Category Archives: Japan

Revisiting Old Television

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Because I have lots of free time right now, even with house arrest, to be doing lots of things, I’ve primarily been watching old tv shows.

One show I didn’t like then liked was Babylon 5, which is the show I’m now watching again.

However, what I do on a rewatch is stick with an episode until I remember the basics of it and then either keep watching or skip ahead past the annoying bits. Sometimes I do both by skipping the comic relief section to get to the main story line mostly to see how the writers handle the story over time.

I also tend to have an episode summary available to help me decide if an episode’s worth watching. For example, with Babylon 5 I’ve skipped two episodes entirely and skipped the entire PSI Cop story line in episode six.

The trouble with Babylon 5 is you’ve got a lot of story line and lots of good performances. Andreas Katsulas is terrific as G’Kar and it’s amazing to see how well he can act despite the prosthetics he’s forced to wear. The make up itself still looks quite good.

I also tend to jump off and read and watch things related to the show. For example, I somehow missed several of the actors dying and also missed that J. Michael Straczynski had revealed in 2013 why Michael O’Hare, who played Captain Sinclair, left the show after only one season. (Note: all the videos, especially the second Arizona ComiCon video are worth your time if you like the show.)

I’m tempted to watch the fifth season, which I’ve only skimmed because, technically, the story line had already ended at that point, but I’ll probably save that until exam time.

 

 

Keeping the Place

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Not feeling it today, er, this morning so this will be short.

Only a few days until I start working at the school where I work and I’m already in Most Horrible Anticipation Mode. This is the mode where I imagine the worse possible scenario and mentally live it until it comes true or not or, most likely, comes partially true.

The worst possible scenario involves the worst possible students with the worst possible number of days and the worse possible encounters with the company I work for.

I realize this is the worst possible way to view things, but it’s that time of year and I’m in that kind of mood.

 

 

Better Easier More and Less Improving

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It’s easy enough making them do what they want to do. It’s trying to get them to do what you want them to do…that gives you a headache. –Azolan (Peter Capaldi) Dangerous Liaisons

The above epigraph was said about women but today I think it applies more to computer software.

As part of my house arrest “work” I spent part of the day redoing the spreadsheet I use to record marks and do all the cipherin’.

This involves lots of clearing and cutting and pasting and swearing when the formulas don’t paste correctly. Things that should have been easy cut-and-paste jobs required lots of extra attention as I was forced to manually edited formulas. Some cells that should have been class names had been replaced with random formulas. (More on that in a second.) Then there were the sections that could only be handled a certain way and couldn’t do what I needed them to do. Then there were the missing columns that required an internet search and a live animal sacrifice to recover. (Well, I tried anyway, but it really didn’t help that much, but there are still lots of feral cats around here to experiment with.)

Remember: we use software to make our lives EASIER.

Eventually I got the spreadsheet into shape and all the parts and formulas seem to be working. Now, though, I have to move on to the second phase of swearing, er, preparation: making sure it all works on my tablet.

For some reason I have the only major brand tablet on the planet that can’t use a version of MS Office and, until recently, Open Office wasn’t available. I tried using a different office program, but it wouldn’t let me save to the tablet and was so buggy I went back to pen and paper until they ran a couple bug fixes.

Now, that program is destined for the scrap heap of software history. However, its legacy will be a lot of swearing as I get used to the new software.

Remember: we use software to make our lives EASIER.

Stuck in the Rules and the Formatting

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Maybe I should have left them how they were, but I don’t remember if I’ve submitted the forms before or not.

Today’s “work” day project as part of my house arrest was to update and reformat the rules form I pass out to my high school second year students. This involved resizing and centering and tweaking a couple fonts. If I’d left it at that, things would have been fine.

However, tweaking things like that trigger what I call “the doodle reflex”.  This is the phenomenon where you’re scribbling a couple silly pictures on a piece of paper during a meeting and then you start adding a line here and thickening a line there and experimenting with shading all over the place and pretty soon the doodle is the center of your attention and you’ve got to make it perfect and before you know it you’ve got a sloppy masterpiece that needs just a little more work and then you realize everyone is looking at you as if you’re a moron because your boss has been trying to get your attention for at least ten minutes. (Oh, like that hasn’t happened to you.)

With the rules changes, one change led to another and then I decided to make a worksheet to help reinforce the rules in the students’ minds and I suddenly I was working on two doodles and although both were sloppy, neither was perfect.

All this took a lot longer than I thought it would and in the end I have something I’ll probably change again.

Eventually, I’m supposed to submit it, but since it’s class rules, I’ll probably say it’s not right for me to do so. I’ll make that a new rule. With nice formatting.

Lost in the Ink World

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Yesterday I mentioned how I went to a knife show and somehow managed to buy ink. Today I somehow managed to sell almost all of that ink. The problem is, now I have to go back and hope the monster I unleashed hasn’t cleaned the place out so that I can buy and sell more.

After I posted pics of the ink on Instagram (mostly to test the waters for potential buyers) I also helped some locals find the store and at least one of those locals will buy one of each. Given the reaction of the clerk when I ordered one of each of the eight flavors they had, I’m sure that having a couple more people show up and ask for all eight was a real surprise.

Note: I will have to use that when I approach the stores when and if I decide to formalize the business: I can move markets. For fifteen minutes or so. I also have customers in North America, New Zealand, The Philippines, Europe and India. If I were not lazy I’d have more. Maybe I’ll leave that last bit off.

Now I’m taking careful notes to avoid repeating the one serious mistake I’ve made. (My confidence is low.)

I’ve also continued to play with the accounting software. This is another post, but let’s just say for now I ran an experiment. Then I had to repeat it. Then I swore. Then I repeated it. Then it seemed to work.

 

 

Lots of the Same

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Went to a knife show but ended up acquiring ink.

Today there was a knife show sponsored by the Japan Custom Knife Makers and the Japan Knife Guild. I wasn’t planning on buying anything, but at these shows you never know.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your point of view, a lot of the makers were displaying similar kinds of knives. The main theme was small fixed blade knives that are popular among some knife geeks in the USA but are problematic here in Japan. In theory a fixed blade with a blade under six centimeters long is legal to carry. However, as soon as you pull it out and use it someone will complain.

After a couple sweeps of the tables my Canadian friend and I headed down for a beer and then, after he went home, I headed down to Maruzen where I tried to convince a woman to make me a leather pen case (she turned me down). Then I went across the street to Takashimaya to pick up a couple bottles of their bespoke ink and discovered they had eight different flavors.

I bought all of them as I’m pretty sure I can sell them. However, on the way to the register, the clerk pointed out three flavors by a different company. I didn’t buy them, but that gives me an excuse to go back.

Back Slidin’ Away

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I was up then I was down now I’m up but balanced.

Today was day 600 of the diet/life style change I’ve been mostly adhering to. I reached a bottom end and decided to put some back on but the bad habits sent me shooting way back over my goal. I’m still well below where I started, but I can feel the weight gain.

Luckily I’ve hit an equilibrium where I’m not adding or dropping. However, I’d prefer to hit that equilibrium a lot lower than where I’m at now.

I dug into my food journals to find the menu I followed when I lost the bulk of the weight. It is intimidating and inspiring but the biggest problem is I’ve lost the motivation behind it all. Work related stress has thrown me off the game lately.

That said, I like being able to buy trousers of more than one style now in Japan rather than online and the clothes I own now are the measure of what I need to be doing.

The girls are away for a couple days which gives me a chance to reboot things without any attention being drawn to what I’m doing. It also gives me a chance to double down on bad habits. We’ll see which wins.

 

Such Haste to Messiness

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The girls have been gone only a few hours and the apartment is already mess. Except for the speed this is normal. In my defense, the dishes were dirty before they left.

I, of course, agreed that I would wash them, and will, eventually. First, though, I confirmed what day the girls would return so that I can plan what day to wash the dishes.

As I’ve written before, this is the old normal. I’ll also have a couple days to do some running around–I did some today, but more on that in a future post.

The trick, of course, is to revert to primeval only those rooms that were already kind of messy. That way I only have to return them to the state they were in. If I can improve them, and quite frankly, there’s little incentive to do so, then I earn bonus points.

Any other room that gets messy, though, is work that has to be done. The rooms that were nearly pristine before the girls left have to be returned to their nearly pristine state.

On a good day, I can do this quickly.

I could do that on a bad day, too, I suppose, but just can’t be bothered usually.

Playing with the Numbers

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I’m beginning to understand corrupt accountants.

I’ve mentioned before how Japan has made me a minor currency speculator but today I was playing with a program and moving numbers around.

For my minor business/hobby, I’ve finally decided to keep more formal notes of my expenses and earnings and setting aside a small chunk of money to be used solely for the business/gambling.

That involved opening an account book on Gnucash (because free). However, because it is a double entry bookkeeping system I also had to learn to make the mental leap about balance and every income is an expense gets a line where it gets spent and, well, it gets.

At that point I started having fun manipulating the numbers in order to make the bottom line look exactly the way I wanted it to. I also experimented with different types of entries to make it do exactly what I wanted it to do.

I think I’ve finally figured it all out, but now it’s time to make an actual inventory database. That will lead to other problems, but I’ll worry about those later.

 

Almost Less Than Worthless

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We are taking over our in-laws’ automobile and have to get rid of our old one. It’s not worth much but it’s worth more than simply dumping it, even though that option is quite tempting.

Every now and then, here in Japan you see news about illegal garbage dumps. Usually the dumps consist of cars and large appliances.

This is partly a problem because the government now charges you for getting rid of old stuff. Because of this used-goods stores will offer pathetic amounts for your electronics and electrical goods. You may only make a few hundred yen for your refrigerator–which will be sold for 8,000-10,000 yen depending on its size–but it saves you money because you don’t have to pay the recycling tax. On the other hand, if you live in an area with no used-goods stores, the only way to avoid the tax is to use your stuff until it dies once and for all forever and then illegally dump your stuff in the woods somewhere.

In the case of automobiles it’s worse. The government has mandatory inspections that get more frequent the older the car gets. Because of this, the car depreciates quickly. Once a car reaches age ten it is almost worthless and you can’t even coax college kids into buying it as the maintenance will be more than the car is worth. (Note: the primary market for decade old cars in Japan seems to be foreign teachers living in rural areas.) The only selling points of a car that old are the condition of the car, if the car has a low-powered (aka, a more “fuel efficient”) engine and the length of time left before the mandatory inspection.

In our case, our car has a couple strikes: 1) it is a 2004 model which means several sales companies wouldn’t even give us a price; and 2) it only has a couple months left before its mandatory inspection which mean it will soon require a few hundred dollars in expenses. As such, it is almost worthless (unless we can find an English teacher in a rural area and want to pay tax on the sale). That said, because we live in a suburbanish area (long story) it’s not worth our energy to drive to a rural area and dump it.

We will sell it though, because we need to get the new car before the next mandatory inspection. If we miss that deadline, then we probably will dump it somewhere.