Dave Brown

How to give yourself a heart attack

1. Grab your favorite backpack with its laptop computer compartment.
2. Leave the house, forgetting the actual laptop computer.
3. Further forget to close the laptop compartment on the bag.
4. Forget that you forgot the laptop.
5. Notice this after riding about 20km around town, and then race home fully expecting to have to retrace your tracks very very slowly in order to eventually find the mangled remains of your laptop.
6. Find laptop at home where you’d left it and feel a bit silly.

My heart attack for the day

I’m beginning to see where James Nicoll gets his love for bicycle riders from.

I was driving along about here this morning (only in the center lane). See that crosswalk there? It has traffic lights. Anyone going across it knows perfectly well that when the cars have a green light, they go, and when pedestrians have a red light, they have to wait (and if it’s night, press the button to cross).

Of course, the idiot on the bicycle had apparently not learned of the mysteries of traffic lights. He figured he’d be perfectly safe just popping out of nowhere right in front of me. The speed limit on that road, incidentally, is 50km/h, the fastest speed limit you’ll find in Tokyo on any surface roads—and traffic was moving well.

Imagine the cyclist’s surprise to hear a chorus of horns coming at him then! Given such an unexpected reception, he did the only thing that was reasonable for someone to do upon hearing a selection of car horns: he panicked and stopped dead. Excellent judgment on that man’s part.

Unfortunately, he’d stopped dead directly in front of me, and I was aiming for behind where I would have expected him to be had he simply kept going. I got to practise my emergency braking and swerving skills, steering just a little bit more to the left to avoid hitting him, whilst attempting to not go far enough more to the left to hit the car that was there (which I knew was there on account of how his horn was part of the chorus).

Just as I was passing him, he compounded his error by attempting to turn around and go back. This not only earned him more horn from me, but an impressive selection of oaths roared at top volume.

Seriously, I wish they made bicycle riders have to pass a license test or something. Not because of the good, well-behaved riders out there, but because of morons like the guy I nearly killed today.

Just for the record

This is my little orange bike.

This is how stupid I look riding it.

Herpity derp

Today, on my drive to work and back home again, I couldn’t help noticing that Tokyo drivers seemed to be suffering from, as a friend of mine put it, having had a week of vacation and thereby having completely forgotten how to drive.

Just in the couple of hours I was driving today, I witnessed:

• a guy on his Honda Cub wearing his barely-adequate helmet in “hat” mode, hit a bump causing his helmet to go flying off his head
• a guy on his motorbike apparently paying more attention to the exciting action going on in his mirrors (me chugging along slowly behind him) than to what was going on ahead of him, and thus nearly rear-ending a car
• endless numbers of people in Captain Impatient mode taking off from green lights as if they were race drivers. And they tended to be driving tiny little minivans, too, not fast sports cars
• a guy who was driving as if he was drunk, judging by how bad he was at staying in his lane (I stayed a safe distance behind him cruising slowly until it was safe to go ahead, at which point I went rocketing off into the distance)
• someone who put on his four-way blinkers and stopped in the middle of the road. Literally. Right in the dead center of the road. But his four-ways were on so that made it okay, I guess
• a procession of cars who apparently didn’t notice an ambulance with all of its lights, sirens, and a guy yelling on the intercom to please get out of the way
• and in the “erring on the side of caution” department, a guy who stopped for a red light fully twenty meters ahead of the line—apparently he was so enthralled by the majesty of the red light that his only thought was to stop, without any consideration as to where might be a proper place to do so

I don’t think I’ve seen driving that bad since I watched the Jackass demolition-derby clip.

Actually, the most impressive part was that with all of that awful driving out there today, I didn’t witness a single accident, or even the aftermath of one (unless the ambulance counts).

The stupidest song I'm going to be spending money on

A few days ago, Jamie Zawinski linked to a disturbing image which also, as a bonus, linked to an extremely silly little video clip. I tossed in an offhand comment—“This is the stupidest, most appalling song that I’m going to be buying the moment it hits iTunes”—and that comment quickly became the most upvoted comment I’ve ever seen on YouTube. Which is in itself ridiculous. I don’t expect to get nearly 200 upvotes on a YouTube comment.

Just today, though, Warner Music, whose legal department are as far as I can tell, the only group of people taking this thing even slightly seriously (the performer obviously isn’t, and neither is the video’s director, or the musicians, or the guy who wrote the song), put the video for the whole song up on the Internet—and just to prevent people like me from threatening to spend money for the song despite (or quite possibly, because of) its silliness. they disabled comments. Here, waste some of Google’s bandwidth, donated to Warner Records.

Don't worry: it's all for a ridiculous cause.

Hate hate hate

I just typed the following at my computer:

shibuyagi# cpan install Mail::POP3

Of course, that immediately installed the Mail::POP3 package from CPAN, because it was immediately obvious that that was what I wanted to do.

Hahaha, just kidding!

What it actually yielded was the following:

It looks like you specified 'install' as an argument to cpan(1). This
script is not the CPAN.pm prompt and doesn't understand the same commands.
In fact, doesn't require the extra typing. You probably just want to
list the modules you want to install:

    cpan Mail::POP3

See the documentation for more details on using this script.

That’s right, the asshole who wrote the CPAN command knew damn well what I was trying to do, and instead of simply doing it, actually went to the trouble of writing a bunch of extra code to detect what I was trying and lecture me about not filling in the correct forms. I guess whoever wrote it gets added to my list of people to punch in the face along with that other asshole who went to all that extra effort to make the Python prompt lecture you when you type “exit” instead of “sys.exit()”.

A pleasant surprise

I just checked my mailbox, and discovered an envelope from the Japanese Driving Safety Center, Saitama Office. Inside it was one of these:

commemorating two years without either receiving a traffic ticket or causing an accident. I was pretty sure that there was no way I was going to qualify for one of those after an incident a few months ago but apparently the police were really certain that it wasn’t my fault. Zurich Insurance’s opinion notwithstanding: they figured I was 10% responsible, probably on account of if I had just damn well stayed at home I wouldn’t have been there for anyone to drive their car into me.

The card also came with an amusing paper with a detailed list of all of my automotive sins since I first got a driver’s license in Japan. Without further ado, here is the list:

Date	Offense	Points	My comments
Aug 22, 2007	Illegal lane change	1 point	That was where I was trying to filter up to the front of a bunch of cars at the Yamato-cho intersection joining Naka-Sendo and Kan-Nana Dori in Tokyo. In filtering up to the front, I crossed a yellow line, a big no-no. That earned me a lecture from the policeman who was patrolling that intersection, and a 6,000 yen fine.
May 6, 2008	Speeding (between 20 and 25km/h over the speed limit)	2 points	That was during Golden Week that year, driving along Yamate-Dori on the little zooming buzzmachine, and having a grand old time. There was no traffic on the roads and it was a properly-nice day for the first time in ages. So I was buzzing along at top speed, which just happened to be 20km/h faster than 50cc bikes are legally allowed to go in Japan. And there was a speed trap just as I exited Yamate-Dori to go to Old Yamate-Dori.
August 8, 2008	Driving In The Incorrect Lane	1 point	Under the impression that motorcycles were allowed to drive in the bus lane, I went riding straight into a trap that the police set up on Meiji-Dori in Toshima ward. The Toshima police are quite strict about their bus lanes. (The Shinjuku police, on the other hand, gave that up as a lost cause years ago.) When I said to the cop, I figured that it was okay for bikes to go in the bus lane, he explained to me that it’s only okay for 50cc bikes to go in the bus lane. He did comment that I had a pretty cool bike though. It was while the Scarabeo was still fresh and new from the shop.

Total: 4 points. Ever. I was a very careful rider after that last one, because I realized that your driver’s license gets suspended if you accumulate 6 points within a year. I didn’t realize that I only needed to wait a couple of weeks to be down to the relative safety of 3 points—today was the first time I’ve seen a complete list of my automotive offenses. My score sheet also helpfully noted that my license has been suspended a total of 0 times, which I’m moderately pleased at.

Only another three years of moderately-safe driving (or at least, being good at spotting police officers’ hiding places—I saw one lurking behind a phone box to catch bus lane offenders the other day), and I’ll qualify for a gold driver’s license, and reduced insurance premiums!

Grumble

Today was a rainy day, a perfect day to stay home and play video games. My gaming rig is my Mac Mini, which is a fire-breathing monster of a computer by 2004 standards, which is why I wanted to play Half-Life 2. That, and I’ve never played it before, and I’ve recently finished Portal 2 (set in the same universe) and wanted more.

Instead, I got to play that much-less-fun game “watch a restore from backup chug along”. The hard disk in the Mac gave up the ghost on me, which meant that I had to pop onto my bike (consulting the weather forecast first—it said that I was probably safe to pop up to Dospara and back, but I took rain gear anyway) and get a new hard disk.

Quite impressively for Dospara, the new hard disk came in a retail box. I’m definitely not used to that—usually the best deal in the place is some OEM thing that comes in a little static-safe bag.

And quite impressively for 2.5" hard disks, it came with a three-year warranty—I’m used to such things only having a year of warranty. The price was also right—a half-terabyte disk for ¥4980 (I love living in the future), so while it was an annoying expenditure, it wasn’t that onerous.

The other thing, though was that my Mac Mini is the last generation before they changed the shape of the machine. The upshot of that is that the single hardest component in the entire machine to replace is, as it turns out, the hard disk. Why they would make the single component most likely to fail also be the single component most likely to fail is a bit beyond me, but that’s how Apple made it. It kind of reminded me of the old toilet-seat iBooks, but fortunately the Mac Mini’s hard disk only requires about half an hour of puzzling the machine apart to replace the hard disk, where the iToiletBook required practically disassembling the machine into its component atoms to replace the hard disk.

Fortunately when I put the machine back together with the new hard disk in place, it saw the disk without any problems, and it was a relatively simple matter to boot from the install DVD and tell it to restore from the most recent Time Machine backup. The worst thing about that was that it took several hours to do so, my Time Machine disk being on the wrong end of a USB connection.

When it was finally feeling itself again, I learned that if you restore a Time Machine backup to a new hard disk, Time Machine itself forgets that it’s still backing up the same old computer, and tries to make a fresh start—which on my machine, caused it to immediately run out of space on the backup disk. Sigh. You’d think that just after restoring, it would be smart enough to continue treating the new disk as a continuation of the old one.

That’s why I spent the afternoon watching the rain pouring down in great sheets and playing Burnout 3 on one of the PlayStation 2s instead of playing Half-Life 2 on the Mac.

Busy day

Today, I:

• over coffee, read a couple of hundred pages or so of Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind, a novel which I’m enjoying thoroughly;
• went to Nitori with Chie and purchased a recliner! For a ridiculously low price on account of it was the display model and the last one they had;
• had surprisingly-good hand-made ramen at a little ramen store not far away from home which I’d just sort of neglected to go to before;
• test-drove (for the second time!) a couple of cars at the local Honda dealership (and sort of became a little infatuated with a third that was unfortunately not test-driveable at the time), and got quotes for all three. This last took a surprisingly long time;
• went shopping at the local home center (and got…a vase! Which is a lot better than what normally happens when we go there, which is leaving with wallets significantly lighter and more stuff than we know how to get home);
• got home exhausted, ordered delivery, watched some of The Last Samurai which was on TV, then got tired of the movie being interrupted by ads all the time.

Phew!

I think I might just sleep well tonight. The trick will be waking up in the morning.

In which my clever strategy is used against me, with predictable results

A few months ago, I was at one of my favorite pubs, and I wanted to order one of my favorite tipples. It was a drink called “Shin-kame”, a reasonably-dry sake made in Hasuda, Saitama, very near to where the pub is located.

Since the waitress was this nice little Chinese girl who spoke Japanese very properly, I tried to make it easy for her, and ordered thus: “Shin-kame, hiyashi de onegai shimasu”. I’d like a Shin-Kame, cold, please.

She had no idea what I had ordered. It completely confused her. As it turns out, she had only heard the publican’s joke version of that order—“Kame Hiya”, a play on words on the English “come here”.

If I’d ordered the slangy version—which I most certainly would have done so if I were ordering directly from the publican himself, and we would have both had a bit of a laugh while we were at it—I would have gotten what I was ordering with no problem whatsoever. But because I’d decided to make the poor girl’s life easier by using correct Japanese when I could have just slurred out some slang, I’d managed to confuse her.

Thus, tonight, I fell into the same trap. I was at another pub that I’m particularly fond of (and they seem to like me in return). Talking to the publican’s wife’s father, he asked me if they had some unfamiliar word that I’d never heard before, in Canada. I asked him to repeat it.

“Genshiryoku hatsuden,” he said.

I had to roll that around in my brain a little bit. Then it dawned upon me—I sort of mentally converted it into its Japanese written representation, which turns out to be 原子力発電. That means, “Atomic electrical power generator”—or, well, y’know, “nuclear reactor”. The Japanese word that I’m familiar with for “nuclear reactor” is “genpatsu”, or, as it’s written, 原発—which is just a contraction for “genshiryoku hatsuden”. In his attempts to make things clearer for me by using the full term instead of the contraction, he’d managed to successfully confuse me.

Which is how I’ve learned that using the Excruciatingly-Proper word for some concept that you want to talk about is often not the word you should be using, in order to get your meaning across. Sometimes, a slangy contraction will be understood when the proper word will just confuse the listener.