Archive for September, 2005

Sunset near Naruko

September 29th, 2005

Went out for a bike ride yesterday after work, along my usual narrow twisty section between Nakaniida and Naruko. Thankfully I had remembered to bring my camera, but without time for color balancing the original photo didn’t quite come out as I hoped. So I brought out the colors a bit in this photo to give you a sense of what this sunset actually looked like.

Sunset near Naruko

why there aren’t more engineers

September 29th, 2005

The truth hurts. I’m sure if more people really understood how universities work, there would be very few engineering applicants.

http://www.techcentralstation.com/092105B.html

I’ll take YOUR census!

September 29th, 2005

I got one of those census forms dropped in my mail slot the other day, and I’ve been doing my best to fill it out. Unfortunately, the “English guide” bundled with it is completely useless. It completely skips over several of the questions, and only gives a very brief explanation of the purpose of some of the questions and explains what TRANSLATIONS of the answers mean. This doesn’t help much if I can’t read the kanji for “Household head or representative” does it??? It tells me to “refer to the English version of the questionnaire” which DOES NOT EXIST. Ladies and gentlemen, witness a perfect example of THE WORLD’S WORST SURVEY.

They gave me TWO copies of the Japanese explanation of terms– I guess this is in case I can’t read the first, then I’ll be able to read the second. Uh huh. I think this year’s census is going to reveal that not a single foreigner lives in Japan BECAUSE WE CAN’T READ THE GODDAMN FORM.

Not quite 24?

September 28th, 2005

By far the oddest thing I’ve seen on TV so far was a parody of 24 guest involving Michael Jackson and starring the real Tony. Those of you who have seen the show will know exactly who I mean. He looked confused and visibly cracked up a few times. The rest of the guys in the skit/promo were all talking in Japanese of course. Comedic gold.

celebrity

September 28th, 2005

Photo

pop, soda, or coke?

September 27th, 2005

I remember seeing a map awhile back about distributions of Republicans and Democrats, with nice color codings. It’s amazing the kind of information you can scrape up if you start color coding maps.

http://www.popvssoda.com/countystats/total-county.html

Mitsu and Nick might find this interesting

September 22nd, 2005

I went touring with the group of “rabble-rousers” on Sunday to some sort of motorbike convention. Apparently it was mostly Kawasaki motorbikes– about 150 by my count. Take a look:

Bikes.  Lots of bikes.

Let’s see, what else… oh so apparently the leader of this bike club (the guy who I met at the motorcycle shop before) works at the Mitsubishi plant in Furukawa. And get this– the guy has a kei minivan (one of those little 600cc cars) with a turbocharger in it. And I’m sure it’s got aftermarket exhaust too, because it sounds like a little rumble monkey Civic or something similar.

This work by Jeff Hiner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.