Windows 7!

I'm using Windows 7 now, and I can thus far say only good things about it. Here's hoping it keeps up.

Strange Day

Today has been interesting, despite not starting until a good deal past 11AM. I hung out with Yanavy and her group who just sort of dropped by around 10PM and we all watched a movie and sat around and slacked off until 5AM, when we collectively realized we ought to get some sleep. My room still smells like Magi's (sp?) perfume very faintly. Could just be a little left on me, though.

That sounds bad, but nothing happened. She sprayed some around at one point.

Anyway, everybody went home and I... was at home, so I just fell over and went to sleep.

On my way to practice today, I stopped and stared at some pigeons, and found one with a peg leg - or at least no toes. I did my best to take his picture with my cell phone camera, but... Cell phone camera, so...

Once I got there, I found out practice was canceled and there was an art show. Random, no? I bought a scrunchie (シュシュ) I liked and headed back home.

Upon returning, I was summoned to go do some tech support. But on the way, I saw a wallet lying on the ground, open, stuffed full of money, in the road. I stopped my bike, parked it off to the side of the road, grabbed the wallet and immediately signaled a nearby guard and explained the situation. He wanted me to hang out for a while so the wallet's owner could thank me, and while I was saying how I was in a hurry, the owner of the wallet came out of the store looking confused and patting his pants pockets. The guard flagged him and we returned his wallet, they both thanked me, and the guy gave me $30 for my trouble. He said I should go buy some ramen or something with it. I thanked him and we went our ways.

So I got to the Cristina's apartment, where Valentina, Betta, and Daniela were waiting, and was able to figure out why they couldn't get on the Internet (they were connected to the wireless router as a gateway instead of the router plugged into the VDSL modem - and their modem had locked up at the same time). Being somewhat short on time, I set up their computers to use static IPs and assigned the gateway and DNS settings manually, and left them with instructions on how to power cycle their setup. It's nice to be able to help like that.

Oh, and I'm currently waiting for Chise and Mikako to show up, and we're going to make okonomiyaki and play some Super Smash Brothers.

Barring anything really bad happening, this has been another pretty decent day. This makes me worry a little bit about tomorrow, but...

Calligraphy Brushes and Combinations

I went to a calligraphy class today* and talked to the teacher for a while afterward since he let everyone out early. We talked about various paper sizes, various weights of paper, and the different things you call some quantities of paper. I was kind of surprised he didn't have any business cards on him.

Apparently, he gets a paper the size of the classroom and uses a brush that could very well be a broom to write out a massive... thing. I don't know what he does with these things. I mean, we're not talking a small classroom, in case you're wondering. Figure... 30' x 40' or so. It's about $200 worth of paper. Yes, he stands on it to write and, yes, he has to walk around to write individual strokes.

He had some of his brushes with him, and he let me take a picture of them. Well, about 20 pictures, actually. Today's pictures were an exercise in photography and photo manipulation more than anything else, because I'm sure most of you know roughly how I feel about calligraphy.

First up is an overhead view of all of them. The one on the right is made from horse hair, though I don't know if it's tail or mane or of there are very fluffy horses, or if they pick their ears, or what.
The next one to left is made from sheep hair, and the next one from tanuki, which is something like a hybrid between a dog and a raccoon. I was going to link the Wikipedia article, but I can't access any of the Wikipedia servers right now, strangely enough. Anyway, there's quite a bit of folklore about them, apparently, and then there's the actual animal.
So what I did to this picture is fairly limited. I corrected the horrible distortion using my 18-55mm at its wide end creates, and I think I changed the colors slightly.

This one was just gratuitous and really didn't need to be included, but I had two similar shots, so I thought I would see about combining them. I've carefully exported this at the same low resoluation as everything else, so it's hard to see the weird misalignment. Apparently, I can't kep the camera perfectly still while handheld. Imagine that! It's one with the flash on, and one with it off and a longer exposure.
Anyway, don't do this, and if you do, be steadier than I am. Or use a tripod, like someone smart would.

Last is a dramatic (in as much as a pile of inanimate hair can be dramatic) shot of the brushes. I took a few pictures, doing my best to keep it lined up by using two scene elements and my viewfinder. I focused each one on a different brush, and then I picked the two that had the most of them in focus and combined them by hand.

The next version of Photoshop will do this for you automatically. And it only costs $800! You can even trigger this kind of stuff from inside of Lightroom, if you've spent a further $300 on that. It's probably worth it for people who do this kind of stuff a lot, but this is the first time I've done it and I don't see myself doing it a lot in the future.

Anyway, I like this picture the best.
...

DRAMA!

New New Hard Drive Setup

In light of my hard drive failure and the corresponding 250GB of data loss, I decided that enough is enough, and I've changed my setup around drastically. First of all, the heat can't be doing good things for the lifespan of these drives, so I bought a second external interface, but this one completely surrounds the drive and has a small fan on one end and an opening diagonally opposed to it. Inside that enclosure is a Seagate 500GB 7200RPM with a 32MB cache, and in my normal, slot-it-like-a-tape interface is (yet another) Western Digital 500GB 7200RPM with a 16MB cache.

Now, any sane person, after three WD drive failures, would stop buying the things. But I've figured out my stupidity. Oh yes, that was a fun conversation.

Me: I bought this 400GB drive here about two months ago, and now it's making this kind of clicking noise.
Employee: Uh... How long ago?
Me: About two months.
Employee: ... Do you have the receipt?
Me: You're holding it.
Employee: So I am.
Me: [Wait for 15 minutes]
Employee: It's a little... difficult.
Me: So you can't do it? That seems odd, because I'm looking at these drives and they all have a one-year warranty. Is it just my drive that's just like this one that doesn't? Just the one drive that I bought?
Employee: Yes.
Me: Doesn't that seem a little strange?
Employee: ...
Me: ...
Employee: I'm very... sorry?
Me: Well, thanks for your help.

As it would turn out, the drives that keep crapping out on me were used. Yeah, used. You know what you shouldn't do? Buy used electronics that have moving parts. Yeah. Apparently, you tell them apart by the fact that the used ones have pink anti-static baggies that they come in, while the new ones come in white anti-static baggies. How could I not have known? It's so clear and intuitive. Was that enough sarcasm to make the hate clear?
The best part is that the new ones don't cost a yen more. They're actually cheaper, in some cases.

Still, it's my fault for not asking or something.
If you need me, I'm going to be beating myself about the spleen with this kanji dictionary...

"Another Hard Drive, Please."

I'm really beginning to hate magnetic hard drives. I think I just had another one fail on me. On the bright side, it gave me one warning death, revived itself, and I had enough time to get all my pictures. I'm trying to bring it online so I can back the rest of it up onto DVDs, but to no avail at this point.
There are a number of things that could be causing them to fail, but I don't know which of them it is, or if it's a combination of a bunch of things. For the past two months or so, it was rare for humidity to drop below 90%. The drive would regularly get hot enough that I couldn't hold my fingers against it without risking a burn due to the lack of cooling... THere are other things, but I'm hoping it's one of those to, and also that they'll take this drive back. I have done nothing to it and am using the same gear the store uses.
It should be fine!

Tokyo

I'm headed out tomorrow for Tokyo for a few days, and I don't know if I'll have ready access to an Internet connection, so there may be no new posts until I get back.

If I had foresight, I would've written some and set them to post while I was gone, but I don't and I didn't, so there aren't. As tempted as I am to leave my laptop behind and instead pack enough clothes that I'll be able to wear clean clothes each day of the four-day trip, I'll probably bring it with in the hopes that there will be a connection somewhere.

いったいなんだ？

I just spent half an hour trying to troubleshoot what had broken my site navigation all of a sudden. During some troubleshooting, I've come to the conclusion that my site is likely broken in Internet Explorer. Fx doesn't work on these computers, but I'll poke at it once I clean up my room some, maybe.
Any of you that use IE: where is the site navigation?

Japanese Internet Connections

If anybody ever complains to you that their Japanese Internet connection is too slow, you should ignore them. They're probably doing it wrong. This is a usage graph for my connection*:If you click on it, you can actually read the numbers, as it open to the full resolution copy. You will see that the big spike on the top graph is where I was downloading 3.3 megabytes per second. While uploading at over a megabyte per second. For reference, here some examples of what you could download if you could maintain speeds like that:

Speed:	3.3	MB/s
Size		StC	MtC
700	MB	212.1	3.5	A full CD
700	MB	212.1	3.5	A standard-definition movie
1.2	GB	363.6	6.1	An HD movie
4.7	GB	1424	24	A full DVD
32	GB	9697	162	All of Ranma. Ever.

StC and MtC are Seconds and Minutes to Completion, respectively. Unfortunately, it's difficult to get those kinds of speeds as very few servers will be sending data to just you. If they are, they probably won't be supporting that kind of data transfer. The peak was 26.4 megabits/second, which is more than two and a half times as fast as we can theoretically get on our connection in Ellensburg. It's also 25% of the fiber line coming into this building. During heavy usage times, such as 9 and 10PM, I usually can't get any more than about 50K/s out of this connection, probably because the building's router is hitting its limit or something.

*Not entirely accurate, but it's not going to be off by more than a little. I was *asleep* at the time, so there's not much else that was going on.

Slacking Weekend and new HDD setup

This is our last weekend before school's out for the summer, so my time for a large part of the rest of today is probably going to be working on presentations and papers. I've got a presentation tomorrow, a big one on Friday, a paper due on Wednesday (in English, strangely enough), and... Gion Festival is on Thursday, so I'm making plans for that.

In other news, I've got a new drive setup that's a little bit less jackassed than the last one. I can't find the receipt for my previous SATA-USB adapter, so I'm going to have to call that a $20 learning experience. Also, don't cover the breather ports on the hard drive. Apparently, you can suffocate them, and they implode. Or something. Especially when the ambient temperature hovers at 85 degrees with high humitidity. Oh, and the drive has no active cooling. Sort of a series of stupid mistakes on my part.

Anyway.
The new setup! I actually got this going Friday morning at 2AM, but... S'okay, I think I did alright on the test that morning. Talking to Dean and mom kept me up till 3AM, but I studied that morning for about twenty minutes anyway.

Here's what my desk looks like now.

Yeah, it actually stays almost that clean. I threw away a folded-up paper towel from this morning's breakfast, though. I think the desk lamp's light on the wal looks cool for some reason...

An Otherwise Unheralded Advantage

We just got a thunderstorm. It went from no rain to "I'm in the street and I'm drowning"-type rain in the span of about thirty seconds. I was standing outside, admiring the rain when I saw the quick flash of lightning nearby, followed about four seconds later by thunder. By the time the thunder got there, I was inside and checking which things I would need to unplug to isolate my computer gear. The answer is "Just about everything." I'll be optimizing that in just a few minutes.

Anyway, in spite of having no connection to any outside circuits, I'm still able to post online. Why? Because I'm using Wi-Fi, and a lightning strike that fries my $50 router won't fry the other $800 of gear I have on my desk because they aren't physically connected. This would be the unheralded advantage, by the way.

I'm not too worried, just a touch paranoid. I think there are a lot of buildings nearby with lightning rods, which are a rather fearsome thing to actually look at up close, if you ask me. I think it's because you know what it's for, maybe. In any case, Jusco has twenty to thirty 10m rods on their roof. I think that's cool.

An ambulance just drove by.

New Windows

Alright, I finally got Windows installed again. I tried to get Linux running, but it couldn't figure out my wireless card, and I dunno how to fix that. And it's difficult to look up such a thing online, given that it was my wireless card, which I use for my 'Net connection.

In case you're wondering, no, it didn't take me three days.

Unfortunately, there's not much interesting going on this week. Some people are going to a club, but we have a big test the next day and I'm too boring to have much fun in a club. By that, I mean that I don't dance and don't drink, and the two combined seem like they'd make for a less than fun time.

I'll try to do something fun soon so I can get something interesting up.