randomwisdom.com

The post that appeared here before wasn't supposed to be published, but this software decided to make a private post public. Sorry about that. Things just haven't been going well recently, it seems.

NTT phoned me up and told me my Internet service, which was originally slated to begin on September 14th and later delayed a week to the 21st, was now going to be delayed until next month.

I've finished building and installing my fuel computer, after getting all the parts I absolutely needed to get it running. It starts up and idles just fine, but loses serial sync after a few seconds of running, requiring a complete restart. This makes tuning impossible. I don't know whether it's because of a bad solder joint somewhere, bad software, a bad driver, or a problem with the USB to serial adapter I'm using. I'm running in circles trying to fix it.

Yesterday I took my laptop apart completely, stripped it down to the motherboard, trying to find out why the power connector has become so unreliable in the past few months. There were carbon scorch marks on the board by the power plug, which I cleaned off, and I resoldered the connections. This took about 3 hours, during which I had every idiot in the staffroom breathing down my neck asking multiple times what I was doing. Not to offer help, but just seemingly to interrupt me while I was trying to remember which screws went where. I think it's fixed, but the only way to make sure is just to wait and see if it breaks again. If it's not I'll have to drop a couple grand on a new laptop.

Today I came into elementary school for the new semester. I guess they hired another teacher, because I got moved to a different desk. They took out all the neatly organized English word cards from my old desk (which took several hours to sort into some kind of order) and dumped them in a pile in a closet on the other side of the room. Apparently my new desk has no drawers or storage of any kind. I had two really important file folders on top of my desk, and the one with my curriculum somehow vanished into thin air. If they had simply waited for me to come in, or told me in advance, I would have moved these things on my own. Instead I walked in with 5 classes in a row scheduled and everything I needed to do my job scattered to the four goddamn winds. And to top it all off, the pointy haired bastards in some office somewhere decided to block my webmail portal, so I can't get email at elementary school anymore.

I haven't gotten much sleep the past week. It feels like nothing is coming to a close, I can't finish any projects. And while I can see the finish line, every time I approach it the line moves back. I feel exhausted, I haven't taken a real vacation in almost a year.

It looks like my webhost is having trouble now...

I spent most of yesterday hooking up the three remaining ALTs with mobile phones, from the same shop that sold me my own phone. Things went smoothly, I talked over all the contract options with the new recruits, they picked out their phones, stamped all the paperwork, and we made arrangements to pick up the activated and tested phones around 7:30 that evening, before the closing time of 8pm. Things were going smoothly... but there's always a hitch. The staff and I had both made the (reasonable) assumption that all the phone models in the store supported English. I mean, it should be pretty basic stuff, right? But when we picked up the phones we discovered that two of the three models they had selected didn't have even basic English support.

The local staff went above and beyond, staying well after their posted closing time to get everything switched over. But the fact is they shouldn't have had to. There was no good reason they had to stay extra hours or go through all the trouble of calling up the au center. Toshiba, Sharp, Sanyo, Kyocera, Mitsubishi, and every other phone maker: this is 2007. Data storage is cheap. The translations have been done. Pull your heads out of your asses, and put the translations on ALL of your goddamn phones. You know, it costs money to put in a nice camera chip and lens, it costs money to put in a better battery, it costs money to make the plastic shell in 15 different colors. I can even understand that it costs money to license the dictionary software that comes on every keitai. But adding an English option in the software doesn't cost you a single fucking cent! Jesus, IR data transfer and micro SD cards are a standard feature on every phone you sell, but you can't be bothered to make bilingual support a standard feature?? What the hell.

I finally got rid of my old Toshiba Vodafone keitai. I guess technically it's now a Softbank phone because they got bought out. It was a decent enough mobile phone but it was literally falling apart, I'd had it for two years, and I was frankly getting a bit fed up with the new management. I'd get an email in Japanese about once a month advertising some feature of their website that I didn't feel like deciphering, and there seemed to be no way to opt out or even switch it to English. Furthermore, to cut costs they stopped sending monthly statements in the mail. The new way to check your billing? Navigate a site all in Japanese, on your cell phone browser, paying money for the packets the whole way. Or pay 3 bucks a month for the privilege of getting a paper statement.

I had good experience with AU when I was living in Sendai some years ago, and a couple of the new JETs were walking around with the W52SA which has nice features like GPS and built in character recognition (which ties in directly with the dictionary), as well as an antenna for the TV tuner (for those of us not living directly beneath the broadcast towers). It looked nice, so I picked one up.

The phone is pretty nice, and the Engrish seems to be minimized compared to previous models. The Toshiba phone had some unintelligible error messages buried deep within the phone, along with a few internal dialog boxes that seemed to slip by without being translated. Unfortunately, the English integration is still poor even on the newer phone. Many of even the most basic features are simply untranslated. For example, the TV application is only in Japanese. When loading up the TV application I'm presented with a 4 page scrollable notification in Japanese, and good luck trying to choose the correct option from the two at the bottom. All of the critical controls for channel programming are only in Japanese-- even though I have my settings set to English. As these are individual phone features, it's really up to the phone manufacturer to fix these things, and I can't REALLY blame the service provider.

But the worst offender by far is the AU main portal page. The default page is beautifully laid out in Japanese (again, regardless of your phone's language setup) with Google search at the top, news, weather, train search, Wikipedia search, billing, support links. If you scroll all the way down there's an option for an English page, which looks like it was designed in the early 1990s. They haven't seemed to grasp the idea that if you have two language versions of a site they should look pretty much identical. At the top is a README link, which defaults to Japanese-- this is from the English page for crying out loud! There are no links for support or billing, and it wouldn't matter anyway because they haven't bothered to translate those pages into English. Good grief, guys, this is the 21st century. Pull your heads out and hire a couple guys to redesign your site, preferably one of them a native English speaker, and get the site to look as good as the Japanese one. I understand if the news isn't translated every day, because that's a continuing cost. But for crying out loud, billing and support only have to be translated once!

This morning was designated as a cleaning day, to sort through stuff in the old school building and either move it into the outdoor storage shed, throw it out, or move it into storage in the newer building. It's a job that's needed doing ever since the new building was constructed, and since everyone was here and nobody had classes the principal declared today to be THE day.

I was tasked with moving stacks of books from the newer storage room out into the storage shed, along with 2 other teachers. Two teachers tied the books together into stacks and I moved them out of the way into the hallway, from where they would be carried to the far end of the building and into the shed. Once I figured out where the books were going, I remembered some carts that we used last year when moving things into the new building. "So wouldn't it be a better idea to load these onto the cart and just make one trip?" I asked one of the teachers. From his reaction, I might as well have asked to load them onto the back of my pet unicorn and ride into the sky. I rolled my eyes, walked to the other end of the building, pulled one of the wheelbarrow-style carts up a flight of stairs and was back in three minutes. I then proceeded to move the stacks from the floor to the cart, and then wheeled it where it needed to go, amongst nervous giggles. We finished in about 10 minutes instead of 30. Again, the reactions from this simple application of available tools and common sense were as if I had broken the sound barrier in a Winnebago.

Incident #2: We finished moving stuff, and people started filtering back to their desks. I check my email, look up, and it's as if the staffroom has gone mad. All the best technology in the world at their fingertips, and every teacher in the room is down on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor of the teachers' room with hand towels. If I recall correctly, we solved that problem a few thousand years ago. It's called a goddamn mop. I tried pointing this out to them, and this was the result:

"Hey guys, why are all of you scrubbing on the floor like that when you could just have one person do it with a mop?"

"Well we can't use mops because it will get the floor wet." She made an exaggerated wringing motion with her damp towel to clarify.

"You do know you're supposed to wring out a mop before you use it, right?"

"Guhrrr... ehh? But... we have to clean the floor... aren't you going to help us?"

"You're all idiots. I'm going to go find a mop."

As it turned out, when I looked in the closet, the staffroom had plenty of buckets but does not seem to stock a mop. A quick trip to the supermarket five minutes down the road would have fixed that, or even a quick jaunt down to the storage shed might have turned something up. But they told me not to bother, and spent the next half hour hand polishing the floor and complaining that they should ask people not to wear shoes with black bottoms. I briefly thought of mentioning the concept of non-marking soles, but didn't want to dive into another ridiculous discussion.

I guess I shouldn't expect much. These are, after all, the same people who do not have even a simple ceiling fan in the staffroom, despite the fact that they have to come in every day and sit in the oppressive summer heat in the hottest room in the complex. I suppose the thought didn't occur to them, and they've been bitching every day about how it's so "atsui". But thankfully I don't have to bow to such utter stupidity.

I bought a desk fan on clearance for eight bucks, and brought it in today. I plugged it in and turned it on, and received awed looks from every teacher. Common sense, guys, not rocket science. I've never claimed to be the sharpest tack in the box, but I guess in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

While the previous week was hectic with the new JETs coming in and me doing all their translating for them, this last week everyone has been out of the office on vacation. Most of the smaller shops were shut down at least on Monday and Tuesday for Obon, the yearly national festival where ancestors are believed to come back and visit the world of the living for a short time. Most people take almost the whole week off to go back home and visit their families. I've been asked countless times if I went back to visit my own family, and everyone acts surprised when I tell them I'm going to wait until Christmas just like last year. Yeah, I want to fly home during the peak travel season, pay triple or quadruple the normal fares, and fly into 100 degree weather. I suspect there's a logical disconnect in their thinking somewhere.

No, I stayed in Nakaniida and divvied up the days between riding the motorcycle, spending time with my girlfriend, and spending the day on my own. I even took one day to visit a couple of the new JETs a few towns over, and we played a bit of Mario Party 8 before going off to a barbecue. The weather has been sunny and hot, though the humidity hasn't really lifted.

Sunday I was on my way back from a date when the girlfriend and I passed a crowd of policemen directing traffic in my hometown. I grabbed my camera and John's monopod to see if I could snap a couple shots of what was going on. I guess it was the Obon festival and dance for my town (pretty much every town has one). I got there just as things were wrapping up, chatted with some local friends and partook of the offered sake.

The new teacher Andres, when I told him there were burning braziers, initially thought the event was a re-enactment of Woodstock.

The dancers weren't perfectly in sync, but it was still cool to watch

Though it looks like I composed this so she was holding fire, this shot was purely accidental.

Last week Ian and I went to the famous Soma horse festival held in northern Fukushima. Sorry I didn't get these posted earlier, but I've been busy. And lazy.

We met up in southern Sendai and then drove down to Soma. Although we missed the parade, we got to see the cool part: people in full samurai armor with flags racing horses. I think most of them were pretty inexperienced, because in most races one person fell off their horse halfway through. Nobody was seriously hurt, but in every case the horse kept running the race along with everyone else... and then kept running after the race finished. Apparently the people on the ground had zero experience with horses, because their idea for stopping the rampaging equine was to stand in front of it and wave flags, in some sort of attempt at equestrian semaphore. I think we can all agree that's a really stupid idea. In one case there was a miscue and the next group of racers came out on the circuit before a stampeding horse ran out of steam. Instead of getting out of the way, some of the riders tried to block it in. Predictably, there was a collision, and the horse got up and just kept running. The situation resolved itself when the flag waving idiots directed the horse into a crowd of bystanders. I'm not making this up. But the flip side of this was that the same sense of danger gave the event some real excitement, kinda like Ben Hur and the chariot race. Maybe that's not the right analogy.

But in the end it appeared that nobody was seriously injured, and they proceeded with the next part of the festival: capture the flag... on horses! Well, it wasn't QUITE the same thing. They fire four flags up into the air with cannons and the samurai-garbed riders have to grab them. Judging by the competition the winner probably gets something really cool, though neither Ian nor I could figure out what. And then they do it again. And again. And as it was hot and we were sitting on a rather uncomfortable grass slope and we'd seen the best part anyway, my esteemed colleague and I jumped in the car and shouted hi-yo Silver.

I had a lot of fun with this photo

Which one is going to fall off?

They seem to have a different definition of "capture the flag" than we do...

Ian snaps off a beautiful portrait of a farmer on the way back home