Soon homeless? :p

Just one week of company-paid hotel left, and the next place to stay in is still not clearly known. What happened this week? Hmm.

- Monday: Initial day at work.

- Tuesday: Day off (spring equinox day), spent mostly wondering about apartment, and
went to have a nice walk in Mogusaen park watching plum blossoms (not quite at full bloom yet). After that, wandered around town.

- Wed-Fri: Work. Not much to tell. One fairly nasty TV program though, quiz where contestant needed to guess answers to quiz when running on a mat, with constantly faster and faster speed, and if too slow -> drop to pool, and _3_ slow-motion replays of the same 'noooo.. splash!'. I watched it about 15min, all contestants wound up in the pool. :p

- Sat: Amusing TV program in the morning: 4 'idiotic' Finnish sports, only one of which did not exist, and contestants needed to figure out which one it was. Much to my surprise they DID guess it correctly. Anyway, spent Saturday looking through the apartment alternatives, both locally (speaking in japanese with a local agent) as well as on the internet (various sites) as well as bit remotely (went to see foreigner-oriented rental agency in shin-nakano). Still no luck, although visited interesting-looking new building with fairly high rent.

- Sun: In the morning went again to local agent, and found out that the 'cheap' apartment in the new building was taken, but some more expensive ones (=higher up the highrise building) were still available. I said 'ok, lets do this.' After that, I spent afternoon in Tokyo Anime Fair, which was incredibly fun (and tiring). The rental agent attempted to contact me 3 times, I called her only once and resolved (more or less) that issue. Still, the last call I left unanswered as it _is_ my day off after all. I hope I still have the apartment available tomorrow..

Oh well. Time to head to hotel, some evening snack and then off to bed :)

Return to Japan

To put it briefly, after returning home I had wonderful summer vacation and then I spent the autumn and winter studying at Helsinki School of Economics (www.hse.fi). I never did manage to make a collection of the 'best' photos of 2005 Japan trip, but oh well.

Last Saturday, I boarded plane again to Tokyo. This time, I was to be employed (for a first time) by a japanese company (or well, subsidiary of an american company at any rate). I had quite mixed feelings about this as well as many other things, but things turned out well for most part.

On Sunday, I was EXTREMELY tired due to not having slept on the plane, and very little the night before. I wandered around like zombie dragging 27kg suitcase as well as two backpacks (probably 10kg each). Luckily, Narita Express went directly to Shinjuku station, so I needed just to walk about kilometer dragging the luggage up and down stairs against VERY strong wind. Sometimes, using a taxi might be good idea. Anyway, after that, I got to hotel and noticed, much to my dismay, that I had forgotten ALL work-related documents to Finland! I did not even have any idea where to report for work the next day! All I had were the work visa related things, which were in hindsight the important ones.

After FURIOUS two hours of digging around the two external hard drives, I found encrypted backup of my home system (good, I thought), very old set of PGP encryption keys (not so good as it turned out, they were not correct), and finally the correct GPG encryption keys I had used. So my laptop spent next two hours decrypting few gigabytes of data to encrypted partition on one of my external drives. Much to my relief, there was an e-mail which contained map and location where to go Monday among the backup files.

Then.. another not so good idea; I slept two hours. This in and of itself does not sound like great deal, but unfortunately it turned out to be. I spent the evening strolling around Shibuya, going for my traditional 'eat something and go for ice-cream' evening program that I do about every time I arrive to Tokyo.

I got to bed maybe 11pm, and woke up.. 4am. Not good. Slightly tired, but still could not sleep. After that, I spent few hours playing with various gizmos, and then watching television. Around 7am, I decided to clean up and start to prepare to head for some sort of breakfast. It turns out that I had also forgotten my shaver back home, so I needed to use disposable razor provided by the hotel.

BAD IDEA! While technically I can use one, I had few small cuts on my face before too long, and one fairly nasty one in my lip that bled for over half an hour before finally stopping. I had by then already researched from the dictionary all the relevant terminology to explain to the front desk of the hotel in case I needed to go to see a doctor about it. Luckily, it was not neccessary.

9am I reported for work, and had fairly eventful workday (starting with apologizing for missing documents, and in the end of the day in possession of everything that I needed - my own cubicle, IBM T42P laptop, Eizo external monitor, and .. drumroll.. Sony Ericsson phone! The last part was bit of a letdown, as it turned out NOT to be one of the most technically advanced ones available in Japan. Oh well, guess I will deal. The laptop is quite nice, I guess it has 17" screen, 2GB of RAM and 80GB? of HD. I spent maybe one hour doing overtime, and then headed home. As Tuesday is national holiday in Japan (spring equinox day), the office was mostly empty as people were taking the day off to get more vacation time.

In recurring way, I was very tired in the early evening when I got to my hotel (7pm) and I slept maybe four hors (until 11pm). After that, I woke up and .. could not sleep. No matter what I did. So I watched TV quite a bit, and then went for a stroll around night-time Shinjuku between 1am and 2am (measuring the walking distances to workplace from different subway and train stations while at it), and then went home, and after shopping some food tried to get some sleep. No luck. After 5am? I started playing with the i-Mode on my new phone, and damn it is nowadays very different from the beast I knew in 2000 when I last time worked in Japan. Color, fast, and very, very much information. The amount of English sites on the i-Mode is not particularly great (maybe hundred?), but the Japanese side contains almost EVERYTHING one could ever need.

During my quick browse through the available stuff, I found
- phone charge program (not special idea in and of itself, but it produces graphs about the amount of money used, and automatically gets billing data from company.. very nice)
- animate site, which contains (among other things) the list of Anime being currently shown on TV, organized both by show name and showing time (I think I will use this site A LOT!)
- funny graphical weather forecasts (strange-looking bear-cat hybrid blowing clouds at sun today, with 14.7 degree temperature estimate, 0mm of water and 2m/s wind estimated for west Shinjuku where I am currently)

I think i-Mode is still quite fun, unlike the services offered by the operators back home; at home, the 2G network was slow, and the available services totally useless compared to the stuff I find here.

I guess I am off now, having actually had IM conversation with my boss (on my day off, at the office), and having completed quite a number of tasks I needed to do. The rest of the day is 'fun', tomorrow I guess I will contact one apartment company I found intriguing.