have My First Photographic Money Pit. If I’m not careful, I’ll end up spending all my discretionary money on glass, I figure. I took it out for a bit of a test drive today:

That wasn’t really my first photo, I thought thought it would be amusing to offer that as my first. Turns out the camera has a setting to make pictures look like they were taken with a Holga. Very nice.

I’m pretty sure the first thing anyone does with a new DSLR is take pictures of flowers, just because, hey, look how clear the images are! And macro mode!

I took this as a sort of challenge for the camera, to see what it could do. It was fully night time, and I’d specifically told it to not use the flash. Since I still have training wheels on, it decided that it needed a full 1.5-second exposure, so I had to put the camera on a bench to let it take its time.

The fun thing is, I have this wonderful camera and I have no idea how to make it go. And even so, with a completely clueless tyro at the shutter, it takes pictures that look nicer than any I’ve ever taken before. I’m going to have fun with this.

It's back!

Well, today I picked my bike up from the shop. It was back in running condition and was working fine! I nearly froze to death on the way home.

Turns out that the guy at the bike shop didn’t really have much more clue what had gone wrong with it than I did. He couldn’t get the bike to start, so he start poking around in the electricals surrounding the starter. He couldn’t see anything wrong, so he took it all apart to have a closer look. Still not finding anything wrong (and, naturally, the bike’s computer didn’t have anything interesting to say either), he put it back together—and the bike started! His theory was that I shook a connection loose somewhere along the way.

The total cost of the fix to me, including labor and the tow in the first place, worked out to the grand sum of—absolutely free! I do like my bike shop. (Connecting Rod in Eifukucho, just to ensure they get a plug.)

Bike update

Well, the guys at the bike shop looked at my bike, and as it turned out, “something complicated and electrical” was a little bit of an exaggeration. It turned out that some wire in the middle of the engine somewhere had gotten shaken loose. Putting it back and screwing it in tight made the bike go perfectly well, with nothing else they could find wrong. I could have done that myself, even, if only I’d had the tools and time to take all the fairing off the bike, someplace to put it when I was working, and the ability to puzzle it all back together again afterwards without bring in terror of my bike spontaneously disassembling itself on the expressway. I think some things I’ll just leave to the pros.

Of course tonight it’s snowing, meaning no way in hell am I going to be driving it home in that, and the bike shop’s closed tomorrow (because bike shops close on Wednesdays in Japan), so I won’t get it back until Thursday. Sad face.

Maybe I should get myself a naked bike so I can at least see the engine when things go wrong.

Encouraging

I just learned that despite her wonderfully-Italian name, Stefani Germanotta can’t speak a word of Italian. Her Italian is so weak that I'm pretty sure I would've comported myself better in that situation.

Goes with the territory, I guess

I tried to start my bike the other day, in the usual way: turn the key to “on”, grab the rear brake lever, and hit the starter button. Aprilia went to some lengths to make sure that you wouldn’t accidentally start it in a way which would have you roaring off into a wall, which is something that, say, Suzuki, would have done well to emulate. Not that I speak from personal experience or anything.

However, instead of the reassuring vrwrwrwrVROOOM! that I was expecting, all I heard was a forlorn clicking noise.

A friend of mine suggested that maybe my battery had become feeble on account of the cold weather, and lent me a charger to get it up to full charge absent taking the bike out for a good roar on the expressway. I spent a significant time on the bike roaring along expressways, so I was a bit dubious, but I did accept the merit of his idea at face value, and charged my battery up.

While I was doing so, I checked all the fuses in the fusebox just in case one of them had blown. If that had been the case, the bike is furnished with a complete collection of spares, so it would have been the work of a moment to make it go again, leaving me with the not-so-onerous task of finding a replacement fuse. But of course, as you might expect, all of the fuses were still in immaculate condition.

When I put the fully-charged battery back into the bike, I grabbed the brake, hit the starter button, and just for good measure, goosed the gas. And it responded with a healthy clicking noise just under the front of the seat near the battery. And nothing else.

Naturally, this meant that, being an Italian bike, something bad had happened in the electrical system, and it would most likely be amazingly involved to fix. It could have been anything from a loose wire going to the starter motor to one of the coils in the starter motor having melted for mysterious reasons, up to and including a random lightning strike. Or possibly one of the neighborhood cats pissing on it.

So I decided to see if I could find some help nearby with it, and hopped onto my smaller auxiliary bike to troll the nearby motorcycle shops. The first shop I went to explained that since they only deal with domestic bikes, if they needed any parts to fix my bike it would be excessively-complicated and expensive on their part; I would be better off finding a bike shop that was authorized to service Aprilia bikes.

So I went a little further afield to find the local shop that dealt with Aprilia bikes. They explained to me that since I hadn’t bought my bike there, getting it serviced would cost a pretty penny which would be sad if it were something that were covered by warranty; and further, having a truck come out to my place to haul my bike to the shop would cost forty thousand yen (somewhere in the neighborhood of four hundred US dollars). The guy at the store pre-emptively told me that that was a bit on the excessive side, and I would most likely be better off getting hold of the place that sold me the bike, inasmuch as if it were covered by warranty, I wouldn’t be out of pocket at all. Hooray for honest mechanics!

So I fell back on the option I should have tried first, despite being far away and all: I called my dealer and told them what had happened. They immediately said, “Wait, we’ll get back to you and tell you when we can send a truck out to pick your bike up!”

Now my bike is at the dealer. I hope it’s just a loose wire somewhere; if that’s the case, that’ll mean I get it back tomorrow. If it’s not, and they have to order parts from Italy, I might get it back sometime next month. Maybe.

Particularly "Frequently Bought Together" and the reviews...

How to live with a huge penis.

Porno for the imagination

This delightfully-profane video introduces the phrase in the subject line of this post. It’s exactly right. Avatar is porno for the imagination. There are all of these wonderful details scattered around like confetti, and if the plot is a bit rudimentary, that’s okay: there’s lots of food for the imagination just in the setting.

A good rough guide to how strong something is at inspiring people is fanfiction.net. If people are inspired by a story, lots of stories will spring up there. Right now, there are 187 Avatar-inspired stories posted there. I like how things are going.