- Mood:
contemplative - Music:Dayvan Cowboy - Boards of Canada - The Campfire Headphase
Ok not enough people were available for Brum so we'll just be doing Little Italy on Monday. Current plan is to book a table for 7 @ 8pm.
---
So turns out it's not long until my birthday (but hey you knew that right!?). I've been umming and ahhing over what I should do this year. Last year I spent my birthday in Venice which was ace. Since I'm saving up for a return to Japan I can't do anything quite so splashy this time, besides 28 ain't that special. It's a Monday which makes it tricky for lots of people to do anything much. So choices are an evening meal that day or go do something over the weekend beforehand. I've boiled it down to two choices and would like to gauge everyone's interest:
1) Monday 27th - Evening meal in Little Italy*
2) Saturday 25th - Trip to Brum and Wagamama.
Could in theory do both if there is split between people who can/can't make one or the other. Your thoughts appreciated.
* last year while in Italy I actually had a very nice Chinese meal on my birthday after getting a bit tired of my pizza diet! Hence why it's kind of fun and ironic to have an Italian meal this time around in the UK :P Admittedly having an Italian meal in China would be better still but that's a little too much effort!
- Mood:
cheerful - Music:My Generation
Aberystwyth is in the news today because the town's first screening of Monty Python's The Life of Brian has attracted quite a bit of attention.. Apparently there are still a handful of religious fanatics vehemently opposed to it, which is amusing. Props to Gareth for getting the film and the special guests together including Michael Palin. Here's the most recent report from Sky News (20MB, QuickTime H.264).
Click the image above to play the video.
- Mood: cheerful
Travelling to Kyoto was an experience of aerodynamic, high-speed luxury on one of Japan’s famous shinkansen (bullet trains). From the outside it looked like something straight from the future, but inside was rather conservative. While it lacked some of the conveniences I’ve experienced on other high speed trains like the Eurostar or Virgin Pendolino, the seats were comfortable, reclined and had an almost obscene amount of legroom. A trolly service zipped up and down the cars so quickly blink and you’d miss it.
It was dark by the time we arrived in Kyoto’s impressive modern station with its high glass and steel ceiling. As ever finding the correct exit proved a challenge and we ended up around the side of the station. Luckily there were taxis already waiting there so it was easy to get to our hotel which was less than 10 minutes away by car. As we’d come to expect at this point the driver didn’t know a word of English, or if he did he was keeping quiet about it. Thankfully it’s a big hotel and the driver recognised the name.
The hotel was incredibly swish looking for a 3 star. Even outdoing the Sunroute Plaza in Shinjuku. Our bags were taken to our room for us by an apparently very strong young Japanese girl who had no problem hefting about 40Kg worth of baggage. The décor became a little suspect as we left the lobby, with flowery prints on the elevator doors and stripes on our room’s walls. We later discovered an entire gothic style chapel housed inside the hotel just down from the lobby. I wish now that I’d taken a photo of it because it was so surreal. Presumably it’s there for those wishing to experience a western style wedding ceremony.
Our first full day in Kyoto quickly revealed that without the bright neon, towering skyscrapers and excitement of Tokyo, the mish-mash of modern Japanese architecture is rather ugly. Kyoto isn’t a city full of skyscrapers, in fact the Kyoto Tower is the tallest building there. Its appearance seems rather in keeping with the rest of the modern city around it and unlike the rather majestic Tokyo Tower, it was instead a concrete spike with a single observatory at the top with a grotty looking hotel building beneath it.
Still our disappointment at the ugliness of the modern city was soon washed away by the first destination we travelled to. The Fushimi Inari shrine was simply incredible. A seemingly endless passageway wound up the mountain beneath thousands of reddy-orange torii gates. Some ancient, some much more recent and quite a few completely rotted away and removed leaving only their round concrete bases. Hundreds of shrines of various sizes and levels of grandeur interrupted the route periodically in dense clusters. The only thing outnumbering the shrines (aside from the aforementioned torii gates) were the Japanese families all apparently there for a mixture of picnics and prayer. I don’t really remember seeing any other westerners, the benefit of going out of season I suppose.
Our next visit was the Kyoto International Manga museum, which I discovered while munching a delicious tonkatsu lunch and browsing a leaflet we had found at the station. It was conveniently close to our hotel too, lucky since the weather had changed for the worse since we had left the Inari shrine earlier.
The museum was less about exhibits and more about being a vault for all the world’s manga. Corridors and reading rooms were packed with thousands of manga volumes, arranged in an order I never quite got the hang of. Quite a few people sat around in the corridors reading intently. It felt a bit like a library. Some interesting exhibits showed artwork from various comic artists from all over the world and some really old and early examples of manga. Done browsing I bought an awesome Naruto t-shirt from the gift shop which no doubt you’ll see me wearing at some point or other.
The following day greeted us with sunny weather so we decided to go and see the Gion district, the traditional area of Kyoto, to see if the city could redeem itself from its ugly first impression. While a lot more visually pleasing than elsewhere in Kyoto, Gion was decidedly more modern looking than I had expected. Perhaps I was expecting to see something more like what I saw in Memoirs of a Geisha, but Gion lacked any of the apparent age or charm one expects from something supposedly old fashioned and traditional.
We did get lucky and spot a maiko (trainee geisha) bustling down a back street with what looked like shopping bags from some designer outlet in hand, but even this was a slightly awkward juxtaposition of old and new.
While wandering around the back streets of Gion we came across what turned out to be the Kennin-ji Temple. It’s apparently the oldest zen temple in Kyoto and was founded some 800 years ago. We were able to enter the temple (after paying and removing our shoes of course) and wander around the large, simple rooms. The floors were all covered in tatami mats, and the rooms were light and airy with the sun shining in. With all the sliding screens open and the little enclosed garden courtyards you rarely had the definite sense of being either in or outdoors. It rather makes me yearn to live in a traditional Japanese style house. Also particularly impressive was the Dharma Hall with it’s amazing painted ceiling, depicting two dragons. I was surprised to later discover this is actually a modern installation (April, 2002), but still it was very impressive.
On our final day in Kyoto we visited the Golden Pavilion and the Kiyomizu Temple. Unlike Tokyo where you could go just about anywhere on the metro or JR lines, we had to resort to using a bus to get to the Golden Pavilion. Kyoto does have two metro lines but they don’t go very far and mostly cover the city centre. It took nearly an hour on the bus even though it wasn’t all that far. One of the caveats of the grid system of urban layout is vehicles having to stop every few hundred yards.
The Golden Pavilion and its gardens were beautiful as expected. Sadly the sky was overcast so we didn’t see it at its best, it must look truly spectacular in the Spring or Autumn on a nice sunny day. Even so the little ornamental islands in the pond by the temple with their gnarly trees looked fantastic.
The Kiyomizu temple was similarly spectacular, this time set up quite high in the hills and on the outskirts of Kyoto. Part of the temple sticks out over the cliff and has a complex and apparently very traditional Japanese style support structure underneath it to hold it up. On our walk through the temple grounds we stopped at a little restaurant of some kind where my friends enjoyed some sake and I had a bottle of Asahi beer.
Another perk of the Kiyomizu Temple is that it offers great views over the city, which looked good in the hazy evening sunlight. Wandering back with the setting sun glinting off the myriad of overhead wires down the narrow back streets I found myself some what forgiving Kyoto for its modern ugliness. Every city has its charms I guess.
So that pretty much concludes things, I hope you’ve enjoyed hearing about my travels in Japan. It’s an amazing, unique place and I can’t recommend it highly enough. I’m desperate to go back as soon as I can and I’m already drawing up plans to visit in the autumn for a couple of weeks. Finally as promised you can see a selection of my favourite photos from the trip here on Flickr.
- Mood: cheerful
Nikko
I’d been hoping like crazy for snow in Nikko, and while there was some, it was clearly past its best and mostly melted in the non-shaded areas. Still there was some and the outstanding beauty of the area helped me get over it. I would still love to see it under a good blanket of snow, so a future trip is most likely in order. It should be exceptionally beautiful in the autumn too.
Unlike with Tokyo and Kyoto in Nikko we stayed at what’s called a ryokan or Japanese inn. These have traditional style rooms with tatami mats on the floors instead of carpets, futons instead of beds and no central heating! We were a bit nervous about the latter point given the temperature in Nikko had frequently been dropping well below zero at night and barely reaching above it during the day (pretty similar to how it was here during the cold snap back in early January). We found the room was indeed cool, but thankfully had a little gas heater (which we ran throughout the night) and the futons had copious layers of blankets and duvets making them very snug.
A Japanese style room
The view from our window was impressive and the polar opposite of the view we’d had in Shinjuku: a forest and a river. The river water looked like something from an Evian commercial, it was so clean and clear looking.
The river we later discovered was crossed by the famous sacred bridge ‘Shinkyo’. The bridge while pretty is a little overrated. You had to pay to cross it and you couldn’t actually exit on the far side so you had to go back the way you came! Still given it exited straight onto a fairly busy road that was perhaps not such a bad thing.
Shinkyo bridge
Across the road from the bridge was a very small shrine. Nothing special, just a typical little Shinto shrine of which there must be thousands across Japan. I made a point of going up and dropping a few coins in praying for snow from whomever the kami was who dwelt there. Did it all in Japanese too (who knows if kami are bilingual?). I probably lost a few atheist points doing so but it was a fun experience all the same. If I were to have a faith it would be hard not to pick Shinto. It really is the non-religious man’s religion, there when you need it or for a cultural knees-up, but not hassling you the rest of the time.
Road-side shrine
That evening we had great fun (by which I mean a Herculean challenge) trying to find somewhere to eat. Nikko’s attractions, while open all year around seem to shut around 3:30 - 4pm. Along with them pretty much everything else in the town does too. Everywhere we went we were greeted by closed shops and restaurants. Finally though we found a charming little place which was obviously popular with tourists. Its walls were covered with postcards, letters, bank notes and scraps of paper from former customers thanking the owners for their food and hospitality. The food was indeed good and very reasonably priced. Having no paper with me at the end of the meal I simply wrote a quick thank you on a business card and added it to the collage on the wall.
I guess I didn’t pay enough or ring the bell hard enough at the shrine the previous evening as the next day brought with it no new snow. Still wrapped up warmly we made our way to the first temple. It was a relatively short walk from our ryokan, up stone steps with a little half frozen stream running beside them down a dedicated channel. Unlike in Wales where streams and runoff are allowed to flood roads and find their own way down hillsides, all waterways in Japan are highly managed and even the smallest trickle of water will have a channel prepared for it.
Sambutsu-doo hall
At the top of the hill was the Rinnoji Temple which is part of a much larger complex of interconnected temples and shrines. In front of the temple I bought a fortune slip and good luck charm (a small golden frog). My fortune was ‘excellent’ so I didn’t need to go tie it to a tree in the shrine to ward off any bad luck.
After climbing the steps to the first temple building the first thing you do is go through the Sambutsu-doo hall, where sadly photography is prohibited. The most interesting thing in there are the three huge Buddha statues, covered in gold leaf. Apparently they are also considered the three gods of Mount Nikko which is a rare fusion of Shinto and Buddhism.
After exiting the rear of the hall the next thing to catch my eye was the Kannon-doo hall and it’s bell and then the Shooyoo garden. The garden was a bit dead due to it being mid-winter but still looked rather pretty. It must be amazing during the spring and autumn. All the ponds were covered with a thick layer of ice but most of the snow was melted there.
Shooyoo garden
Also around the back of the main hall building and of note was the Soorin-too which is basically the spire from a pagoda, minus the pagoda. It’s another Buddhist thing I guess.
Wandering on to the next place we found Tooshoogu shrine. A massive complex of shrines with a big five story pagoda greeting you as soon as you pass through the entrance torri gate. All the buildings in this shrine were incredibly colourful and ornate, with fanciful carvings of dragons, lions and all manner of creatures. It also contains a stable with the famous carved wooden monkeys depicting ‘Hear no evil, speak no evil and see no evil’.
Carved monkeys
There isn’t really much more to say about Nikko and its shrines as it was such a visual experience so I’ll leave you with some more pictures:
I'll upload a full gallery after I've written my last entry (on Kyoto).
- Mood: cheerful
Tokyo
You could spend a lifetime exploring Tokyo and still never have the chance to walk every street, it's that massive and sprawling and seemingly endless. The central part of Tokyo with its skyscrapers and famous shrines and temples is truly an amazing place and should be high on anyone's 'must see' list.
Tokyo with Mount Fuji in the distance
View from our hotel room in Shinjuku
Shinjuku has an underground labyrinth that passes for a station which is actually several stations conjoined with shopping malls and other curious spaces over a huge area. Coming out the right exit is key to not getting horribly lost, but where's the fun in that? Above ground skyscrapers abound. Every tall building in Tokyo is adorned with softly pulsing red lights on each imaginable corner at night which makes for a pretty sight and is presumably useful for any very low-flying aircraft. The Shinjuku Metropolitan Government Building's free observation deck (and the Tokyo Tower which is elsewhere) offer incredible views over the city, letting you see as far as Mount Fuji in the distance if it's clear. It takes a little while to get used to the realising the shops and restaurants you see on the street level are far from the only ones in any given building. Those signs you see creeping up to the rooves of the buildings are showing that there are probably another 7 stores above it.
Ginza
Ginza and Shibuya are a shoppers dream and nightmare merged into one. Expensive shops come at you from every turn and elevation, while swarms of people wait to burst forth from the sidewalks the second the street lights change. Huge TVs behind glass fronted buildings and neon signs blink and draw the eye up from the street. Snatches of jpop and cheerful sounding girls babbling in Japanese from loudspeakers bubble from numerous places around you. Shop attendants cheerfully call 'Irashaimasen! (welcome) continually as either guttural cries or through polite smiles. Walking back and forth within the same store, the same attendant will welcome you each time you pass him or her. It takes awhile to get over the sticker shock of seeing five and six figure prices.
Akihabara, the Electric Town, was brilliant. Where else could you find shops selling everything from cameras and TVs on the ground floor, kimono on the second and manga smut on the 3rd? We walked into one store that had two whole floors or yaoi (gay) manga and doujinshi (unofficial manga featuring popular characters, the manga equivalent of fanfics if you like). Although it's mainly a genre aimed at women we spotted a few men up there. I was able to get another of my One Piece figures (Nico Robin) for a good price (around £30) which is cheaper than what it would have been to import it from Hong Kong.
Shimokitazawa
Shimokitazawa, which I visited with James, was Tokyo on a more human scale. Small friendly shops and cheap restaurants lined each narrow, bustling street. Lawsons Station, am pm, K-Mart and other Conbini's (convenience stores) appeared on almost every street offering everything from fresh shirts and manga to light meals and snacks. There were arcades full of video games ranging from brand-new to pretty ancient and those machines full of cuddly toys you have to try and grab my maneuvering a robotic claw. Tony Tony Chopper from One Piece is obviously pretty popular given his frequent presence in such machines alongside stalwarts like Hello Kitty.
Laputa robot on the roof of the Ghibli Museum
The Ghibli Museum in Mitaka is beautiful. It's a wonderfully quirky building with pretty little stained glass windows featuring Totoro's and other creatures which cast beautiful little pools of coloured light on the floor with the sun shining through. Spiral staircases and bridges, tiny passageways for children to clamber through and a general sense eccentricity make the place thoroughly charming and fascinating. The animated exhibits on the ground floor are the highlight, showing various scenes animated through different methods. These things are best seen rather than described and since no photography was allowed inside you'll just have to go see for yourself!
Asakusa
Asakusa was our first taste of Japanese shrines and the bustling religions that go with them (Shinto and Buddhism). Omiyagi (souvenir) stalls line the road between the two gates with their giant lanterns that lead to the temple. A huge five story pagoda sits to one side of the main temple. There were people everywhere, nearly all Japanese and many there to pray. The eager worshippers rattled boxes of numbered sticks to get their fortune slips, shook shrine bells and clapped their hands with great enthusiasm before bowing their heads in silent prayer. The smell (and smoke) from burning incense was strong in the air. A giant burner full of incense sticks was surrounded by people who would waft the smoke over themselves in some kind of cleansing exercise before entering the shrine. On either side of the main shrine building were two walls of sake barrels for the apparently thirsty gods.
Ueno
Ueno park and the shrines and temples within it were a pleasant break from the hustle and bustle of Tokyo. The silence there was only broken by the occasional clapping and bell ringing associated with the shrines and the cawing of ravens, that seem omnipresent in such places. Large stone lanterns line all the walkways to the elegant pagodas that house the shrines themselves. A peace memorial sits to one side of the walkway, where a flame supposedly ignited by an atom bomb, has been kept burning since the end of the war.
Shinigawa Aquarium
Shinigawa is near to the Tokyo Bay area which we sadly didn't get a chance to explore, but did have a bit of a view over from our final hotel's lobby. Smaller than Shinjuku and without the lights or dazzle of Ginza and Shibuya the area wasn't hugely exciting. The large train station there is where we caught the Shinkansen down to Kyoto. One place we did visit there however was the Shinigawa Aquarium. A large and impressive aqarium with a huge variety of creatures ranging from tanks of pulsing jellyfish to the usual dolphins and sealions. The later which we saw perform some very impressive tricks with their outwardly clumsy looking bodies. Underwater glass tunnels gave a really fascinating way to view the fish swimming around and above you.
General Observations:
Vending machines nestle in every side street offering you 24 hour access to any kind of drink you could want, hot or cold. You're probably never further than 100 meters from a vending machine in Tokyo. You think it's overkill at first, but you quickly realise how damn convenient it is. Typical prices for anything from a vending machine are about ¥120-¥150. This is about £1-£1.25 today but would be much less if the exchange rate would sort itself out.
All Japanese restaurants have wax/plastic representations of the meals they sell. Many of these are incredibly lifelike, everything is presented perfectly from ice cream to each grain of rice. Sometimes they do clever things like suspend chopsticks in mid-air from noodles coming from a bowl of ramen.
Tokyo Metro map
The public transportation system in Japan is incredible. The trains are always on time to the minute. In Tokyo you can get everywhere and anywhere by either JR (over-ground) or the various metro lines. One annoyance however is that there are so many companies operating different lines which means multiple fares and tickets. You can't use the JR rail pass on the metro, you can't use the Tokyo Metro pass on the Toei lines or the Keio lines etc. Buying tickets is quite easy. The ticket machines always have a route map above them, so you locate where you are and simply find the station you're travelling to and put the amount of yen into the machine indicated on the map for that station (always the higher amount unless you're a child) and out pops the ticket and any change you're owed.
All the signs on the public transport system are bilingual in Japanese and English. Sometimes finding maps which have the English names on can be tricky though, especially at the smaller stations so it's worth carrying a map around. All announcements are also bilingual for the most part. Some excellent free maps covering both the streets and transport network can be picked up at the Shinjuku Metropolitan Govt. Building.
The temperature difference between indoors and outdoors is extreme. It's about 5 or 6 degrees outside and you go indoors and it's in the upper 20s. When you're popping in and out of shops and public transport it's quite exhausting. The only solution I found was to wear clothes I could quickly unbutton and unzip when I went inside because you need the layers once you're outdoors again.
There are two kinds of menus in Japan, pictorial ones and textual ones. If you're a foreigner with little knowledge of kanji and you pick the later, you're screwed as the waiter/waitress won't be able to explain anything to you in English 99% of the time.
If you work on the assumption that no one in Japan has any knowledge of the English language and plan accordingly then you'll be fine. Some people do speak it of course, at exceptionally touristy places or at information desks you'll probably get lucky. But anywhere else and people will look at you blankly. Knowing some basic Japanese is essential for communication in Japan in pretty much every situation.
The Japanese seem to like ham. In fact if you want a sandwich or roll in many places your choices will only be ham with something. You can get these amazing little sandwiches which are sealed around the edges a bit like a toasted sandwich which keeps all the filling neatly inside so you don't make a mess while you eat. Both tasty and perfect for me!
Everywhere you go to eat you'll be bought a hot towel to clean your hands. This is really nice when you have to use public transport to get everywhere, which usually entails hanging off the overhead hand holds.
- Mood:
impressed
It's only 6 days now until I fly out to Japan. To say I'm excited about this would be a big understatement. These last few days are not without their frustrations however, I'm still a little worried about getting sick again after the long chest infection that floored me over Christmas. Still hopefully everything should be fine in that regard as I've now finished my second course of antibiotics. Another cause of irritation is discovering my iPhone won't work in Japan. Despite being quad band it seems Japan is one of the few countries in the world that doesn't have any kind of GSM network. With no GPRS or Edge either my phone would be a brick over there. Now if I had an iPhone 3G I'd be fine as that apparently supports the 3G network used in Japan. So I tried going to Carphone Warehouse in town and calling O2 customer service about getting an upgrade, with no joy. It seems I can't upgrade my phone until my contract runs out even if I'm happy to extend my contract by another 18 months and pay for the damn handset. I could technically get a pay as you go iPhone now but I really don't want to spend £340 on one when I can probably get it for £90 or less in a few months. I could apparently have upgraded in a 2 month window last year but now it's impossible for me until May. Fucking brilliant. Anyway thankfully I'm able to borrow a Sony Ericsson from my travel buddy which should work on the Softbank 3G network in Japan and all I need to do is get a Vodafone pay as you go SIM for it. At least their data plan is a heck of a lot cheaper than O2's abroad.
- Mood: thoughtful
When 'crap' is the first word out of your mouth when asked about how your Christmas went then a bit of an explanation is usually required. An eyebrow raises and the questioner wonders why you're such a miserable fucker all of a sudden. Well everything was going smoothly right up until Monday evening back at my parents. The train journey home, while long and tedious, went smoothly. I managed not to get lost in Birmingham changing stations (something about gong from New St. to Moor St. seems to confuse my internal compass). I arrived in High Wycombe precisely on-time, after having lost my outward ticket in Birmingham with no trouble. Had a really nice roast lamb dinner with my folks. All good.
Then the mild little chest infection that I thought was about to bugger off the week before found some new source of energy to tap into and went crazy. I was able to get some antibiotics for it the next morning but this evidently wasn't soon enough as I had to spend the rest of the week, through the majority of Christmas day, in bed feeling very sorry for myself. So yeah Christmas in bed feeling exhausted because you've barely slept, with a painful cough, foggy consciousness, an aching back and of course no appetite is indeed crap. I'm feeling a lot better today thankfully, I should even manage my 3rd full meal since Monday tonight with any luck. I just have a horrid tickling cough and running nose to contend with now at least. I'm pretty sure this is the first year in memory that I've been sick over Christmas, hopefully this will be both the first and last time.
All that aside it has been great seeing my family, I got some great gifts (parents twigged I like Japanese stuff, yay). So some small silver lining in there. I hope you all had a better time of the festive season than me anyway, speak to you all soon.
- Mood:
tired
Victims so far this month include my bluetooth keyboard, ADSL router and my Lacie external HDD.
I managed to break the keyboard when replacing the batteries - a piece of plastic that wasn't supposed to come out did and I managed to put it back in the wrong way around and it jammed so I couldn't fit the batteries back in. Trying to pry pieces of plastic out of long narrow aluminium tubes is surprisingly hard it turns out! I ended up snapping some nerve thin wires which I successfully re-soldered, but the top two rows of keys seem permanently dead now. This is the most annoying failure of the lot as it was an expensive keyboard and I loved typing on it. Plus it wasted an evening.
My LinkSys ADSL router is now over 2 years old and the wireless base station in it has been slowly failing it seems. Today it bit the dust, ping times were anywhere from a few milliseconds to 10 seconds or more with serious packet loss. No amount of turning it on and off or fiddling with the settings seemed to want to repair it. I've had a few problems lately where ping times had been crappy then recovered and other odd internet slow downs, I guess I know why now. Bought a new ADSL router from Argos today and everything is back to normal.
The external Lacie drive is ancient, I've had it since around 2004 and while it was using a new HDD (which is fine incidentally) clearly the firewire bridge board was on its way out as the drive would randomly unmount. Having a drive that decides to spin your HDD down while in use is obvious A Bad Thing™. I will make do with my giant custom built firewire 800 drive box even if it's a bit noisy and power hungry for the time being.
- Mood:
grumpy - Music:Fans humming in said giant drive box
- Mood: grumpy
- Music:Angels and Demons (Unabridged), Part 1-Dan Brown
- Mood:
ecstatic - Music:BBC News
I have a friend who also loves Japanese stuff who is willing to travel with me too which makes the whole prospect of going to such an alien country a lot less intimidating. The plan is to go during the winter (probably January) when flights are cheaper and when in theory touristy places will be much quieter. I also would really like to see Japan in the snow and it seems there is a reasonable chance of getting some in Kyoto at least. We can always day trip a bit further north too if necessary. I'm still working out exactly where I want to go, but my current line of thinking is to employ a strategy similar to the one Tom and I used in Italy and spend a week broken between two cities. Except rather than Rome and Venice it will be Tokyo and Kyoto and switch the Eurostar for the Shinkansen (bullet train). It would be nice to stay a bit longer, but that depends on what the accommodation prices are like. Ideally I'd like to keep the cost of the whole trip below around £1500, (which is about double what I spent on visiting Italy). Virgin Atlantic have return flights for around £500 which seems pretty sweet. A JR railpass is about £150 for a week I believe, which will make it easy to get about. In contrast I spent about £50 each way on the Eurostar in Italy to get between Padova and Rome alone, although the local trips were very cheap. That leaves £850 for food and accommodation which hopefully shouldn't be too hard. Heck the famous capsule hotel in Akihabara is only £20 a night and will feel like sleeping on a spaceship so gotta try that ^_^
Anyway I'm very excited about the whole thing, I've been looking through photos of some of the places I'd like to visit on Flickr and they look pretty mind blowing. Here are a few of my faves:
Heian Shrine, Golden Temple, Tokyo skyline, Inari (I think) shrine, Yoshida shrine, Imperial Palace, Neon Tokyo
- Mood: thoughtful
- Music:Falling Down - Oasis
While down south I took a day out to pop into nearby London (ah real civilisation how I missed ye). I finally got to go see Wall-e, the latest (and quite possibly best) Disney/Pixar film. Sci-fi + ecological message + cool little robots = WIN. If you've not already seen it you'll probably have to wait for the DVD or the torrent of the DVD if you're that way inclined. The cinema I went to was in the London Trocadero which is possibly one of the oddest shopping centres/entertainment complexes I've been to. Practically a maze of escalators, most of which seem to go up (I managed to get to the top floor and it took quite a while to find a way back down again). As a bonus across from the cinema was Tokyo Toys (surprisingly not some kind of adult store catering to whimsical Japanese fetishes but an anime/manga store) which I'd been meaning to visit sometime since Christmas. It's annoying that of all the anime shops I've come across in London if you want anything that isn't from the (ancient) Evangelion, Naruto (and increasingly Bleach too) you're shit out of luck. Thank fuck for the Internet. Anyway I was in sufficiently high spirits from seeing Wall-e not to have my mood soured by another mediocre manga store. After all that I paid my increasingly customary visit to Japan Centre to snap up some goodies for myself and some sushi for lunch. They even had One Piece curry which I had lost all hope of ever seeing again in this country after the sad demise of Oriental City. I was also surprised and delighted to find them selling chicken katsu (breaded, fried chicken) sushi which was very tasty (could have used some tonkatsu sauce though guys!). I'm glad to see the Japanese aren't too uptight about keeping sushi contents overly conservative which will no doubt make eating out in Japan a lot easier, when I eventually visit, as I'm not a lover of seafood.
Unfortunately either in London, or perhaps on the train down south, I've contracted any icky cold that has me coughing and sniffling. Hopefully it will clear up soon though as I at least feel a bit better this afternoon than I did yesterday.
Still in some brighter news I've had two of my most successful sales months to date in July and August so I've treated myself to some new goodies. In addition to the beautiful Mordant Short floor standing speakers you have probably spied by now if you've visited in the last month, I've also ordered a new HD projector to bring my home cinema back up to speed. With any luck it should be delivered by Sci-fi night. I've also purchased an induction hob after being intrigued by the one in
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myzelik's kitchen. I'm still waiting on my new stainless steel sauté pan (truly the king of pots and pans btw) to be delivered so I can make use of it. Induction is supposed to offer the rapid heating and controllability of gas while being more energy efficient and safe. The only slight drawback is you need steel or iron pans in order for the magic to happen. Still anything should be better than the rusting old electric resistance hobs I currently have in terms of efficiency and with rising energy bills every little helps as they say.Speaking of rising energy bills, lately I've been increasingly thinking about things I can do to lower my energy usage, I've already long since banned old fashioned light bulbs from my flat and so I've been looking around for other things I can do to help. I'd really love my own solar installation but alas it's not currently an idea that's very compatible with my rented flat or wallet. Still I bought a solar battery charger and a 'Freeloader' for my iPhone which is rather handy and great for zapping its battery back to life. That's a few watts saved. Next I dug out an old electronic timer and stuck it between my ADSL router and the mains so it can switch off every night after I've gone to bed and turn back on in the morning. Then I spotted a fab deal on Maplin for a energy monitor (£7.99!) which I've hooked up between my workstation and the mains. It tells me exactly how much power my equipment is using and even how much it is costing me. Turns out my iMac and 24" monitor are very efficient, barely drawing above 90W combined when not doing anything strenuous. It seems to be costing me about 15p a day to keep them running most of the day which is about £4.50 a month or £54 a year. I've noticed that powering off my external HDDs drops the power usage about 20W and completely switching off my computer at the mains eliminates the 8W it always seems to be sipping even when totally powered off. It's certainly a reminder to switch off stuff at the mains that you're not using. Even if it's only saving you a relatively small amount a year in terms of money it's helping to reduce your impact on the planet, something we should all be striving to do.
Now if you'll excuse me I need to return to my mildly soapy chemical warfare with the aphids that have invaded my basil plants.
- Mood: thoughtful
- Music:Falling Down - Oasis
Quite a few of the photos are taken with my 50mm prime lens, which I'm trying to get a bit more use out of. Because my DSLR has a cropped sensor (i.e. it's not a full 35mm sensor this is about an 80mm equivalent, or a slight telephoto) If you're not familiar with the concept of replaceable lenses on cameras then I'll quickly explain. A prime lens is one with a fixed focal length, i.e. you can't zoom in or out with it. You can of course still make small adjustments to focus. Because it's not a zoom lens the optics are much simpler which results in fantastically detailed images. This lens also has a very narrow depth of field. That means the closer you are to your subject the narrower the area that will be in focus. This lets you do all kinds of nice effects, for example you can have a single flower in perfect focus and other flowers just inches behind it nicely blurred out. You can also have the foreground blurred, the centre of the image sharp and the background similarly blurred which can be great for picking out certain details in a scene.
Anyway I hope you enjoy the photos :)
- Mood: thoughtful
- Music:Life In Technicolor - Coldplay
Thankfully the weather has been beautiful this afternoon as it was windy and raining this morning which had me worrying the whole thing was going to get called off. Anyway, wow the Japanese know how to BBQ! The food is never ending small portions and it goes on for hour after hour! Yakitori, yakiniku, rice, salad, sake, plum wine (OMG this is nice), punch and lots more. I am very much full of niku this evening I can tell you ^_^
Claire has volunteered to rejoin us for Japanese evening classes and will be catching up with my help on Beginners 4 (which she hasn't done yet) over the summer so she's ready to join us in lower intermediate in September. There really wasn't that much pressure or cajoling honestly! It's fab anyway as the class likely wouldn't be able to run otherwise as we have the bare minimum needed for it to go ahead.
A friend staying with my teacher kindly gave me a massive amount of Japanese manga novels which she won't be able to take back with her to Japan so I've got two full bag loads of things from Death Note to Naruto. The downside is it's all in kana and kanji, but meh, I should practice reading those anyway.
- Mood:
full
So my blog updating has lapsed a little of late so it's high time for an update. Life in Aber has been pretty good as usual, the weather is decent and I'm being unusually productive at work.
Birmingham shopping and meet-up
Last week, myself, Paul, Gareth and Satoko went shopping in Birmingham and had the opportunity to meet up with Matt, whose presence in and around Aber has been rather missed. We also met up with some friends of Satoko's, one of whom was James who I knew from Japanese Beginners 3. After a delicious lunch at Wagamama and the perusal of the usual shops we said our goodbyes to James and his fiancé and headed to Wing Yip with a curious Matt in tow. Wingyip is fab as I've probably said before and well worth a visit if you're in Birmingham with access to car and/or an intimate knowledge of the bus routes.
After Wing Yip and dropping Matt back off in the town centre we headed to Ikea where I bought four coffee tables (yes four). They measure 55x55cm each so I can arrange them into one big 110x110cm table or split them up as necessary. Ideal for geeknights and easily tucked away into various corners when not required. Amazingly they all fitted into Gareth's already loaded Ford Ka. We'll have to convince him to get something a bit roomier next time he buys a car, the back of a Ka is not a place you want to spend much time. Crushing three people in the back going to Wing Yip and back was interesting too.
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| Durian must be in season or something. First time I've seen them, they're surprisingly large, easily the size of a big melon. | Matt in Wing Yip, in a hoody! Look what Brum is doing to this poor fellow, he'll have an ASBO next! | Cows. Lots of cows, in the road. Bloody cows. |
iPhone dev course
This week I'm attending an iPhone development course hosted by Chris Price at Aberystwyth University. It's good fun and a lot of my former lecturers are attending so it feels rather nostalgic. Everyone from Fred Long, Chris Loftus, Edel, Dave Price and Linda are there. Amusingly it's a subject I know far more about than any of them so I often find myself helping folks out or correcting Chris mid-slide (sorry Chris!). People are struggling with Objective-C and Interface Builder quite a bit, it's a lot to take in such a short period of time. You almost need a week long course on that first. I've been begging Chris to explain memory management to people and even produced some concise slides which hopefully he'll show soon as people are doing some crazy things and having their apps crash as a result of not understanding it.
Still it's awesome to have some time dedicated to learning this new platform and transferring my Mac development skills to another platform. It's very gratifying to see your freshly compiled app launch right there on your iPod touch. The mobile OS X platform is gonna really shake up the mobile industry, what you can achieve once you know your way around IB and Obj-C, is quite amazing. In the SDK demoes given in Steve Jobs' keynotes, developers like Sega have boasted how they've had a couple of developers port entire games to the mobile OS X platform in the period of a week. I can see why first hand, the development tools combined with the frameworks just make it that quick and easy to deploy real applications and games. When the AppStore goes live in July and users gain access to 100s, if not 1000s of 3rd party apps it's pretty much over for the other smart phone vendors out there, they get to become also-rans like Creative and Microsoft did in the MP3 player market.
- Mood: tired
Italy
Lets do things in order, so obviously I'm back from Italy now. It was a really amazing holiday. Yes there was one thing that kind of took some of the shine off it which will remain nameless but you all know about that anyway. Seeing both Rome and particularly Venice crosses some big check boxes in the big old list of things one should do before one departs this planet. I'd really like to go see Venice again actually, perhaps a little bit earlier so it's less crowded. I'm a year older now of course, having turned the ripe old age of 27 on the 27th, a day spent partly in Padova and partly in Venice. I ended up eating Chinese food which isn't really what I expected, but it turns out it can be hard to eat out in some parts of Italy and avoid pizza. Anyway I've already bored you all to death about this holiday so I'll leave it at that, if you have questions about anything I'm sure I'd be happy to field them, more so if you buy me a pint beforehand.
Badminton
Since someone finally invited me to come join in with Badminton I've been having a lot of fun with it. I've played about 3 or 4 times now and I seem to be doing fairly well. No worse than anyone else at least, with the possible exception of Matt who turns out is very good at it. It's nice to finally be getting some exercise since I've been particularly bad this year with regards to the weight lifting and I really don't want to get fat and lazy. I've discovered a new liking for this Lucasaid enhanced water stuff which could probably best be described as tasting of citrus + sweat, which sounds kind of disgusting but boy it is good when you're panting and soaking in sweat after a couple of rounds.
One Piece
My favourite distraction from reality has snagged another of my nakama, ha! I've got a decent straw hat (mugiwara no boshi) at last too, from Venice of all places. I just need a replacement red ribbon for it then I can fully cosplay Luffy ^_^ I need to convince Paul to dress up as Sanji, his favourite character.
Departure
So Matt hit me with the bad news that he had finally decided to leave Aber last weekend which has left me feeling kinda sad on and off throughout the week. It was sort of inevitable that he was going sooner or later but it always seemed a long way off for some reason. I feel a bit daft now for not really getting to know him a bit sooner than I did, I guess I should have started going to geeknight sooner or something. Anyway that's one less coupled off person who'll be around during the day time for a random chats over lunch and coffee, just as I was starting to get rather used to the idea *sigh*. Still I hope the poor bloke can find a job sooner or later as it's not much fun being without money and a place to call your own. We're all gonna miss having him around though that's for sure.
Food
So as not to end all melancholy like lets talk about food. Ever since coming back from Italy I've been making lots of Italian food, bruschetta, spaghetti with meat sauce *cough*spag bol*cough*, pizza and today lasagne for the first time. The bruschetta is fab, it's quick and easy, healthy and tasty. Fancy toast = win. Pizza wise I've started making my own from scratch and they've all been delicious so far. It really is worth going the extra mile and making everything yourself, kneading your own dough, blending your own sauce and chopping a nice big lump of fresh mozzarella, dotting it with cherry tomatoes and fresh basil leaves. I made lasagne for the first time this evening for myself and Matt and it turned out kinda ok. Alright admittedly I was halfway through cooking the Bolognese before I realised I didn't have anything to bake the thing in. Oops. So Matt held down the fort while I dashed to Matalan to get a baking dish. Everything else went smoothly, even if it did get a little bit overdone in the end. The soft gooey bit in the middle tasted right and that's what counts. I'll get the outside right next time too.
- Mood: tired
I thought it might be fun to compile a list of every computer I've ever owned, compare their vital statistics, what they've been used for and what happened to them.
|
Name |
Model |
CPU |
Clock speed |
RAM |
Purchased |
Fate |
|
none |
ZX81 |
Z80 |
3.25MHz |
1KB |
??? |
Died |
|
none |
Spectrum +2a |
Z80 |
3.5MHz |
128KB |
1987? |
Died |
|
none |
Amiga 500 |
68000 |
8MHz |
3MB |
1991 |
Thrown out |
|
none |
Generic |
AMD 486 DX4 |
100MHz |
16MB |
1995 |
Thrown out |
|
none |
Time |
Cyrix 6x86 |
333MHz |
128MB |
1997 |
Thrown out |
|
none |
Generic |
Intel Celeron |
400MHz |
128MB |
1998 |
Thrown out |
|
Hobbes |
iBook (blueberry) |
PPC G3 |
300MHz |
160MB |
1999 |
Retired |
|
Aquarius |
Power Mac G4 (sawtooth) |
PPC G4 |
400MHz |
256MB |
2000 |
Sold 2002 |
|
Pismo |
PowerBook G3 (pismo) |
PPC G3 |
400MHz |
384MB |
2002 |
Sold 2003 |
|
Bonsai |
Power Mac G4 (quicksilver) |
PPC G4 |
800MHz |
384MB |
2002 |
Sold 2003 |
|
Apollo |
PowerBook G4 (Al) |
PPC G4 |
1GHz |
768MB |
2003 |
Sold 2006 |
|
Battlestar |
Power Mac G5 |
PPC G5 x 2 |
1.8GHz |
1GB |
2005 |
Sold 2007 |
|
Kakashi |
MacBook |
Intel Core Duo |
2GHz |
1GB |
2006 |
Sold 2008 |
|
Going Merry |
Mac Mini |
Intel Core Solo |
1.5GHz |
1GB |
2007 |
In use |
|
Luffy |
iMac |
Intel Core 2 Duo |
2GHz |
2GB |
2007 |
In use |
|
Yuki |
MacBook |
Intel Core 2 Duo |
2.17GHz |
2GB |
2008 |
In use |
|
Squeee |
Eee PC |
Intel Celeron |
900MHz |
1GB |
2008 |
To be sold |
The ZX81 was actually a freebie my Dad got when the ad agency he worked for at the time did some ads for Sinclair. I found it in a box up in the loft as a kid and managed to get it up and running with an old black and white tele. Without the 16KB expansion pack the thing was basically useless, it couldn't run any of the software my Dad had picked up for it (free as well I assume) - which was pretty much all still shrink-wrapped when I found it. I did have fun typing in programme listings from the manual though, my first introduction to programming. The front of the manual had a kind of cool sci-fi scene on it I'll always remember. There was a photo inside the manual showing the innards of the ZX81 too and a block diagram of all the chips and how they interfaced, as someone always interested in how things worked this was totally awesome.
The SpeccyThe Speccy +2 was my first 'proper' computer that could actually do useful things, we even got an Olivetti dot matrix printer for it and I remember typing up my report for our school trip to the Isle of Wight on it in Tasword. I learned to program in BASIC fairly decently. It was also my first introduction to computer art thanks to the drawing program that came with the Genius Mouse I got for it (my first mouse!)
The Amiga 500The Amiga 500 was an amazing computer, with a whopping 2MB memory expansion popping out the left side of the machine. I mostly played games on the Amiga (various Lemmings, Zool, Sim City etc) and spent god knows how many hours in Deluxe Paint, 2, 3 and finally 4. I used it for word processing a few times too during my GCSE days. Wordsworth was quite decent. I had AMOS but never really go into programming on the Amiga.
The 486The 486 was a real work horse and was my main machine through much of my time in secondary school. Getting this PC marked the end of me as a 'die hard' Amiga user, and it also largely ended my interest in computer animation as there was no equivalent to Deluxe Paint 3 or 4 in the PC world. OS wise the 486 lived in Windows 3.1 much of the time, it only briefly ran Windows 95 towards the very end of its life but I found it slow and chuggy. This is the machine that I first tried Linux on, Caldera Linux then Redhat 2.0 back in the mid-nineties which came with a huge tome called "Using Linux" which I still have to this day. I also briefly flirted with OS/2 Warp on the 486 which ran decent enough but never really won me over.
The Cyrix Time PCThe Cyrix PC was the last one I used to do any BASIC programming. I used to be a big fan of QBasic (the commercial version that would actually compile stuff) and later PowerBasic. I spent a lot of time in Photoshop on this thing doing my art A level stuff, for what little good it did me.
The DIY PCThe Cryix was dog slow when it came to 3D gaming and I quickly discovered it would actually be pretty cheap and easy to build my own PC borrowing various parts from it. That's how my first Intel based PC was born, it lasted through the 1st semester of my 1st year at university before the Windows experience would push me over the egde.
The Blueberry iBookI'd dabbled with Macs before, my Dad had always used them both at work and at home (the expensive computer in his study I was only ever allowed to use with supervision as a kid *sigh*), so I knew there was something else out there besides Windows. Heck I'd played with Linux quite a bit at this point too and had found that an entirely underwhelming alternative to Windows. Linux, an operating system whose apparent sole purpose is endless tweaking to make it more like some other illusory platform that always seems slightly out of grasp. So anyway I decided a laptop would be really useful for taking down notes/killing time in lectures and with the help of my Dad an iBook became my first Apple purchase. It was a funky little machine with its outlandish design, likened by some to Barbie's purse or less generously, to a toilet seat. The processor, while 100MHz slower clocked than my previous PC ran circles around it in terms of general performance. I remember at the time being impressed that it ran SETI@home twice as fast as the PC did. OS 8 and 9 weren't incredibly stable all the time but in general I found the iBook to be very reliable and the software all seemed to work well and was nicely designed. A pleasing change over Windows 98, OS/2 and Linux.
The PowerMac G4Properly sucked into the Mac world now after a couple of months working for a local dot com company called Ultrastore during the summer months I had enough cash to get a desktop Mac to replace my old PC. Heck I could even afford an expensive transparent Apple 17" monitor. This little machine was a real power house with its speedy G4 processor which spent a good chunk of its time chewing through the DV footage for our careers fair video in iMovie 2. This is the first machine I ran OS X on, the infamous Public Beta and later the 10.0 and then 10.1 releases.
The PowerBook G3During my year in industry working at BT I became ever more hungry for a more power laptop, and one which I could plug into an external monitor so I could make as little use of Windows during the day at work as possible. The solution was to get a cheaper refurbished PowerBook G3 just shortly after the super expensive new G4 PowerBooks started shipping. With a big 14" screen, 400MHz CPU, larger hard drive and more RAM, expandability and lovely case design this was quite possibly one of the best laptops I've ever owned.
The Quicksilver PowerMac G4I'd been stuck on or around 400MHz machines now since the end of the nineties and it was time for something faster. Apple had finally managed to coax some faster chips from Motorola and I managed to scrape together the cash to pick up the 800MHz model during my last few months at BT.
The PowerBook G4I sold both the G4 tower and PowerBook to buy this beautiful laptop. This marked the beginning of the only period where I've only had a laptop and no secondary desktop machine. This laptop lasted me through my brief 6 month stint working in Cambridge right up until I moved back to Aberystwyth in 2006 where it was eventually sold to help pay for a new MacBook. The most reliable laptop I ever owned, every other laptop I've had has had some part of it fail during its lifetime. Although I can probably let the iBook off with its trackpad failing as that was years after it left regular service and it survived my sister using it for a couple of years.
The G5My last PowerPC Mac, if I'd known Apple were going to end up shipping the Intel Macs months ahead of schedule I'd probably have not bothered getting it. It was kind of loud and very big and heavy. Cool case design though and it was fairly fast. Oh yeah it was my first dual CPU machine as it sported two 1.8GHz G5 chips.
The black MacBookNotable as my first Intel Mac and as my least reliable Mac ever. It suffered two hard drive failures and the screen started flickering intermittently about 6 months into its life, an issue that Apple failed to fix when I sent it in for servicing, *grumble*.
The Mac miniI got a great deal on this discontinued 1.5GHz model, it's been upgraded a few times and runs like a charm to this day as the hub of my media centre. Had some brief troubles with a faulty CPU upgrade I bought from eBay.
The iMacMy first iMac, bought as a stopgap machine while my MacBook was being serviced and while the Mac mini was having CPU related issues due to the aforementioned dodgy eBay upgrade. The iMac is a fast and reliable computer, the optical drive did fail on me though before Christmas last year which resulted in a rather nerve wracking repair job, this machine was not designed to be serviced :P
The white MacBookMy most recent Mac purchase and also the 1st second hand Mac I've ever bought, cost me a little over £100 after selling the old MacBook. All good so far!
The Eeeeeee PCFirst ever computer to have entirely flash based storage, my 1st PC purchase in over 8 years! Turns out Linux still sucks! Now it's done its job as my travel computer it's going on eBay next week.
The also rans...
The above list isn't actually a complete list of every computer I've ever owned (ZOMG there's more!??!1), but it's every one that I've spent any significant time using. The also rans include:
- A Mac Quadra 650 my Dad found dumped outside an office in London. I fixed it and got it working, never did much with it though.
- A Power Mac 6100/66 bought from the Uni after I spotted it abandoned in a corridor. Sold for well over 3x what I paid for it!
- A PowerMac 7100/100 rescued from BT. Not sure what happened to this, probably thrown out.
- A Mac SE/30 rescued from BT. Still got this back at my parents place.
- A Performa of some kind I used to use as a TV, rescued from BT.
- A PowerBook 170 rescued from BT. Still got it.
- A Mac LC 475 - I got this from Nightline somehow. I loved the form factor of this tiny 68K Mac
- A PowerBook Duo 230 rescued from BT. Still got it.
- A PowerBook Duo 2300 bought from eBay because I wanted a colour Duo for some reason. Required some work to get it running. Still have it.
- A PowerBook G4 my Dad gave me I keep as a PPC test machine.
Yes I've owned too many computers! Only lightly proof read so sorry for any mistakes etc :P
Update: added yet another 'also ran' computer.- Mood: cheerful
Rome is really interesting, beautiful in places and really grotty in others. There is an immense amount of graffiti everywhere. The metro is really ugly and needs some love. Lots of harassing street sellers trying to sell shitty torches and nonsense. Some of the buskers that randomly pop up and start playing are quite decent though and worth tipping. The roads are a bit crazy. At traffic crossings the usual red and green little men are joining by a yellow/white one. Regardless, no configuration of traffic lights seems to order the traffic much. Speaking of which man there are a lot of cute lil Smart cars around *want*. Had a decent meal this evening a stones throw from the Colosseum which looks rather spectacular. I look forward to seeing that properly tomorrow. Hotel is nice, small room but very smart. Anyway I imagine my 3 euro prepaid wifi card is about expired so I better sign off. Ciao!
- Mood: tired
- Music:CNN on the tele
Turns out it's a Naval Auxiliary ship called the SD Salmoor (A185). According to this website "From April this year, they will not only be operated by Serco Denholm, but also be owned by them following a lengthy tendering process resulting in the award of a fifteen year contract to provide marine support services to the Royal Navy throughout the UK."
- Mood:
content
