Finland - the return/visit

After spending quality time of roughly 22 hours (home at Shinjuku - train to Narita - plane to Wien - plane to Helsinki), I almost got the final grace by the Finnish customs. Luckily, they asked first where I was from and I wasn't suspected visitor from Amsterdam (plane from there had landed at same time), they waved me off.. *phew* Luckily they were apparently only after drugs I guess, and Vienna (and especially Japan?) doesn't feature high on the list.

In home, I for the first time notice how much more quiet / environment controlled the Finnish housing is; I can hear my Macbook's hard drive for the first time! And almost nowhere does it feel too hot or cold.. bliss. None of that 'insulation is for wimps, get your ass next to air conditioner!' here. Of course, toilet seat, as well as the floor of the bathroom, was cold as hell; seat because I wasn't in Japan, and floor because the heating hadn't been turned on yet.

Japan clearly has some upsides, but also clearly some downsides. I keep wondering why I am still interested..

A day of shopping and nerding away..

For once, not a single sports-oriented event planned for the whole weekend. Saturday's forecast was lousy, and the flu continues, so I need to do assorted Christmas-related shopping excursions on Saturday and find something interesting to do on Sunday - most likely, it revolves around playing too much Go and too little else.

Recently I haven't done much else than play Go on my days off, which is unfortunate. While in Japan, studying the language might be sensible way to go, but unfortunately I think I have learned already as much as I can reasonably expect to learn without significant effort, and these days me + effort = no go.. Or so does it seem.

Computer stuff is also wellspring of trouble; finally, the Mac is stable - I guess either Parallels or fancontrol daemon was unstable, and I wound up using fancontrol daemon in the first place due to bugs in the Kotoeri (Japanese input method).. oh well. Haven't found a reason for Parallels, as it does not support USB2 and therefore I cannot use my TV tuner with it, but perhaps I will make a local BootCamp-based installation for TV watching, one of these days. Unfortunately, with the Mac stabilizing, Zaurus did the reverse - the new installation's kanji key did not work, so I needed to do multiple reinstalls and it still did not work.. stupid Cacko ROM (http://cacko.biz). Guess I will have to switch to original Sharp ROM, but for that I need working SD card reader (mine gave up the ghost suddenly sometime last month)..

So shopping today:
- getting ticket to Finland
- SD card reader
- christmas gifts to various people
- something to read (I have been reading manga called "Death Note" recently, maybe more of that..)

And of course, my usual Metropolis magazine, which while free, is inconvenient to get on Fridays so guess I will grab it during the grand shopping tour. It remains to be seen if I ever go to any events mentioned there anymore though, because the last time I went somewhere was in mid-September or something. It seems most of my activities are nowadays daily ritual.

..

It turns out that the ticket was to be picked up at the airport, so my trip to Shibuya was a waste except for a book and Metropolis I picked up there. Then, I spent few hours shopping in Akihabara for assorted geeky christmas gifts. Pending shopping: kid stuff for people of young persuasion (hi, Ken). I also accidentally bought a new Mac-compatible TV tuner and SD card reader from Akihabara, and I HOPE they will work without issues once I get home. Otherwise life will be somewhat painful (that is, I need to buy either more SD or CF cards of small size to get my Zaurus re-installed, sigh)..

..

I spent 17-23 nerding away, getting my TV setup back working (The EyeTV2 software for Mac was considerable improvement from the shit MagicTV for Windows), and Zaurus back up and running. It seems that my IT issues are finally(?) solved; things mostly work like they should now (with the exception of the Mac forgetting some settings when it is rebooted suddenly, but I guess I cannot blame it entirely for that..)

Finally initial picture sorting done..

More pictures available.. by the ton! About 790 pictures dumped to my picture album, as I was too lazy to sort out good from the bad. Featured trips:

- October North Carolina (3 days)

- October New York week

- November San Diego

- November hiking at Mitake and Takao

Disclaimer: Some of them definitely need some postprocessing, but just categorizing/deleting really bad ones/filtering inappropriate ones took enough work so that I will work on the postprocessing angle for a bit, and get back to it. Here's my favourite so far, though..