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Too many emcees
The reason I have not been updating here lately is that I am trying to figure out the best blogging system to move to from Blogger. Moveable Type? City Desk? Radio? pmachine? Too many MCs, not enough mics. In any case, I am updating my moblog fairly often: http://www.yapeus.com/users/cosmicbuddha/ I’m happy with yapeus even though I usually shy away from free services. I have only one complaint: Sometimes it is several hours between mailing a new post from my phone to the time it’s tranferred to the yapeus webserver. Oh well, free services come at a price, I guess, and no one else supports Japanese and offers as much at…
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cosmicbuddha.com is back up!
We are now officially posting to the servers of my new hosting company. DNS magic is complete and everything should be pointed here now. Please ignore the broken links off the main page as I am completely redoing the site. Meow, meow, meow-meow.
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Headlight & Horn Etiquette
I must limit the scope of this rant because the full breadth of the topic would require too much thinking. In Japan, drivers use their horns and headlights in ways that [A] baffle visiting Americans and [B] are extremely dangerous. The retardedest element of this usage is its foundation in etiquette. The Japanese use car horns and headlights to be courteous. In Japan, drivers that stop at a red light will often dim their headlights so as not to shine at oncoming traffic at the other side of the intersection (or at the car stopped directly in front of them). This is the single most dangerous practice covered here, and…
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Ketchup vs. BBQ Sauce
First on my hit list: Ketchup vs. BBQ Sauce (I’ve always thought that “catsup” sounds like what a starving family in Pyongyang does to celebrate Our Great Leader Day. Official notice to all employees of McDonalds (Would you like that Oppression Value Set Super-Sized?) located in Japan: KETCHUP IS NOT THE SAME AS MCNUGGET BBQ SAUCE, NOR CAN YOU CONVINCE ME OTHERWISE. EVER. PERIOD. In retrospect, I wish I had written this rant years ago, because although I have educated hundreds of drive-through females (I say this, interestingly enough, because none have been males.) verbally or with “this stuff’s made in NYC!” type gesticulations, I have never been formally recognized…
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Future Subjects
Today as I walked back to my desk from the musty pisstrap hell for overgrown boys down the hall, I neatly outlined four rants that have been steadily chipping away at my sanity slightly after my arrival in Japan. I?m sure I can think of another one, too, in case I want to list five. Today our subjects include: – Ketchup vs. BBQ Sauce – Headlight & Horn Etiquette – Seasonal Vending Machine Coffee Temperature – Effluvious Packaging I had originally wanted to cover these as feature pages for this site, and may still do so, but permalinks to an MT blog might work just as well, I suppose. Gotta…
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Tatoo Blues
I want to relay a story about a bad day I had two Saturdays ago. Actually, I’ll skip over the really bad parts and jump right into the fray (and that’s a good definition of my life in general). I ended up that day with a friend who was going to get a tattoo. We went to the tattoo dude’s apartment in separate cars (completely unnecessary detail), and to make a really long story short, I ended up waiting for 3 hours in the living room with 3 guys, friends of the tattoo dude, who were hard at work. Their profession of choice was of the “Receptionist/Driver for Escort Service”…
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About a Girl
On Saturday, I was awakened by Kohei (the guy who gave me a Devo hat when I was like ten) who had the nerve to call me at ONE THIRTY in the afternoon. As I groped to find the ringing cellmonster around the gap between futon and tatami, my arm brushed against the wet spot on my pillow (I admit, sometimes the whole pillow is a giant wet spot. That’s when it’s time to flip it over.). Somehow, the saliva rub woke me up almost instantly, and it was act-like-you-weren’t-sleeping talkfest time. You know that feeling, when your tongue moves two steps faster than your brain…. But I Digress Heinously.…
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Oh neighbor, forgive me…
Oh, I took off from work early on Friday because I couldn’t stand the excitement. Rushed home and saw a telephone line crane-truck parked next to my parking lot (on a street close to my house). Got a sick feeling in my stomach because I somehow knew this was used to bring the princess Hikari to my home, and remembered asking for my landlord’s permission a month ago, before going to Thailand. I passed on the explanation I got from the NTT rep, that FTTH installation is not a big deal, and existing holes in the walls are used so that there is a minimum of impact. Well, it was…
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happyhappyjoyjoy
First of all, the Hikari works. It rocks. Last night I heard the lonely scream of a 56k on some lame hackeresque TV movie, and it made me cringe. I watched the green LINK lamp on the ONU (FTTH “modem”) flicker as I downloaded files off some puny T1 server in Sweden, and was reminded about the Salaryman post I wrote a few years ago about hacking into the company LAN. About bandwidth: Out of the box, I have measured 23 Mbps in both directions. Average speed for this type of Hikari (B Flets Family 100 plan) is around 17, so I have a decent connection to begin with, which…
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Just Chill, foo!
Twenty-seven full minutes have passed since my last mail update from Nam. What is that girl thinking? I give her the benefit of the doubt and check for new mail actively instead of letting the system update my phone – it’s faster that way and the auto update is spotty in these concrete buidings sometimes. Goddamn it, why do factories have to be so utilitarian? I’d trade the third story metal doors (for moving big equipment directly in by crane) for wide-open (packet-friendly) gaping holes any day. Thirty-one minutes now. I could really piss her off by calling for an update again, but before I get home she will be…
