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In which I am a bit of a cock

Dave Brown — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 12:37:00 GMT

One of the nice things about riding a motorcycle is that you can, when traffic is stopped, fit your bike in between cars, and between cars and sidewalks when necessary.

But one of the downsides of that is when you get some cager who has no idea how big his car is, and where it is in relation to the road. They often end up far to one side or the other, and they get in your way.

This morning, there was one such person who was sitting way over to the right hand side of his lane, and I was venturing to pass him on the right, between him and the sidewalk. All of the rest of the cars were in the center of the lane, so it was smooth sailing, until I got to this one guy.

I figured I’d give him a bit of a startle, and maybe make him pay more attention to where he was in his lane, by bumping my mirror against his before maneouvering my bike around it. He was stopped and I was travelling very slowly, so it wasn’t like I was endangering anyone’s life by this—just making a bit of a point.

But his car’s mirror was set up better than my wildest dreams. Instead of just simply making annoying knocking noises to startle the driver, apparently the people who had made the car had anticipated this very circumstance. The mirror simply bent forward as I went past the car—and then when I’d passed, it snapped back with an incredibly-satisfying BBBBBBDDDDOINGNGNGNGNGGGGG noise.

I have no regrets about what I did. None whatsoever.

I feel this should be in comic format

Dave Brown — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 11:01:00 GMT

Steve at his desk

Dave Brown — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 11:01:00 GMT

I really like this photo:

I learned so many things from it. Using the Mac Pro in the foreground as a reference for scale, I learned that Steve had a custom 60" monitor made for his home office. I also learned that he was four meters tall.

Otaku moment

Dave Brown — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 15:16:00 GMT

After listening to it for the first time after a long break, I can’t help noticing that Japanese anime voice actress Kikuko Inoue’s 1992 album “Tadaima” has an interesting characteristic: it is entirely free of English. There isn’t even any use of English loan words in it. It’s almost a linguistic exercise: is it possible to make an entire album of light pop songs that don’t make use of any English loan words whatsoever?

Well, she seemed to pull it off. Making the album not only fun to listen to for the music, but for the odd purity of the language she used.

So, I got home after work tonight...

Dave Brown — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 10:27:00 GMT

Riding home, I was sort of dithering over whether to use the expressway under Yamate-Dori to get home. I noticed the pixelboard over the Tomigaya entrance saying 西池袋から渋滞 which means “Traffic jam from Nishi-Ikebukuro”. It also observed that the traffic jam was 1km long, which is pretty long, but nothing I couldn’t deal with. Just on a hunch, because I’m familiar with that stretch of road and how traffic jams build up on it, I decided that I’d not go onto the expressway there and that I’d keep going to the next entrance, to see what the conditions were like.

The next entrance, Nakano Chojabashi, had amended the congestion notice: 中野長者橋から渋滞５ｋｍ. Which meant that the traffic jam started right there and went on for 5km. Under it, there was another, much more ominous note: 自動二輪者死亡事故発生. Motorcycle fatality.

Not only did I not take the expressway home, but I was riding noticeably slower and more carefully on the way.

WTF du jour

Dave Brown — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 12:25:00 GMT

I was first startled by someone riding their bicycle across Todabashi on the wrong side of the road, not generally-advisable at the best of times.

I did a double-take when I realized they were wearing a bikini. It’s kind of getting colder lately.

I did a triple-take when I realized that the rider was a middle-aged man.

A funny thing happened when I went out yesterday

Dave Brown — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 08:42:00 GMT

I went out for dinner last night with a friend of mine, and that involved taking the train at about 5pm. My train is the Keihin-Tohoku line, and when I got to the station, I noticed that they’d rather ominously turned off the scheduled time for the next train on the pixelboards.

At first I figured there’d been an “accident” (i.e., someone jumping in front of a train), and those always take a long time to clean up. Then I noticed the announcements, and they were talking about an obstruction on the track.

As I stuck around, the reports became, as they tend to, progressively more detailed. At first, there was talk of the train hitting a bicycle on the track. I figured, oh, it’s some idiot who didn’t think that the flashing lights, bells, and barriers actually meant anything if he was on a bicycle.

Then it got weirder. It wasn’t a bicycle—it was several bicycles. The count kept going up, settling at 4 for a while. They were looking for a victim to see if anyone had been hurt or killed or anything. And they were looking for more bicycles. I vowed that I would be following up on this story in the morning.

So I just looked it up and discovered that what had actually happened was that someone had apparently gotten angry at people parking their bicycles outside the railway station, and had just started hurling them over the fence onto the tracks which were a few meters below. He managed to throw five bicycles over the fence before a train came along, smashing a couple of the bicycles, terrifying the train driver, and suddenly focusing JR’s attention directly upon him, at which he fled.

Well, this afternoon the police arrested a 50-year-old unemployed man. I expect he’ll be charged with destruction of property and made to buy his victims new bicycles.

The final end of the bodge

Dave Brown — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 04:03:00 GMT

I’ve put quite a lot of effort into getting a satnav mounted onto my bike in the past, which was complicated by the fact that every piece of mounting equipment out there mounts onto the handlebars. Which, on my bike, are covered in plastic. What I eventually ended up doing was just slapping a bit of velcro on top of the headlight, and sticking the satnav to that.

The bike having recently been replaced with a newer one after some excitement a few months ago, I decided that if at all possible, I would try to find a non-bodge way of getting a satnav onto the bike. Preferably also no involving Velcro. So yesterday, I hopped onto #2 Industry Road, and went to a bike-goods store not too far away from me that happens to quite often have just the sort of thing I’m looking for when I go there.

I wasn’t disappointed this time either. I found one of these which is a bar bracket. It’s basically a little bit of handlebar that mounts in your mirror mounting, so that if your bike doesn’t make any handlebars available, you can make some extra for your purposes.

After puzzling out the dual-bolt arrangement for my mirrors (the top bolt, it turns out, holds the mirror on, while the bottom bolt holds the mirror assembly on), I got the thing in place, and it looks like this:

I also picked up an inexpensive generic mounting thing, because now that I have a bit of handlebar on my handlebars, inexpensive generic mounting things are actually available. It looks like this in place:

And with the satnav finally installed:

It finally doesn’t look like I’ve put a horrible hack into place. It almost looks as if it even belongs there.

This is relevant to this discussion. Pay attention.

Dave Brown — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 05:40:00 GMT

Today I went to the Mister Donut near me—you know about Mister Donut, right? Well, there was an insane number of people there, and I couldn’t get in. Then I looked at the banner hanging from the ceiling. It had “half price” written on it. How stupid, I thought. Those fools.

You don’t go to Mister Donut because it’s half price! That’s crazy. It’s only like 63 yen per donut. Sixty-three yen. There were entire families here, I was thinking. Family of four, all going out for Mister Donut? Crazy.

“Alright, Daddy’s going to order a dozen crappy donuts.” I couldn’t even bear to watch it. Mister Donut should be a battleground. With a tense atmosphere where two guys at opposite tables can start a fight any time. The dog-eat-dog mentality, that’s what’s good about it. Women and children should piss off and stay home.

Anyway, I was about to start eating, and then the bastard at the cash register goes, “Old-fashioned, and a Pon de Ring.” Who in the world orders an old-fashioned and a Pon de Ring? I wanted to ask him, “Do you really want to eat both of those horrible donuts?” I wanted to sit him down for a good hour to figure out what on earth was going through his head.

Coming from a Mister Donut expert like myself, the latest trend is the “crunchy” donuts. That’s right, with the filling with rice crispie bits in the middle. That’s the proper way to eat at Mister Donut. Then it’s delicious—you can’t get better.

However, if you order that, then there’s a danger that you’ll be noticed especially by the employees the next time you come in. It’s a double-edged sword. I can’t recommend it to amateurs.

What this all really means, though, is that you should just stick with today’s special.

With apologies to 2ch.net oldbies.

How to give yourself a heart attack

Dave Brown — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 06:16:00 GMT

Grab your favorite backpack with its laptop computer compartment.
Leave the house, forgetting the actual laptop computer.
Further forget to close the laptop compartment on the bag.
Forget that you forgot the laptop.
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.
Find laptop at home where you’d left it and feel a bit silly.

My heart attack for the day

Dave Brown — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 05:48:00 GMT

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

Dave Brown — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 12:44:00 GMT

This is my little orange bike.

This is how stupid I look riding it.

Herpity derp

Dave Brown — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 13:46:00 GMT

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

Dave Brown — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 14:52:00 GMT

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

Dave Brown — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 07:13:00 GMT

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

Dave Brown — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 13:37:00 GMT

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

Dave Brown — Sun, 22 May 2011 13:22:00 GMT

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

Dave Brown — Sun, 15 May 2011 13:28:00 GMT

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

Dave Brown — Sat, 07 May 2011 14:50:00 GMT

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.

Sometimes you're better off learning from the mistakes of others

Dave Brown — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 13:51:00 GMT

Today I found myself behind a couple of vehicles the likes of which I find myself nervous being around. The first was a little three-wheeled motor-scooter, the sort of which is generally used to deliver pizzas. They have tiny 50cc engines, roofs above the head of the driver, and nothing in the head of the driver but his destination and how fast he needs to get there.

The second was the dreaded menace of the Tokyo streets—a taxi. I already knew I should be staying well clear of this particular taxi, because of the way he was pootling around—he wasn’t in any particular lane or other, and while he was hoofing it along at a good pace, he wasn’t in any particular hurry to get anywhere. It was obvious that he was on the prowl for a fare.

After hanging out at a piously-safe distance behind the pair for a while, the little scooter’s driver decided that he was going to Make His Move! He would pass the taxi driver on the left, get clear of him, and smooth sailing to his destination!

At the very same moment, the taxi driver spotted something out of the corner of his eye—an arm, raised! To flag down a taxi! He had to make his move quickly, otherwise some other taxi driver would swoop in and steal the opportunity! So from his vantage point halfway between the two lanes, he pulled over to the left really fast to catch the fare—as you might expect, the decision was made too quickly for him to have time to actually indicate his move.

There was a loud clattering noise as the plastic of the scooter and the metal of the cab met quite violently, followed immediately by some colourful language. For my part, I had a lovely chance to practice the emergency-braking skills that were drummed into my head during my motorcycle training—a safe following distance doesn’t mean an invincible following distance after all. Judging by the volume of the shouting, nobody was serious hurt, though, which was fortunate. Two people were embarrassed in front of a potential taxi fare though.