Cucumber Pepsi

Ok, so I saw this light-green bottle labeled "ICE CUCUMBER" in the convenience store and had to buy it. It's the latest drink from Pepsi, and I think it's a limited-time trial only in Japan. At least I hope so.

The inscription on the label:

CUCUMBER (キューカンバー)とは
英語でキュウリのこと。
コーラとキュウリ、驚きの
コンビネーションの爽やかなコーラ！

Which roughly means:

"CUCUMBER" means "kyuuri" in English.
The surprising combination of cola and cucumber
makes a refreshing cola!

I guess I was hoping for an actual light, refreshing cucumber drink. Instead, it turned out to be a light-refreshing-cucumber-colored cola. I personally have always despised the sickly-sweet and harsh taste of cola. There did seem to be a slight scent of fake cucumber, or something like that, but really I was unable to distinguish the flavor from standard cola.

Anyway, um... nice try, Pepsi.

I hate technology

Yes, a self-inflicted slap in the face with a fist of irony. But it's true.

My computer has been giving me the same old B.S. (bluescreen, that is) that it always has, and I've had it. I'm supposed to be this knowledgeable person about computers, and yet why is it that I have worse computer problems than any of my friends? Granted, it has less impact on me than on many of them, because having done it so many times, I've more or less streamlined the process of installing all my software, which I've consolidated onto one DVD. I've even made ISO images of my install CD's and put them on there to mount virtually. It's still a pain in the ass, but it's much less painful for me than for most of the people I know.

Kind of like my sister, who has lost her wallet so many times she has streamlined the process of replacing her driver's license, credit cards, etc. Funny, the similarities in the lives we lead on opposite sides of the planet.

Anyway, after three years of struggle, I think I've found the culprit, by a painful and expensive process of elimination.

You see,
I've tweaked my BIOS settings.
I've reinstalled my drivers.
I've reinstalled Windows.
I've flashed my BIOS.
I've replaced my hard drives.
I've replaced my fans.
I've replaced my memory.
I've replaced my motherboard.
I've replaced my power supply.
I've replaced my case.
In fact, I've replaced every single thing inside my computer except ...
yes, you guessed it. The CPU.

The cursed CPU. (How do you write the word "cursed" with two syllables in text? That's how I intend it to be read. Shakespeare style.)

I should have gotten suspicious when it MELTED THE ENTIRE CPU BRACKET OFF MY MOTHERBOARD back in Boston, but no... I blamed it on the fan, the fan controller, ANYTHING but the CPU!

That CPU was my baby... I did everything for it. Replacing parts, jacking up fan speeds... Everything to take care of it, but in the end, the CPU was the one that betrayed me.

Anyway, it's outta here. As soon as I can get on down to Den-Den town, I'm buying a new one. The ironic thing? It's an old Pentium 4, far cheaper than a single stick of memory, or a single hard drive. Cheaper even than the motherboard it's running on.

---------------

And although I want to end here, can I say? KORG SUCKS! There's this weird hardware problem with adjusting the gains on my D-888 multitrack recording console that makes it nearly impossible to get good mic level settings during recording. I've been struggling with this problem for months, but there's no good solution in sight. Korg apparently knows about this problem and refuses to do anything about it.

Buying individual preamps for each mic would probably solve the problem but probably also cost more than the recording console itself. The closest thing to a solution I've found is an impedance-balancing connector I have, which makes it easier to adjust the volume but attenuates the treble range a lot, causing the recordings to sound somewhat dull.

*sigh*

On the plus side, I'm making some progress with cleaning my room. It's amazing how much time magically appears when your computer is tied up running low-level diagnostics.

By the way, you may wonder how it is that I'm able to write this...
My PC's cover is off and I have a huge room fan blowing on it to bring the CPU core temperature down to a level where it runs stably. :P

A Very Random Day

Ok, it's been a long day, so I'll try to keep this short. However, let me preface this with my dream from last night:

I'll leave out the details, but I was afflicted with a bizarre condition (hazardous waste was involved) in which my hair would instantly grow out when cut, like a hydra. Except, only on the sides and back. The top grew like normal hair. So every time I would go to get my hair cut, they would buzz off the sides and trim the top a little. Then the sides grew out into a big bushy 'fro again within a day, and I would go back to get it cut again, developing a sort of artificial bald spot on top while never being able to escape the wild bushiness of my hair.

Anyway, waking up from that odd nightmare is how my day started. Now back to reality:

Today started out with two unexpected structural failures.

First, while I was dashing for the train (not very hard, mind you... just a light trot) my bag experienced a sudden double-failure, and I found myself carrying only a shoulder strap, with no bag attached. Now what are the chances that the seams would rip (yes, the seams... the buckles themselves didn't fail) on both sides simultaneously? Normally you would expect one side to fail before the other and the strap to go down with the bag. Here are the remains:



Fortunately nothing inside was damaged.

The next failure, this one even more bizarre, occurred sometime between boarding the bus and arriving at work. It seems that the tip of my umbrella somehow snagged on my shoelace, pulled out some threads, and unraveled it while I was walking. What? Here, let me show you:



I've never seen anything like that happen in my life.

In Japanese class, I got all the really hard kanji right, and I got all the really simple beginner stuff wrong. I blame it on the fact that today is Friday. Actually I blame everything on that.

The rest of the day was spent uneventfully programming. My current project is coming along nicely, and the interface I'm building is already starting to look cool.

The evening was spent at a kick-ass cool a cappella concert. It was a vocal band called "Naturally7" who use a lot of looping and effects, but end up producing an amazing R&B sound comparable to or cooler than similar bands that use instruments. It was a rockin' show.

Afterwards, Kern and I headed home while the more hardcore fans stayed to get autographs. I found myself walking into two convenience stores on the way home, searching for ... something. I felt somehow unsatisfied. Milk. Milk was on my list, so I grabbed a liter. I wandered around for another five minutes or so as I often do in life, searching... searching... not sure what it is I'm looking for. Finally I bought the milk and headed home, still feeling like I wanted something. The thing is, everything in the convenience store is either high-calorie, expensive, or porn. Or, I suppose, two of the three possible two-item combinations of the above list. Granted, things exist which are pornographic and high-calorie, but they don't sell them at Lawson. ;)

I took my milk up to the cashier, and I was somewhat distracted by the strange woman outside the door squatting and carefully making a dogfood pizza on the ground (with no dog in sight). As the cashier processed my carton of milk, by attention was torn between watching the woman outside and eyeing the little chocolates by the register. Cheese flavored. Cheese-flavored chocolate.. I tried to envision that. I like cheese, and I like chocolate, but ... um... is that actually good?

The cashier must have seen me eyeing the chocolates, because he asked me, "Is this the only thing you want to buy?" in a more inquisitive tone than the mindless confirmation that is usually spoken just as a formality. I asked him, "do these chocolate cheese things actually taste good?" and he sort of nervously replied, "um... I ... think they do...?".

Unconvincing.

"So would you like to buy one?"

"No, sorry ... I'm too scared."

On my way home I pondered my search for the elusive source of satisfaction which was not illegal, immoral, fattening, or expensive. By the time the elevator hit 23, I realized that there was in fact, at least one item which would fit that description. Before I could go grab it, though, I opened my bag from the convenience store.

The dude put a straw in there. Did he really expect me to drink an entire liter of milk from the carton with a straw? O_o



I laughed out loud.

Anyway, before sitting down to write this post, I took a few minutes out to enjoy the solution I came up with to the aforementioned satisfaction problem. I haven't pulled this out in months, but sometimes it feels really good to have your back mercilessly jackhammered. Especially at the end of a long week.



Have a good weekend, everyone.

Greatest Band of All Time

Thanks to the subtle suggestions of the shuffle function on my iPod, I was reminded again today that, considering all the genres of music that have and will be developed across all the history and future of humanity, and all the talented composers and performers who have ever lived or ever will, that there is a very high possibility that the greatest band of all time is, in fact, Rip Slyme.

T3A - Hisashiburi!

Yeah, it's been a while since I've done one of these...

#3 - Linkin Park.
Whenever things settle into a rut and life feels like it's starting to stagnate, leave it up to the shuffle function on my iPod to give life that caffeine kick it needs! While I was sitting on the train studying kanji, my iPod fished out some Linkin Park from the unfathomable gigabytes of eternity.

I remember being skeptical the first time I listened to them... I'm really not a fan of intentional misspellings. (This was the same reason I was slow to become a Def Leppard fan, although they later became one of my favorite bands.) Anyway, they quickly grew on me. The crisp sound engineering and delicate blend of light, warm, surrounding sounds with cold, hard, thrashing guitars really does it for me. They're kind of like a younger version of Faith No More.

Rejuvenated by this rediscovery, I dialed them up on my iPod after that and listened to them for most of the rest of the day. :)

#2 - Warm summer breeze.
Granted, the air has been getting warmer with the coming of "spring" (actually this is what most people from nations in temperate climates would call summer. As the Japanese are fond of saying, "Japan has four seasons". What they neglect to mention is that these seasons are not winter, spring, summer, and fall, but in fact dreary-and-miserable, summer, unbearable-humid-roasting-inferno, and summer-again-but-with-colorful-leaves-this-time.)

Anyway, the change I noticed today was that the wind on my knuckles as I biked home from the station was quite warm. Soothing. Enveloping. Like taking a long, warm shower after a day of hiking in the cold rain. Like rubbing warm lotion into dry, cracked skin. It was a wonderful feeling. A delicate balance point between the seasons, and I'm sure it won't last for long.

#1 - Anonymous encounter.
This morning on my commute to work, I looked up from my studying while we were stopped at one of the stations I never get off at. A troop of elementary school kids was walking along the platform, identical little yellow hats bobbing past the window.

I watched their faces as they passed, trying to imagine them later in life. Trying to read their thoughts, their opinions of Japanese society. Although a few were joking around and laughing, most of them had dull, uninspired looks in their eyes. They only looked forward and down, making sure they stayed in their proper place in line.

That seemed kind of sad to me, but about 3/4 of the way down the line, one little girl seemed different. She was bouncing along with a sparkle in her eye, and she was looking at the things around her. As the line shuffled past my car, she looked in and saw me. The expression on her face transformed instantly. She was so excited! A real, live foreigner! Our eyes met for a moment through the train window... the glance we exchanged was like a little secret between the two of us, and we smiled at each other for a moment. Then the line began to move again, and just before she was swept away from the window, she mouthed a word to me through the glass.

"Hello."

And she was gone.

Stillness

[Higashi-Osaka and Ikoma Mountain, just before sunrise]

I did a little bit of shopping after work today, (mostly due to the shocking fact I discovered yesterday that I was out of soy sauce!) and somehow I ended up catching a gap between trains after I finished. Normally I don't have to wait more than five minutes for a train, but right now I've been sitting here for about fifteen. The strange feeling of patience that you only see at the end of the line.

And yet... I have nothing to do here but wait. I finished dinner, finished shopping, and replied to a few of the outstanding mails on my phone. I guess I could dive into my kanji studying like I usually do, but it just isn't the same when the train isn't in motion. Maybe that's a bad thing. If I get too used to this, I won't be able to take the Japanese proficiency exam if I'm not in a moving vehicle...

Such a strange feeling, stillness... The train is just sitting here, a muted chorus of hums and hisses coming from above, below and all around me as its circulatory and respiratory systems idle away. Train conductors walk up and down the cars picking up the occasional forgotten wrapper or manga book left by the passengers on the way out here.

Work has been pretty intense lately. Intense in an off-season kind of way. The kind of intensity when you're struggling to put your head around a problem and learn what the last people did. Not the kind of heads-down, sprint-to-the-end intensity that characterized the last couple months. It's pretty exciting for me that I'm working with a team now. At the same time it's exhausting to sit through hours of meetings held completely in Japanese. My comprehension kind of saturates and then my mind just sits back and waves the words on through with a smile.

Been studying like mad lately, too. I realized last week that I'm going to have to cover three kanji lessons a week in order to be ready for the Level One test this December. That's a pretty ambitious goal, but I think I can keep it up as long as I study on the train every morning and most evenings. Feels like binge-and-purge education, but what else would be appropriate for this country?

My personal life has also been pretty eventful lately. The big news is that KIP and his friend Ryan came to visit over the weekend! It was sooo awesome to see him. We rented bicycles on Saturday and biked around Kyoto with Niklas and Keiko (yes... the girlfriend I've been hinting about for a couple of months), taking in some of the major sights and seeing some of the little back streets as well.


[Traffic hazards in Kyoto - Photo by Niklas]

Let me just say that this is THE best way to do Kyoto. I've ridden the crowded, stuffy buses, I've walked enormous distances, and I've taken overpriced taxis... but there is nothing like tearing across the city on a rented bike for 300 yen on a beautiful spring day!


[A beautiful afternoon at Kinkaku-ji - Photo by Niklas]

Although I have lots of photos from this trip, I won't have time to crop, resize, and upload them for a while. Fortunately, however, Niklas is a great photographer and is also diligent about uploading his pictures!

You can see his pics from our trip on his Flickr page, which has a cool slideshow function.

Yoriai 2007

I had a show on Sunday with Urara 6. We sang three songs at an annual event in Kita-Senri called Yoriai, where a huge number of amateur a cappella groups gather to perform, network, and enjoy the spring air.



Our performance was well-received. Our set was much tighter than it was last year, and I think we delivered a lot more energy than most of the Japanese groups. And really, it's hard to ignore the music and talk with your friends when Kern is rockin' the house with "Signed, Sealed, Delivered".



I've still got a lot of work to do on my solo, and we have some new songs in the pipeline for our upcoming summer concerts. On top of that, both Urara 6 and Osakapella are in the middle of recording projects, and I recently started taking voice lessons! Busy busy busy.



It sounds like we'll be taking some time off from performing after our summer shows are over, though, so things won't continue at this intensity forever. We need to make some time off for group bonding, I think. Personally I'm recommending paintball, although the ladies don't seem to be quite so enthusiastic about that suggestion. ;)