New Sack

I'm not certain what spurred it, exactly, but my dad sent me some cash to by a new backpack. "What's wrong with your normal backpack?" you might ask. The answer is "Nothing... in Ellensburg." My black and grey Pacific Crest backpack has served me well for quite a while and I intend to continue using it to transport my laptop and whatnot.

The primary problem lies in the foam padding on the side of the bag that rests against my back. Because it's a very soft, comfy foam, it conforms to fit my back just right. While fine and dandy in many circumstances, that's less than ideal when 100% humidity is considered to be fairly low. (That's only mostly a joke.) The solution is to get a back that is somewhat separated from your body, utilizing either an external frame or a combination of hard foam pads and an internal frame.

After about six and a half hours spread over two days of looking at bags in a local hiking shop and having already checked prices elsewhere, I ended up picking the Deuter Navajo 35, which is a very simple bag, but it's got twin sets of compression straps, shoulder straps that are adjustable from both ends, pockets on both sides (something my black and grey bag doesn't have, for some unknown reason) that are both big enough to put a one-liter bottle of water in, and it's rated to hold 35L of loot. Now, those are just extra features that are really, really nice. What makes it simple is that it has one main compartment with two places to access it from, and a zipper that allows you to separate the bottom 1/3 of the bag from the rest. That's all. No weird little pockets or anything as yet, though I may look into strapping some on the side or on the daisy chain.

Left: Me, being round.

Right: See the hard foam strips?
They're magical.

Now, this bag uses a flexible internal frame with a layer of medium-soft foam on top of that, with two strips of fairly hard foam that keep the bag about 3/4 of an inch off of your back. When you combine that with the fact that you can distribute load and place the bag much more precisely, it makes this bag much easier to wear. I wore it to school today it was very comfortable.

In this picture of Kilik at right, the bag has two 1.5L bottles of water in the side pockets, two in the bottom pocket with a 1L as well. The main compartment has all of my school stuff in it. You might take notice of the fact that it looks nearly empty, despite having seven liters of water and a stack of books and papers about 6" thick in it.

The bag itself weighs something like 700 grams (1.5 pounds), I think, which puts it in the middle to light range.

Anyway, I like it.

Thanks, dad!

日本の物価

I just bought floss and laundry soap. A two-pound box cost me $2, while 40m of floss cost me $5. That seems strange to me, somehow. Maybe next time I'll just get some twine.

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...

Bike Brake Redux

I forgot to mention it, but it would appear the fix to my rear brake was only a temporary one. It still starts to drag, and if I go a long way without stopping to let the brake cool down, it squeaks pretty loud, in addition to the whole pedaling-through-molasses thing. All in all, not particularly pleasant.

In the end, I'm still looking for a new bike, but it's not really urgent, because this one still goes forward. My plan is just to keep my eyes and ears open for a good deal on something like what I'm looking for.

"GTFO, shopz0rz"

I was in the local grocery store near closing time and I heard Auld Lang Syme being played. I thought Gee, what an odd choice of music for a Japanese store. Wait, they don't usually play music, do they?
A few hours later, I went to Jusco at about 10:40. After a few minutes, I noticed that Auld Lang Syme was playing there, too. Then I finally made the connection and remembered reading somewhere oh-so-long ago that Japanese stores play Auld Lang Syne when they are about to close.

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!

Shopping

I picked up some really cool gloves. They're designed for taking pictures, and they're thin enough that I can type fairly accurately with them. I mean, you know the dimples on the the F and J keys? I can feel those through the index fingers on these gloves. On the right hand, it doesn't matter, though, as the index fingertip folds back and Velcros to the back of the glove so you can have you index finger exposed because it does so much. Same for the right thumb.

Keys

[Edit: I had this post all done and written the day it happened, but picture upload was once again being wenchy, so it's almost a week late.]

Meli got locked out of her room due to a fire alarm test that she (apparently?) forgot about. I guess she spent the night at her boyfriend's house, but when she came back to Paradole 2 in the morning, she found she was locked out of her apartment. Want to guess who is the only person silly enough to be awake in Paradole 2 at 8AM?

But I was taking a shower when she rang the doorbell, so I thought Uh, do I rush for the door and answer it wearing a towel, or ask them to wait? Maybe he/she already left... In the end, I opted for option towel, and answered the door wearing just my green towel tied around my waist.

Josh, hush.

Anyway, we ended up hanging out until around 9PM that day, and I got a couple of pictures you guys should like.

I went over to Tsutaya to drop off some movies I rented that had to be back in before the store opened at 10AM, and saw this... vehicle on the way.

I went over to Tsutaya to drop off some movies I rented that had to be back in before the store opened at 10AM, and saw this... vehicle on the way.

How do you describe this thing? It's not a truck, but it's not really a van or a car. It's like... a trunkmobile? It sort of reminds me of an elephant, in a way.

Meli, however, does not, and here's a Mario statue we found that was as tall as her when she took off her shoes.

And with a nose that phallic, could she really resist the second pose?
I didn't think so either. My camera was at 100 ISO for these shots, so it was trying to expose indoor lighting and decided to give me crappy shutter speed. They're a touch blurry, but if you wanted to professional photos, you'd be reading a different blog.
She looks pretty decent for having been up all night and not having showered in two days, I think.
I'm a bit tired, but here's a mochi shop we found. I hear there's a very good okonomiyaki shop right above this place, but I didn't know at the time, so we ate a barely mediocre burger place. They were confused by the idea of not putting mayonnaise on a burger.

Shopping Trip

I finally had time this morning to do some shopping that I've been meaning to do. I was able to pick up a couple things for my Americans (I really wanted to say that), but I was also able to track down a (unfortunately) small bottle of hydrogen peroxide. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to find something like that. The first two employees I asked didn't know what it was. The third showed me right where it was, but said it had a bunch of other stuff in it. So I asked a pharmacist and he basically pointed at the ingredients list and was like "Look. Peroxide. Water. That's all." It may sound derisive, but it was helpful.Also, I picked up some ninja Q-tips. I've got a pair of pictures of them; let's see if picture uploading likes me today.
[Edit:It looks like it isn't liking me today.]
[Later edit: But it does now! Hopefully, the fixed whatever it was.]

Now, while the black Q-Tips are kind of interesting, this next bit is cooler and involves less earwax.
What's that grey mat look like to you? About a square yard in size, you say? Roughly the same size as a DDR pad? Give you two guesses at what I picked up for $6 as Jusco today. The first three don't count.

Anyway, a yard or so of duct tape later, I had this. It should be a big improvement over the bare floor, which is, I think, concrete laminated with some kind of imitation hardwood. Not conducive to responsive buttons, whatever it is. Due to the lack of squish, you have to have more accurate footwork on a hard floor. I'm hoping the quarter-inch of padding is thick enough to make a difference.

Adventure to the East

Obligatory picture of some 桜 (cherry blossoms) because I'm in Japan and they're blooming.

So I ventured out all by myself (to prove I’m a big boy now, I guess?) and found the sushi place I was looking for. Admittedly, I had to ask someone for directions, and I was a block away at the time, but the nice lady showed me the way there as it was on the way to where she was headed. That’s the second time someone’s done that for me here.

Once I was there, I stood outside until they opened, checking out their menu. I didn’t see anything that looked amazingly delicious, or even edible, so I just ordered something that didn’t look too bad. It was a good choice, apparently, as the only part of the meal I wasn’t fond of was the wasabi they had hidden in the sashimi. Oh yeah, I tried something with sashimi. It was a lot more edible than I expected it to be.

In addition to finding and eating at the aforementioned sushi shop, I managed to find the train station, which was a whole two blocks away. That didn’t stop me from crossing eight different intersections on the way, though.

The train fare was a pretty reasonable $1.50 to get there and the same price back, so I dug out a ￥100 and a ￥50 coin, and got a ticket from the ticket vending machine.

See, the way the fare works is pretty ingenious, I think. You pay fare X. It spits out a ticket that I think has data encoded on it magnetically. Then, when you go into the train station itself, you pass the ticket through this very aggressive feed mechanism, which then encodes where you started from on to the ticket. When you get off the train, you pass it through the same thing backwards and it eats your ticket.

My guess is that if you went farther than your fare allows, the nice man with the asp has choice words for you, along with a fee. I haven’t seen that as yet, though. I would’ve been completely lost if it weren’t for this guy about my age who helped me buy the ticket and showed me what to do with it. I had been relying on the fact that if I stood around for a while, I’d find someone approachable-looking to ask for help. As you can see, I did.

You might recall from my last post that I purchased a compass and thought it was kind of lame. If you don’t, that’s basically what I said, so don’t bother reading the other post. Eh.

Here's a picture of some hats. The cheapest was $98. Want to guess which one? I don't remember.

I found the place that the かんりんりん said would sell compasses, and it does indeed sell compasses. They had compasses for your pocket, your keychain, your backpack, your zipper. They had compasses integrated with barometers and loupes and all sorts of things, along with ones specifically for use with paper maps. It was pretty cool. The thing is, this was a very, very small part of their store. Maybe a ten square feet of hookboard. The rest of the shop was just as awesome. They had bags, ponchos, shoes, boots, boots for shoes, hats, waterproof hats, umbrellas, “bear bells”, loops, random little pouches, backpacks, slippers, keychains… It’s not a huge store, mind you. But it was very nicely laid out. It was underground, so it was a lot bigger than most stores in Japan. Probably a couple thousand square feet, so fairly average by US standards. Point is, the store is awesome. I think I have pictures.

I only had my 50mm with me – which is not a great indoor lens due to its rather telephoto nature – so I didn’t take a lot of pictures, but I did manage to find a compass, and grabbed a couple other things I’d been meaning to buy. Ended up spending almost $60, but I think it was worth it.

On the way there and on the way back, I managed to – completely by accident – run across the 花まつい(flower festival), a festival not listed in my book on Kyoto. I wonder if it was created in the last three years – I doubt it given Japan’s nature – or if they just missed it. In any case, there were a bunch of little munchkins

being cute, as munchkins are wont to do, some old guys and some cheerleaders that could’ve been anywhere from middle school to high school. I completely fail at guessing Japanese people’s ages. One of them glared at me, as you can see in the picture that I hope I will remember to attach when I post this.

A Lensatic Adventure? Guess not.

I went to the store today to buy for myself a compass. This seems kind of silly when you first hear it, but I’ve a pretty good reason.

So I woke up this morning at around six, like I usually do. So I take a shower, get dressed, and sit around, trying to find something to do. Well, I think to myself, I’ve got to go find food at some point. I could have rice again but maybe I should try someplace new. Hey, I’ve got $50 worth of guidebooks on that shelf over there… and proceeded to try and find my apartment in the books. The books don’t cover my area at all, and describe the area around it basically as “Uh, there’s not much to do here, but at least it’s linked to the other areas of Kyoto, so it’s easy to leave.” Ouch.

Unfortunately, the streets here always shoot off at odd angles to each other, so I’m constantly getting turned around. My thinking was that if I have a compass, I can at least know which general direction to go. You’d be surprised how hard that is to keep track of here. (Hint: that was my good reason)

So, what does it take to leave? It looks like it’s about five minutes by bike to the nearest train station, and a $1.50 fare should get me to Eastern Kyoto. From the station, it’s about half a kilometer to a store the かんりんりん (apartment caretaker) recommended I check out if I want to buy a decent compass instead of the one I picked up a little earlier, which even I recognize is pretty lame.

I had asked him where I could buy a decent compass as I was walking in the door, by the way.

In this same area, according to my books, is… a lot of stuff. I’m hoping to visit a shrine and find a compass today. Probably also need to eat lunch, ‘cause it’s almost 11AM and I have yet to eat breakfast.

Actually, there’s a sushi place near here…