Status Updated: Missed Flight, part two

I am (as of 10AM February 19th) still at the airport, and I'm doing alright. It's looking like my, uh, little mistake is going to cost my family about $1,500 on top of the $1,200 it already took.

Moral of the story: Don't miss your flight.

[Update:
The moral of the story is still "Don't miss your flight". The people at Northwest have been very helpful, especially when compared to the nice, if rather English-challenged lady I talked to who was with Travelocity. They were able to get it down to $1,200 by waiving a couple of fees and doing some kind of magic - this is actually what the woman said - which is pretty cool. If I were to wait a week, I could get it for "only" $300 on top of my current ticket price, but that flight was taken by the time I talked to them about it again.]

[Edit: Oh, and this is the 400th post to this blog. Beth put up two or three, so it's not my 400th. I had been hoping to hit 500 before I left, but I guess the number's not really important.]

Lecherous Statistics Advertisement

"Your log is full. Increase your log size today!"

Sure, it looks like spam that is going to promise that you can get Viagra for 10% it's normal price by going through Nigeria, but it's not.
This is what my stats app tells me every time I log into to see what's going on. And I chuckle every time. Wouldn't you?

Not Dead Yet

I'm not dead yet! Feeling quite well, actually. I think I'd like to go for a walk...

Yeah, I'm doing quite well actually. Just been surprisingly busy with stuff, and so I haven't been at my computer as much. What little time I've been at my computer has been spent organizing things or processing pictures. I have a couple of pictures to put up and I'll get to finding which ones to put up right now.

「日本：その土地の2つだけのProngs」

So... machine translation.

I went through and corrected some errors I saw right off, but it seems in general much more lucid than the going from Japanese to English. I mean, there are plenty of errors, and I'm sure I'm just missing a lot of weirdness because I'm not a native speaker, but at least what it spews out makes grammatic sense more than half the time, which is more than I can say for most other languages to English.

If you don't have Japanese font support installed, you can still see what this page looks like in terrible, machine-translated Japanese.

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.

Matsuri-try

There was a festival today.

People marched.
I took pictures.

It rained.
I'm wet.

Some horses came by.
I have 600 pictures.

There is another festival today.

Workin' on a Post

I'm detailing what's gone on the past few days that has kept me so busy, but it's late and I have class in the morning, so I'll see about getting posted tomorrow (Monday). That'll help me procrastinate on studying for the big test on Tuesday!

Oops, Sleep.

I kept meaning to write a post about the stuff I've been doing the past few days, but I got in a long and very involved email conversation with someone and ended up writing a few pages of that instead.
I'll try and get up early and get some pictures up here, with some accompanying textual bits.

For now, sleepy bed bed, says my sleepy-o-meter.

Peanut Butter and Jelly Victory!

I was just looking through the statistics for this site and I was happily surprised. Someone found the post I wrote on peanut butter and jelly rice and not by accident. I kid you not: someone actually searched for peanut butter and jelly rice on Google, and this blog comes up.

Not only that, but other people have recipes up for it.

Pretend I've got a spiel here about how "They all laughed" and "I'll show them all" and "[maniacal laughter]".

Query Responses

In other news, here are the top results for how people search to find the blog. The majority of people just straight to the address ([my name] + ".com" + "/japan"), but a good percentage of people gett here by completely different methods.

Percent	Terms
21.9%	maiko
9.4%	monkey
9.4%	japan the land of only two prongs
6.3%	judo choke out
6.3%	rice cooker

But some of the best things are the completely random ones:

frawress victoly	what is kouhai mean
mcdonalds english menu japan	japan america land area
butterfly seek hdd	how to buy a bike in japan
japanese camera bag	bicycle drum brake japanese
ramen museum+tokyo	okonomiyaki utensils
Okayama farm picking	tikimee
japan 3 pronged plugs	soap japan
sex shops in oomiya city

I'm going to do my best to satisfy the searches that actually make sense.

• Maiko - Maiko are like the oh-so-famous geisha, but are in training. Maiko tend to wear brighter clothes, and have more colorful decorations. In my experience, maiko are more likely to be attractive, probably because they're tend to be much younger and in better shape.
  My post "Jeff" has some pictures of actual maiko, and my post Maiko'd has my friends getting dressed up as maiko.
• Monkeys - I've run into these while hiking to the east of Kyoto, and at the monkey park.
• Judo choke out - There are lots of different ways to choke someone out in judo, and honestly, if you manage to get someone into a choke hold, they deserve what they get. For more information on the chokes in judo, please see JudoInfo's page on the topic.
• Rice cookers - I use my rice cooker almost as much as I use my computer. It's constantly either keeping rice warm or making it warm. I paid $60 for mine at Joshin's, an electronics store, when I first got here. I would recommend anybody staying in Japan longer than a few weeks to look at getting a rice cooker. You can probably find a small, cheap one at a recycle shop for $20 or so.
  The cheapest rice cooker I've seen was $47, and was a total waste of money. It held 1.5 cups of rice, and had no warming feature, no timer. Switch on, switch off. Same thing in the States would cost $10 and hold twice as much rice.
  The most expensive rice cooker I've seen was priced at about $1,200. It was a 10-cup contraption with stainless steel casing. Presumably, it makes rice taste better?
  
• Frawress victoly - Uh, I guess I used this once? It's just "flawless victory" with the Rs and Ls flipped, as per the basic rules of Engrish.
• mcdonalds english menu japan - The McDonalds here in Kyoto have Japanese menus, then on the back of those menus are English versions. Same in Osaka and Kobe, so no worries.
• Japanese camera bag - Don't buy camera gear here in Japan. Just don't. I mean a bag isn't usually a really expensive piece of gear, but in general, it's cheaper to fly to America and buy it there. Nonetheless, I did buy a small camera bag here for $27. It's an American brand, though, just like nearly all camera bag brands are. I mean, LowePro, Tamrac, National Geographic...
• ramen museum+tokyo - See my post on the ramen museum. You should be warned that the museum is in Shin-Yokohama, and not Tokyo. It's probably a half hour out of, say, Shinjuku, but don't quote me on that.
• Okayama farm picking - I guess this is a common thing? I haven't heard of anybody doing it except our trip to the strawberry field. If anybody seriously wants me to research this, drop me a line via email and I can look into it.
• japan 3 pronged plugs - Key word here is konsento, which, while pronounced like the English consent ("permission"), means an electric plug. Almost all plugs here in Japan are only two prongs, hence the name of this blog. If you're wondering if your American electronics will work here, they should be fine. My laptop had no problems in Yokohama, which is in Eastern Japan, and thus uses 50Hz. Neither did my cell phone charger or Bluetooth headset charger.
  If you're looking for a converter, you can probably get by with some obscene gestures involving fingers and holes. People who work in shops here often don't know what their store sells, so don't believe any employee of a large store who says that they don't sell a particular item. This happened to me and I got a little upset, and proceeded to show the Joshin employee where they keep the converters.
  
• sex shops in oomiya city - ... I've never been to Oomiya city, but there's a part of Kyoto called Oomiya. The only sex shop I know about in Kyoto is over by Kawaramachi, though. If you're looking specifically for sex shops, I'd look for a larger city like Tokyo or Osaka. Osaka's less than an hour away, though, so...
• what is kouhai mean - All criticism about grammar and the formation of effective search queries aside... kouhai refers to someone you are senior to in some kind of organization, be it a club or a company or school. The term isn't used very often, though you hear its opposite, sempai, quite often.
  Again, people with less rank than you are your kouhai, and your superiors are sempai.
  
• japan america land area - The entire Japanese archipelago (377,873 km²) has roughly the same land area as the state of California (423,970 km²), and that's pretty much the best comparison I've seen between the two. It's worth pointing out that while California is mostly habitable, Japan has something around 7% arable land, and in spite of that, has over half the population (127,433,494) of the USA (estimated at 305 million).
  
• how to buy a bike in japan - Go to a used bike shop with $60, and buy a bike. Point to the one you want, and wave the money around. New bikes start at $100, and go up through $400 for normal ones, with battery-powered ones at about $900. You don't need to bring anything with you except for some kind of proof of identity, but to fill out the bike registration card (required), you will need to know your address, and they prefer it if you have a telephone number as well. There's a $5 for buying any kind of bike, new or used. If you don't have to fill out a registration card, there's a chance the bike was either stolen, or that there's some other questionable thing going on. Keep in mind that if you get a bike from your buddy who's leaving the country, and the cops stop you - I've heard they stop foreigners a lot, but I've never been stopped on my bike - they're going to wonder why you're using someone else's bike.
• bicycle drum brake japanese - Japanese bikes tend to use drum brakes instead of the pad- and disc-type brakes common in America. They consist of a band of metal that compresses around a central cylinder, probably made of something heat resistant like arsenic. They're loud and squeaky and often used instead of the bell on a bike. "Drum brake" in Japanese is, unsurprisingly, doramu bureeki.
• okonomiyaki utensils - Okonomiyaki can be made with any generic turner, or even a spatula if you must. Okonomiyaki shops tend to have little metal spatulas ("spatulae"?) that you use to cook and murderate the okonomiyaki. You should be able to buy them at any supermarket or someplace like Jusco.
• tikimee - That's the name of the guy that tagged my site on StumbleUpon. I guess he does this a lot?
• soap japan - Soap is soap. There's nothing special about soap here as far as I know. They have a similar selection to what I've seen in the States. Prices are decent.
  

And that's the end of that. I've been meaning to do this post for a few months now. I wish I could email these people somehow, but you can't really send emails to IPs, and with XP SP2, NT Messenger Service was disabled by default...

Slow Week, part three

This is my last full week of summer freedom and I have a proficiency test coming up on Saturday. Between that and trying to switch over to a awake-during-the-day sleep schedule, I'm not doing much that's particularly exciting stuff to write about right now.

Grah, so tired...

Weird 'Net Twitchiness

I don't know what's causing it, but I've been having problems accessing services authenticated by Google, such as Blogger and Gmail. Around 6PM my time, the connection starts become a little wonky as it becomes evident that Japan has expanded access to broadband faster than it's expanded the infrastructure to support it. From 6PM until midnight or 1AM, the connection is not very fast, and the ISPs do their best to stop any kind of peer-to-peer filesharing, such as Winny, BitTorrent, and eDonkey.

During that time, I have issues getting logged into Blogger, for some reason, though if I'm already logged in I have no problems using the site. I had to restart my web browser around 4PM and didn't log into Blogger again until about 7PM, and it naturally failed. I was able to login around 1:30AM and now it's all good.

As far as what the problem is, I'm not certain. Only Google seems to be affected, strangely. And only if I'm trying to log in. It's weird.

Erm...

I'm not quite sure what happened today. I have stuff to write, and pictures to post, but somehow I didn't get around to it.
It's on the list for tomorrow. Well, later today.
Gr, 1AM...

Back Home

I'm back in Kyoto and still alive. Food takes precedence over writing, and sleep is getting pretty high up on the list, too. I'm going to work on blog posts about the trip tomorrow after some errands, so they shouldn't be too long in coming.

Waterville?

By the way, who lives out in Waterville that reads this? I think everybody I know that lived there has moved to other places. Drop me a line?
That reminds me! My email address is at the bottom, in case anybody was wondering.

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.

Queries

I have no idea how this works, but someone managed to find my blog not once, but twice, by searching orginal sexy prong in the prety on Google. I can't make any sense of the query, though. Am I just not up on the current terminology of society, or what?

Repellant Testing

Alright, here's pretty much the ultimate test for this bug repellant stuff I got from Shari: I'm going to go to an area where there are lots of mosquitoes and ants and whatnot, while wearing shorts, a t-shirt, and sandals.
I've put some repellant on all of my exposed skin (don't forget the ears - seriously!) and anything near a clothing boundary that could become exposed through normal movement or by someone far more flexible than I.

If I survive to write the next post, the stuff works.
---
Thus far, it's seems to be working great. I appear to have missed a small part of my left elbow, however, which went from one bite when I left to... somewhere between three and ten.
I have the next two posts written, and I had meant to post them now, but I forgot to get the pictures off of my camera. No surprise there.
---
In other news, I now know what mosquitoes look like during sex. Until they broke apart, I was trying to figure out what has 12 legs, four sets of eyes, and wobbles back and forth without going anywhere.

Return.

I'm back, finally1 I got lots of pictures today. I took about 512 in total, though I was spamming pretty hard, and I'd be lucky for a hit:miss ratio of 1:5. Computer's processing the pictures right now, so I can't upload them. It's 12:30AM and I need some sleep so I'll get them up tomorrow after a my second set of post-processings.

I need sleep.

It's possible to get a brain freeze from cold water, by the way. One way to do this is by having very nearly frozen water in a jug, then chugging half a liter of it.

Sleep for me, pictures first thing in the morning, I promise.

StumbleUpon

Apparently, one of you guys uses StumbleUpon.
I was checking my statistics, and I've had 768 page loads today, which makes the previous record, 104, seem... somewhat paltry.
That said, there were 429 unique visitors today, which means the median person looked at the main page, then went about their business somewhere else.


So, uh... Hi?

[Edit: It would seem that it was StumbleUpon user "Tikimee" who tagged the site. I'd love to see how he/she found it, but the nearly 1000 page loads kind of overwhelmed my logs...]
[Edit 2: And I've had nearly 1,500 page loads today, which makes the previous record of 822 (yesterday) seem kind of paltry.
So is my normal traffic paltry^2?]

Blogger in Draft

I'm switching over to the new Blogger in Draft interface, so I have some new cool things at my disposal.
The most visible of these on your end is the comment form, which is now where it should be, instead of on a popup, which was just silly.
It also has a little cleaner, yet powerful, interface on my end, which is nice.  Go Google!
...
I am Google's wench.

"Arashiyama" means "storm mountain"

Hamid and I were going to go to Arashiyama today, but he kind of fell asleep. I went over to see what was going on he said something along the lines of "I wish I could just sleep..." so I came back and I've been poking at the Internet for a while. I got some nice pictures yesterday, so I'll put some of those up.

[Edit: Looks like it'll have to wait. We've got a pretty decent thunderstorm going on right now, so I've got nearly all my electronics unplugged. All that's left is my wireless router, and that's only plugged in because someone else is using the connection as well. I Wi-Fi router I can replace for about $50, but the rest would get pretty pricey to replace.
Maybe I should follow Hamid's example and just take a nap?]

Donations!

I've added a PayPal "Donate" button to the footer, so if you have too much money and it's burning a hole in your pocket, send some my way and I'll be sure to put it to good use.
Good uses include, but are not limited to food, photography gear, food, computer stuff, food, and Kagome. Also, food.
[Edit: Apparently, you're not allowed to donate to yourself:
"You cannot email money to yourself. Please enter another user's email address if you would like to send money to someone." ]

Aha!

Figured it out.
I recently added a Google search box in the navbar (the thing on the right) that was marked as being 31 characters in width. IE actually forced it over, while Fx just made it work somehow. Simple solution: cut the width of the search box to 20 characters, and now IE and Fx are both happy.

[Edit: My dad pointed out this really doesn't make any sense unless you know exactly what I'm talking about. The search bar on the right was defined as being 31 characters in width, which is too big to fit inside the bounds of the navbar's allocated space, which makes things get messy pretty quickly.]

Yabari

I just wrote this post, but it's mostly explanatory griping about a classmate, and I'm not really comfortable complaining this extensively about anybody but me. Anyway, it's getting put in the archives at the end of first semester. I'll link to it from the post I'm writing today and actually putting where it ought to go.

Now, none of you know Yabari, and for that you can only be grateful. It's mean, I know, but he fought with everybody, including the teachers, looked down on all of us, and generally monopolized class time. A great example of one of his genius discourses was his half-hour explanation to us "less-studied peoples" on how Mercury is not only not hot, but the coldest planet overall, in our solar system.
He also cheated blatantly on about half of our tests.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, so let's go back to his question to me, simplified here because five minutes of back-and-forth arguing is no fun to type out or read:

「むし。。。何でじゅうを守るための、じゅうがひつようですか。」
mushi... nande juu wo mamoru tame no, juu ga hitsuyou desu ka.
"Insect... Why are guns necessary to protect guns?"

Now, I was totally expecting some kind of simple question like "What's your favorite color?" or "Why did you start studying Japanese?" or "What's the answer to life, the universe, and everything?" but no, those would all make too much sense. Instead, he starts off with a charged political question that requires difficult words to talk about at all, much less try to justify.

Here's what he was trying to ask: "Why are guns necessary? Further, if they necessary to protect individual freedom, why is that?"
Or rather, that's what we figured out he was trying to ask, after five minutes of him telling us and the native-born, highly educated teacher, that juu means "freedom" and that we were all simply wrong. Between the second-language barrier and the Yabari barrier, you saw what it came out as.

I'd like to point out that I caught a lot of flak for being one of his strongest supporters in the school, so my opinion here is likely biased in his favor more than you will find from other people. He was pretty nice in general, but he was really frustrating in class. His nicknames from other people in the class include, but are not limited to Yabai-san ("Mr. Awful", chosen for its phonetic closeness to his real name) and "The mushi guy", a reference to his common mispronunciation of the two-syllable word moshi.

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?

Slow Week

Sorry for the lack of updates. Last week was a killer for reasons unknown, and this week is our last week of the first semester. I have, I think, four papers to write between now and Friday. It's Monday evening when I'm posting this. Oh, and Thursday is pretty much all out because there's a festival we're required to go to.

Anyway, it's slow, but I'll try and get something up between now and the festival.

Just Another Day in the Japan

Nothing particularly interesting for you guys today. Might have some adventuring going on later, though I'm not making any promises.

Search

I made a Google Custom Search Engine for the site, because I want search, but I don't like Google's Blogger bar. I'll poke at it eventually and make it blend in, but for now it's that ugly bright-white box on the right.

Placeholders

The last two posts were placeholder posts I put up because I wrote them at 2AM and 4AM. Their purpose was to remind me that I need to write about stuff. I had meant to do that yesterday, but... I left the apartment at 9AM and didn't get back until 2AM.
So I'm going to write a little about what happened on Friday and Saturday now. Though it would've been better to do it while it was still fresh in my mind, writing when your eyes won't stay open is not a technique I use to write anything decent.

Weekend

I'll try and get something up tomorrow. It's not yet 2AM yet, but I only got four hours of sleep yesterday, and I went about 20km today. I'm not promising that number, but I'll try and check it tomorrow.

Novel Backup Strategy

I'm having some problems with my external hard drive mess, unsurprisingly. I'm going to do some various things to troubleshoot it, but I'm not particularly hopeful.

I was poking at it when I realized that I've accidentally been performing a kind of backup simply by making regular blog posts. Everything on that drive is either somewhere else as well, or not particularly worth keeping.
All the pictures I've taken are backed up in the States on magnetic and optical media, and the stuff I've taken since coming to Japan, well... I have a lot of random snapshots, but most of the good pictures are up on this blog, which will be completely unaffected if my external hard drive bites it.

Convenient, isn't it?

Post Taglets

This should come as no surprise to any of you, but the label that has been used the most is "pictures", with 31 posts. Out of 132. Here are some statistics:
31 - pictures (posts that actually contain pictures)
22 - food (posts where I talk about food at some point)
21 - meta (posts that relate to the blog itself, such as this one)
14 - adventuring (getting lost or wondering around on purpose)
8 - money, shopping, and thecakeisalie

And the rest are between 1 and 7.

Archives

I just found what was wrong with the archives: I had set the archive URL for Blogger to upload the pages to, but you apparently have to set where the links to the archive pages will point separately from that. Why, I don't know.

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.

Heian Jingu, kind of

I felt bad for not posting anything today, despite having 200 pictures in my backlog of stuff to sort through.
Anyway, here's probably my favorite picture of the trip.

Ah, Engrish.

Tests

I wanted to post about our trip to Heian Jingu, but I kind of have two big tests today and I've only studied about an hour in total. Beth should be getting something up, too, since she doesn't have club stuff tonight. Or tests.

Classesssss

Some of you have asked why it is that I almost never talk about classes here.
Part of it is that what we're studying really doesn't make any sense unless you can read Japanese and have a fairly thorough background in Japanese grammar. I'm not out to give grammar lessons - though that's not to say I won't ever post language-related stuff. I intend to, but not until I find something truly useful that I understand well enough to talk about at length.

So I could talk about what I'm learning in classes, but it would look something like this:
Today, we learned about some of the various uses of ということだ and わけにはいかない. ということだ is similar in meaning to だそうです, except it also serves double-duty functioning as a more distant-sounding つまり.

Anyway who can understand that will already know what I'm talking about, or will have had to look up every word, and then make the connections from there. Probably with some sort of paper in there somewhere.

In any case, that would just be boring.

So that aside, I can just say something like:
Classes are going like they usually do, which is to say that they are usually boring with interesting bits scattered around about once a day.

Which would also get old quick. So if you ever feel like asking me how classes are going, you can feel free to point yourself to that. There's a 99% chance that's how classes are going.

Oh, and here's some Dilbert. The post needed a picture.

Osaka with Yasuko

Last Saturday, I went to Osaka and was shown around my Yasuko, the daughter of a teacher from about a year and a half ago. Here's her posing with some たこ焼き (... it's pronounced takoyaki...). Trying to describe takoyaki is... well...
Basically, they're little balls of fried dough with bits of octopus inside. I had some more today, actually, on the way to judo club.

It ended up being a day full of coincidences, but basically we just wandered around Osaka for five hours. We visited the Umeda Sky Building, which was ... Disappointingly unfrightening, but sufficiently high that I got a good pano. I still need to stitch it together, though.

They had a couple of gift shops, and I almost bought these for Josh. It is, in fact, pudding cups. They're called おっぱいプリン, literally, "breast pudding". The text on the right reads "A sweet desert!" and the text on the left reads something like... "If you want to lick, it's okay to lick!" but in some sort of cutesy fashion, I guess. They're caramel flavored, I think.
I also ate some cake and discovered this Engrish, seen at left.

At this point, we ditched her friend and wandered around Osaka for a while in search of cheap radios. I found a couple of shops that sold them, but they were all really expensive. I asked one of the shop owners where the cheap radios were and pointed at the one I was standing in front of that was only $120 without an antenna and for a single unit. What's more, they only interoperate reliably with other radios of the same model. That's totally... cool, I guess?
Also, I intend to go to at least one maid cafe, just so I can have gone to one. We didn't have time, though, so not today. We did find a couple to check out later, though.

At left are Yasuko, Yoko, and Toru Kodama, who totally bought me dinner at a really nice place. Nice as in, it had courses. Nice as in, they had delicious, properly-cooked steak. I don't want to know how much my part of that dinner was, by itself.

On the way back, I ended up talking to a cute-ish girl on the way back to Kyoto. As it turned out, she had just gotten off work and was about to go get dinner, so we went and ate at a bar. I totally misread her and thought she was going to try and get me to pay for her to drink, but she ended up paying for my food and the weird juice stuff I had, so I felt bad for thinking she was up to something, but we met up with some of my other friends and everybody had a good time, I think. At left is her posing with a gay Japanese man and some guy from my apartment building. I don't know either of their names.

The pano just finished pano'ing, here it is, in the most friendly format possible. I left it all weird-looking because I think it looks cool. That's five different pictures, believe it or not.
Warning: full size is 2.8MB and will take forever to load.

It's just about 11:30PM here now, and I am, as they say in Kansai dialect, meccha tired. That's pronounced "may-chuh", by the way.

Now for homework!

Why?

Well, I've annotated all the photos that I intended to upload, but the administrators here apparently feel that Picasa is a scourge upon the world (or something) and have felt the need to block access to it. Since my laptop's battery is already drained, I'll upload the gallery either tonight or tomorrow. I should have a few more pictures from later today by then, too.

Here are some pictures to hold you over.

I'm Not Dead Yet

Contrary to popular belief, I'm not quite dead. I am in fact, merely very tired. I just got back from a field trip and didn't have 'Net access. I can post from my cell phone, but I haven't actually set that up yet.

Anyway, I have 520 or so pictures to sort through and a presentation and a quiz tomorrow, so I can't write anything significant tonight.

Backpost

I got a post for Sunday up just now. I wanted the pictures to go with it, so I was waiting for picture upload to stop failing. I wish I could figure out what messes it up.

Picture Catchup, part I

So, while Blogger is working the way it's supposed to, I'm going to catch up on some of the pictures I've taken in the past... while.

I visited a "recycle shop" and bought some stuff. Apparently, someone bought something off this mannequin, as it is now rather topless. Oh, to be that pert, no?


I also happened to see this Hello Kitty toilet paper. I was thinking You know, I don't think I have any toilet paper in the apartment except the roll that's on there. Maybe I should buy it... but I ended up not buying it. I was very tempted by the value pack, though. Somehow, I managed to blur this second picture, but only what I was actually trying to take a picture of. Everything else is decently sharp. Go figure.

So I did end up going into the store, however, and wandered around for a while. Besides disturbing quantities of pre-chopped musherooms, I also found this spam display, and felt it was picture-worthy. In case there was any question before of Spam's strangehold on the world's food supply, here's the proof.

Picture Upload

I don't know what's going on, but picture upload is completely failing. You wouldn't think that it would be that hard. But apparently, it is.

Keen-kah-koo-jee

We'll be going to 金閣寺 (gold cabinet temple, go figure) today, so there should be some good pictures tomorrow unless something happens.

Wait for it...

I did some wandering with my camera yesterday, and I've got a couple decent pictures. I'm about to start uploading and annotating them, so... check back in about half an hour?

At The School

So I'm at the school and I just uploaded the picture of the not-okonomiyaki that I made a few days back. The school's connection... the picture upload was like poof and it was done. I've gotten used to people's random connections, where uploading 200k takes a few seconds.

"The Usual"

Sorry about the lack of updates! It’s not the usual laziness that leads to this kind of thing, at least. Really, it’s not!

I tried to get online Tuesday morning and post stuff up here, but my laptop said “… ? FU.” And wouldn’t connect to any wireless networks. I tried again yesterday, but got distracted sorting through three days worth of spam. I don’t quite have the heart to mark email from Facebook apps as spam, though I think I will when I get online to post this.

Anyway, that’s what’s going on.

I have a test that I ought to be studying for right now, so that’s it for now.

50 posts! And other stuff

We ran Jynxed Productions for about two years and I think we never hit 50 posts. This is the 50th post in this blog, so three cheers and whatnot, you know?

[Insert smooth transition here]

So I laid out what I think is my schedule this morning in an Excel (coughKMDcough) spreadsheet, but I'm not entirely certain. I'm going to run by the International Office a little later and see if they have a copy of my official schedule that I can check this one against.

[Insert another smooth transition here]

As it turns out, it would seem that I should've been studying for a cumulative test this morning, instead. I think I did okay, but I've learned not to be optimistic with Japanese tests. A 75% here is a B, though, which is kind of cool. Bonus cool if they report it as a 3.0 like it should be.

[Insert crunchy, peanut-butter-like transition here]

I invited Bethany to add to this if she has anything interesting happen, so there should be something from her forthcoming, though as to when, I know not.

My Trick

In case anybody hasn't picked up on it, I'm writing the posts at home in Word, then coming to somewhere with a 'Net connection and posting them with the time I wrote them. Posting only takes a couple of minutes, while a good-sized blog post takes from a half hour to three hours to actually compose. For this post, I'm in a ramen shop, having ピリカラぎょうざ(~"spicy meat dumplings") and some plain white rice.

In a way, I'm paying for a 'Net connection. And food. That helps to take some of the ouch out of the $5 lunch I just ate.

It's a Sweatdrop

It was during the prep work for today’s blog post that I realized my laptop is not a multimedia workhorse. It’s great for browsing the ‘Net, checking email, writing reports, and other fairly business-y things, but Lightroom and Photoshop both bring it completely to its knees. The panorama of the bike racks took it almost five minutes to perform. Granted, it was a 300MB file when all was said and done, but still.

Exporting today’s photo set from Lightroom (which consists of resizing and recompressing a set of photos I’ve already picked out) took it about three minutes. This doesn’t sound like much, but then you realize that that’s for 16 pictures. Oh, 17 with the addition of this picture at the right. [Edit: And now I’m at 18 because of the lunchbox picture.]

Now, I’m not complaining. In fact, given that thing’s got a 1.3Ghz Celeron M, I’m surprised it boots, and these figures are not that much slower than my 3500+ desktop machine doing similar work, which means the bottleneck could be at the memory or scratch file…

What’s this blog about?

Oh, right.

Instead... Bi-eek.

I've spent today's blog time going through the comments for some of the other posts and replying to them. Sorry to take so long!
That said, I still have a little feeling in my butt...

I mentioned I wanted to get a bike and had been looking at a green one ($168). I didn't end up buying that one and ended up getting el cheapo discount used bike ($60) instead. Since almost all of you are American, you'll know the same thing I do: it's secretly a girl's bike. They don't make men's bikes here, though. Still, the bike I got is pretty... bleh. It's kind of a dark grey (+), has one gear (-), a light (+) that is aimed sideways (-) and is dim (-), a springy seat (+) but no shocks (-), a basket (+), a back-mounted rack-thing (+), water-guard things (+) that refuse to call fenders (++), and a pretty cool lock (+). There's a lot of rounding error on those, so don't bother counting 'em out. Also, the brakes blow. They are both loud and fail at braking. Never get a bike with a drum brake. Most useless POS ever.

Oh, I went back to the shrine with Bethany and Sara. It was nice to be able to take pictures with both hands this time. No jokes, please.

Blogging in the Rain

My laptop doesn't like being rained on and I'm losing the dexterity in my fingers, so that last blog post was a bit hurried. If I remember, I'll go back and pretty it up a bit.

Blogspotted

I've got the whole thing in Blogger now, and it's all mostly the way it was before. You should see some changes, but I think the biggest improvement is that you can leave comments now.
I can't get the formatting right. If I change it so that borders look right in IE, they stack in Fx. Blargh.