More Search Queries

I really don't understand how some of these end up with people getting to my blog - or rather, how my blog ends up on the results page for them, but I guess it did. Here are the last 20 queries people used to get to my blog, in order of recency:
japanese bucket pudding, japan nuclear waste, tofu, tofu, tofu, tofu, tofu, kanji, kyoto Paradole Saiin III, kyoto Paradole Saiin III, kuso atsui, where can i buy sex toys in yokohama?, japanese いいお天気ですね。, rice cooker at jusco japan, ATSUI TOWELL KANJI RYOKAN, mamachari bike for work out, how to use yabari, japanese people-pictures, judo, American electronics in japan 3 prong

I can understand the first one. I can understand the tofu searches, given all the stupid ideas I try with tofu. kuso atsui means "fucking hot". I don't know where to buy sex toys in Yokohama. いいお天気ですね ii otenki desu ne means "It's nice weather today, isn't it?", roughly.

I'm a little baffled by atsui towell kanji ryokan, but I think the person is trying to find the kanji for お絞り, a hot (atsui), moist towel that many places will give you before eating for washing your hands. A 旅館 ryokan ("Japanese-style inn", lit: "travel house") is one such example of a place that might do that.

I don't know how to use Yabari, and I don't see why someone would buy a mamacheri to work out, but... Well, tofu.

Statistically Kanji-ing...

For the test one Wednesday, we have to know 172 new words comprised of 271 different characters and a total of 344. Here are the top four kanji by frequency:

Character | Count | Chinese readings | Japanese readings | English meanings
的　7　テキ　まと　bull's eye, mark, target, object, adjective ending
迷　5　メイ　まよ(う)　astray, be perplexed, in doubt, lost, err, illusion
地　5　チ／ジ　ground, earth
動　4　ドウ　うご(く)／うご(かす)　move, motion, change, confusion, shift, shake

Statistically Speaking...

I was just looking at the statistics for pictures I've posted. I can see, for the most part, how often all the pictures on the site are viewed, and I was look at these so often when I ought to be doing other things, like studying, or not burning dinner.

The picture of the Shana figures has held the top spot since I posted it three months ago and nothing has displaced it that I know of.After that, these two pictures of girls dancing at the 外大際 gaidai-sai are tied for second place and have held steady about there for the past few weeks. For the record, I think the girl in this picture is the hottest of the ones on stage. Bonus for the amazingly sexy outfit, yes? I don't usually like lace, but... rawr, you know?

A clear fourth, though not until recently, is the panorama of the izakaya party that Miso arranged. I still don't know who Miso is, though I recall that she had a cool name. I think her last name was "Woo" or something like that, which just makes her whole name sound like an exclamation from someone who likes miso soup.

Miso, woo!

After that are a bunch of pictures that are all about even, and after that big set is one picture with me in it.
Slightly ahead of that picture is this picture of the molted exoskeleton of a cicada on a log, I think. As in, I don't know what kind of bug it is/was. Apparently, "In North China cicadas are skewered or stir fried as a delicacy." (Wikipedia)

At least I know where I stand.

Transportation

Here's a table showing my costs and times for the places I went yesterday.  You should know that Kobe is decently far from Kyoto, about 40 miles as the crow flies and well over 45 if you have to stay on the ground like the rest of us mortals.

From	To	Duration	Cost	In Real Money
Kyoto Saiin	Juuso	00:50	¥ 390	$ 3.54
Juuso	Kobe Sannomiya	00:40	¥ 250	$ 2.27
Kobe Sannomiya	Juuso	00:40	¥ 250	$ 2.27
Juuso	Kyoto Saiin	00:50	¥ 390	$ 3.54
Total		03:00	¥ 1,280	$ 11.62
From	To	Duration	Cost	In Real Money
Apartment	Sanjo Keihan	00:30	¥ -	$ -
Waiting in the crowd		00:25	¥ -	$ -
Sanjo Keihan	JR Yamashina	00:20	¥ 250	$ 2.27
OMG CROWD		00:20	¥ -	$ -
Yamashina	Otsu	00:10	¥ 180	$ 1.63
WTF crowd (even after an hour!)		00:30	*	*
Otsu	JR Yamashina	00:10	¥ 180	$ 1.63
JR Yamashina	Sanjo Keihan	00:20	¥ 250	$ 2.27
Total		02:45	¥ 860	$ 7.81

*Actually, we were going so slow that I got a lot of pictures here; there was just enough space for my 18-55mm to get most of a person at the wide end.  Good thing Japanese women are short?  In addition, I was running around and spotted a pretty decent fan that had fallen under-ish some shrubbery.  It's blue.
So I spent about $20 total on trains yesterday, and figure about $15 for food: $5 for lunch, ~$4 at a pastry shop, and $3 for a melon-flavored shaved ice thing.

Internets

I just talked to Roy, one of the other students in this building and asked if/how much we agreed on for him using my Internet connection. Apparently, we didn't, but he grabbed his wallet and handed me $20. That's nearly half the monthly cost, so it's a pretty good deal.

What I'm hoping to do next quarter is share my 'Net connection with everybody I can and charge them $10 to $20 per month for it. If I can get that going with three people, it'd at least take care of most of the bill, in addition to being convenient for them since they don't have to deal with the application process or paying bills. Plus, it's pretty much instantaneous, instead of taking a month.
My room is in a particularly poor place to have the router, as it's on the end on the ground floor, which puts it in a corner.
If my router projected a perfect sphere of connectivity, a diagram of the rooms that it could cover would look something like the diagram at left. That's all well and good, except that it's losing over half of the area it can cover into the ground and outside. That's both wasteful and a security risk.
All that unused space on the outside is where people can walk by and use your Internet connection, like I was doing to other people, or more nefarious things, like snoop on your wireless network activity. Wi-fi security is not really great, with even the newer schemes being crackable in under an hour.

Now, unfortunately for my plan of sharing my Internet connection with other people, the router isn't actually set up like that. You usually don't need to be able to talk up for long distances, so they squish the sphere down, which gives it more reach to the sides, where it matters. In addition, the floors seem to be somewhat more difficult to penetrate than the walls.

In the end, my current coverage area looks roughly like second diagram at left. You might be able to get a spotty connection on the third floor, but I doubt you'd get anything useful.

Now, if I could just put Wi-Fi routers wherever I felt like, and could find a way to get one to radiate vertically effectively, I'd be able to lay out something like this next diagram. You could either chain the routers together with Ethernet, or use a Wi-Fi mirroring protocol I don't remember the name of.
Linking them together with Ethernet has the advantage of providing speed and reliability, but I'd have to convince the manager that he wants little blue cords dangling from one room to another. Simply linking the routers together wirelessly would be a little bit unreliable unless I stuck one in the middle to bridge them all. It would still be a lot less reliable than wiring 'em all up with magic blue strings. If the manager wanted to do it, he could sure make a pretty penny. It would take about $150 of new equipment, give or take.

Alternately, if I can convince people in a couple of rooms that they want to lend me a wall socket and some space, I might be able to rig this up, and it would pay for itself pretty quick if I could contact the people in those rooms.

Now, all of that said, it would require a significant amount of work on my part, so I'll probably just stick with diagram 2, which what I've got now.

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.

Frivolity?

I'm not certain the title is a word, but spellcheck isn't whining so this is what you get. Strangely enough, it doesn't like the word "spellcheck". Not too surprising, I guess.

In any case, today was another shopping day. I got four liters of various kinds of juices, two trash cans (we have to separate our garbage into "plastic" and "everything else") duct tape, another foam thing for DDR, zip strips, bungee cords, lunch (which was tasty, if disturbing. Don't ask.), and ibuprofen, because it's handy and I didn't have any. I broke two $10 and a $50, but I have most of the $50 still in my wallet and $20 in change in my change-thingy-that-is-not-a-purse.
Very little of it was frivolous, though I suppose none of it was completely necessary. I made a list before I went and the only thing I bought that wasn't on the list was the zip strips.
But seriously: can you not buy zip strips? I apparently can't.

I was surprised by the quantity in the ibuprofen box. It's less than you'd think for $5 if you were in America, but it seems decent here.

In other news, I got another matburn at judo, as you can see.
Apparently the Japanese don't use the same percent system we do, or maybe they just make hydrogen peroxide more hardcore. Somehow. I dunno what the hell it is, but this stuff is not the 3% I'm used to.
This picture was taken after I had rinsed all the peroxide away, by the way. My foot's actually bleached right there now. From about 30 seconds of contact, that's pretty impressive. Anyway, I put some antibiotic ointment on it and a bandage, so it should heal decently, unlike the others that I just kind of left.

Now I'm going to go beat up some hay. With fists. And my head. I suspect that Pepper will help.

Picture Wandering

So, this isn't the first picture that I took while I was down by the river, but it's one of my favorites. I'll only be posting a few pictures in the post itself, but you're welcome to check out the gallery page for more of the pictures I took while I was wandering around yesterday.
Anyway.
So this dog is, if I remember right, a "kitaben" type. Apparently it's native to Japan, or at least according to the woman walking said dog. The dog's name is "Maru", which means circle.
Japanese people with dogs are usually those that have quite the pile of money to toss around (I suspect!), as dogs require large open spaces to be happy, and large open space comes at a bit of a premium here in Kyoto. Because fewer people own dogs and those that do are usually upper-class (from what I've seen), they are much more likely to have their pet professionally groomed fairly often compared to what you might expect as an American. I dunno if that's actually the case, but the important point here is that all the dogs are so soft.
As much as the might think the Japanese are, in general, less litterbugful (?) than Americans, this park should tell you that they're not, or at least not by much.
This is just a random can that was floating in the river and I liked the way it was bobbing around, but there was quite the plethora of random litter. Strangely enough, it seems as though many people pick up after themselves, bag the whole thing up, then just leave it there. I'd say about half of the random litter I found was in such a state.

If you take a look at the panorama shot that'll be at the end of this post, you'll understand this sign better, as it's posted by those rocks that make the rapids.
It reads:

Danger
Playing in the water here
is danger!!

and I didn't bother to lookup the kanji on the bottom, but at a glance I would guess that it reads something along the lines of Published by the Katsura River Foundation for Putting Signs Up Everywhere, except that it's on the ground, so it probably took them a year to file an internal Request to Put a Sign Down Somewhere request or something.

Here's a guy I saw on the way back to my bike. As you can see, he's simply too hardcore to use one fishing pole at a time.
This makes me think we need a new match time for Halo 2: fishduels. It would totally be a no-shields match, and would involve large fish and slapping. IRC-style.
It'd be hardcore.

This guy, who called himself Nishimura, apparently trains in kenpo. As far as I can tell, that's the Japanese word for kung fu, because the Japanese don't want to admit that they got most of their martial arts from the Chinese, who have a long history of kicking ass.
His dog, Mame, is the same breed as the dog from earlier, but he said it was different, and that this breed "used to protect Japan from nothing". Presumably, something was lost in translation here.
Anyway, we sat around and talked for about fifteen minutes while Mame wandered around was apathetic. I took this next picture while I was talking to him.
If Bethany is to be trusted, mame (まめ) means bean, but I was wondering if there was a slightly less silly meaning for it, so I tossed it at a dictionary. I suspect the first entry I found is the meaning Nishimura intended, as he said at one point "The bond between Nishimura and Mame... It's there. Between Mame and other people there is nothing." I think he said this to cheer me up as I was trying to get Mame's attention so I could scratch his/her head, but s/he was busy sniffing dirt.
I didn't know the meaning of it at the time, and didn't think to ask, so Bethany is as likely to be right as not.


And here's my obligatory sunset picture.


Isn't it pretty?



Good. Moving on, then...

Here's the last one.

I spent an hour this morning trying to get this to stitch properly, but in the end, I failed. It's decent enough, but I've got another 90 degrees of view I could tack on the right side if the connecting shot had exposed properly. The sunset kind of freemed the exposure on my camera, as you can see, but I was able to mostly recover things. The sky above the stuff in the SW looked too nice to crop out, so you get weird grey matting where I didn't have any picture to put.

As a last note, in case you're wondering (I was), the gallery has about every 6th picture I took. I mean, on average. According to my Excel math, it's actually 6.6296, but about every 6th is good enough, unless you're talking to KMD, who would bitch that you couldn't shoot it at a satellite without compromising its pie. Or something.
In case any of you didn't know, Dan's not allowed in the kitchen when people are cooking. God forbid he actually touch something.

Well, it was. I made some changes and went over by a little...

I went to Osaka with Bethany and Sara today. It was pretty lame. It was like Kyoto, but more spread out, with less space to walk, more people, and the shops were more expensive. Watch me stick around Kyoto for shopping. Bethany and Sara have both been picking on me quite a bit, and it’s getting on my nerves a little, so I have to admit that watching Bethany fail at the train made me feel good. You’ll recall that I did the same thing yesterday. (Edit: By the way, I talked to Bethany about it, and I think she must've mentioned it to Sara. Yesterday was much more fun.

That said, it wasn’t a complete waste of time. We stopped at a マックド(McDonald’s) and I had my first taste of Japanese McDonald’s food, which was, unsurprisingly, just like American McDonald’s food. I mean, imagine that! … Yeah.

Roxanne has some bizarre obsession with ice, and the ice is different here. It’s smaller, a little jagged on the edges to improve surface area and thus cooling speed, and very soft. Perfect for chewing. The picture is McDonald’s’ ice, but that seems to be standard, ‘cause it’s the same stuff I got at the Mr. Young Men’s later.

We found a random escalator outside. I’m not certain how they keep it from dying in the rain, as it seems like it would be a pain to waterproof that kind of thing. Oh, and right next to the escalators was this nice fountain… thing. Is that a fountain? I don’t really know. It’s in the picture, on the right.

So once we decided that Osaka sucks, we headed back to Kyoto and got off at Kawaramachi, the shopping district. You’d think that shopping with two girls for a whole day that they would’ve bought something. As far as I know, the only things that were purchased by them were train tickets and one bottle of water because Bethany was getting pretty thirsty. Anyway, I lost them/they lost me somewhere in one of the shopping arcades, so I started wandering around on my own.

There are a number of interesting shops in the area, such as the two army surplus stores (one of which I checked out, and it has decent prices), a couple kimono shops (between $50 and $3,000 here), about three dozen (not kidding!) Japanese confectionaries, and a couple of convenience stores. It’s so weird to find a 7-11 indoors. Well, there aren’t any actual doors, per se. You know.

But right by the not-a-door entrance is an お好み焼き(okonmiyaki literally translates to “what you like, fried”) where I got a very delicious ラブラブお好み(“love love okonomi”, a heart-shaped お好み焼き with fish flakes and beef on top). I thought I was watching her make it, but she kept making other people’s orders. Right when I was about to ask about how long was left on mine, she pulls it nearly completed from a nearby countertop oven. At my request, she added ベニショウガ(pickled ginger chopped into cubes or Julian-style – it’s the red stuff with a strong smell), which is one of my favorite condiments/ingredients.

You can be certain that I’ll be going back to that shop in the future. It’s that Mr. Young Men’s I mentioned earlier. Sounds weird, but the prices are decent for that kind of eating. And they have an English menu that’s actually translated decently. First one I’ve seen in two weeks of being here.

Now that I had eaten my fill of delicious egg-pancake-pizza stuff, I headed towards the area that Sara had described as “Kyoto’s own little Denden town”. Denden Town is Osaka’s very own little Akihabara. We had meant to go to Denden town today, but we got off the train about three miles away and the girls are… girls.

This area was quite a lot of electronics on its own, so I can hardly imagine what Akihabara must be like. In any case, I found a place called Camera Naniwa that had all kinds of, you guessed it, camera stuff. It was a very decent store, and had two of four floors with interesting stuff. The other two were scrapbooking and an art gallery.

In any case, I ended up wandering around that place for about, oh, a good hour. Except, I had gone rather far south and had to walk about ¾ of a mile north to get to the station entrance. Then I got lost in the department store that leads to the train station. Seriously, a square turtle-load of overpriced crap. Oh, and a couple パン屋(basically a bakery), which I ignored due to it being very overcrowded.

Obligatory car-a-vator. See left.

So. I finally get on the train and get back to my part of Kyoto. I then proceed to get lost (vaguely in the right direction, though) due to it now being night and chat up a random family that’s walking home from… somewhere. Forgot to ask. I get to the mall about ten minutes later, wander around for a few minutes, accost some random woman and tell her about the supermarket’s really low prices on something she’s holding, and head home. As I step inside, I realize I’ve forgotten something.

So I toss all the bags (three of them) on the ground and go get my bike from Sara’s place, where we met this morning to walk to the train station.

And that concludes today’s freaktastically long entry. They say a picture is worth a thousand words; I have 929 here, and, what, six pictures?

Damn, I’m getting long-winded.

Transportation Price Breakdown
From		To		Cost		Running Total
City	Area	City	Area	JPY	USD
Kyoto	Saiin	Osaka	Umeda	¥390	$ 3.94	$ 3.94
Osaka	Umeda	Osaka	Namba	¥230	$ 2.32	$ 6.26
Osaka	Namba	Osaka	Umeda	¥230	$ 2.32	$ 8.59
Osaka	Umeda	Kyoto	Kawaramachi	¥390	$ 3.94	$ 12.53
Kyoto	Kawaramachi	Kyoto	Saiin	¥150	$ 1.52	$ 14.04	Total

Actually, my pride mandates that I also put one last picture up. You see that? It says the fare is ￥150 from Kawaramachi (the red one) to Saiin. Sara said it was ￥230. We got into quite a debate over it, so I’m glad to at least be somewhat right. She may be thinking of from a different station or something. I’m not certain.

Well, that’s one thousand words.