Month without writeup? Must be a record.

I was quite busy in the week leading up to the combined Montreal+San Jose trip, so hardly had time to write. Then I had two weeks there, and now have spent week back in Tokyo.

The amount of trauma going/leaving US nowadays involves is just incredible. It seems to be more fascist place than China of all things nowadays, with too "empowered" border guards keen to keep people in and out that have been ALREADY let to country 10+ times. Sigh. I had two quality discussions at immigration, and two "bonus" security checks after some attitude problems; it is lovely that EVERYONE at immigration is fingerprinted and photographed nowadays, feels more like entering a jail than "home of the free" (parentheses really needed these days).

Anyway. Montreal was fun, 500+ pictures taken in 8 days. San Jose was not, 2 pictures taken within 6 days (and few more at the airport just to annoy the security after they had given me the bonus security check).

Palais de Congress, the place of the meeting.

Downtown Montreal, from top of Mount Royal.

The end of the International Jazz Festival I got to enjoy two days.. Quite interesting event.

And then, I returned back to Tokyo. The first thing I did was my long-postponed laptop hard drive upgrade (40GB harddrive is so old-fashioned, and additionally warranty just ran out in May); therefore, excellent time for some hardware deassembly!

I landed in Japan on Saturday afternoon, and I spent the next day in Akihabara, shopping the needed parts. 160GB notebook-size HD, as well as 320GB desktop HD (for backups) later, I was home doing the installation. Or, hoping to do the installation. It turns out that backing 40GB of data took quite a while, and I actually fell asleep waiting for it to complete early in the evening.

So, jet-lagged, 2am, I woke up and started the project:

Laptop deassembly done - 20+ screws and assorted parts!

Much to my surprise, the deassembly+assembly went without a hitch, and around 4am Monday morning I started restoring my backup to the new, improved HD. And the system has worked ever since (*knock on the wood*) for all of 8 days..

Week passed without much to speak of, until the weekend. On Saturday, the Sumida river fireworks festival (the largest amount of explosives on numerical terms) in Tokyo was held. I went on-site over 3 hours earlier, and didn't even manage to get a good place to set up my tripod.. sigh. Anyway, after waiting 3 hours, enjoyed 70 minutes of fireworks and about 1.5 hours of getting out (LOTS of people).

Random picture of the fireworks.

On Sunday I went to some meet-the-people event, and actually won some free movie tickets.. The irony, considering I haven't yet even bothered to go to a movie in Japan.

To rectify this, I actually went today to see one movie; however, as it was based on one of my favourite book series, it didn't have much of a chance; I was slightly disappointed, but as far as tales go, the Earthsea movie was ok. It did not follow plot of the books at all though (mix of book 3, 4, and "new stuff" in random order).