Computer woes

I have a seven-year-old iBook, and it's on its last legs...

Every time there's a security update (not as often now, since I can't run the newest version of Mac OS X), and I have to reboot the thing, there's a greater than 50% chance that the reboot will hang at either the grey screen or the blue screen, and I have to do the ol' 3-finger salute to get it to boot up. This runs the risk of hosing the directory on the hard drive...

I have an external HD. The internal HD is only 20GB, and my iTunes music library alone is over 15 gigs. Last month, the external drive crashed so hard the computer wouldn't even recognized that there was a device plugged in...

The original dual-USB iBooks had an interesting design flaw, where the hinge of the unit would after time damage and ultimately sever the power cable running to the LCD backlight. Due to this, I can no longer close my iBook. I got an external monitor last year, which was an acceptable work-around until this morning, when that backlight died unexpectedly...

Plus a host of other annoyances, some small (the c key works intermittently), some large (various bits of the system software don't seem to be working correctly; for example, I no longer have a brightness control. And re-installing the system would run back into the first problem I mentioned.)

*sigh*

Donations for the "Buy Rob a new computer" fund can be sent to....

Meh. I'm off to drown my sorrows in a bad-for-me McDonalds breakfast.

Apropos of nothing #6: Bookstore memory

So one day in the distant past, I was working the back cashwrap at the big Barnes & Noble in town. (Yes, they call it a cashwrap. No, I don't know why.) Now at that time, the section of the store surrounding the back cashwrap was Religion. So, most of the books displayed around and behind the counter were books on various aspects of religion -- fiction, theology, and such.

Official store policy was that people working at the cashwraps were not allowed to read anything during the occasional downtime. However, because the store opened before most of the other stores in the mall, for the first few hours the back cashwrap was fairly dead. The managers tended to look the other way during these hours, so often we could grab a book or magazine from the displays and skim through them. The selection was limited to religion, however. (I credit this as the reason why I made it as far into the Left Behind series as I did, before the poor writing style and bad plotting threw me off. Man, did those guys need an editor...and maybe a ghost writer...)

One day, two guys came up to the back cashwrap to check out before venturing into the mall for other shopping. As I rang up their book, one of them noticed a display of the mass-market paperback edition of Billy Graham's autobiography, thought it looked interesting, and picked it up as well. I put their books in a bag, and one of them commented, "I bet you've never seen THOSE two books in a bag together before."

I looked.

Billy Graham's biography, and...the Homo Handbook, by Judy Carter.

We all laughed.

Since we were never all that busy at the back cash registers, we also got to call people and tell them their special orders were in. Saw lots of interesting titles that way...oddly, I can't seem to recall any of them right now. I guess they weren't all that interesting.

If when we called, a person was out, and they had no answering machine or voice mail, the general practice was that we'd try again in an hour or so. One shift I tried calling one woman three or four times. Now as it turns out this wasn't necessary, as somehow we had accidentally double-ordered her book and she already had picked up a copy. But when this woman got home and saw on her caller ID that B&N had called her four times, she immediately called the store and started complaining of harassment. "WHY ARE YOU CALLING ME SO MANY TIMES?!?" "Well, ma'am, I was unable to leave a message, so I thought--" "I'M GOING TO CALL THE POLICE! THIS IS HARASSMENT!"

Joe the manager took over at that point, taking a long time to calm this woman down. He apologized profusely, and swore that he'd reprimand me for doing my job calling so much. After he got off the phone, Joe turned to me, got in my face, and said, "...Good job trying to get in touch with the customer, Rob."

We all wondered why she had caller ID, but no answering machine. Well, whatever works, I guess.

Apropos of nothing #5: Airplane anecdote

I first came to Japan at the end of July, 2001. After our first JET Programme orientation in Chicago, we took off on an ANA jet out of O'Hare.

Also on this ANA flight was some church group out of Milwaukee. Most of them were teens, and they were wearing matching group t-shirts proudly emblazoned with a hand-drawn logo. "Manitou-something-or-other." (Manitou is probably the most over-used Native American word in non-Native-American context.) Anyway, I couldn't describe the group as a whole, but the two guys in the same row as us spent the first hour or so of the flight snarking about the JET Programme and us "losers in suits" who were in it. "Oh, I wanna be a JET toooooo..." was about the wittiest comment they made, but they were still being really annoying.

Finally the guy next to me turned to them and said, politely,

"So, you guys are from Wisconsin, right?"

"Uh, hey, yeah! We --"

"Fuckin' cheeseheads." And with that, he dropped the pretense of wanting to talk to them and turned back to continue our conversation.

This one still makes me laugh even now.

Apropos of nothing #3: Fraud

A while back on one of the many webfora I peruse, someone posted this question: "Have any of you fallen for a scam?"

This was my response.

I almost got scammed once, to the tune of about $500 US.

I used to live in Kagoshima, Japan, and since it's out in the hind end of nowhere, if I wanted to buy anything invented in the 20th century I had to go to Kagoshima City.

One of the places I used to frequent there was the Kagoshima City branch of Tower Records. I wouldn't buy much there, because CDs and DVDs are insanely overpriced in Japan ($30 for a new-release CD? yaright). One rare occasion when I did buy something, I decided to use my credit card, 'cause I was a bit low on cash at that point in the month. They tried to swipe it through twice, but it didn't work. This didn't cause me to be suspicious, because there are CC readers in Japan that can't read U.S. cards due to different formatting.

That night, when I got home, NHK news was showing a feature about how there was a ring of credit card thieves working in Japan, surreptitiously switching store's CC readers with ones that had hidden transmitters that would send card info to someone w. a laptop hiding in the stairwell (usually). Again, this did not set off any alarm bells.

A few days later, I get the frantic e-mails from Citibank, along with the frantic phone calls from my parents. "Call us NOW. This is not a sales issue. There has been suspicious activity..."

Apparently, the swipe machine at Tower Records sent my CC info to the scammers, who then promptly put it on a fake credit card and tried to buy 60,000 yen worth of clothes with it. In Tokyo.

I had to explain to the nice Citibank lady that I was nowhere near Tokyo, and my card was still in my posession. This confused her because the records showed that a card was physically swiped at the store in Tokyo.

The thing that saved me from having to deal w. chargebacks, etc. was that at that time I was always riding very close to my limit with that card. On that particular day, I only had $50 of credit before I hit the limit, so the $500 charge was denied.

When the Citibank lady said that the thieves had tried to buy clothes, I had to point out that, as an average (big&tall, oh hell FAT) American, there was no way in hell that I could actually buy clothes in Japan. We laughed, and she fed-exed me a new card.

Futility Watch part 318790234.617 (out of ∞)

Well, it's a new month, and gas prices have gone up again. ¥157 a liter. That translates to about $5.32 a gallon.

Multiple readers (okay, two readers: Scott and Doug) have pointed out to me that it is in fact worse in Europe. Fair enough.... So, all you Americans be happy you're not driving in Japan, while I'll be happy I'm not driving in Europe. (^_^)

Actually, it's one of the aftereffects of the rise in petroleum prices that REALLY has Japanese people worried. Because the cost of ingredients has gone up, and the cost making aluminum cans has also risen, for the first time in a while the price of beer has gone up! Asahi Breweries was the first to announce the new prices, and other Japanese breweries have followed suit.

Not that this affects me at all. I've still got gift/free sample alcohol in the fridge.

So I went to a concert last week

So I went to a concert last Sunday. (I got the ¥500 ticket for free.)

It was billed as "Blues Live Concert" (ブルースライブコンサート). Turns out that the name of the band is actually "Live". They were mainly an Eric Clapton cover band, with a few songs by other people as well.

The band consisted of a vocalist, a lead guitarist (not even CLOSE to Clapton quality), a bass player (actually a better guitarist than the lead) and a drummer. The rhythm guitar parts, and various other things like keyboards or horns, were covered by a CD player. They were neither insanely great nor insanely awful, but...

Why is it that the odds of an amateur band playing in a small auditorium (around 500 seats, I think) having a competent sound guy so close to nil? IT'S A TINY ROOM, DAMMIT, YOU DON'T HAVE TO CRANK EVERYTHING TO 11!

I also wondered why the bass player wasn't playing lead guitar. They played three sets, and the middle set was the bass player, solo, playing acoustic guitar and singing, and he had some serious guitar chops.

The lead guitar player, on the other hand, was merely adequate. When they played Hotel California, he didn't even bother trying to play the intro, instead just letting the CD of whatever canned MIDI box they used play it, while he played random noodling over the top. (But he did do a halfway decent run on the guitar part for "Long Train Running," go figure.)

I finally ended up leaving in the middle of the third set, when they swung into a far-too-electrified version of "Tears in Heaven."

Still, this wasn't the worst concert I'd seen in Japan.

The WORST concert I've ever been to in Japan was this guy in Kagoshima. He was just about to return to America (I think he had been a JET or something; I don't really recall.) Anyway, he thought he was hot stuff, and he rented a fairly large auditorium for a "farewell concert." In order to improve the appeal of this show, the guy (whose name I seem to have blocked out) arranged for a Latin dance group and a local acapella group to perform as well, and they were pretty good.

The guy himself, though....

As I recall, the tickets were on the pricey side, and this guy was really promoting himself as an up and coming new talent to justify this. Now, what with the hype and the price and all, I expected there to be a live band backing him up. Nope! He was using, and I am NOT making this up, karaoke CDs. What's worse, he didn't even bother using the karaoke pitch function to put the songs in a range that he could sing.

Don't get me wrong, he had a great range between F# and G...he couldn't stay on pitch to save his life. Coupled with the overacting histrionics -- the man thought he was Seal, or R Kelly, or something -- and it was all we could do to not start laughing. Lots of cringing, though. When he started doing the grand arm sweep to throw it back to his back-up singers CD player, I had to leave the auditorium before the laughter escaped.

On top of that, he pulled a real jerk move in the middle of the show that made all of us go from amusement to annoyance.

When the acapella group came out, they started with "Good Ol' Acapella," if I recall correctly, which was very well received. (After the GUY, anything that would have stayed in the correct key would have been lauded, and these guys were GOOD.) Then, the leader went into banter mode, and introduced the rest of the group. He was cracking jokes, and the small crowd was enjoying it -- finally, something entertaining!

Then they went into their second song, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." Now, apparently the banter went long, and the GUY was fuming that the acapella group was actually way more entertaining than he was...so he turned the lights out on them.

They kept singing. In the dark, the GUY came out to argue with the leader. Finally, the leader cut the song short, and left the stage -- but with a loud ovation from the audience.

At the end of the show, the dance group came out for a final bow with the GUY, but the acapella group was nowhere to be seen...Go figure.

What is it with certain motorcycle riders?

The road running past my apartment complex is really popular with motorcyclists. All day, you hear them cruising up and down the (wide, gently curved) street. It's even worse after 10:00 PM, when all the lights switch to "flashing yellow".

Also, at that time, the bikes with the straight pipes start going. And, one especially loud biker likes drag racing at 4 AM. He ALWAYS revs loud around the apartment.

A few weeks ago I found out that the loud revving and shifting was because he lives in the apartment building across the parking lot from here. *sigh* He did see me staring at him from my window, though, and the noise abated for a few days. But only a few.

GAIJIN SMASH!

For a unique point of view on the life of a foreigner in Japan, take a look at this article. It's pretty funny, but some bits of it are uncomfortably close to the truth.

Gaijin Telepathy - Our co-workers and supervisors don't tell us anything. Literally. One day, I came into work at the ghetto school and found a straw hat and pair of garden gloves on my desk. OK. I sat in the teachers' room kind of waiting for an explanation, but one never came. Eventually I noticed it had become really quiet. I then noticed that I was the only one around. Odd. I went outside to find the whole school, teachers and students, picking weeds in the soccer and baseball fields. Ah, so that's what the garden hat and gloves were for! However, no one ever actually told me this.

"Y'see that big drawing of a 車椅子, pal?"

One thing I've noticed now that I can drive here in Japan is that newer commercial buildings seem to be required to have handicapped accessible parking. However, it also seems that there is no law or rule in place to reserve said parking for handicapped people. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen people blithely drive into the handicapped parking, jump out of their car and dash into the store. Their cars are usually still there when I'm leaving.

My boss has noticed this too, and for some reason (possibly the couple years she spent living in California), this really pisses her off. She's even confronted people about it.

Usually, when the topic comes up in conversation at work, it usually leads to a rant session about how many young people in Japan don't seem to give a damn about things. The example I often cite is seeing kids sitting in the parking lot of the local convenience store, eating bento and drinking can coffee, and then just leaving their bags and cans sitting on the ground, not five meters away from the big garbage/recycling containers next to the store entrance.

Not all Japanese youth are like this, but the ones who are are extremely noticeable.

On owning a six year old laptop

One of the annoying things about my computer is that when I type on a website that uses java/flash/whatever extensively, there is serious lag between my typing speed and how quickly the text appears onscreen. So, i find that I can't watch the screen while I'm typing, because the discrepancy between what I'm typing and what I'm seeing on the screen seriously throws me off. This of course leads to a lot of annoying typos...

A couple of months ago, I noticed that the screen of my computer is not as bright as it should be. It turns out that the earliest versions of the white iBooks had a design flaw that led to the power cable to the backlights to eventually be severed. Also, I had had this issue repaired (under warranty) something like five years ago. Naturally, Apple no longer services this model of computer.

So, I'm sitting here typing into an iBook that's hooked up to a cheap external monitor...that I can't look at while I'm typing, anyway.

Meh.

Rob