Dave Brown

Not quite what I was expecting

A while ago, I traded in my old Nokia phone for an iPhone, when I went to try to delete a very large number of messages from the old phone and discovered that there was no mass delete functionality in it. Not a very smart phone after all. Quite a stupid phone, really.

Turns out that if I’d gotten it earlier, and wanted to delete, say, hundreds of text messages from one particular person, it would have been a simple matter of a single swipe and a single click to confirm. Makes me wish I’d gotten it earlier than that. Well, that, and the Nokia was just generally crap anyway. Anyway, I’ve been perfectly happy with it since I’ve gotten it, especially since I like to be able to poke around in the (software) innards of my devices, and it’s not hard to do that.

But, and there’s always a but, the problem with things that have moving parts is that the moving parts tend to break. In the spirit of that, the vibrate-mode switch on my iPhone just recently started acting wonky—sometimes not actually setting (or cancelling, as the case may be) vibrate mode. Also, the earphone remote control stopped working. All related to, apparently, a wire or two coming loose.

So I swung by the Apple store and told the guy at the Genius Bar about it. He poked and prodded at my phone, confirmed that the earphone remote wasn’t working, confirmed further that the vibrate switch didn’t always work, and said, “Oh, and there are some scratches and cracks on the case.” Well, of course there are, I thought, because it just naturally suffers from wear and tear.

So he said, “Okay, what I’m going to do is give you a new phone.”

I said, “What, to lend to me while you fix my phone?”

I’m familiar with cell phone repair in this country. When I had the Nokia, it developed the nasty habit of simply rebooting every now and then, which is a pretty antisocial thing for a phone to do. Then it started not coming back up again after it rebooted. And just generally not working at all. I took it to the local Softbank store to have them repair it, and they lent me a phone that looked approximately three generations old. And when I got it back, it was still broken, but they had replaced a rear panel on it! I took it back three times, and it came back slightly less broken each time, but only slightly less broken, which pushed me over the edge into getting the iPhone.

He said, “What? No, I’m just going to give you a new one. Black 32G iPhone 3GS, just like what you had before. Just restore from the last backup you took from your old phone and you’ll be good to go.” Good thing I took a backup this morning. That was the easiest cell phone service I’ve ever received in this country.

I wonder if they’re going to fix my old phone and sell it as a refurb.

Spotted in Akihabara today

I saw a couple of young people wearing bright red T-shirts with “TRUE NORTH STRONG AND FREE” in white letters on them. One of them was wearing a bandanna exceedingly gaily embossed with Canadian flags.

My theory is that they were a couple of Americans who had received the advice “try to look like Canadians, and people won’t be as antagonistic towards you” and had translated it into “be as Canadian as a really enthusiastic George Bush supporter would be American”. So they overdid it, and ended up being Canadian with the bass and treble turned up way too high.

Little Canadian flag pin on your backpack: good.

Great big loud T-shirts and bandannas and general bombasticness about YAY CANADA: you’re trying too hard. Everyone can tell you’re not really Canadian.

(If they were actually Canadians, they were just doing it wrong.)

Shopping today

I went out shopping today for various things I wanted. I went to Hard-Off and didn’t get things that I was actually looking for, but I got things that I wanted anyway:

• a Playstation memory card
• a Ministry CD
• a Lisa Loeb CD
• Gran Turismo 2 for the PlayStation 2
• a cable splitter

Total bill: ¥1050.

Having been unsuccessful in finding what I was looking for, I ventured to Akihabara. There I was successful!

• a Game Cube memory card

Total bill: ¥1550.

If only Hard-Off had had any Game Cube memory cards handy.

Book-Off is silly

I went there a few months ago in hopes of finding a GameCube game for my newly-purchased Wii, and there was damn near nothing.

Today I went there and the only good games—for any console at all—were for the Game Cube. Paper Mario, Zelda: Wind Waker and Viewtiful Joe. And a Game Cube controller to boot.

Shame they didn’t have a Game Cube memory cartridge to make it perfect for me.

Today I learned...

…that it’s illegal to mount stuff on the mirror posts of a motorcycle in Japan. I learned this by asking a nice man how I’d go about mounting my GPS onto my mirror post, considering I was having the damnedest time finding anything to mount it with.

Also, my old mount, while nice-looking, was made of plastic. And broke when I was adjusting it one day. Whoops.

So now the GPS is on the mounting post for the windscreen instead—the new mounting clamp and brace set me back ¥840, somewhat cheaper than the ¥2000 that the previous one cost. Well, a bit more than that—I ended up getting a sheet of Velcro to actually attach the navi to the brace.

It's the summer holiday! Time to play some video games!

I used to spend quite a lot of time playing video games. That was fun—working my way all the way through Final Fantasy X, for example. Following the epic story as it unfolded. Going through all of the dungeons in The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past was also fun—accumulating all of the extras. I recently thought about the fun I had with video games a few years ago, and wondered how come I don’t seem to be able to find the time to play big long video games any more.

It came to me today. I managed to find lots of time to devote to video games before I bought a motorcycle. It came to me as I’d hopped onto the little toy scooter to pop out for a bit of lunch, and then noticed that the fuel warning light was on so I should buy myself some gas, and then figured that it would be a shame just to fill up the tank without actually using some of it, and going for a bit of a drive around the countryside. For about three hours.

Recently I heard from an old Internet friend, a guy by the name of Jon Povey. To my surprise, it turned out that he’d decided to move to Japan, and was living in Tokyo. To my further surprise, he’d acquired a motorcycle license, and with it a motorbike—a Honda CB400. He suggested getting together to go for a bit of a ride sometime.

On Saturday, I was talking with Chie about what to do on Sunday, and suggested going for a bit of a drive. “Where to?” she said. “Oh, I don’t know. Just somewhere. Let’s follow our noses.”

Then on Saturday evening, I got an email from Jon saying, “Hey, I have a lot of spare time tomorrow as it turns out. Want to go for a bit of a drive?” Since this created absolutely no conflict with my previous plans whatsoever, I agreed. Then I sent a note to my other buddy Drew, saying, essentially, “Want to go to the Cow Place tomorrow?”

The Cow Place is a farm on the top of a hill in Chichibu, one of the more beautiful parts of Saitama. It has (unsurprisingly) cows, and sheep and goats. And you can go into the goats’ pen and pet the goats. You can also chuck pebbles at the cows if you’re feeling mean, and see how long it takes them to react to a pebble bouncing off their haunches (several seconds, as it turns out).

The day got off to the sort of disorganized start that I’m used to—Jon phoned me and said, “I’m hear,” and I managed to somehow groggily misunderstand him and get the wrong end of the stick, so he was hanging around outside my place bored for way too long. Oops. Drew nearly called the whole thing off, but I talked him into coming along anyway by explaining that, well, he had a navi with “Cow Place” in it, whereas I’d just recently broken the mount for my navi trying to get a handlebar mount to fit onto a mirror stem. Oops again.

Eventually everyone got together and we headed off. Jon was on his CB400, Drew was on his Scarabeo, and I was on my Scarabeo, with Chie on the passenger seat. Drew lent Chie his spare helmet, because his spare helmet is actually legal for full-sized motorcycles, unlike my spare helmet which is really more of a hard hat than a helmet.

Jon wanted to visit the sort of motorcycle shop that sold things that you could put onto your bike—he mentioned storage and decorations, and he was also delighted by the compass that I have perched atop the dash on my bike and wanted one for his. So our first port of call—after a gas station, of course—was the Nap’s store in Okegawa.

I think that Jon had looked at the trunk under the seat on my bike, and the enormous back box on Drew’s bike, and felt some amount of envy. The storage space under his seat is just about big enough for his surprisingly-compact rain gear, and not much more. So, with an eye to fixing that situation, when we arrived at Nap’s, he immediately set about furnishing his bike with more storage than Drew’s and my bikes put together—he got two expandable pannier bags, and a tank bag with lots of room for a navi, or a selection of maps, or both. And an iPad. And a small laptop computer.

Then he spent quite a while actually installing all of the baggage he’d bought. The tank bag was easy enough to install—he just sort of put it there:

He spent quite a while fiddling around with various straps and whatnot, however, to get the panniers in place:

But eventually he got it all installed. He asked me to tag along behind him and let him know if anything fell off. I did that, and all I noticed was that he wasn’t quite used to manually cancelling turn signals just yet. He also didn’t notice my frantic hand signals to try and get him to stop indicating that he was about to turn left for miles on end. Then again, we all made fun of each other for forgetting to turn off turn signals.

After that, we headed over to Higashi-Matsuyama and enjoyed a nice lunch at Hanaya-Yohei, and then headed on over to the cow place. That involved a really fun roar up some nice windy twisty mountain roads. Since Drew had the navi, he was the leader. With that in mind, Chie surreptitiously—while I was taking a bathroom break—said to Drew, “It might be scary going up the mountain, so don’t go too fast leading us up, okay?” I didn’t learn about this until after we’d gotten home—and it was Drew who told me, not Chie. She’s trying to trust my driving ability, which is giving me more credit than I give myself.

When we got to the Cow Place, we discovered that all of the cows had already been taken away for the day, which meant that it was very aptly named. With all that, Jon put a waypoint into his GPS—which also doubled as a phone—calling it “Cow Place”, explaining, “If anyone asks, I’ll say that it’s the place that I went to which had no cows in it.” Makes sense to me.

However, lack of cows aside, we all got an ice cream cone from the ice cream stand by the cow place, and it turned out to be the sort of ice cream that’s actually worth driving seventy-five kilometers for. Then we went strolling around a bit in the spirit of exploration and discovered…

A fantastic view. I tried to take pictures of people, but, as Drew demonstrates…

…the view was more interesting than some berk with a camera clicking away.

We walked around a bit, and discovered to our delight, a goat pen. Which people could freely enter if they wanted! So of course we went in. Here are two very comfortable goats and one really pregnant one:

We played around with the goats for a bit, then decided that it would be fun to take a picture with all of the bikes in it. This was my attempt (note that I’m not in it. This is because I was behind the camera):

Chie took several pictures of me, but I kept looking weird in them. For instance:

But that’s okay. I seem to be allergic to cameras anyway. I’m much happier behind the camera than in front of it.

All of that fun having been had, we decided to head back home. Going down the hill was good fun for the scooters—I don’t think I actually had to engage the clutch once the whole way down. I’m not entirely sure why I even bothered turning the engine on—I guess it just seemed like good form to do so. Then Drew’s navi took us on a wonderfully-meandering-seeming route back to my place (by way of Tsutaya because Chie wanted to rent some CDs), which was quite likely the result of him telling it to give the most direct route possible. His navi is such that if you ask it for such a route, it racks its brains and comes up with routes that, while they’re as short as possible, also tend to take some rather surprisingly small back alleys, in the navi’s enthusiasm to deliver the shortest possible route.

At the Tsutaya, I bid Jon farewell, because that the point where our routes home diverged. My place was nearby and his was over in Tokyo. He commented that he was quite tired after the ride up the hill and back down again (to say nothing of all the roads intervening). I only hope that he got home in one piece—I haven’t heard anything from him since. Drew and I went back to my place and Chie returned Drew’s spare helmet to him with thanks. Then we basically collapsed into bed, exhausted (but in a good way) from a hell of a fun road trip.

And that’s why I can’t find the time to play big long video games any more.

My dose of schadenfreude for the day

Laura Ingraham wrote a very very bad book. It’s called “The Obama Diaries” and its conceit is that it’s the “secret diary” of Barack Obama. She went onto the Colbert Report and he told her, to her face, that her book was terribly-written and racist. It was a beautiful moment.

And then she went into what she figured was friendlier territory, and got her ass handed to her again. By Bill O’Reilly.

Update on an earlier thing

I fixed the starter motor on the little bike!

It turns out that it needs to have the bolts holding the kickstarter mechanism in place very carefully tightened (to Not Very Tight At All, just a smidge past finger-tight) otherwise the starter gear gadget doesn’t turn around at all. Now I can start the bike with a button again, though, instead of having to kickstart it all the time.

Wow

My bank balance is now significantly higher than my remaining student loan!

So should I pay the leftover student loan off all in one go, or let it fizzle out and keep my credit rating alive a bit longer?

A dose of schadenfreude to make my morning

Today I pulled up at the Jingu-mae intersection on Meiji-Dori (it’s in Harajuku—Kiddy-Land is on one corner, and Condomania is on the opposite corner, and I guess they exist in direct and bitter opposition with each other). I had a red light, so I settled in to wait for it, pausing only to curse at the van driver to my left who had done an amazing job of swerving around without so much as touching his turn signals, so that he could get to the front of the line.

The light going the opposite way turned yellow; then red. Just as it was turning red, a series of little red and white trucks decided they were going to make their right-hand turn. First one truck turn, just as the light was turning red; then the next truck went right shortly after the right turned red and just as my light was turning green. Then, finally, a third truck went roaring into the intersection.

At this point, he must have been intimidated by the combination of the minivan next to me, and my terrifying motorbike, because he decided that, on the balance, it would probably be better if he stopped, even though he was a good third of the way into his turn—he wasn’t entirely in the cross-traffic’s way just yet, even though the truck was well over the line he should have stopped behind if he were actually paying attention to the rules of the road.

He didn’t notice that there was a cop that was just chilling by the side of the road, unfortunately. So when he stopped, she casually strolled over, clipboard in hand, and wrote him a ticket. And he was also treated to the spectacle of a foreigner on a motorcycle putting slowly past his nose, not able to drive as fast as usual because he was doubled over with laughter.