I'm back!

Hey everyone...
It's been a long time. I haven't slacked on my blog like this in months!

Autumn is here, and the air is starting to get cooler. At night, at least. The days are still miserably hot, but it's nice to stand at the bus stop in the evening and not be drenched with sweat by the time the bus comes.

I just finished a monster deadline... Fingers are crossed now and there's nothing to do but wait. I sincerely hope this paper gets in though... I had to work far harder for this one than for any of my previous papers. Plus the project was pretty cool, and I'd be psyched to present it. :)

I have literally hundreds of pictures to upload from this summer. Bad Dylan. As history has shown, I don't tend to deal with backlogs gracefully.

Anyway, I'll do what I can about the pictures. They take way too long to photoshop. :P

Here are a few to start, though.

First, I love this pic of Yuki and Florian. They're so cute together. :)
This was from our annual trip to Lake Biwa. Just a day trip this year, since we were all too busy for camping.



This one is from the PL Hanabi, perhaps the biggest fireworks festival in the world. We took the advice of a friend I have who lives in that area, and we watched it from a nearby graveyard instead of getting crushed for several hours in the mash of people struggling to watch it from the "official" site.




And finally, here's one of Keiko and me on our 6 month anniversary. Pictures of us together are always hard to find, since we usually take pictures of each other. Hmm... who took this one?



[ed - A number of people have asked me about this last one. Here are links to the original photos I used.]

Neighborhood Matsuri

It's 9:00 on a Saturday.

Ok, more like 10. Sleeping in is awesome. It wasn't always that way... when I was a little kid I remember getting up at 5am to catch some obscure Saturday morning cartoons. Weekends and Christmas were times to get up _early_ rather than sleep in. I wonder when that transition came, and if the opposite transition will happen again later in life.

Anyway, as pretty much everyone in Japan knows, this weekend is the Gion Matsuri, which some consider the most famous festival in all Japan. It is also the weekend of Typhoon #4 (back home they give hurricanes cute names, but here they just stick with numbers). My plan up until a few days ago was to go to the matsuri on Sunday with some friends in yukata (pictures will be coming sooner or later) but now that doesn't seem likely.

Gion is not the only place having a matsuri this weekend, though. As I slide open the door and step out onto the veranda for a breath of morning air, I hear the familiar cacophonous, yet compellingly rhythmic, clacking and clanging of a danjiri matsuri floating up to me from the neighborhood below.

A danjiri is a kind of portable shrine with wheels that people push through neighborhoods during festivals. Not to be confused with a mikoshi, which has no wheels and has to be hoisted on the shoulders, danjiri are pulled by ropes. The most famous danjiri matsuri I know of is held in Kishiwada, in southern Osaka, in early September, and every once in a while people get injured or killed as these enormous multi-ton wooden structures barrel out of control through narrow streets clogged with onlookers. They even sell a special kind of home insurance there that covers you in the event that a chunk of your house is gouged out by a danjiri cutting a corner. Not all danjiri matsuri resemble insane chariot races with garbage trucks, however. Most are a bit more relaxed and civilized, like the one in my neighborhood.

I step back inside, wipe the sleep from my eyes, grab my camera, and go back out to try to spot the source of the clattering and shouting. These festivals usually have teams of 40-50 people hauling the danjiri, standing on it, or walking alongside and playing some sort of rhythm instrument, preferably a loud one.

Interestingly, from my 23rd floor vantage point, I can't spot a festival at all.

"DANG di-ga dong DON DON di-ga dong doom DANG di-ga dong DON DON di-ga dong..."

At last, they emerge briefly at a street corner far below.

Can you find them? (Click for larger image)



Haha... kinda like "Where's Waldo" (which, by the way, is called "Where's Wally" in Japanese)

Anyway, the answer is here. You can just barely make out some people dressed completely in white emerging from the street to the left.

The procession moves on slowly, and after they turn the corner by the school, you can get a better view of the arrangement. Two long ropes extend far out in front of the danjiri, and it looks like 20-30 people are pulling it.



They come closer, and as they turn the corner you can get a better view of the danjiri itself, with its rain hood on to protect the fine wood carvings. Remember, it's a portable shrine and a fine piece of artwork.



Here you can see in the side of the danjiri. It looks like there's somebody sitting inside, probably playing taiko drums or something. I've never hauled a danjiri, but I've carried two mikoshi. The first one had little kids inside (actually, not so "little" when their weight is crushing your spine for 4 hours straight) playing taiko, and the second one didn't... I guess it depends on local tradition.



Finally, they arrive at the shrine. These festivals have their roots in Shinto tradition, and thus center around the neighborhood shrines. There is generally an element of testosterone involved as well, and the mikoshi matsuri I've been to have generally involved hoisting the massive mikoshi overhead and spinning it around until you are about to collapse and be crushed to death. This matsuri didn't seem to be quite so extreme, but here you can see them lining up on one side, preparing to pop a danjiri wheelie.



...and it's in the air. Note that the shrine grounds are the only green to be found in the whole neighborhood. To me, that's one of the best things about the preservation of traditional religion here. Everywhere else they seem to have no qualms about not only tearing down forests, but decapitating entire mountains to make space for housing developments, shopping malls, and pachinko parlors. Only on the holy ground is nature really held sacred.



So, it's taken me so long to write this up that the danjiri-pullers have finished their lunch break and are now back out on the streets. I guess it's time to go experience some more of life rather than just blogging about it.

Summer is here

Stepping out of the choking humidity into the blissfully air-conditioned bus, I felt a weight lift itself not just off my shoulders, but off of my entire body. Summer has come. Not full-force yet, but the vanguard has arrived.

And they have already started setting traps for the unwary... Tonight on the way home from work I was clotheslined by my first spiderweb of the year. It was barely anything, just a few light strands of silk. A mere suggestion of what is to come, like the sole concert A played by a violinist before the start of a dramatic orchestral piece. Had this been August, I might not still be here to blog about it. As I wiped the sticky strands from my face, horrific memories of the grim architectural creations of these monsters began to creep out of the dark corners of my memory. Evil, twisted, gnarly sticky webs, meters in length, nearly the size of the trees that bore them. Ghastly three-dimensional towers of death, sometimes with five or six giant spiders sitting in wait for whatever prey may come along. Massive, deep networks of threads stronger than steel, probably big enough to immobilize a baby or small dog.

We recently had a scourge of caterpillars that nearly ate the trees bare, and now there are brown moths everywhere. And now that the season has started, out come the dani (ticks that live in tatami floor mats) and poisonous centipedes!

Japanese summer is never dull.

The Last Train

About two weeks ago, we had a farewell party for my coworker Eriko. It was held near work, so my last bus was pretty early - 10:50. As always, it took me longer than I expected to extract myself from the party, and I ended up missing my bus by about a minute.

However, due to the brilliant planning of the engineers who designed the Nara Kotsu bus system, the last bus arrives substantially earlier than the last train leaves. So, in addition to the 7-10-minute bus trip, I had an extra 10-15 minutes of margin, assuming I could get to the station in time.

Now, I've walked several times, and it takes about 30-35 minutes, depending on how much stuff I'm carrying. So my thinking was, if I can jog the whole way, I can get there in just under 20 minutes, and that should get me there in time for the train. So I flew out the door, clutching my bag, feet pounding the pavement.

After about 10-15 minutes of this, it became obvious that I wasn't going to make it in time. My starting point had been further from the station than I had internally modeled, and my bag was kind of heavy, making it difficult to run. I switched to plan B, and stuck out my thumb.

Unfortunately, working in the sticks like I do, there are very few passing cars. So I alternated jogging and trying to hitchhike. The first four cars passed by me with no hesitation. After another few minutes, a fifth car came by and I saw brake lights up ahead.

The guys who gave me a ride were bored college students out for a drive in the middle of the night. They seemed entertained at the novelty of picking up a foreign guy hitchhiking out in the middle of nowhere, and they were happy to take me to the station.

As I thanked them and got out of the car by the station, I looked at my watch. I had missed the last train by about 2 minutes! Nooooooooo!

However, I went up to the platform anyway. There are one or two trains after my last train that go about 1/3 of the way to the city, which is better than nothing if I have to take a taxi the rest of the way.

Strangely, my train was sitting there for me.

With the lights out.

And passengers sitting inside.

I was thoroughly confused for a moment, until an announcement came over the loudspeaker saying that somebody had jumped into the tracks a few stations down, and they were busy cleaning up the body parts. (Well, not so explicitly, but they announced an "accident involving human injury" and said that they had turned off the power so that station staff could go down into the tracks, which is the same thing). Suicide by jumping in front of the trains is a popular pastime in Japan.

So I sat down in the dark train car, still sweating profusely from my run, reflecting on the fact that someone gave their life to enable me to catch my last train home.

My last train of the night.

Someone's last train ever.

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.