Strange Day

Today has been interesting, despite not starting until a good deal past 11AM. I hung out with Yanavy and her group who just sort of dropped by around 10PM and we all watched a movie and sat around and slacked off until 5AM, when we collectively realized we ought to get some sleep. My room still smells like Magi's (sp?) perfume very faintly. Could just be a little left on me, though.

That sounds bad, but nothing happened. She sprayed some around at one point.

Anyway, everybody went home and I... was at home, so I just fell over and went to sleep.

On my way to practice today, I stopped and stared at some pigeons, and found one with a peg leg - or at least no toes. I did my best to take his picture with my cell phone camera, but... Cell phone camera, so...

Once I got there, I found out practice was canceled and there was an art show. Random, no? I bought a scrunchie (シュシュ) I liked and headed back home.

Upon returning, I was summoned to go do some tech support. But on the way, I saw a wallet lying on the ground, open, stuffed full of money, in the road. I stopped my bike, parked it off to the side of the road, grabbed the wallet and immediately signaled a nearby guard and explained the situation. He wanted me to hang out for a while so the wallet's owner could thank me, and while I was saying how I was in a hurry, the owner of the wallet came out of the store looking confused and patting his pants pockets. The guard flagged him and we returned his wallet, they both thanked me, and the guy gave me $30 for my trouble. He said I should go buy some ramen or something with it. I thanked him and we went our ways.

So I got to the Cristina's apartment, where Valentina, Betta, and Daniela were waiting, and was able to figure out why they couldn't get on the Internet (they were connected to the wireless router as a gateway instead of the router plugged into the VDSL modem - and their modem had locked up at the same time). Being somewhat short on time, I set up their computers to use static IPs and assigned the gateway and DNS settings manually, and left them with instructions on how to power cycle their setup. It's nice to be able to help like that.

Oh, and I'm currently waiting for Chise and Mikako to show up, and we're going to make okonomiyaki and play some Super Smash Brothers.

Barring anything really bad happening, this has been another pretty decent day. This makes me worry a little bit about tomorrow, but...

Ubernets on the Intertube

I was able to get 7.5 megabytes per second of uploading going on a few days ago. That may not seem like much, but with a speed like that, it's as likely that I'm hitting the limits for how fast the Ethernet cable connecting my computer to the router, and even the router's ability to process packets, as I am to be hitting the connection cap applied by the ISP.
7.5MB/s is very fast. Our connection back in the States in Ellensburg is a 10Mb (megabit) per second connection, and usually runs at about 8 Mbits/s, while my connection here passed 50Mbits/s.
Our connection in the States: 10Mbits/s, $80/month
My connection here in Japan: 100Mbits/s, $50/month

But, and this is kind of a pain, for about a quarter of the day, from about 6PM until midnight, the ISP blocks peer to peer software as best they can, and you generally get very poor bandwidth and generally a poor connection during this time. What this says to me is they've oversold their infrastructure by quite a lot.
The rest of the time, though, it's a nice, fairly stable connection that is blindingly fast.

INTERNETS AGAIN

I have an Internet connection again. Great timing, isn't it?

Apparently, they got my payment sometime last week and just forgot to turn the connection back on.

Yeah.

Tokyo

I'm headed out tomorrow for Tokyo for a few days, and I don't know if I'll have ready access to an Internet connection, so there may be no new posts until I get back.

If I had foresight, I would've written some and set them to post while I was gone, but I don't and I didn't, so there aren't. As tempted as I am to leave my laptop behind and instead pack enough clothes that I'll be able to wear clean clothes each day of the four-day trip, I'll probably bring it with in the hopes that there will be a connection somewhere.

A Narrow Escape? Nah.

I was just stopped by cops for the first time! I was out using the Internet at 4AM and - purely by coincidence - was wearing mostly black: black BDU pants, a black ACU top, and my big brown desert Marine boots. To top it off, I was wearing a hat and had on my black photo gloves. Truly a suspicious sight indeed.

If I were going to commit a robbery, I certain wouldn't dress in all black. Would you?

On the other hand, I was out there for about an hour and I don't think I got a single mosquito bite. And I got to talk to the cops, who were surprisingly easy to understand.

One of them - of three! - triggered his siren (on accident?) about three blocks away, which gave me a bad feeling and I was thinking I should pack up, and I could've been out of there if I had hurried, but I think that would've just made things worse. So maybe the siren was on purpose to spook me if I were doing anything actually questionable? Dunno.
As it was, they came up and I think I might have greeted them before they said anything. I greet cops whenever I see them, so that's normal for me.
Anyway, they asked what I was doing, and I responded that I was using the Internet. I explained how it was close to my apartment, and my rather suspicious location (by a dumpster, in a dark corner!) was due to the relative low number of mosquitoes*. At some point, I explained that I was having trouble with the "Internet company" because my credit card is foreign, so the company says the numbers are wrong. I *think* they asked, but I might have just been too stressed and said it.

*For some reason, no matter how many times I talk about animals, I am completely unable to to use the iru verb form. I kept using aru which is the verb of existence for things that don't that don't move perceptibly, like plants and inanimate objects. Say, a chair.

I was patted down and they checked all but one of my pockets, which I thought was pretty weird; I was surprised they missed my only pocket that actually had stuff in it. I mean, one of my cargo pockets had my card wallet in it, and they had me pull out a couple of cards at random. Then he found my left-front pocket and apparently thought my changepurse was suspicious. I was so nervous at this point that I opened it to show him and managed to launch a $1 coin onto the ground.
Then he he checked my rear pockets, while saying something like "We're men, so it's okay". Strangely, they didn't check any of my jacket pockets, though I was careful to use those in front of them.
They also checked the pouch I keep my dictionary and insurance information in, and I guess checked my insurance to see if it was all in order. Presumably, they found the bandages I had stuffed in it.
*The reason this surprises me is because they were pretty thorough, so it seems odd that they would miss the one pocket that almost everyone would have. Also, in that pocket was my only vaguely dangerous object, a pen.

They didn't seem suspicious of my flashlight, though one of them got a little bit concerned when I reached to my waist to pull it out. I guess I could've as easily been drawing a weapon, though, and he would've been out of luck: anybody can shoot from the hip at 2m and get a solid hit, and none of them reacted enough to do anything about it, had it been a weapon.
My jacket had been covering the flashlight until that point, so I doubt it's the case that they knew what it was. They didn't check anything above the waist at all, thinking back on it.

They also searched my bag, though they didn't check the main compartment or any of the small ones, which seems odd. They checked the laptop section and two of the miscellaneous crap pockets. I have to wonder what they were thinking as they saw the what I was carrying with me.

In addition, they wanted to know what I was using the Internet for. I responded that I was checking my email and reading comics. They didn't think I could really be out here using the Internet, so I showed them that I had had my email and comics open and pointed to the balloon tooltip and translated for them. I think one of them said "Ah, it was Gmail!" at one point.

So while all of this was going on, one guy hung back out of reach and at a different angle and watched what his partner was doing, and a third guy checked my bicycle and foreigner registration information. I don't think the second guy ever said a word, and expect he may have been trying to go unnoticed, which would make sense.
I learned that the radios they have apparently have long enough cords to reach at least a meter in any direction. Never know when that might be useful. At least two had firearms or firearm-shaped things (but probably normal pistols) on their belts, but I never saw the third guy at an angle to be able to see. I expect they all had asps in addition, and beyond that, I didn't note anything about their equipment, as it was all in leather (I think) cases. Japanese police officers have their firearms on coiled tethers, by the way.

They escorted me home and hung around for a few minutes at least, and were still out there five minutes later when I went to check to see if I'd left anything in my bike. I want them to still be out there so I can maybe get a picture, and to see why they didn't search my jacket, but I don't think they are.
They're not, but it's been nearly an hour.

I asked right before I went inside the first time why there were three instead of two, like normal, and the guy that had been interacting with me the most responded that they usually work in groups, but they're sometimes on their own and sometimes in groups of up to four. As they were leaving, I apologized for causing trouble and thanked them for their hard work.

Even though it was stressful, it was fun and it's an experience I'm glad to have had. I should've asked more questions, though, as it's usually really hard to get cops to talk to me.

Well, for as long as this post has been, the entire thing probably didn't last fifteen minutes. And it's nearly 5:30AM, so I'm calling it a day.

[When I went to actually put this online, two cops walked by and I greeted them. I've never seen cops around here with the exception of the past 24 hours.]

Mosquitos. Yeah, Again

So in my last trip out to get some Internet - not that I'm an addict or anything, though - I was online for a total of roughly twenty minutes.
On my left arm, I have seven new bites, and I have three new bites on my right arm. Strange thing, though, is that about half of the new bites look much more like I've been stung by a honeybee than a mosquito. I mean the fairly mellow ones that don't hurt that much, and you sometimes don't notice until afterwords, so it's not anything serious, but I'm surprised to see a wound like that from a mosquito, still.

Internets...

The wired 'Net connection at my place hasn't been working since this morning, so I'm standing in the road to Internet again.
I have no idea what's wrong, though. The modem says everything is good and the router is unmanaged, so I can't have done anything to it. I plan to try and talk to the ISP tomorrow, since I don't think anybody will be around on Sunday.

Internets

I just talked to Roy, one of the other students in this building and asked if/how much we agreed on for him using my Internet connection. Apparently, we didn't, but he grabbed his wallet and handed me $20. That's nearly half the monthly cost, so it's a pretty good deal.

What I'm hoping to do next quarter is share my 'Net connection with everybody I can and charge them $10 to $20 per month for it. If I can get that going with three people, it'd at least take care of most of the bill, in addition to being convenient for them since they don't have to deal with the application process or paying bills. Plus, it's pretty much instantaneous, instead of taking a month.
My room is in a particularly poor place to have the router, as it's on the end on the ground floor, which puts it in a corner.
If my router projected a perfect sphere of connectivity, a diagram of the rooms that it could cover would look something like the diagram at left. That's all well and good, except that it's losing over half of the area it can cover into the ground and outside. That's both wasteful and a security risk.
All that unused space on the outside is where people can walk by and use your Internet connection, like I was doing to other people, or more nefarious things, like snoop on your wireless network activity. Wi-fi security is not really great, with even the newer schemes being crackable in under an hour.

Now, unfortunately for my plan of sharing my Internet connection with other people, the router isn't actually set up like that. You usually don't need to be able to talk up for long distances, so they squish the sphere down, which gives it more reach to the sides, where it matters. In addition, the floors seem to be somewhat more difficult to penetrate than the walls.

In the end, my current coverage area looks roughly like second diagram at left. You might be able to get a spotty connection on the third floor, but I doubt you'd get anything useful.

Now, if I could just put Wi-Fi routers wherever I felt like, and could find a way to get one to radiate vertically effectively, I'd be able to lay out something like this next diagram. You could either chain the routers together with Ethernet, or use a Wi-Fi mirroring protocol I don't remember the name of.
Linking them together with Ethernet has the advantage of providing speed and reliability, but I'd have to convince the manager that he wants little blue cords dangling from one room to another. Simply linking the routers together wirelessly would be a little bit unreliable unless I stuck one in the middle to bridge them all. It would still be a lot less reliable than wiring 'em all up with magic blue strings. If the manager wanted to do it, he could sure make a pretty penny. It would take about $150 of new equipment, give or take.

Alternately, if I can convince people in a couple of rooms that they want to lend me a wall socket and some space, I might be able to rig this up, and it would pay for itself pretty quick if I could contact the people in those rooms.

Now, all of that said, it would require a significant amount of work on my part, so I'll probably just stick with diagram 2, which what I've got now.

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.

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.

INTERNETS

Someone a few doors down finally got a 'Net connection, and I agreed to share the fee with him if we hooked up my wireless router and I could access it from my room. I can't download for crap due to UPnP issues, but I can check my email and browse teh Intarwebs.

New AP

I found another access point that's open. It's much closer to my apartment than the other two, and actually has a bench nearby. Bonus for the fact that it's in a park. Oh, and my laptop is in the shade, so it's not competing with the sun in a brightness contest (it usually loses). I think my apartment is less than a minute away, even on foot. It won't be much faster on bike, it's so close.
As far as Internet access at my apartment itself, I think we're still waiting on NTT. Eventually, they'll pull their heads out of their... towels, I hope.
I'd love to think that I might eventually be able to use my own Internet connection.
Maybe.

At The School

So I'm at the school and I just uploaded the picture of the not-okonomiyaki that I made a few days back. The school's connection... the picture upload was like poof and it was done. I've gotten used to people's random connections, where uploading 200k takes a few seconds.

My Trick

In case anybody hasn't picked up on it, I'm writing the posts at home in Word, then coming to somewhere with a 'Net connection and posting them with the time I wrote them. Posting only takes a couple of minutes, while a good-sized blog post takes from a half hour to three hours to actually compose. For this post, I'm in a ramen shop, having ピリカラぎょうざ(~"spicy meat dumplings") and some plain white rice.

In a way, I'm paying for a 'Net connection. And food. That helps to take some of the ouch out of the $5 lunch I just ate.

Supiido

A couple of us in my apartment complex are looking at getting one connection and sharing it. This may sound like a bad idea for five or six college students, given college students' usage habits, but I'd like to point out that $50/month gets us a 100Mbit/s connection. It takes a lot of work to use up the 10Mbit/s one we have at home, and with five of us, this is twice as much. I have to assume that's just downstream, and that I can't upload at that speed.

きちゃったぞ

Well, at some point yesterday, whoever had an open Wi-Fi access point took it down. It disappeared suddenly, and I lost my Internet connection. As it turns out, though I think I may have mentioned this before, I can’t get my own Internet connection until I get a cell phone, which I can’t do until my alien registration card (外国人登録証明書) arrives. But only mostly! They’re going to issue me a interim not-card (仮外国人登録証明書) that will perform the same function as the card until a month from now when I will go get the card itself.

I’m going to wander around town for a while today and see about finding an open Wi-Fi hotspot. It appears to have stopped raining, so I should be able to walk around and just check my laptop every so often. I am suspecting that my best bet is by the 電気屋 (Fry’s) or down by the school.

Oh, apparently, the school has an active judo (wrestling) club. And kendo (sword-ing), kyuudo (archery), and a “free guide club”. Obviously, I have no idea what that last one is. This school is so amazingly massive that they have their own high school.