Status Updated: Missed Flight, part two

I am (as of 10AM February 19th) still at the airport, and I'm doing alright. It's looking like my, uh, little mistake is going to cost my family about $1,500 on top of the $1,200 it already took.

Moral of the story: Don't miss your flight.

[Update:
The moral of the story is still "Don't miss your flight". The people at Northwest have been very helpful, especially when compared to the nice, if rather English-challenged lady I talked to who was with Travelocity. They were able to get it down to $1,200 by waiving a couple of fees and doing some kind of magic - this is actually what the woman said - which is pretty cool. If I were to wait a week, I could get it for "only" $300 on top of my current ticket price, but that flight was taken by the time I talked to them about it again.]

[Edit: Oh, and this is the 400th post to this blog. Beth put up two or three, so it's not my 400th. I had been hoping to hit 500 before I left, but I guess the number's not really important.]

Lecherous Statistics Advertisement

"Your log is full. Increase your log size today!"

Sure, it looks like spam that is going to promise that you can get Viagra for 10% it's normal price by going through Nigeria, but it's not.
This is what my stats app tells me every time I log into to see what's going on. And I chuckle every time. Wouldn't you?

Not Dead Yet

I'm not dead yet! Feeling quite well, actually. I think I'd like to go for a walk...

Yeah, I'm doing quite well actually. Just been surprisingly busy with stuff, and so I haven't been at my computer as much. What little time I've been at my computer has been spent organizing things or processing pictures. I have a couple of pictures to put up and I'll get to finding which ones to put up right now.

「日本：その土地の2つだけのProngs」

So... machine translation.

I went through and corrected some errors I saw right off, but it seems in general much more lucid than the going from Japanese to English. I mean, there are plenty of errors, and I'm sure I'm just missing a lot of weirdness because I'm not a native speaker, but at least what it spews out makes grammatic sense more than half the time, which is more than I can say for most other languages to English.

If you don't have Japanese font support installed, you can still see what this page looks like in terrible, machine-translated Japanese.

Statistically Speaking...

I was just looking at the statistics for pictures I've posted. I can see, for the most part, how often all the pictures on the site are viewed, and I was look at these so often when I ought to be doing other things, like studying, or not burning dinner.

The picture of the Shana figures has held the top spot since I posted it three months ago and nothing has displaced it that I know of.After that, these two pictures of girls dancing at the 外大際 gaidai-sai are tied for second place and have held steady about there for the past few weeks. For the record, I think the girl in this picture is the hottest of the ones on stage. Bonus for the amazingly sexy outfit, yes? I don't usually like lace, but... rawr, you know?

A clear fourth, though not until recently, is the panorama of the izakaya party that Miso arranged. I still don't know who Miso is, though I recall that she had a cool name. I think her last name was "Woo" or something like that, which just makes her whole name sound like an exclamation from someone who likes miso soup.

Miso, woo!

After that are a bunch of pictures that are all about even, and after that big set is one picture with me in it.
Slightly ahead of that picture is this picture of the molted exoskeleton of a cicada on a log, I think. As in, I don't know what kind of bug it is/was. Apparently, "In North China cicadas are skewered or stir fried as a delicacy." (Wikipedia)

At least I know where I stand.

Matsuri-try

There was a festival today.

People marched.
I took pictures.

It rained.
I'm wet.

Some horses came by.
I have 600 pictures.

There is another festival today.

Workin' on a Post

I'm detailing what's gone on the past few days that has kept me so busy, but it's late and I have class in the morning, so I'll see about getting posted tomorrow (Monday). That'll help me procrastinate on studying for the big test on Tuesday!

Oops, Sleep.

I kept meaning to write a post about the stuff I've been doing the past few days, but I got in a long and very involved email conversation with someone and ended up writing a few pages of that instead.
I'll try and get up early and get some pictures up here, with some accompanying textual bits.

For now, sleepy bed bed, says my sleepy-o-meter.

Peanut Butter and Jelly Victory!

I was just looking through the statistics for this site and I was happily surprised. Someone found the post I wrote on peanut butter and jelly rice and not by accident. I kid you not: someone actually searched for peanut butter and jelly rice on Google, and this blog comes up.

Not only that, but other people have recipes up for it.

Pretend I've got a spiel here about how "They all laughed" and "I'll show them all" and "[maniacal laughter]".

Query Responses

In other news, here are the top results for how people search to find the blog. The majority of people just straight to the address ([my name] + ".com" + "/japan"), but a good percentage of people gett here by completely different methods.

Percent	Terms
21.9%	maiko
9.4%	monkey
9.4%	japan the land of only two prongs
6.3%	judo choke out
6.3%	rice cooker

But some of the best things are the completely random ones:

frawress victoly	what is kouhai mean
mcdonalds english menu japan	japan america land area
butterfly seek hdd	how to buy a bike in japan
japanese camera bag	bicycle drum brake japanese
ramen museum+tokyo	okonomiyaki utensils
Okayama farm picking	tikimee
japan 3 pronged plugs	soap japan
sex shops in oomiya city

I'm going to do my best to satisfy the searches that actually make sense.

• Maiko - Maiko are like the oh-so-famous geisha, but are in training. Maiko tend to wear brighter clothes, and have more colorful decorations. In my experience, maiko are more likely to be attractive, probably because they're tend to be much younger and in better shape.
  My post "Jeff" has some pictures of actual maiko, and my post Maiko'd has my friends getting dressed up as maiko.
• Monkeys - I've run into these while hiking to the east of Kyoto, and at the monkey park.
• Judo choke out - There are lots of different ways to choke someone out in judo, and honestly, if you manage to get someone into a choke hold, they deserve what they get. For more information on the chokes in judo, please see JudoInfo's page on the topic.
• Rice cookers - I use my rice cooker almost as much as I use my computer. It's constantly either keeping rice warm or making it warm. I paid $60 for mine at Joshin's, an electronics store, when I first got here. I would recommend anybody staying in Japan longer than a few weeks to look at getting a rice cooker. You can probably find a small, cheap one at a recycle shop for $20 or so.
  The cheapest rice cooker I've seen was $47, and was a total waste of money. It held 1.5 cups of rice, and had no warming feature, no timer. Switch on, switch off. Same thing in the States would cost $10 and hold twice as much rice.
  The most expensive rice cooker I've seen was priced at about $1,200. It was a 10-cup contraption with stainless steel casing. Presumably, it makes rice taste better?
  
• Frawress victoly - Uh, I guess I used this once? It's just "flawless victory" with the Rs and Ls flipped, as per the basic rules of Engrish.
• mcdonalds english menu japan - The McDonalds here in Kyoto have Japanese menus, then on the back of those menus are English versions. Same in Osaka and Kobe, so no worries.
• Japanese camera bag - Don't buy camera gear here in Japan. Just don't. I mean a bag isn't usually a really expensive piece of gear, but in general, it's cheaper to fly to America and buy it there. Nonetheless, I did buy a small camera bag here for $27. It's an American brand, though, just like nearly all camera bag brands are. I mean, LowePro, Tamrac, National Geographic...
• ramen museum+tokyo - See my post on the ramen museum. You should be warned that the museum is in Shin-Yokohama, and not Tokyo. It's probably a half hour out of, say, Shinjuku, but don't quote me on that.
• Okayama farm picking - I guess this is a common thing? I haven't heard of anybody doing it except our trip to the strawberry field. If anybody seriously wants me to research this, drop me a line via email and I can look into it.
• japan 3 pronged plugs - Key word here is konsento, which, while pronounced like the English consent ("permission"), means an electric plug. Almost all plugs here in Japan are only two prongs, hence the name of this blog. If you're wondering if your American electronics will work here, they should be fine. My laptop had no problems in Yokohama, which is in Eastern Japan, and thus uses 50Hz. Neither did my cell phone charger or Bluetooth headset charger.
  If you're looking for a converter, you can probably get by with some obscene gestures involving fingers and holes. People who work in shops here often don't know what their store sells, so don't believe any employee of a large store who says that they don't sell a particular item. This happened to me and I got a little upset, and proceeded to show the Joshin employee where they keep the converters.
  
• sex shops in oomiya city - ... I've never been to Oomiya city, but there's a part of Kyoto called Oomiya. The only sex shop I know about in Kyoto is over by Kawaramachi, though. If you're looking specifically for sex shops, I'd look for a larger city like Tokyo or Osaka. Osaka's less than an hour away, though, so...
• what is kouhai mean - All criticism about grammar and the formation of effective search queries aside... kouhai refers to someone you are senior to in some kind of organization, be it a club or a company or school. The term isn't used very often, though you hear its opposite, sempai, quite often.
  Again, people with less rank than you are your kouhai, and your superiors are sempai.
  
• japan america land area - The entire Japanese archipelago (377,873 km²) has roughly the same land area as the state of California (423,970 km²), and that's pretty much the best comparison I've seen between the two. It's worth pointing out that while California is mostly habitable, Japan has something around 7% arable land, and in spite of that, has over half the population (127,433,494) of the USA (estimated at 305 million).
  
• how to buy a bike in japan - Go to a used bike shop with $60, and buy a bike. Point to the one you want, and wave the money around. New bikes start at $100, and go up through $400 for normal ones, with battery-powered ones at about $900. You don't need to bring anything with you except for some kind of proof of identity, but to fill out the bike registration card (required), you will need to know your address, and they prefer it if you have a telephone number as well. There's a $5 for buying any kind of bike, new or used. If you don't have to fill out a registration card, there's a chance the bike was either stolen, or that there's some other questionable thing going on. Keep in mind that if you get a bike from your buddy who's leaving the country, and the cops stop you - I've heard they stop foreigners a lot, but I've never been stopped on my bike - they're going to wonder why you're using someone else's bike.
• bicycle drum brake japanese - Japanese bikes tend to use drum brakes instead of the pad- and disc-type brakes common in America. They consist of a band of metal that compresses around a central cylinder, probably made of something heat resistant like arsenic. They're loud and squeaky and often used instead of the bell on a bike. "Drum brake" in Japanese is, unsurprisingly, doramu bureeki.
• okonomiyaki utensils - Okonomiyaki can be made with any generic turner, or even a spatula if you must. Okonomiyaki shops tend to have little metal spatulas ("spatulae"?) that you use to cook and murderate the okonomiyaki. You should be able to buy them at any supermarket or someplace like Jusco.
• tikimee - That's the name of the guy that tagged my site on StumbleUpon. I guess he does this a lot?
• soap japan - Soap is soap. There's nothing special about soap here as far as I know. They have a similar selection to what I've seen in the States. Prices are decent.
  

And that's the end of that. I've been meaning to do this post for a few months now. I wish I could email these people somehow, but you can't really send emails to IPs, and with XP SP2, NT Messenger Service was disabled by default...

Slow Week, part three

This is my last full week of summer freedom and I have a proficiency test coming up on Saturday. Between that and trying to switch over to a awake-during-the-day sleep schedule, I'm not doing much that's particularly exciting stuff to write about right now.

Grah, so tired...

Weird 'Net Twitchiness

I don't know what's causing it, but I've been having problems accessing services authenticated by Google, such as Blogger and Gmail. Around 6PM my time, the connection starts become a little wonky as it becomes evident that Japan has expanded access to broadband faster than it's expanded the infrastructure to support it. From 6PM until midnight or 1AM, the connection is not very fast, and the ISPs do their best to stop any kind of peer-to-peer filesharing, such as Winny, BitTorrent, and eDonkey.

During that time, I have issues getting logged into Blogger, for some reason, though if I'm already logged in I have no problems using the site. I had to restart my web browser around 4PM and didn't log into Blogger again until about 7PM, and it naturally failed. I was able to login around 1:30AM and now it's all good.

As far as what the problem is, I'm not certain. Only Google seems to be affected, strangely. And only if I'm trying to log in. It's weird.

Erm...

I'm not quite sure what happened today. I have stuff to write, and pictures to post, but somehow I didn't get around to it.
It's on the list for tomorrow. Well, later today.
Gr, 1AM...

Back Home

I'm back in Kyoto and still alive. Food takes precedence over writing, and sleep is getting pretty high up on the list, too. I'm going to work on blog posts about the trip tomorrow after some errands, so they shouldn't be too long in coming.

Waterville?

By the way, who lives out in Waterville that reads this? I think everybody I know that lived there has moved to other places. Drop me a line?
That reminds me! My email address is at the bottom, in case anybody was wondering.

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.

Queries

I have no idea how this works, but someone managed to find my blog not once, but twice, by searching orginal sexy prong in the prety on Google. I can't make any sense of the query, though. Am I just not up on the current terminology of society, or what?

Repellant Testing

Alright, here's pretty much the ultimate test for this bug repellant stuff I got from Shari: I'm going to go to an area where there are lots of mosquitoes and ants and whatnot, while wearing shorts, a t-shirt, and sandals.
I've put some repellant on all of my exposed skin (don't forget the ears - seriously!) and anything near a clothing boundary that could become exposed through normal movement or by someone far more flexible than I.

If I survive to write the next post, the stuff works.
---
Thus far, it's seems to be working great. I appear to have missed a small part of my left elbow, however, which went from one bite when I left to... somewhere between three and ten.
I have the next two posts written, and I had meant to post them now, but I forgot to get the pictures off of my camera. No surprise there.
---
In other news, I now know what mosquitoes look like during sex. Until they broke apart, I was trying to figure out what has 12 legs, four sets of eyes, and wobbles back and forth without going anywhere.

Return.

I'm back, finally1 I got lots of pictures today. I took about 512 in total, though I was spamming pretty hard, and I'd be lucky for a hit:miss ratio of 1:5. Computer's processing the pictures right now, so I can't upload them. It's 12:30AM and I need some sleep so I'll get them up tomorrow after a my second set of post-processings.

I need sleep.

It's possible to get a brain freeze from cold water, by the way. One way to do this is by having very nearly frozen water in a jug, then chugging half a liter of it.

Sleep for me, pictures first thing in the morning, I promise.

StumbleUpon

Apparently, one of you guys uses StumbleUpon.
I was checking my statistics, and I've had 768 page loads today, which makes the previous record, 104, seem... somewhat paltry.
That said, there were 429 unique visitors today, which means the median person looked at the main page, then went about their business somewhere else.


So, uh... Hi?

[Edit: It would seem that it was StumbleUpon user "Tikimee" who tagged the site. I'd love to see how he/she found it, but the nearly 1000 page loads kind of overwhelmed my logs...]
[Edit 2: And I've had nearly 1,500 page loads today, which makes the previous record of 822 (yesterday) seem kind of paltry.
So is my normal traffic paltry^2?]