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Wow

Dave Brown — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 08:00:00 GMT

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

Dave Brown — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 12:34:00 GMT

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.

!

Dave Brown — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 23:54:00 GMT

Even raising the top speed of the little bike by a modest 15% or so cut about ten minutes off my ride to work. I am impressed.

At home with Chie

Dave Brown — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 11:17:00 GMT

A few days ago, I spent over seven hundred yen at 7-11, which was cause for them letting me draw a ticket from a bucket in case I won something.

I was lucky, and did! A can of Sapporo Mugi and Hop. Which is a bit of a booby prize for beer drinkers—it’s happoshu, which is a beer-like drink that you can get in Japan which cleverly skirts rules about what officially constitutes “beer”.

Well, I finally had a good reason to crack the can today—it was LUDICROUSLY hot, and I needed something that was (a) cold and (b) not actually necessarily good. The free happoshu fit the bill perfectly!

I let Chie have a taste, although she didn’t really see any reason to. But you never know, it might actually turn out to be good (there’s a novelty happoshu from Osaka, for instance, called “Hemp High”, a stoner brew that uses hemp in place of malt, and is actually very drinkable).

It wasn’t very good though. The odds were against it right from the get-go. She said, “Yup! That’s definitely happoshu. It’s actually kind of a nostalgic flavour.”

I said, “A reminder of the days when you had no money?”

She said, “That’s about the shape of it, yup.”

“Your university days?”

“Half a year ago, more like.”

Well…I guess she’s doing well for herself, at any rate.

Speed demon!

Dave Brown — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 06:51:00 GMT

Since I decided to keep the little toy scooter (well, it’s fun to ride, for one thing) instead of giving it away or selling it, I’ve decided that I might also use it to learn a thing or two about doing Manly Work With My Hands—in other words, I would do my own maintenance on it.

To that end, I decided that, as the first bit of maintenance I would do by my own self, I would replace its drive belt. It has a CVT transmission which connects the engine to the wheels by means of a V-shaped belt and a pulley with springs connected to these little metal saucers to vary how fast the engine drives the wheels. It’s quite ingenious really. But one of the bits that wears out is the belt itself.

So I popped round to my local motorcycle bits store and picked up a new belt. I could have gotten an official Suzuki belt, but I chose to get a Daytona-brand Reinforced Drive Belt™ from the “tuning” bit of the store, just to see what (if any) impact a performance drive belt would have.

Well, I managed to get the transmission open, after quite a lot of fiddling. Lacking an impact wrench to dismantle the gear assembly, I had to sort of wrestle the belt off, and then wrestle the new one on (which was actually much harder than taking the old one off).

Somewhere along the line, I managed to make the bike so the starter motor can’t turn over any more. Whoops. I think I did something wrong with the starter widget thing so that it doesn’t fit in properly any more, or turn around, or something. At some point I’m going to have to fix that, I suppose.

I put the bike back together, which went a lot smoother than taking it apart because there weren’t so many confusing puzzles to figure out along the way, and then kicked it to life to take it for a test drive.

When I first got the bike, it had a top speed on flat ground of about 52km/h (by its own speedometer). By the time I changed the belt, it could just barely manage 50km/h. With the new belt, on the other hand, the new top speed on flat ground is about 63km/h; and going downhill, it can get up to nearly 70km/h!

Stay tuned (heh!) for my next exciting installment, where I get it up to 80km/h, whilst at the same time (because I’m a genius) disabling the turn signals.

Obligatory omiyage

Dave Brown — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 06:37:00 GMT

Of course, being back in Japan, I am pretty well obliged to bring the people in the office something by way of omiyage—something small and edible and somehow representative of where I’d gone to.

Since I’d gone to Canada, the obvious candidate is maple cookies. However, cookies in Canada aren’t packaged quite like cookies in Japan are—instead of having each cookie individually wrapped in its own sterile wrapper, it was just a bunch of cookies in a tray in a box.

So when I gave the packages of cookies to the admin assistants, this happened:

The admin assistant made tiny little boxes, one for each cookie, for everyone in the entire department.

It was annoying me, and it can annoy you too

Dave Brown — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 20:13:00 GMT

Richard Goyce in the recent TV adaptation of Going Postal sounds exactly like David Essex as the artillery man in Jeff Wayne’s musical version of War of the Worlds.

I'm in Canada!

Dave Brown — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 18:31:00 GMT

Maybe something weird has happened to me while I was in Japan, but man, the food here is all HUGE. I wanted a little bite to eat and got an oatmeal square from Starbucks—but there was some trick of perspective caused by how everything is scaled up by about 1.5x from what I’m used to, and I swear, the thing felt like it weighed about a kilogram.

Anyway, I’m in Vancouver right now, having cleared immigration and customs and picked up my checked-in bag and then re-checked it for the rest of the journey, in approximately, I’m not kidding here, five minutes. I was astounded—it’s never been that fast for me before. There just happened to be no lineups anywhere, and the whole rigamarole with showing my passport and handing over the customs declaration card was handled deftly by a robot. It was awesome.

Also recommended: Air Canada’s multicolored light show from the ceiling lights on their new 777s.

Phew

Dave Brown — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 10:16:00 GMT

My drive home tonight felt like some sort of traffic safety exam.

The drive was full of lots of lovely cars swerving and changing lanes at the last moment with no notice, people on bicycles only rarely looking where they were going, and people with only a vague at best concept of such things as “traffic lights” and “lanes”. At one point, a little kid actually ran out into the road directly in front of me! Also, the ride was oddly-populated by old guys driving big bikes—I noticed a Harley Sportster 1200 and a BMW R1200 especially—really really fast. That was a bit disconcerting, yes.

Fortunately I apparently passed—nobody was hurt, nobody got driven into, and nobody got knocked off their bikes. And here I am, home.

Couple of inches to fill

Dave Brown — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 11:25:00 GMT

At least 28 people died and at least 44 were injured when a bus plunged off a highway and into a ravine in Bolivia Sunday, state media said.

Preliminary police reports indicate that brake problems on the bus, which was carrying 70 passengers, may have caused the accident, state-run Radio Patria Nueva reported.

I love a nice shiny doomity-doom scenario

Dave Brown — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 07:29:00 GMT

This scientist thinks that humans are doomed to extinction.

Hey, 95-year-old former scientists are very rarely wrong.

How I spent today

Dave Brown — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 14:04:00 GMT

It was a nice day, and the next few days are all forecast to be rain, and Chie was feeling more like curling up in front of the TV doing nothing than going out and doing stuff, so (with her blessing) I took my bike out into the countryside for a bit.

Instead of what I normally do when I do things like that, which is to see how many prefectures I can manage to encounter in a single ride (I consider such rides successful if I hit four of ’em, counting Tokyo as a prefecture), I decided to explore some of the more hilly country-ish bits of Saitama.

Final tally: 220km (plus epsilon for me to get to the gas station—ten or so, I believe). And some lovely photographs. You might think my camera exaggerates the greens, but it doesn’t. They’re actually slightly more vivid in person than the camera can record without making them look plasticky and artificial. (Maybe they’ll look better if someone makes hexachrome sensors and displays—possibly for the benefit of mantis shrimp.)

Day O' Fail, kind of

Dave Brown — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 13:28:00 GMT

I started out the day attempting to renew my visa, only to learn that there was a piece of paperwork that my place of work needed to fill out—which they hadn’t. They figured just the quick note saying “Dear Immigration, Dave still works for us, so please let him do so, love $ORKPLACE” would suffice. Immigration disagreed.

I’d taken the entire day off—the morning to take care of immigration paperwork and the afternoon to go to the dentist. I went to the dentist and got properly dented (that new tooth is quite nice, thanks).

Unfortunately my bike also got dented, but not nearly as badly as the car that ran into it did. I was pulling up to a red light at one of the crazier intersections in Tokyo and the car pulling up behind me didn’t see the light. BAM! I was knocked about a foot to the right.

The car’s driver was very nice about it, because he knew he was 100% in the wrong—the light was red, after all, and I was stopping, because that’s what you do at a red light. He was trying to beat it, which is precisely what you don’t do. He ended with the bumper of his car stove in quite impressively—and the only damage the bike suffered was a bent license plate and a couple of scuffs on the transmission case. Congratulations to Aprilia for making such a sturdy bike! I wasn’t even knocked off it by the impact.

We exchanged names, phone numbers and addresses, and he told me that if there was anything that needed fixing on it, to call him and he’d arrange for it to be paid for. Impressively enough, even though he hit me directly in front of a police box, no policemen seemed to notice.

It turns out that the bike is just fine, though—I didn’t even notice any difference in the way it drove at all. I’m quite impressed at the amount of damage to the car, though—I guess when they make cars with crumple zones, they take it seriously these days. Bike 1, car 0.

Lurching into the future

Dave Brown — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 12:18:00 GMT

We determined that we needed to get a vacuum cleaner, so we went shopping for one the other day.

Did you know that vacuum cleaners have all of a sudden gotten really expensive? It used to be that you could get a really good vacuum cleaner for an ichiman or so (about a hundred dollars, for people in Foreign)—but the current crop of vacuum cleaners can be gotten for somewhere north of five hundred bucks. For that kind of price, I’d expect the thing to do its own damn vacuuming!

So we got a Roomba, which for the introductory model these days, costs somewhat less than ¥50,000—but which does, in fact, do its own damn vacuuming.

It’s really cute! It bumbles around just like a sort of drunken cat, in its efforts to cover the entire apartment. But it does have its downsides.

It really is happiest when you have a tidy apartment for it to run around in. That’s a bit of a problem for a geek like me, who has wires trailing around all over the place. It’s already proven its prowess at emulating a real human janitor, by tripping over the router’s power cable and disconnecting me from the Internet. It also tends to get tangled in the curtains—although to its credit, it seems to realize that this has happened, and backs away quite gracefully.

It’s surprisingly good at navigating its way around obstacles—for instance, it cheerfully clambered up onto the quite-thick living-room rug we have and did quite a thorough job of cleaning it, even though it has a coffee table and an end table on it.

A lovely benefit of having a vacuum cleaner that’s self-propelled and is only four inches high, though, is that it can cheerfully go under things. It did a great job of clearing out the dust from underneath the sofa and the TV stand, places which would generally go unvacuumed by normal people. And it’s still good fun to watch.

When we get sufficiently-organized, with any luck, I’ll be able to just hit “go!” on the thing in the morning and then head off to work, and come back to find a robot in some place for me to trip over—but a clean apartment. We determined that the price boost for getting a robot that could find its own charging stand was a bit high—and the price boost for getting a robot with scheduling was just plain excessive.

So far: two thumbs up!

Also, it’s fun when it gets stuck somewhere—it stops, beeps mournfully, and says, “I’m stuck! Please move me to somewhere else and press the CLEAN button again.”

As I was saying to my taxi driver tonight...

Dave Brown — Fri, 28 May 2010 15:03:00 GMT

“Man, what a pain it is, this construction.”

Because backwards your sentences run, when a point there is you want in Japanese to make.

He seemed okay with the construction, because he earned an extra couple of hundred yen from me, just from time spent waiting for the construction worker to give the go-ahead.

On the Prime Minister's fashion sense

Dave Brown — Mon, 17 May 2010 13:09:00 GMT

Yukio Hatoyama just can’t get a break. When people aren’t complaining about how he can’t get a simple military base moved from one location in Okinawa to another (and hey, good luck ordering the US military around while you’re at it), people find fault with every little thing he does.

Apparently this is a hideous shirt, and he deserves to resign over it. Or something. Or so says a fashion designer who talked to CNN.

My favorite part of the CNN story is how Kyung Lah, the reporter who fashion designer Don Konishi talked to, blandly reports:

On the day Konishi spoke with CNN, he wore white-rimmed glasses, silver shoes and a small brimmed hat.

Yes, I did giggle at that. It’s a shame nobody else noticed that subtle Look Of Disapproval on the part of CNN. The Diplomat in their story went a step further though: they linked to the designer’s web page wherein he wears the same horrendous orange shirt on four different occasions. Talk about your motes and beams.

Casual racism or laziness? Or just excessive pedantry?

Dave Brown — Sat, 15 May 2010 13:19:00 GMT

Cory Doctorow has a new novel out! It’s called For The Win, and as is his usual wont, he’s put it up on his web page for people to download at will. Which is, of course, exactly what I did.

And then I was almost immediately ejected from the book, through the petard of carefully establishing that a bunch of characters are speaking Mandarin to one another, and then having one of them say, “Oh, here comes the gweilo.”

Two things wrong with that spring immediately to mind. The first thing wrong with it is that it’s apparently a spelling that’s been through at least one iteration of someone who doesn’t know Chinese looking up “a Chinese derogatory term for a foreigner”, and pronouncing the resulting “gwailo” through their monolingual English filter. Hence ending up as “gweilo”, which if this were a linguistics paper, would have an asterisk after it to indicate its non-word-ness. That’s just not the pronunciation of the word. Just ask someone from Hong Kong.

The other thing is that, even if that’s what he came up with, it’s a Cantonese word. That would be like asserting that gringo is a word that the French use to talk about foreigners. Cantonese is a different language from Mandarin, with its own grammar, vocabulary and all that stuff.

As a bonus, he went on to carefully explain that the word meant “foreign devil”, which is nonsense. It actually means “foreign ghost”, and refers to the pale ghost-like skin that Europeans tend to sport. It ain’t a polite term, but its literal meaning is considerably less diabolical than people think it is.

This leads me to wonder: is this just a case of being lazy (asking some guy what a derogatory Chinese term for foreigner is and accepting the first answer that comes by) or casual racism (assuming that all of those yellow people speak the same lingo, and hey, Chinese is Chinese)? If the former, I would certainly expect better from someone so proud of being a member of The Internet. If the latter—I am very disappoint. I would expect better from a Torontonian.

Loud pipes do not save lives

Dave Brown — Thu, 13 May 2010 12:55:00 GMT

Tonight on the way home, I found myself behind a guy on a big scooter. He had, er…enhanced his exhaust system. Instead of making polite little quiet scooter noises, he had set it up to make earth-shattering explosion noises. I swear, his exhaust had been set up to make whatever poor bastard who was stuck behind him stone deaf.

As a direct result of the sonic assault, I drove much too fast and much too aggressively, just so that I could get ahead of him—and get way ahead of him. I didn’t want to hear that horrible noise any more.

Which just goes to show, loud pipes not only don’t save lives, but they’re actually dangerous. For the love of God, please keep your motorcycle quiet. For my sake.

If only I'd thought to take a picture

Dave Brown — Tue, 11 May 2010 10:49:00 GMT

Chie’s out tonight Drinking With Her Co-Workers And Boss, a curious ritual that Japanese people take part in in order to foster a closer working relationship amongst the workers (also, when Japanese people get drunk, they can say what they want, and anything embarassing they say can be laughed off as “Oh, they were just drunk, disregard”). Which leaves me at home alone, allowing me to indulge in something that I’m quite fond of, which because of her distaste for it, I don’t get to have very often.

Namely, tofu.

I totally stole the idea from Torisumi, but then again it’s simple enough. Take a block of tofu, slice it up, arrange it on a plate, splash a bit of sesame oil and light soy sauce over it, sprinkle some katsuo flakes over it (vegetarian alternative: substitute thinly-sliced nori for a different, but equally-delicious effect), and serve.

Easiest dish ever, but oh so good. Preparation time: less than a minute. Best results with slightly harder tofu, but Torisumi does it well enough with soft, light tofu.

Slightly mistaken identity

Dave Brown — Tue, 04 May 2010 10:56:00 GMT

I just helped a bunch of people identify the face on the US $1 bill. The Federal Reserve helpfully wrote George Washington's name under his portrait.

Bonus points to whoever that rapper was for helping me to remember which bill has Benjamin Franklin's mug on it.

The pathetic thing is that I couldn't possibly name who's on the Japanese bills. It's that guy with the hair, the lady who wrote one book and then died, and uh...the guy who founded Tokyo University, or something.

Canada's bills have Wilfred Laurier, the Queen and er...well, I remember the Newfie Firing Squad on the old fifty well enough.

Didn't Yugoslavia have Nikola Tesla on their bills when they were enjoying skyrocketing hyperinflation?

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