Rice

I discovered last night that I eat rather more rice than the other people here.
My first week here, I bought a 10kg bag of rice, which lasted me the first two months.  I then bought a 5kg bag which, predictably, lasted me about a month. I'm now nearly done with a second 10kg bag of rice.  Fortunately, Bethany didn't manage to go through half of her 5kg bag she bought, and I have that as well.
Once I finish this bag, I will have cooked 55 pounds of dry rice in my rice cooker.

Hamid's Last Katsuragawa Party

We had another party up on Katsuragawa tonight, and we actually planned to have a fire from the beginner and were much more prepared. Bryden and I go there about 45 minutes before everybody else, so we explored a little and gathered up some firewood.
Once Hamid and everybody else got there, it got a lot more fun and we put some food on the fire to cook. We cooked up some sausages, but didn't have anything to put them on to put them in the fire, so I sharpened a piece of bamboo a little bit and used that.
Here's mostly everybody sitting around the fire at right. starting with the two people who are standing and working counterclockwise, we have Bryden, Soujong (crouching in green shirt), Robert, some guy, Hamid, Alessandra, Melinda, Martin (blue shirt), Rafael, and Aaron Poulliot.

I didn't start taking pictures until pretty late, but here you can see Sara trying to not get in the frame while I'm taking this picture and catching the flash at half power in the face from four feet away. Teach her to try and give me chocolate!
Tasty chocolate, by the way.

Apparently, Valeria will be singing in a band when she gets back to Italy. The obligatory stardom jokes were swapped, and you've got this, which is a pretty decent picture of the two of them. Actually, with my night vision gone due to looking at the LCD and whatnot, I had no idea they were posing. Last I could tell, they were facing the other direction. I imagine I looked pretty funny when I looked at this picture.

Not too long after this, people starting getting ready to go, and you can see them (very) slowly working their way towards that end here at right.

On the way back, I gave Melinda a ride back on the back of my bike. I didn't know she was there until about when we left, and I don't really have any good pictures of her face. Here's this, though, 'cause it's what I've got. Left <-- If you take a look at the picture at the right, you can see the waviness of a favorite of people's clothing caused by the temperature differentials in the air above the fire. When I first saw this, I was thinking my camera was being weird, but then I realized what it was.

I just spelled realized with two Ls and a W, so I'm going to bed. It's way past my... Zzz...

[Edit: This post is more coherent than I thought it would be, given that I was asleep when I wrote the last three paragraphs.]

Arashiyama

Hamid leaves fairly soon, and he's one of the few people I've hung out with much while I've been here. Once he leaves, my nearest friend will be about 5 minutes away. Bryen lives next door to me, but he's a popular person and we don't mesh as well. Hamid and I are nearly opposites - he owns a pair of jeans that cost him about $220 and considers this normal - but we've gotten along pretty decently, somehow.
Reminds me, last night the lesson "Don't try to argue with drunk people" was reinforced. Apparently I had forgotten.

Anyway, we're trying to get some people to go up to a swimming area and we're going to try and have a bit of an open barbecue kind of thhing. Should be tasty, if nothing else.

Sandy the Pink and the Teleswap

Sandy, a year-long study-abroad student from the semester before me, left on Tuesday around 5PM, following about three solid days of saying goodbye to various people. Sandy and I think we met once in line for a Super Smash Brothers Melee tournament at Sakura-con two years previously, but we have no proof either way.
Sandy has been organizing a large portion of the get-togethers, parties, and most things with more than one person this semester, and acted as a mutual friend for almost every study abroad student. Aaron Poulliot, of my Central Washington University, came up with the idea of putting together a scrapbook for him, to which I was invited to contribute. I don't know if he liked my page or not, but I had fun making it.

We agreed that his empty room wouldn't make good use of his 24"-ish TV, and that my 13" would suffice just fine, so I talked to my manager, who happily let me borrow one of the Paradole dollies and I wheeled my 13" over. This was the embarrassing part, since the dolly and the TV weighed no more than 20 pounds.
But on the way back, I was sure glad for that dolly. You can see my fairly new TV sitting on the bed in the picture at right, on the left.
That same day, the manager came and fixed my lights, one of which had begun to flicker. So naturally, he just replaced all of them. With the stuff that was going on, my room became a bit of a mess, as you can see. Most of the mess is at the far end and looks smaller in this picture do to distortion correction, but it looked pretty bad.

Blogger in Draft

I'm switching over to the new Blogger in Draft interface, so I have some new cool things at my disposal.
The most visible of these on your end is the comment form, which is now where it should be, instead of on a popup, which was just silly.
It also has a little cleaner, yet powerful, interface on my end, which is nice.  Go Google!
...
I am Google's wench.

Name Changes

I got an email from one of the readers and she wrote her name in katakana (the writing system used for foreign words and names) at the end - ロクサーン (rokusaan). But it's awfully long, don't you think? How many people do you know with five-syllable names? How many of those people address letters to friends with the whole name? Here's a list of all the five-syllable Western names I could find: Alexandria, Anastasia, Angelia, Evangelinam Philidephia

So, as I was saying.

The way I spell my name here is inaccurate to my English name, but that was done on purpose to facilitate pronunciation by other people. William is not easy for Japanese people to say, and comes out as ウィリアム (uiriamu), another five-syllable beast. Then I thought "I usually go by Will, so how about that?" and got ウィル (uiru). Japanese doesn't have the W sound that's at the beginning of my name, so I'm largely out of luck in making it any shorter if I want it to be recognizable. It's spelled as three syllables, but the I is written smaller, so it's slurred into the U noise to sort emulate a W. My name is effectively two syllables long.

With my last name, I completely gave up. Lockwood is nice and easy in English, yeah? Not nearly so in Japanese: ロックウード (rokku-uudo). Compare this to a normal Japanese name in length:

ウィリアム・ロックウード (Uiriamu ROKKU-UUDO)

たなかたろ (Taro TANAKA)

This post was originally an email to ロクサーン (without the romanized pronunciation guides), which went something like this, with some fluff at the beginning:

You might consider shortening your name, for example. I mean, your name has two syllables in English, but the way you write it in katakana, it has five. In addition, you get that whole ロクサーン/Ａさん (rokusaan/A-san thing, right? [san is a generic suffix for people in Japan, so having it as part of your name gets frustrating quickly]
You will also want to avoid any constructions with くそ in them, as that's a prefix that means "fucking". くそ暑い (kuso atsui) - Fucking hot

You might consider the following options:
ラックセン (rakkusen) - About the closest you can get to your real name with my pronunciation.
ラクセン (rakusen) - But this is the reading for 落選 (election loss, rejection)
ロクセン (rokusen) - You probably want to avoid the さん, though...
ロクス (rokusu)
ロックス (rokksu) - That 小さいつ is kind of annoying sometimes, though, and adds another syllable.
ロカン (rokan) - Sounds vaguely similar to 旅館 (ryokan, Japanese-style inn)
ロカ (roka) - Sounds close to 廊下 (rouka, corridor)

Any questions, class?

Cool!

For the first time in months, it's actually cool outside. It's probably about 69F, and boy does it feel good.

On the Roof

The manager actually let me borrow the key to the roof this time, and I went up all by myself! There was a cute girl keeping him company, and he was working through his lunch break handling her departure, if I read the situation right.
Anyway, went up on the roof to watch the lightning, but I missed the best part watching from my room and talking to the manager. Still, it was pretty cool. Gotta go drop off some ninja stuff to the next person in The Conspiracy, so I'm off.

Storm

This is actually the strongest storm we've had yet. It's got decent lightning, thunder, and the rain is coming down in pretty good quantity. My back door is about four feet back from the edge of my veranda and about six back from the nearest open sky.
The light/sound speed difference is ranging between one - make that a third of a second - and about ten seconds, with an average around three. That's 300 feet, half a mile, and two miles, respectively.
I imagine the close one hit Jusco, as the top is covered in lightning rods. I am... somewhat tempted to go over there... Don't worry, I won't. Camera gear is too sensitive to EM since I've got digital.

"Arashiyama" means "storm mountain"

Hamid and I were going to go to Arashiyama today, but he kind of fell asleep. I went over to see what was going on he said something along the lines of "I wish I could just sleep..." so I came back and I've been poking at the Internet for a while. I got some nice pictures yesterday, so I'll put some of those up.

[Edit: Looks like it'll have to wait. We've got a pretty decent thunderstorm going on right now, so I've got nearly all my electronics unplugged. All that's left is my wireless router, and that's only plugged in because someone else is using the connection as well. I Wi-Fi router I can replace for about $50, but the rest would get pretty pricey to replace.
Maybe I should follow Hamid's example and just take a nap?]

Donations!

I've added a PayPal "Donate" button to the footer, so if you have too much money and it's burning a hole in your pocket, send some my way and I'll be sure to put it to good use.
Good uses include, but are not limited to food, photography gear, food, computer stuff, food, and Kagome. Also, food.
[Edit: Apparently, you're not allowed to donate to yourself:
"You cannot email money to yourself. Please enter another user's email address if you would like to send money to someone." ]

Post-Processing

You might think that simply because you take pictures on a digital camera, the days of processing are all over. I was working on something for a friend and made this image to show the difference that two seconds' processing makes. It only takes that long 'cause I'm on a 1.6GHz machine. On a modern computer, it'll probably happen faster than you can see.

"Jeff"

There's a prof at 京都外国語大学 (my school) who has, as far as anybody can tell, entirely too much cash. Whether or not that's the case, I have no idea. Maybe he's just very frugal.
In any case, he invited all of the foreigners to his place for an end-of-semester party that was pretty cool. We had nice company, good food, and I think everybody had a good time.

House is huge, 180 tatami mats, if memory serves. And beautiful: old-style paper doors, some of which have sumi-e on them. It dates from the Edo period, I think he said.

Oh, and it has its own alley.

It's kind of designed for... Japanese people, so the stairs are a little dangerous if you're over 5'6", but he has a nice view of the river and Gion. We did the whole party out on his veranda that's on the Kamogawa river (the main river in Kyoto), where the wind kept us nicely cool. As it would turn out, they take down the outer veranda every year at the end of summer, then put it back up at the beginning. This somehow makes it slighlty less illegal, I guess. In any case, it's the norm for the houses along the river, if I got what he said right.

As an added bonus, there was another party going on next door, and we got to see some maiko (apprentice geisha), which was pretty cool. They even posed for me! It's hard to get them to let you take their picture, but as you can see, three posed in this one! And they look kind of cute, even, which rare among geisha.
The teacher managed to accidentally make some new contacts, and by "some new contacts", I mean three Japanese men who all looked pretty well-to-do themselves. This happening was what confirmed my suspicions: diplomacy.

That's his secret, as far as I can tell. He's probably the most diplomatic person I have ever met. When people talk to him, they always walk away smiling or laughing, and he does a very good job of playing up his foreign-ness when it will help, and downplaying it at other times. It's... impressive, to say the least.

As a note, I toted a Japanese girl for a picture, but someone else took it, so I don't have the shot.
Here's an example of how to completely miss your focus, though.

Also, I got my first shot of a Japanese policeman. Normally, they get flustered and run away when I try to take a picture, but this guy was really excited. I took a couple, but his vest combined with me using onboard flash kind of completely blew out, as you can see.
Notice the glow on his vest?

Mosquitos

The mosquitos are bad enough right now that I got two or three (not sure at this point) new bites while being outside for about five minutes to hang up my newly-washed laundry and bring in the dry stuff.
Buggers.

Another Proof

I just wrote this this morning, and I didn't proofread it at all, but here's a presentation stuffed into a paper.
The thing is, I accidentally convinced the teacher that we shouldn't give presentations, and she said we could just turn in a paper on the subject. Here's mine (Japanese, PDF), though I think it might be too late to be graded, I sent it to her a little bit ago.

Gion Matsuri Pictures - Finally!

The Gallery

I finally got some time last night - well, this morning - and finished sorting through the bulk of the Gion festival pictures. This morning (after some sleep) I went through and captioned them, did some final processing, and now they're up in the gallery. Maybe not the best selection if you just care about the festival, but I was excited by the festival as I was by all the gear people were using.

Most of the pictures make sense, but these two require a little explanation. These bizarre things at left are used to make sure the float stays floating forward. It allows a guy on each side to turn the float ever so slightly so that the float doesn't end up driving off into a building or something. I originally thought that it was so the wheels wouldn't fall off or something, but it's nothing quite so stupid.

These girls were part of the three kids' floats that I swear were chasing Aaron and I around. At first, we got a little lost, heard drums, and decided to see what was going on. So we saw them, got some pictures, and left.
Then, we got where we were trying to go, and right as we were about to go into the store, we heard them come around the corner.
When we came out of that store, they were back. Going into another store, they were still stomping around.
We come out of that store half an hour later and they come around the corner again. Creepy stalker munchkins.

Anyway, the festival was decently fun, and I got some mango ice cream.
In other news, the point of the festival is to protect the citizens of Kyoto from some disease that was rather endemic at the time. Some of the floats have spear-shaped things on top, and this is theoretically to kill the evil spirits, I think. We got all the history and stuff about a week ago, and I was really only interested in taking pictures. I need not worry, though, as I think 80% of the population of Kyoto was taking pictures.
Anyway, the festival itself is a week-long event, but the parade is sort of the climax. I was too busy with school stuff to go to any of it, except this, which they canceled school for.

Anyway, check out the gallery for a bunch of pictures.

Manly Priorities

Aaron got a new multimedia player (I do mean multi) and was poking around in the options. He found a custom equalizer setting, and 30 seconds later exclaimed:

"Boobs!"

What I thought was a fairly innocent W was, in fact, supposed to be a pair of boobs.

I think we had it plugged in for all of about two minutes before this happened.

Zoom Lenses

This is in response to thots about stuff's comment on another post. It seemed like it might be useful information, so I thought I'd put it up as a post.

"Zoom", when talking about lenses, refers to the ability to change focal length. Large (long) focal lengths bring things closer to you, and small (short) focal lengths provide a wider field of view.

The 18-55mm lens that comes with entry-level SLRs is an example of a zoom lens. There are wide-angle zoom lenses (Ex: Nikon's 12-24mm), normal zoom lenses (Canon's 28-80), and there are telephoto zoom lenses, which is anything longer than about 100mm* (Nikon's 600mm).

The opposite of zoom lenses is a prime lenses (Ex: Sigma's 30mm f/1.4) which are always stuck at one focal length. In other words, if you're using a prime lens, you have to move the camera to zoom in and out. They are generally cheaper than a zoom lens that includes the same focal length, in addition to being much smaller and lighter. From what I know, you can't buy a zoom lens that will go to f/1.4, but there are prime lenses that actually have f/1.0, which means that they have the same focal length as they do aperture, and will have a very small depth of field when at maximum aperture. Keep in mind that smaller aperture numbers indicate larger aperture sizes, which means more light hitting your film, sensor, AF, or eyes.

*This is not strictly true. Telephoto lenses have special optical properties, but I suspect that most photographers don't know or care about this.

I just found this in the mall

Aha!

Figured it out.
I recently added a Google search box in the navbar (the thing on the right) that was marked as being 31 characters in width. IE actually forced it over, while Fx just made it work somehow. Simple solution: cut the width of the search box to 20 characters, and now IE and Fx are both happy.

[Edit: My dad pointed out this really doesn't make any sense unless you know exactly what I'm talking about. The search bar on the right was defined as being 31 characters in width, which is too big to fit inside the bounds of the navbar's allocated space, which makes things get messy pretty quickly.]

Yabari

I just wrote this post, but it's mostly explanatory griping about a classmate, and I'm not really comfortable complaining this extensively about anybody but me. Anyway, it's getting put in the archives at the end of first semester. I'll link to it from the post I'm writing today and actually putting where it ought to go.

Now, none of you know Yabari, and for that you can only be grateful. It's mean, I know, but he fought with everybody, including the teachers, looked down on all of us, and generally monopolized class time. A great example of one of his genius discourses was his half-hour explanation to us "less-studied peoples" on how Mercury is not only not hot, but the coldest planet overall, in our solar system.
He also cheated blatantly on about half of our tests.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, so let's go back to his question to me, simplified here because five minutes of back-and-forth arguing is no fun to type out or read:

「むし。。。何でじゅうを守るための、じゅうがひつようですか。」
mushi... nande juu wo mamoru tame no, juu ga hitsuyou desu ka.
"Insect... Why are guns necessary to protect guns?"

Now, I was totally expecting some kind of simple question like "What's your favorite color?" or "Why did you start studying Japanese?" or "What's the answer to life, the universe, and everything?" but no, those would all make too much sense. Instead, he starts off with a charged political question that requires difficult words to talk about at all, much less try to justify.

Here's what he was trying to ask: "Why are guns necessary? Further, if they necessary to protect individual freedom, why is that?"
Or rather, that's what we figured out he was trying to ask, after five minutes of him telling us and the native-born, highly educated teacher, that juu means "freedom" and that we were all simply wrong. Between the second-language barrier and the Yabari barrier, you saw what it came out as.

I'd like to point out that I caught a lot of flak for being one of his strongest supporters in the school, so my opinion here is likely biased in his favor more than you will find from other people. He was pretty nice in general, but he was really frustrating in class. His nicknames from other people in the class include, but are not limited to Yabai-san ("Mr. Awful", chosen for its phonetic closeness to his real name) and "The mushi guy", a reference to his common mispronunciation of the two-syllable word moshi.

いったいなんだ？

I just spent half an hour trying to troubleshoot what had broken my site navigation all of a sudden. During some troubleshooting, I've come to the conclusion that my site is likely broken in Internet Explorer. Fx doesn't work on these computers, but I'll poke at it once I clean up my room some, maybe.
Any of you that use IE: where is the site navigation?

相棒

I have a part-time job a few hours a week helping people with pronunciation. It's a class with English and Chinese, so I have a Chinese-speaking counterpart. She dressed up in yukata (light cotton summer kimono) and when I asked her to send me a picture she was showing me, she demanded to send the rest.



So, here they are.



The two on the right are examples of what the Japanese call purikura ("picture club"), which is a popular thing that girls make guys do, regardless of whether they're going out - these two are, by the way.



It's a testament to my unpopularity that I haven't done any, but you won't see me complaining! I think all of you know which side of the lens I prefer to be on.



Guesses on her age and nationality?

A Piece of Proof?

Now, I'm really not that confident about my writing in English, let alone Japanese, but in an effort to show that I'm actually doing something over here, I thought there might be some interest in my end-of-quarter presentation.
I don't think any of you will be able to make much sense of it, but I can assure you that it sounds roughly like my 7-year-old little sister trying to explain nuclear waste using a four-year-old's grammar and the generic politeness level. I feel sorry for our teachers that have to listen to 100 of these.
Anyway, I haven't proofread this, and I probably won't since it's nearly 3AM (I am tired). and I need to present this tomorrow around 9AM. Also, it's hard to proofread your own writing. Also, I am very tired. Also... well, I'm pretty tired.

[Edit: I should have put this up earlier, but here's a vocab list that will probably help a lot if you try and read the Japanese. It's got some pretty brutal 漢字 in it.

[

なんでしょうかな～ (What is it?)
核廃棄物といったら色々な産業が作った有害な放射能のゴミや副生物です。核廃棄物は水道や大気中に出なかったらそれほど危ないものではありません。　それらは体に入るまでに大部分は事実で少ししか危なくないですから。体に入ったら、なかなか速く損害し始めます。
広い範疇の二つあり：高レベルと低レベル放射性廃棄物です。減力発電の色々なもの、または種類が多くのものは低レベル放射性廃棄物です。アメリカのこれほどのことに関する規制では、普通のコーヒーなどは低レベル放射性廃棄物でも、みんなの安全のためにそれほどにきびしい規制は必要だと思われています。もっと普通の例は防護マスクやフィルターや二冷却税の管など名者です。これらのようなものの放射性能は割合に危なくなくても、あるえりますから、十・五十年間に待っての方がいいと思われています。この期間の後に普通のゴミになって、土に埋められることになります。
高レベル放射性廃棄物は本当に危ないものです。放射能が高くて、百・千・億年間も残ります。例として、放射性同位元素の一つは沃素の百二十九中性子の半減期は億五十万年間ものです。他の例はウラン・プルトゥニアムの使用済み核燃料またはもう使ってしまった核燃料です。

いつから始まりましたか (Since when was it a problem?)
核廃棄物は千九百の後半までに問題ではありませんでした。その時までに、人口な核廃棄物はなかなか珍しかったのですから。その上、一番目 使用できる原発は千九百五十四年でした。

何の結果ですか (What causes it?)
普通 核廃棄物源の中から病院と原子力発電と原子爆弾の軍縮です。癌を殺すためし、体の液処理を確認するために、病院では色々な放射性 液体を使います。

どこ問題ですか (Where is it a problem?)
オーストラリア以外工業先進国の全部原子発電を使いますから、核廃棄物を作ります。オーストラリアも病院がある結果、少なくても核廃棄物は世界の環境問題だと思います。
特に核廃棄物の捨て場がある国では大問題です。誰でもは家と近くにそんなものが日しくなくても必要ですか、質問は「どこがいいですか」というふうです。
テロルをしたい人ご多すぎるから、この国は核捨て場に関してとても心配です。

どうしましょうか (What’s being done?)
今の人気がある核廃棄物の処理の選択肢は大部分に二つです。
一番目はどこかに埋めることです。ある人は深く土に埋めて方がいいと思っています。ただし、他の人は潜り込みところに埋めて方がいいと思っているのです。潜り込み所に埋めたら、核廃棄物を地球の中に戻すので、問題なくなると言われます。
その他の選択肢は高レベル核廃棄物を変えることです。ブリーダーと言う原子力発電をしたら、機能的に核燃料を使えて悪い放射性物をそれほどの悪くない放射性物に変えます。でもブリーダー種類はプロトゥニアムを作るので、便利すぎで取り消しました。

]

And that's all there is of that. As much as I would've liked to write it in Japanese to begin with, I couldn't get anything straightened out and it was all very confusing to write. By writing it in English, I was able to mostly keep up with what i was thinking, which allows for a much more natural writing style.
And that's all there is of that. As much as I would've liked to write it in Japanese to begin with, I couldn't get anything straightened out and it was all very confusing to write. By writing it in English, I was able to mostly keep up with what i was thinking, which allows for a much more natural writing style.
I have a sneaking suspicion that translation by way of hitting something with a dictionary helps to rid the writing of any naturalness it has... S'what I did. You may also notice that I reordered the paragraphs. The flow is a little awkward in this English one, I felt.
Here's the English draft I translated it from:


[What is nuclear waste?
Nuclear waste is the trash and byproducts of the nuclear power generation industry and the disarming of nuclear weapons. It’s not very dangerous until it gets into the water supply or the atmosphere, where it can be ingested or inhaled. Once on the inside, it starts doing damage fairly quickly.

There are two broad categories: high-level and low-level.

Low-level nuclear waste is anything that was used in the process and may be contaminated. Some people joke that the United States’ laws on this are so strict that a normal cup of coffee would qualify due to the amount of radiation given off. More serious examples would be the protective suits workers wear and the pipes that carry coolant. Low-level waste typically becomes no more dangerous than normal trash after 10-50 years.

High-level waste is the really dangerous stuff that lasts hundred, thousands, or even millions of years. Iodine-129, for example, has a half-life of 15 million years. Example include spent uranium/plutonium fuel and the (usually Boron) control rods.


Where is it a problem?
With the exception of Australia, all the industrialized countries of the world produce both high- and low-level nuclear waste because they use nuclear power generation. Until very recently the world’s nuclear waste was all stored above-ground, but they make very attractive targets during war and for terrorism, in addition to natural disasters. In addition, countries fear that nuclear waste may be stolen and reprocessed to make nuclear weapons or dirty bombs.

When did it start?
Nuclear waste didn’t really become a problem until the second half of the 19th century. Prior to this, the only sources of nuclear waste were largely experimental, as working nuclear power plants were not developed until the late fifties. The burning of fossil fuels releases significant amounts of concentrated radioactive material into the atmosphere, and still does today. Someone who smokes cigarettes also receives a considerable dose of radiation due to the concentration of radioactive materials in tobacco plants.

What causes it?
The most common sources for nuclear waste are nuclear power generation facilities, disarmament of nuclear weapons, the medical industry. Various radioactive materials are used in the treatment of cancer and to track fluid flow throughout the body.

What is being done?
The most popular options right now are various forms of burying it. Some suggest burying nuclear waste about 1000m underground in stable geologic areas and simply ignoring it for a few thousand years, while other s say it would be best to bury nuclear waste near subduction zones of the Earth’s crust and let the waste be carried into the mantle, where such things are not a problem.

Another solution is to transform the long-lived high-level nuclear waste into short-lived waste by transformation, such as in fast breeder reactor or through chemical means.]

Now all I need to do is read that a few hundred times so I don't forget how to read the kanji once I'm under pressure...

Gion Matsuri, with an Oops

So I took quite a few pictures today. 627 to be precise.
Well, 628 if you really want to be precise, but the bowl of peanut butter and jelly rice doesn't really relate to the rest of what happened today. Today was the parade for Gion Matsuri, and it's a pretty big affair. There's about a week of lead-up to it where random people from around town build the floats out of various bits of stuff. There are around 30 different floats, and the parade lasts from around 9AM to well after noon. The floats are pretty, if not exactly to my taste. And I'll admit I was a little creeped out by the plastic people mounted in all but the lead float. But! It's pretty neat as parades go and everybody takes lots and lots of pictures.

I'm still working on translating some stuff for my last class tomorrow, so I haven't had time to sort through the pictures, but I think I got some pretty good shots...

...

... at 3200 ISO.

[seppuku noises (whatever those are)]

Here's the story of how it happened:
So last night I was demonstrating to Aaron what difference ISO makes and why it is that you would never want to take pictures you care about at 3200 ISO. The noise reduction required to get a vaguely decent picture completely drains all the color out of it, and all the detail is sort of smudgy. If you use RAWs or turn off noise reduction, you just have a very, very noisy picture.
If you open up that picture, you'll see it looks very much as if I took it with my cell phone. Except my cell phone doesn't let you change settings like this, so you can't screw up in quite this fashion.
[Edit: It would seem you can't see the noise itself very well, as the picture was downsized to 1600 pixels in width, which is about 1/3 of how big it was to begin with.]

Ahem.

I have 627 very, very noisy pictures using six more stops of ISO than was necessary, given the lighting conditions.
I had been wondering why it was that my camera seemed to be over-exposing things and using tiny, tiny apertures. "Gee, 1/4000th of a second is odd in this light..." is something I thought a number of times, but I never thought to check my ISO setting. As much as I want to say something like "Man, what an amateur mistake!" it would be entirely too accurate.
But as long as I learn from it, it's a good thing, right? Right! I mean, at least I've made this mistake during something that happens annually. Imagine this at a wedding!

Next time, I'll be sure to check my WB and ISO settings in addition to physical checks and cleaning.

So, here's today's lesson for everybody:

If you're going to show someone what not to do,
make sure to not do it yourself.

Peanut Butter Jelly Time, redux

So I have rice. I have about 5 kilos of rice on my floor by the rice cooker.
However! I have not a single slice of bread. Goes bad too quickly, you know?
But, I have peanut butter. Source of protein!

What happened? Well, as it would turn out, peanut butter works pretty decently as butter.

That is, in fact, peanut butter and jelly rice.

祇園祭 (Gion Matsuri)

Aaron Dean and I are going to head over early and see if we can't get a good spot to get pictures of the opening ceremonies for Gion festival. Here's hoping!

More Connection Bragging

I installed the .NET Framework 3.0 today. Here's my impromptu log of what the installer said:

Downloading components...
Calculating transfer rate... Current speed is 12K/s.
Completed: 1MB/30MB.
Calculating transfer rate... Current speed is 12K/s.
Completed: 3MB/30MB.
Calculating transfer rate... Current speed is...
Completed: 10MB/30MB.
Calculating transfer rate...
Completed: 24MB/30MB.
Installing...

Each of the bolded messages were about five seconds apart.

Dewobbled?

And I'm back at 1MB/s up again. It's nearly 11PM here, which is a little past peak 'Net usage times. I wonder if I'm being blocked, or maybe throttled, people here spam the Internet around 9PM, or if it's just a coincidence.

Actually, I just saw a 2.0MB/s spike, but it's hovering around 1.6MB/s. I won't complain either way, but I'll take the extra 500K/s if I can get it.g

[Edit: I hit "Publish Post" and it immediately jumped up to 2.7, and actually hit 2.96MB/s for a few seconds. I'll keep an eye on it and see if it breaks 3MB/s up.]

[More-edit: It would seem there are two other Japanese users on and I'm transferring to each of them at a bit under 1MB/s. Looks like one's up in Niigata (260 miles NE of me), which means he's about the same distance as Boise, Idaho to Seattle, Washington .
The other person is in Fukuoka (312 miles WSW of me), but they're pretty slow at about 600K/s. ]

Bizarre Internet Wobbles

It's 8:43PM here, and about three minutes ago, I went from uploading 1.3MB/s to .2KB/s and all the trackers are not responding. I wonder if my ISP has something that blocks off some ports starting automatically at 8:40PM (the beginning of the really peak usage times for the Internet) or if it's something else. Here's a graph showing what it looks like.
If you're wondering about those last few spikes of red, it was probably ghost throughput or something from a couple last things sending that had already mostly finished. I don't really know. It's 8:51 now and I'm currently at effectively 0K/s either direction, except for browsing the web. Strange, isn't it?

S'ok, my hard drive needs a break. As you can see, I transferred over 100GB today.

Finally, the Bike Post

I bought my bike last week, but somehow I totally didn't mention it here on the blog. It's too bad, 'cause last weekend was pretty slow and it would've been a great time for it.

Anyway, this is my old bike (at left), which I'm letting Bethany use until she goes. Not certain what to do with it after that, though. I might be able to sell it back to the cycle shop i got it from, but I don't have a lot of hope for that. Besides, it'd be nice if I could keep it. You never know when a second bike might be handy.
Actually, there's a place by Part One that might work well... The biggest set of differences is in the ass-end, so I took a close-up of the back end, where you can clearly see the drum brake, the downward kickstand (you got a better name for it?), the lock, and... the little plastic guards to keep your skirt from getting caught in the spokes.

Yeah, I'm excited to have a new bike.

Here it is,alone and straight-on at right, and with my old one for comparison at left.

To review, I picked out my new bike because it has pretty much all the features I want in a bike here, about which I learned a great deal through my mamachari - "mama's bike" (actually "mama's chariot", a reference to the shape) - that was a $62.50 used deal.

My new bike - scratch that. It needs a name. "My new bike" just doesn't work. It's temporary name will be nueji ("new bike" - you see a lot of creative names like that in Japanese).

Anyway! Nueji has the following features that I want in a bike:

• Bike - That is, it means I don't have to walk. Walking is so frustrating after riding around town. I average 10-12 miles an hour through town if I pay attention to lights, while I average about 3 miles an hour.
  
• Twin caliper brakes - Caliper brakes are standard in the States, but most brakes here are of the drum type. This means they start to squeak after about a month, even when they are completely dry. It's a noise you quickly get used to, and you end up using your rear brakes as a way of warning people that you're behind them.
  That said, I can fix caliper brakes. Nothin' doin' with drum brakes.
• Basket shape - If you take a close look at the diagram at left, you'll see the difference. Nueji's basket is the one outlined in purple. I'm too lazy to take a top-down view, but it's squared off more from that perspective, as well, which makes it infinitely more useful than the more narrow, curvy basket of my old bike.
• Gears - Nueji has 6 gears, from which I've found myself generally using 3-5 and occasionally 6, if I'm trying to keep up with cars. The others might be useful if I were going up a steep hill, but I'd probably as soon walk.
• Magnetically-driven light - Many bikes use a cog that rubs against the tire to drive a flywheel which powers a light. These have to be switched on and require a noticable amount of work to drive, in addition to being loud and - this surprised* me when it happened - I've had them completely not work when my tires were very wet.
  Nueji's light is driven by a magnet mounted on the axle of the front tire that passes another and works as a very simple electric motor, just in reverse. I understand speedometers often work in this fashion.
  
• Shape - It's not a mamachari. I feel silly enough about having a basket on the bike, but the bent-back girls' handlebars and the I'm-wearing-a-long-skirt super-low frame just rubbed salt in the wound. Besides that, the frame is unsturdy when you start putting any decent amount of weight on the back rack.
• New tires - Old bike's tires were pretty worn down, and skidding took very little effort. In addition, the tubes had been patched too many times and needed to be replaced, so they had to be pumped up about once a week or they would be dangerously low. If you've ever tried to ride a bike or drive a car on rims, you know what I'm talking about. There are a lot of little imperfections in the road that you don't notice until your tires slide into every single one of them.

So, I got a new bike, and after a week, the only thing I don't like is that the bell rings very quietly every time you go over any decent bump. Easily solved by placing my hands closer to the center of the handlebars, though.

Thanks to my dad, who financed this. Thanks!

*Original word here was shocked, but I thought that might convey the wrong meaning. I turn the light on and off with my foot anyway, so that would take quite some doing. Insulated, waterproof boots don't conduct electricity so good, you know?

Japanese Internet Connections

If anybody ever complains to you that their Japanese Internet connection is too slow, you should ignore them. They're probably doing it wrong. This is a usage graph for my connection*:If you click on it, you can actually read the numbers, as it open to the full resolution copy. You will see that the big spike on the top graph is where I was downloading 3.3 megabytes per second. While uploading at over a megabyte per second. For reference, here some examples of what you could download if you could maintain speeds like that:

Speed:	3.3	MB/s
Size		StC	MtC
700	MB	212.1	3.5	A full CD
700	MB	212.1	3.5	A standard-definition movie
1.2	GB	363.6	6.1	An HD movie
4.7	GB	1424	24	A full DVD
32	GB	9697	162	All of Ranma. Ever.

StC and MtC are Seconds and Minutes to Completion, respectively. Unfortunately, it's difficult to get those kinds of speeds as very few servers will be sending data to just you. If they are, they probably won't be supporting that kind of data transfer. The peak was 26.4 megabits/second, which is more than two and a half times as fast as we can theoretically get on our connection in Ellensburg. It's also 25% of the fiber line coming into this building. During heavy usage times, such as 9 and 10PM, I usually can't get any more than about 50K/s out of this connection, probably because the building's router is hitting its limit or something.

*Not entirely accurate, but it's not going to be off by more than a little. I was *asleep* at the time, so there's not much else that was going on.

Slow Week, part two

I did some wandering on Sunday and got these two pictures, of which type you'll probably be seeing a lot of in the next few days.

At left is a float under construction. As you can see, they don't so much build the float as much as bondage half a forest. Very Japanese, I think.

At right are some women who, after some tittering and debating among themselves, agreed to pose for me.

Also, I had some sushi, which was pretty normal for the most part. Saw a couple new dishes, such as black sesame pudding and somem kind of coleslaw sushi.

But what really took the cake* was the hamburger sushi. You can see it at right. The sign in the background has the name of the store, then under that, hanbaagu which is "hamburger" in Japanese.

Traffic... Laws? With Bonus Takoyaki

On the way back from the school today, I unintentionally joked a rather true observation: Japan doesn't seem to have traffic laws. It's much more like they have traffic suggestions. I don't know if it's the case in other large cities (Kyoto is 1.4 million. I consider that to be pretty big), but the lights here turn red, and people keep going through. Pedestrians wait at crosswalks about anywhere from 50% to 95% of the time, and this number varies on the width of the street the walk crosses, with streets 20m (60 feet) across usually not crossed unless it's green.
I've seen plenty of instances where motorbikes have been puttering along on the sidewalk or in a bicycle parking lot.
One of the weirdest things is that the areas with big, six-foot-tall signs that say "Don't park your bike here!" - and have large pictures in addition - these are the places where you will find the most bikes parked. They will theoretically impound your bike and charge you a $20-40 fee (varies on location) if you do, but these areas usually have a pile of bikes neatly lined up near them.

I had Sandy pose while parking his bike right behind the sign, as you can see here. I don't know why they even bother with the signs.

I picked up some takoyaki (octopus dumplings) at a place by the school for dinner, as they're cheap and pretty filling.

They don't look real appetizing in the picture, but a 10-minute ride over bumpy road in a sealed container covered in sauce doesn't make much of anything look attractive. But they were pretty tasty and at just the right temperature when I ate them.

One of the hardest parts about eating takoyaki is that they very quickly go from "Ohgodthefireextinguishernow!" hot to "That's some slimy... goober-balls you've got there" cold. There's a shop near the school that probably makes a killing in the winter selling these things for lunch.

Slow Week

Sorry for the lack of updates. Last week was a killer for reasons unknown, and this week is our last week of the first semester. I have, I think, four papers to write between now and Friday. It's Monday evening when I'm posting this. Oh, and Thursday is pretty much all out because there's a festival we're required to go to.

Anyway, it's slow, but I'll try and get something up between now and the festival.

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...

Just Another Day in the Japan

Nothing particularly interesting for you guys today. Might have some adventuring going on later, though I'm not making any promises.

Artist's Rendition

Here's an artists rendition of me doing judo:
Actually, it's something Gabe did for a book, pulled almost-but-not-quite shamelessly.

Search

I made a Google Custom Search Engine for the site, because I want search, but I don't like Google's Blogger bar. I'll poke at it eventually and make it blend in, but for now it's that ugly bright-white box on the right.

Self-Defense

I wrote this in response to a comment, but it's a pretty massive reply, and an important topic, so it gets its own post. I hope nobody thinks I'm some kind of expert on this kind of stuff.
Anyway, here it is, nearly quoted from the reply.

------------------------------------------

The art for you for self-defense is any art that fits you. The reason for this is that even the perfect art, if you don't like it, won't help you because you will quit studying if it's no fun. Most dojo will let you try for a month, and often for free. I would recommend trying any art for about two months before you try to make a decision on it.

Now, that said, there are some fairly simple things to keep in mind when choosing a martial art for self-defense.

Basic way: The question here is "Hard or soft?"
Hard styles use a lot of striking attacks - punches, kicks, elbow strikes, and soforth. Examples: karatedo, tae kwon do.
Soft styles emphasize blending with the enemy and utilizing their weight and power against them. Examples are judo, aikido, jujutsu,
In my opinion, soft styles take much more training to become equally proficient in when compared to hard styles.

Your body: Judo is theoretically all about using your opponent's weight against him and blah, blah, blah.
If it were really that simple, there wouldn't be ten weight divisions in competitions and I wouldn't be able to keep up with my dojo's captain when we're doing ground techniques. So if you've got a small frame, judo is probably not the best option. That said, I feel everyone should have some practice with groundfighting, as something like 80% of fights go to the ground eventually.
Hell, you never know when groundfighting practice could come in handy. "Passing the guard" could be convenient of your partner isn't particularly flexible or your bed is a little small... Am I still talking about martial arts?
As a beginner, your weight and physical stature have a great effect on what you can do. As you progress, they begin to matter less and less, and I'd point at Keri Erikson as a perfect example of this, deadly little fighting machine with massive glasses that she is.

Focus: Some dojo train their students for competitions, some train just for self-defense, and some do a little of both. You can usually identify real-life self-defense stuff by how strange it is. That is to say that anything that's likely going to be useful in a real self defense situation will likely be a little silly or embarassing the first time you do it.

Convenience: As silly as this sounds, it's a pretty big factor. The most important thing about a martial art is simply that you enjoy practicing it, and that you will keep practicing for at least a few years.
As an example, if you have to travel an hour to get to your dojo, you're more likely to make excuses to yourself to skip classes.

To some up: convenience of study, your body type, dojo goals, and preferred way of doing things are all important things to keep in mind when choosing a dojo and a style.

To get to the point, already: Ignoring everything above, my personal recommendations for fighting arts to learn for the purpose of self-defense are, again, hapkido (semi-AKA "combat aikido"), many of the popular arts (tae kwon do, karatedo, kung fu, etc), and - actually, this would be my preference, though I've never practiced any - pretty much any Philipino martial art (ex: escrima and silat).

Now, you might be able to avoid this altogether and simply take a self-defense class. Any decent-sized city will have women's self defense classes being taught in them, probably once a month. The most important part is that you do whatever it is a lot, as the effectiveness of any technique comes from its execution.

Important: Even if you don't study a martial art or anything, please bear in mind that the statistics show that in the event of attempted rape (and probably kidnapping, too), people who resist violently are the least likely to become victims.
The important part is to make yourself be more work than it's worth; kick, scratch, claw, slap, scream - it doesn't matter, as long you're physically and verbally resisting, you're much more likely to come out both alive and unraped.

Crass Algument

I was pretty much just spacing out in Basic Japanese today, largely because the prof was going on about Gion matsuri. Gion matsuri is a festival to protect Kyoto from evil spirits and takes place once a year. It lasts about a week and a half.
We're required to go to it on Thursday, and there are no study-abroad classes that day.

So, I was spacing out, abusing my dictionary, and suddenly K and Y (names changed to protect those involved?) started arguing.
Y:"Why are you laughing at me?"
K:"I'm not laughing at you."
Y:"I said [his accent is nearly indecipherable when he's in a good mood, so I lost what he was saying here]"
K:"And if I want to laugh - "
Teacher: "Stop, stop."
They both ignore the teacher and keep arguing, with the teacher doing his best to stop the argument without raising his voice. Y gets upset at being interrupted, and the teacher points out that it's his classroom, and if he says to stop, they ought to stop. Anyway, the three of them go back and forth for a bit, then the teacher starts lecturing to the class about asking questions that are on-topic and not arguing with everything that anybody tries to say.
With about a half hour of class left, B and H both start packing up their stuff with. H is from Afghanistan, and people always think he's Y, so I sort of understand. B is tired to being lectured at instead of being taught Japanese. H leaves, but the teacher convinces B to come back, and promises they'll get back on track.
W has no idea what's going on, and neither does A. They both thought they were following what was going on, but it would seem they weren't.

By now, the readers are completely lost and wondering if the FBI, DHS, or the SPCA* will come save them from this alphabet soup, only to realize the irony of such a dream, and to wonder how the SPCA got involved.

*Society for the Creation of Creative Acronyms

Underpants Judo

Today was my last day of judo until school starts up again in the fall. There's just no point in going when it's this hot. I mean, the dojo's pretty nice and has fans, but nobody feels like doing anything, so we all just sit around. And it consumes my entire evening or morning, depending on the day.

Today was so muggy that two of the guys took off their clothes and were jumping around the dojo in their underpants. One guy started taking those off, too, but then his girlfriend hit him and he stopped.

It's pretty muggy here.

Saturday everything: Hiking around

So after being up until 4AM and not having made any preparations whatsoever, I somehow woke up at 8AM the next day - a half hour before the first alarm I had set. So I threw my stuff together, got a shower, and headed off. I knew at this point only that I had to cross a river, and not the one to my west.
So I did.

Then I called for help.

After that, you can pretty much follow the pictures... at the gallery!

I have to get going, so none of those even have captions. The girls are Ana (dark hair) and Simone (blonde).

Vanity, I guess?

I was cleaning out my pants pockets and found one of my flash drives in them. What's on here, I wonder? I wondered.
I recall now that I used it to get some pictures from Bryden (my neighbor), who's been picture-swapping rather more than I have. Here are some of them.

This first on the left is obviously from before Anna left. It's at the okonomiyaki place down the street. Alessandra, the girl on the right, is in some of my classes, but she's leaving in about two weeks. She's pretty cute, and nothing ever happened, unfortunately.

Here at right is either right before or right after I got on the ball of death. With a normal merry-go-round, you can jump off if it gets too intense; with this, you're stuck. Hamid got me spinning at a good clip right as everybody was leaving. Nice of him, yeah? Oh, then he left.
He was just playing around, though. We're actually pretty good friends.

This last one is a bunch of people playing the drinking game "I've never..." Of course, I'm far too boring to participate in such a game, but everyone had a great time. They were also up until way too late. I got up at 5:30 or so the next morning, so...
Anyway, from left to right are [someone's leg], Hamid, Sara, Catherine, Aaron, me, Angela, and... some guy whose name I don't know.

And here's Tanaka, our coolest teacher. Out of the 15 or so teachers I have, I have five male teachers, and this one guy is two of them.

Train Warning-er

There are a lot of small train overpasses here. They're fairly minimally constructed; just a couple of girders bolted together with a mesh to keep things from falling on peoples heads underneath. If you're under the overpass when the train goes by, it is almost painfully loud.
I didn't notice it until today, but there's a strange hissing noise that you hear if you stand under the overpass if a train is coming. It gives you a few seconds' warning, which is plenty of time to plug your ears or get out from under it.

Friday night: "Sam and Dave's"

After writing that far-too-long post about the Gaidai summer gala, this will be shorter than it otherwise might be. But I'm lazy, so it's going to be short.

After an hour of sitting around and shooting the breeze with Aaron Dean, he, Monique, and myself all headed down to the station to meet up with everybody else. The three of us were probably the 10th/11th/12th people there, but as we waited, more people came. In groups of three or four, we eventually had a mob consisting of about fifty people.

So gathered, we headed east, to Sam and Dave's.

Once we got there, we all stood outside for a bit to wait for the others, and there was a shallow stream that runs by the street. Naturally, I was wearing my Danner 453 GTX boots (the short brown ones that are oh-so-soft), so, naturally, I stood in the stream and took some pictures.

Aaron at right is wearing my fuzzy green shirt, which appears to actually fit him. My shoulders are a little too wide now, but I still wear it sometimes because it's one of my favorite shirts. Got it from my grandparents, too.

So, we were about to go in.

Now, I should warn you that this was first time going to a club. Not just, "first time going to a club in Japan" or something like that. I'd never been to a club before. The reasoning for this is as follows:

• Clubs are places where you dance.
• Clubs are places where you drink.
• Clubs are expensive.

I can't dance, I don't drink, and I'm not rich, so it really doesn't seem like something I would like.
That said, I wanted to go just so I can have gone to one. In the end, it was a two-story bar with a dance floor a little smaller than our two Chamith house's living rooms combined.

So, we went in. There was rather steep $20 entrance fee with one drink* for men, $10 for women. I spent most of the time wandering around, just kind of watching people. Used my drink ticket to get a glass of mango juice, and later paid $5 (!) for a ginger-ale and mango juice blend that the bartender thought would be silly. It was tasty.

*I understand that it's usually a much better deal, as there's a student discount if you make it before midnight, so it's normally free for women and $10 with two drinks for men.

Umm...

I played some pool, and that started everybody else playing pool, which was kind of cool.
Here, Roy (the enviously attractive and well-built guy with the pool cue) just made a double-bounce shot, but I think it was n accident.

After a few more rounds of pool, everyone started dancing.
I tried to take pictures, but between the flash-nuking and the dancing it all just came out as a lot people in weird poses. I did get to see some salsa action, though, as Sandy and Melissa sort-of started doing salsa. Sandy's only been doing it for a few weeks, but he's pretty good. Melissa's got actual dance shoes, which I think says everything.

I discovered this poster, and loved it. If you look in the middle, it says "The woman who comes in yukata or bikini is free".

I took this picture on the way out. Apparently, the foreigner registration card has glow in the dark lettering on it. I would've never known if it weren't for the fact that they stamp your hand with a UV-sensitive stamp. Because of that, there are black lights at the entrance and in other areas at random.

The card isn't really that color at all, but I did what I could to bring out the glowing text, which reads "gaikokujin touroku shoumeisho" in katakana.

From here, it's about a3.5km walk home, which took me about an hour.

I'll gallery the rest of Saturday's stuff later, I guess. This wasn't nearly as short as I was expecting it to be.