No pain no gain

Again back from the US of A. For once my terrorist grading has gone down, I wasn't picked for the 'random' security screening (*whee*). Returned to Japan on Saturday, went bicycling/play Go on Sunday, and hiking on Monday. Took bunch of pictures (check my picture album for details if you care, two random favourites here):

Last Thursday, went to Scissor Sisters' concert (one of those "hum.. what do I. random choice. ok, here!"). The music was better than I expected, although the live concert's audio mechanics were rather droll compared to your average CDs - the vocals are difficult to hear and some instruments dominate too much. I found their CD after the concert from the internet and then was like "oh.. so that's what those songs were all about.". Fairly unremarkable concert, went too early there, ate as-much-as-you-can-eat shabu shabu afterwards.

Went also bouldering twice last week (Wednesday and Friday), and doing it alone is definitely tricky. Usually when doing it with friends it is easy to remember to keep pauses, but when alone you mostly get the feeling of "I'm in bad condition" due to lack of pauses unless you remind to keep them. On Saturday, didn't do anything except book skiing trip to Gala Yuzawa for Sunday (bullet train ride from Tokyo station, about 2 hours from home door to the skiing slopes). Unfortunately, the wind wasn't co-operating and due to strong wind gondola lifts at Gala were not operational so I got to some other resort instead (NAPSA). It wasn't as fun, supposedly, and considerably smaller..

Despite not having gone downhill skiing for over year, still did mostly recently - did expert-grade course 3 times and fell all over the place (with DSLR in my pocket to boot). The intermediate-level courses weren't challenging at all though, so I guess I'm somewhere in the middle I guess. Returning, I committed major faux pas at a local bus when I was returning from dinner to home; in Tokyo buses there's separate money exchange slot and "exact fee" slot where you pay the driver, and of course I put too much money to the wrong one.. after that, I got 200 yen back from the next customer's payment (apparently driver could not access the contents of the moneybox), and finally didn't get last 100 yen because when I was leaving, the driver offered me the rest in 10 en coins and I was said that I didn't really need them. After that I laughed my way home, as this wasn't first time I had amusing experience on a bus recently - when going hiking two weeks ago, I changed money in the money change slot and assumed that the fee had been deducted from the remaining money, but apparently not, so the driver wasn't happy when I tried to leave without paying ;-)

Monday, hated the idea of going to the US so much that I had great difficulty actually packing, so I think I did lots of irrelevant stuff with my toys and finished the packing effort like 3 am. Tuesday (today) found out that going to US is even more painful nowadays than it used to be.

Airport quality experience:
- Go to United Airlines counter - after some queueing, some nice lady handles checkin and only result is "go to ANA counter" (damned codesharing)
- At ANA counter, there was insanely slowly moving queue for the people going to the US; I understood the reason when I got to the counter, as either I had completely clueless clerk or regulations are somewhat strange these days. She first wanted to see all my documents (e-ticket, passport, mileage card) which is mostly normal. Then she asked about my visa which isn't, and then she returned the passport to me and fiddled with computer many minutes. During that I filled in the assorted imigration/customs forms needed for leaving Japan / entering US, and she muttered something about passport online check or something. Then she wanted my passport AGAIN and after minute or two of deliberation I actually got it and boarding pass(!). I think this took almost 10 minutes or something..
- Of course, there was normal security screening where they wanted me to get my laptop out of the bag (normal, but tedious)
- Then there was 'special' America-only section of the airport (few gates) where everyone got ALL of their hand luggage hand-searched; I was seriously tempted to answer "no" when the lady asked me if it was ok for her to go through my bag.
- And THEN another tedious new thing; apparently, the US of A wants MORE than one paper about where people are staying; in addition to normal visa waiver paper, they wanted some blue sheet which supposedly airline will provide to the US govt about where the customer in question is staying.

I'm starting to consider NOT going to the united states of dystopia any longer, as this is starting to get ridiculous.. Of course, it remains to be seen how long I will work in my current job, or in Japan, or both; my new work project's considerably more boring than my old one, my old boss that I liked is being replaced in two months, and additionally even our office's possibly moving further off (to Roppongi, ugh.)

.. later.. .. on the positive note, immigration guy in SFO was (for a change) nice guy and didn't cause trouble.

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..

Attacking my picture collection finally. About 700 pictures to sort, but the pictures from North Carolina+New York, and San Diego trips should be coming up sometime this week (if I have the time). Happened since last update:

My Linux mania lasted all of 3 weeks. I survived the IETF trip to San Diego with it, but that is the most I can say about the time - in general, although I normally use only my picture management application and few other select applications, my favourite, that is, movie playing did not quite work with Linux and it was a deal-killer. Therefore I went ahead and bought a new laptop ( MacBook ). After that, spent last week and half getting it up and running, porting the software I ran on Linux and Windows before that to it and so forth. Now it's working fairly well though.

Last week forgot my Sharp Zaurus to some train, so had to buy new one last Sunday.. I really don't like how much money I've spent this month, but oh well. (Bought also plane ticket finally to Finland yesterday.)

Anyway, significant chunk of pictures coming up in few days, hopefully. Scary to think that I have only bit over 2 weeks in Japan ntil my vacation in the cold, cold Finland..

Maybe quiet for awhile..?

I have had series of not-so-happy events during the last 24 hours: to start off, I had pleasant 14.5 hour flight from NYC to Narita, starting with a security check (.. surprise ..). The flight ended relatively happily (half-full plane, so I had 2 seats to myself, luxury!), although I forgot my pen somewhere on the airplane. Similarly, I forgot my pen case AND pens on the flight from Narita to Chicago bit over week ago, so I guess it is a trend.. I hate the idea of shopping for replacements, sigh.

That was not a big hurdle though, and I got off the airport (relatively) happy. Of course, I missed the train home by 3 minutes and needed to wait another half an hour. Then, I got home and learned that our most recent hunting dog (Tupu) had died (driven over by a car) during the week. I wasn't too happy after that.

Then, I went to bed too early (7pm), and woke up 1am and could not sleep. Again, not a huge obstacle. Then the fun began.. I started playing with my laptop, trying to backup files from the trip, and suddenly all sorts of strange error messages started showing up. Not deterred, I played with it few more hours, but in the end even the adminstrator's profile got corrupted and I got depressed and decided to debug things later on after trying to copy what I could to safe place in safe mode.

On further examination, I guessed problem to be either memory or CPU - the machine booted randomly, or programs crashed, depending on phase of the moon or something. After fiddling with memory sticks, USB devices, and the CPU's thermal paste, I ran memtest86 - and lo and behold, the internal memory was partially broken. (few bits on 168mb (out of 256mb internal memory) point did not work correctly)

So to conclude, it seems that my pimped Panasonic R3 laptop is dying, sigh.. 3 months after the hard drive upgrade, to boot. I see only two real alternatives - move to a Linux-only environment at home (because Linux can be told that the few kb of memory are dead), or alternatively have the laptop repaired/replaced. I guess I will inquire Panasonic if they do memory chip replacements (somewhat unlikely, as it's somewhat tedious thing to do), and if not, I suppose I have a Linux-only laptop - and nasty decision whether to buy a new one for Windows use or not.

So, the NYC pictures will show up once I salvage them off my laptop's HD (one way or another), and until the time I get laptop up and running I don't think I will be reachable via Skype or MSN either. I'm safely in the land of the more free though, so all is well, relatively speaking - potential financial expense of replacing the laptop is not appealing.

(Although, the repairs of my camera were fairly cheap here, so maybe laptop repair is cheap too - we shall see.)