Better Late Than Never (RSS)

The Google Reader RSS interface

As late as 1974, my paternal grandfather still had a black and white television. He told me that he thought color was bad for your eyes and he didn’t think anyone needed a color T.V. I remember thinking that he was stuck in his ways and old-fashioned. I felt he was just reluctant to move with the times, even when technology was much improved. I’m not sure that he every had a color T.V., but I didn’t visit my grandparents to watch television anyway. He was a kind and wonderful man who I loved and still miss to this day.

Fast forward to the present where I have inherited my grandfather’s attitude except that my stubbornness applies to cell phones. I have a land line which my husband and I forked over about $500 for the privilege of owning when we first came to Japan and it serves us quite sufficiently. While there are times when it seems it wouldn’t be bad to have a cell phone, it seems like a pointless luxury and an invitation to have our privacy invaded more frequently. Frankly, I don’t want to be accessible all the time.

One of the dubious benefits of age appears to be that you make the transition to wanting the best of what is currently available to being satisfied with what merely works at a level which meets you most basic needs. I’m not sure when this tends to occur for most people, but it hit me around 35 or so. I guess that the loss of desire to acquire new items for the sake of new functionality which you technically do not need but rather simply want is one of the reasons why the target demographic for most advertisers is so young.

Around the same time that I lost nearly all of my materialistic impulses, I also seem to have stopped enjoying upgrading my computer for the sake of having the newest thing with the shiniest operating system. I also stopped enjoying tweaking the interface and buying new software. If what I have installed is working, I’m content to leave well enough alone now. I used to actually look forward to backing up all my data, wiping out the hard drive and installing a nice, fresh, new system and apps any time I experienced some instability. Now, I approach the thought with dread over the time it’d take and having to dig out all my installation discs.

Because of this reluctance, I’ve avoided switching from using bookmarks for web sites to using RSS. For those who are even further behind than I (all 2 or 3 of you), I’ll mention that RSS is a way of tracking when sites update so that you don’t have to load a web page every day just in case they updated. An RSS reader will notify you when sites update and you can either read them in whole or part inside the reader or go to the site yourself.

In my case, I went with Google Reader because I’m too lazy to look anywhere else and my sister told me that’s what she used. It’s pretty easy to set up, but quite time consuming initially. Once you've subscribed to all the sites you want to track, you're set and it's going to end up saving you time. It's mainly useful for someone who reads sites which are sporadically updated rather than someone who reads big ticket sites that are updated faithfully every day. In other words, it's custom made for someone who follows a lot of personal blogs like me.

Washing Machines

This morning while I was washing dishes, I heard my washing machine start to spin an imbalanced load of wet clothes and then stop because it detected the problem. It waited for the clothes to fall into a different weight balance then proceeded to spin out the water. When I heard it stop, I had the feeling it was "pondering" what to do then initiated a different course of action. Note that I usually do not anthropomorphize my appliances and was fully cognizant of how silly it was to do so in this case.

Our washing machine is about 14 years old and was one of the earlier "fuzzy logic" models. I'm not sure exactly how the fuzzy logic is applied in this case though I do know modern models guess the amount of water, detergent, etc. which are necessary based on the weight of the load. I also know it has a lot of buttons which allow you to choose the amount of water, wash time, etc. but it doesn't have any seriously fancy capabilities. That being said, it's still head and shoulders above our first washing machine in Japan in terms of its sophistication.

A modern semi-automatic washing machine. Note the two lids over the two chambers - one for washing and one for spinning out. If you want to know what our old machine looked like, think about this model's smaller, dirtier, clunkier grandpa.

When we first arrived, most folks in apartments were using what are called "semi-automatic washing machines". These are the types of machines with two chambers, one for washing and a separate one for spinning out clothes, and had to have water added manually. Doing a load of laundry in "the old days" of our life in Tokyo meant going through this multi-step process:

• tossing in a small bunch of clothes (about 1/3 what you'd fit in a standard U.S. machine) into the first chamber
  
• turning on the spigot and watching to see that it filled to the right point (if you walked away, you could bet on a flood)
  
• twisting a timer knob which set how long it anemically swished the clothes around,
• pushing a button to drain the water from the washing chamber and waiting a half hour for it to actually drain out
  
• using the spigot again to add in rinse water
• twisting the timer again so it could listlessly swish around the rinse water
  
• draining again with a button push and another long wait
  
• transferring a sopping wet wad of freezing cold clothes to the spin chamber (note: almost no washing machines use hot water in Japan)
  
• twisting a timer knob to get the clothes to spin out
• rebalancing the imbalanced wad
• spinning again (and possibly rebalancing again and trying to spin again)
  
• pulling the wad of intricately-tangled clothes from the spinner
• detangling the wad
• hanging them outside to dry
  

The main problem with this machine was that you had to keep an eye on it and be a part of every process. The secondary problem was that the spinning chamber was so small even a leprechaun wouldn't be able to fit his weekly laundry in it (and his tights would never, ever come untangled after a spin). The size of the machine seemed to assume one did a small load of laundry every day to keep on top of it. The other bad points included the fact that the washer didn't wash clothes especially well (nor rinse out detergent well) and the spinner really didn't get enough water out.

While this contraption may sound old-fashioned, the truth is that these things are still sold today. I'm not even talking about third-world countries or just in Japan where women still do many chores the labor-intensive way, but in many countries. To be fair, I've read that newer models include a drying function as part of the spinning portion of the current crop of semi-automatic washing machines. I'm also guessing they don't require all of the fiddling to add water and have sensors to add to the right water level without the user having to turn on a spigot or watch the levels. They also carry with them some green benefits like reducing water and power consumption.

The ecological issues regarding use of a semi-automatic washing machine are pretty compelling and, when our current machine goes off for its eternal rest, I'd have to at least consider the possibility of a semi-automatic for this reason alone. However, it's going to be really hard to shake the memory of that old machine and the vastly increased effort and attention it required to simply get something done which no one really enjoys doing.

Buffalo

One of the things I learned a long time ago was that optical drives, CD, DVD, and MO, go wonky much more quickly than any other component of your computer or audio/video system. On every Mac I've owned the CD-ROM drive has developed difficulty reading discs within two years. This usually starts with the disc whirring and repeatedly rotating until it either mounts the disc, stops attempting to try to read it, or spits it out.

At my former office, we used magnetic-optical discs for back-up and one of our MO drives was crapping out. A programmer who temporarily worked at our office and who claimed to know a bit about the mechanisms in optical drives told us that this sort of failure is inevitable and that most of them weren't going to go the distance because the optical mechanism wore out rather quickly. He said that it was almost certainly going to start experiencing problems after 4 years and often has issues sooner than that.

I don't know if this fellow knew what he was on about but the information he gave me certainly fits in with my experiences. Knowing this, I've made it a habit to replace failed internal DVD and CD drives on computers with the cheapest possible solution. The same goes for the DVD player we connect to the television. Getting a high-end solution seems pretty pointless when there's a decent chance it'll crap out in 3 years or so. Of course, there are people who are dead certain that the DVD media is dead and have already concluded that CDs are ancient technology. Nonetheless, I still continue to need mine and to find that software is distributed on them.

My husband uses his notebook PC (an Acer) in his English lessons with his students for a variety of purposes. One of the things he does sometimes is watch DVDs that his students want to discuss the contents of in class. This actually allows him to teach the types of classes that other teachers envy, but it also means he needs a PC with a functioning DVD drive as PCs are not part of the standard classroom equipment. When his DVD drive started having difficulty reading one of his student's DVDs, we knew it'd have to be replaced.

While I was researching replacements, I discovered that the model used in his Acer was troublesome for many users of that particular drive. I also discovered that it cost around $200 to buy a new one and the known issues with it meant that a replacement wouldn't necessarily work any better than his currently faulty one. Given these problems, we decided to go for a portable external DVD drive to replace my husband's ailing internal mechanism. As always, I check Amazon in the U.S. first for a baseline price for various models then check Amazon Japan for the same models if they are available to see how much more expensive they are here. If the price difference is too great, we have family ship a U.S. model to us. If it's a reasonable gap, we just buy one here.

The baseline model for me was a nice portable Sony dual layer DVD burner/player for about $96. It was compact, had a USB2 connection, and could burn and read almost any type of disc. The price was also quite reasonable. Unfortunately, Amazon Japan didn't carry it and most comparable models were about $180.


Fortunately, continued poking around in the electronics section at Amazon Japan turned up a Buffalo model which had everything the Sony had for only about $20 more. Buffalo in Japan seems to be the low cost model for almost anything you want as a peripheral for a computer. I'm guessing it might be regarded as a relatively undesirable brand but I've had pretty good luck with all the Buffalo items I've purchased among which there have been two high capacity hard drives, a Firewire PCI card, and a PC slot LAN card. None of these items have ever failed though I did drop and destroy one of the hard drives though I can hardly blame Buffalo for my clumsiness.


The drive is only slightly larger than a CD jewel case and brings to mind the old IBM external floppy drive mechanisms I used to see people using at work as companions to their ThinkPads ages ago. It has an AC adapter but also runs off of USB bus power. I tested it out on my Mac Mini (which cannot power anything which runs off the bus except thumb drives and required the AC adapter) and on my PC (which did run it off the bus only) and it was instantly recognized and worked fine on both without any driver installation.


Since my husband is very hard on his hardware and he'll be tossing this drive into his backpack when he goes to work, I decided to track down a case for it. I've found that the Daiso 100 yen shop has a wide variety of such things and sifting through the copious number of cases yielded one which was not only a perfect fit but also has a zippered pocket on the outside for the USB cable.

Word is that the next super small models of Macs will come without a DVD drive and I'm thinking that something like this should be very handy to have around should that time come and should I take the plunge on a new Mac. In fact, given my problems with internal drives, I find this a preferable option.

Akihabara - Part 1

The current "face" of Akihabara puts girls in maid uniforms front and center.

Those who have been away for awhile and return home often find that the towns and cities they left behind have transformed. My husband first experienced the shock of this about 10 years after he had lived in Japan and went home. His hometown had been noticeably transformed such that it didn’t feel like home to him. I haven’t been home for a very long time though the last time I went, my home had been plowed down and my family had moved.

If you stay in one place long enough, you find that it undergoes similar transformations but you don't tend to notice it happening if it is making that transition bit by bit. However, in Tokyo, you can still see some pretty stunning transformations because it is so vast that you may find that you don’t get back to an area for quite some time in some circumstances. Such has been the case with me and Akihabara.

Ads for various bits of electronic equipment paper the platform when they aren't edged out by ads for otaku-related interests.

When we first arrived, Akihabara was a bustling hub of businesses selling electronics at prices that were lower than the local shops. Most of the time there was little variation in pricing for most major items but, occasionally, you’d find something which was a cut below the others. My husband and I made frequent trips to Akihabara between 16 and 12 years ago when we were both working, bringing in plenty of cash, and in a frame of mind to build up our lifestyle. That period of time also was when the tech boom was going on and new computer equipment every few years to keep up with the leaps in speed and capability made a lot of sense.

Streets on the "old" side of the station lined with electronics shops.

Our earliest forays to Akihabara were spent prowling the major stores looking for the best prices on large appliances for our apartment. There was no shortage of rather old-fashioned buildings which had a plethora of options and we picked up a big refrigerator, washing machine (and a now long departed dryer), oven, stereo, and television. Most of the shops were fronted by middle-aged men shouting out and offering flyers about certain deals.

Macs and Apple products are a lot easier to buy in Japan now compared to a decade ago. Prices are also relatively similar to those in the U.S. though they do tend to be slightly higher in Japan.

The next several rounds of shopping there consisted of me prowling the side streets for stores that carried Macs. At that time, Macs were hard to locate even in Akihabara because they simply were not all that popular in Japan. They still aren’t all that commonly-used but the popularity of iPods has brought about an increase in shops that also carry other Apple products including Macs. We’d have to scour the shops petty hard and sometimes we’d run across one sad little Mac model in a sea of PCs. There’s be the odd glittering jewel of a shop which carried a variety of models like La-Ox Mac but they were the exception.

In my case, the shopping was all the harder because I’d be searching for an English language model. In the pre-OS X days, Macs did not come with system software with every language available. With OS 8 and 9, you got what came with the machine and that was usually Japanese. You could replace the OS with an English one but that required buying an English version which added to the cost overall. The last Mac model I made the trek to Akihabara for was a PowerPC G3/DT 266. After that, I gave up and started buying my Macs from the U.S. and having them sent over via my in-laws.

The inside of a typical small electronics shop. These places are a pain to navigate but can be good places to get the best prices, particularly on specialty items such as electronic dictionaries.

The internet started to change the way in which folks made pilgrimages to Akihabara. With the ability to comparison shop via web sites and make orders effortlessly, who would choose to slog around the grubby streets of “Tokyo’s electric town”? The truth is that, up until changes started to be made in Akihabara, it wasn’t that fun a place to visit. Back during one of our appliance-hunting sojourns, I recall we had trouble even finding a vending machine that carried a palatable beverage. They didn’t carry water or Diet Coke and there were very few of them. There were also almost no restaurants within reasonable walking distance of the station and shops. It simply was not profitable enough compared to the value of the land to build a McDonald’s or whatnot for people to eat at, particularly when the space could be used for a more lucrative electronics business.

Ishimaru was one of the few big shops that had a relatively old-fashioned picture in its window. Most of the other shops had huge female anime characters on them.

Rather than shrivel up and die, the services offered at Akihabara started to change. Since there were already a good number of geeks making pilgrimages there to shop for DIY (Do It Yourself) computer parts and software, businesses that catered to their lack of social skills and fantasy-based social needs started to crop up. In my opinion, the birth of the cosplaying maid-manned places can be directly linked to the need to offer something more than low-priced electronics because of internet shopping.

Pervy toys for like-minded boys. Note all the submissive and inviting poses...like these women are female dogs presenting themselves for entry.

For those who don’t know, Akihabara is currently as well-known (or possibly better-known) for the way it caters to otaku (rabid aficionados of anime or other generally juvenile interests or collectors). It’s now quite common to see women walking around in maid costumes handing out flyers, traveling to and from the station and going to lunch. In fact, it seems that there are more women in costume sometimes than there are shopping, at least on the older side of the station.

Maids walking through the station. I get the feeling one shouldn't mess with the one who has a skull hanging off her skirt though it's possible she's involved in some sort of "highly specialized" service.

The point of these places seems mainly to allow men to be catered to and served by women who roleplay not only their anime-based fantasy characters but do so in a completely deferential and subservient fashion. The whole situation has relatively perverted overtones but it is mainly about psychological gratification rather than physical though women do give foot rubs and whatnot. The perception is that men go to these places because they are too shy or lacking in social skills to socialize with women in real life but I don’t know if it’s that or if it’s essentially paying women to cater to their non-sexual whims.

A french bakery in the station.

Beyond the somewhat kinky addition of the cosplay service business, Akihabara has experienced some other big changes. Remember when I mentioned that there were few places to eat or drink before? That has most certainly changed. The station has been re-built and there are a great many places that seem to be catering to women and families. I believe the growth of shops selling sweets and cakes is for female customers because Japanese men are not known for their consumption of sugary treats. For men, the main vice when it comes to eating and drinking is alcohol. For women, it is sweets.

An import food shop which carried the selection of Spam in a previous post.

I was shocked that so many European-style bakery options had opened up and that there was even an import shop in the station. I hadn’t seen Akihabara for quite some time though so these places may have opened up a long time ago. It could be that these areas are there to cater to the number for foreigners who flow in for a bit of shopping but I doubt that.

I wonder if the glass is bullet-proof.

If the number of foreigners walking around shopping isn’t a clue that it’s a major tourist destination, the presence of a currency exchange kiosk in the station (something which is relatively rare in most stations in Tokyo) would be a major tip-off. Akihabara has always been a popular tourist spot but I’m guessing it’s more so now that there’s the freak show nature of the maid cafes in addition to the overwhelming number of electronics shops.

The face of the older side of the station. Note how the facade is peeling and very worn.

Back when we were frequenting Akihabara, one side of the station was pretty dead and both sides were pretty dirty and rundown. One side still does look pretty worn and crummy as you can see in the picture above. There were few shops of value on one side and that side was not doing much business.

The monster Yodobashi-Akiba.

That all changed when a huge Yodobashi Akiba shop was opened. This is sort of a mega-store where you can find everything in one place if you’re not inclined to search up and down the many streets on the other side looking for the best possible deal.


Akiba is the sort of place that’s built for comfort rather than for price. The area in front is open, clean and clear. There are restaurants in the building so you can have a sit down, a drink, or a meal. The whole Akiba experience seems to me to draw in families. In fact, my conclusion about the changes in Akihabara is that some business savvy people have learned how to lure in every demographic with some savvy changes. The young males are drawn in by the maids and cosplaying businesses. Women and families are drawn to Akiba and the increased number of shops which carry food and non-electronic items and men seeking bargains can go to the older shops.

Windswept Baking

The poor little fellow on the right in front isn't getting his share of heat and has become the runt of the litter.

Though I took delivery of a new oven a little over a month ago, I haven't put it through all of its paces yet. The biggest reason for this has been the lingering hot and humid weather. One is hardly inspired to bake goodies when one is baking oneself everyday.

While I've made several savory dishes and some cinnamon rolls in the new oven with very good results, I hadn't yet attempted to make anything in the cake/muffin style. This evening, I gave a batch of pumpkin muffins a try and learned about some of the uneven heating patterns of the new oven. To be fair, all ovens seem to have this sort of problem though I'm guessing more expensive ones may lack them. My former oven was always hotter toward the front.

The new oven is a convection oven though so I had though it might be a bit better but the muffins tell no lies. If you look at the picture above, you can see it heats unevenly such that the left side bakes faster than the right and the air seems to blow harder from left to right such that the tops appear rather windswept. This doesn't make for very pretty presentation but it's not a big deal. The main thing I'll have to look out for is the fact that the right side seems to stay "raw" while the left cooks through. I'll have to turn the tray around at the mid-point of the cooking time to accommodate this weakness.

The finished muffins. They erupted over the sides because of the way they rose unevenly. Note how the ones in the back were swept both left and right and toward the center. They don't look so great but I'm sure they'll taste fine.

The odd thing is that all the muffins seem to have had their contents shift with the breeze in different directions. All I can imagine is that the convection blows in various directions and, depending on the position of the food on the tray, they are pushed one way or the other. One thing I did notice though was that regardless of position, the silicon bake-ware (the blue stuff) did a better job than the old aluminum ones. I had my husband pick up one "tin" of them while in the U.S. (they are much more expensive and harder to find in Japan) and now I wish I'd had him get two. Silicon "pans" are a bit flimsy and hard to handle when you fill them up (you have to put them on a flat surface that you can carry over to the oven) but they're better at conducting heat, cool off more quickly, easier to clean and don't require oiling (though it does help to oil them a little, they can be turned inside out to remove foods).

New Oven

I recently read that the difference between people who shop so much that they end up living beyond their means or at least who shop for recreation is that they don't feel any guilt when they spend money on things. If you're the sort of person who feels guilty for spending money, you're far less likely to be a shopaholic or to spend money you don't have on meaningless crap.

I used to be guilt-free in regards to buying things then at some point that changed and now I find it hard to buy things that I arguably need without feeling guilty. I think it has something to do with not working full-time anymore though I'll admit it started at least 3 years before I quit. Perhaps it's age and the feeling that "stuff" isn't really making me happy anymore.

Anyway, I've been limping by with my old oven (which must be at least 13 years old by now) since I posted about problems with the timer knob in April. In an attempt to use it until it was truly dead, I was baking or roasting in a step by step process in order to accommodate the knob that would not set a proper time until the oven got really, really hot. The process went something like this:

1. Painstakingly attempt to dial up one minute of time at the pre-set temperature and push the start button to initiate the pre-heat sequence.
   
2. Wait 15 minutes for pre-heat sequence to complete then place food in the oven where it ran for one minute. Look at the clock to keep track of cooking time since the timer wasn't going to do the trick.
3. Repeat step one.
4. Repeat step one.
5. Repeat step one.
   
6. Painstakingly attempt to dial up more than one minute (4 minutes was a lucky day) to continue cooking.
7. Repeat step 6.
8. Depending on how hot a day it is and my luck, I may be able to finally coax the oven to run dial up the remaining cooking time (calculated by the clock on the wall, of course) or repeat step 6 again.

You can see how this might be a problem. What was worse was that the timer was even more useless when using the microwave function because the oven didn't heat up and the timer didn't get easier to set. The only way I could use it was by using the auto-cook function whereby you open the door to activate the microwave, close the door and push "start" and the microwave was supposed to auto-detect when it reached whatever random temperature it felt was correct for that food. Sometimes the food was only lukewarm. Sometimes it overcooked. When I heated water or milk in there, it more often than not boiled over if I didn't keep an eye on it.

My old oven. It worked as good as it looked.

I even soldiered on after the lower left bezel cracked and the front glass plate slipped down some. I just taped it up and kept on going. After months and months now (possibly well over a year) of fighting with it and it getting harder and harder to set the timer on even on hot days (initially, it worked pretty well in the summer but poorly in the winter), I found that I was starting to hate it so much that I didn't want to cook with it at all. When the notion to bake or roast something popped into my head, the laborious process of dealing with the oven chased it right out again. It was at this point that I decided it was time to bite the bullet and get a new oven.

The two main criteria for the new oven were a relatively modest price and that it's internal cavity be large enough to cook a whole chicken. After considerable research, I found a Mitsubishi for about ¥32,000 ($271) which accommodates two 32 cm (12.6 inch) square ceramic trays. Since my old oven uses two 32 cm square metal trays, I figured the size should be sufficient and the price well within what might be expected for such an oven. The old Toshiba we bought was ¥80,000 ($678) but part of that high price was a reflection of the fact that such ovens were not as commonly purchased in those days. Based on my pre-purchase research, I believe a comparable one today would be ¥60,000 ($508) or so.

The shiny new oven. It works better than its tacky color scheme makes it look.

The new oven is just as wide and deep as the old one but not quite as high. I'm pretty sure it can still roast a whole chicken but it may be rather close to the top of the oven. The new one is one of those fancy convection things which swirls the air around the food for even cooking. Our old oven twirled the food around on a circular plate in the center and left the air alone. I often had to turn food around at the mid-baking point because the front was hotter than the back and it wouldn't cook evenly otherwise. The new one also has more custom temperature settings including the ability to heat food to precise temperatures and it allows you to cook with steam though I'm not sure how useful that function is going to be for me. Except for the steam cooking, I'm pretty sure most of these functions are old hat for people who aren't using antiquated equipment.

I used the microwave function several times last night and this morning to re-heat food and make tea and it was a delight having knobs turn and actually set the time as I wanted. The target temperature function was also pretty nifty though I can't say I know what temperature is best for certain foods yet. I tested out the oven today by making a banana bread recipe which is tried and true. Since I know how it usually turns out, a comparison between the old and new for this particular item was easy.

Here is where I ran across the differences between a cheap and an expensive oven. For one thing, the oven can't be set at 5 degree temperature variations. It's either 170 degrees (338 degrees) or 180 degrees (356 degrees) and not 175 (which is often the preferred baking temperature as 176.6 is 350 degrees - the near universal setting for baked goods). Also, I noticed that the door has an overzealous spring on its hinge and slams shut rapidly and loudly unless you ease it up by hand.

The oven also appears to have a separate preheat cycle and a separate timed cycle but I could be misunderstanding how to use it. Today, I preheated it to 180 degrees and it beeped when it reached that temperature but I couldn't figure out how to set the timer for 45 minutes. I had to stop the oven then switch to one of the other 3 oven modes and then set the time and temperature again. One good point though is that the pre-heat time is easily 1/3 the length of time that the old oven took, possibly it's even faster than that. This is certainly saving on energy consumption.


Since I had to choose too high or too low for the temperature, I settled on too high because I was afraid too low would impede the rising of the banana bread. This made it darken very rapidly compared to baking in the old oven. I also noticed it didn't rise as much in the center but rose more evenly overall (because of the convection). About 2/3 of the way through the baking, I reduced the temperature to 170 degrees. Next time, I'll have to split the time or try the lower temperature first.

Though it is a bit darker, it turned out very well. The texture seems softer and better than ever. I'm not sure if this was a random preparation factor (though I doubt it as this is my standard no fuss banana bread recipe made largely in the food processor so there's little variation in method) or the convection oven's influence.

The irony is that last night after I received the new oven and had set it up, I started to feel guilty for not having endured dealing with the old one until it conked out for good. Somewhere along the line I went from the type of person who blithely bought a new Macintosh every year and a half to the type who feels bad about replacing a dying piece of necessary equipment. I've got to work on finding the happy medium between those two, especially since I also ordered a new toaster oven. ;-)

Going Wireless

My husband and I have lived in the Stone Age of networking for awhile now and it was only a failing (wired) router that pushed me to finally make a move to wireless. Part of the reason I resisted going wireless is that I'd heard that the signal strength was inconsistent or weak and the connection would drop out at not infrequent intervals. My guess is those sorts of problems are in the past now that wireless is far past being bleeding edge technology.

We'd been using a venerable basic Linksys 4-port router for quite some time but over the past 6 months, it had picked up the bad habit of dropping the connection at random intervals. While we figured it had developed a problem assigning local IP addresses, we weren't sure and decided quite some time ago to replace it with a router that would allow us to have the option of using a wireless connection.

I chose a router which was very similar to my old one because I was already familiar with the interface and Linksys has pretty good quality products. It didn't hurt that it was also relatively cheap (about $50 from Amazon U.S.). The only problem is that you cannot have electronic items shipped to Japan from Amazon U.S. and this particular model wasn't available at any of my usual haunts in Japan so we had to wait for my husband's trip to the U.S. to order it so he could carry it back.

Unfortunately, there was a problem. My husband didn't check the contents of the software and paperwork packets and I found that the disc had been badly damaged when it was shipped. Given my past experience with my router, I wasn't really too worried about configuring it without a set-up disc except for the fact that the back of the disc's sleeve says in big bold letters "Run CD First" (as you can see above). If that weren't enough to give me second thoughts about configuring the router manually, the router's Ethernet ports were taped over with a bright orange piece of tape shouting "RUN CD FIRST".

I started to wonder if Linksys knew better than me. Otherwise, why would they bother with all the warnings? Well, they bother because manufacturer's these days are designing their products for the same type of customer who needs several warnings on the cup of coffee they buy such as, "CAUTION: contents are hot","do not re-use disposable cup", "contents of coffee may contain coffee beans - do not consume if you are allergic to coffee" and "do not eat lid" . In other words, they assume the purchaser would probably lose in a battle of wits with a doorknob.

All those warnings are to prevent thousands of people who probably require Velcro on their shoes because the act tying a shoe is too great a mental challenge from just plugging in random cables and thinking the magic network fairy will tap her wand and make it work. In fact, there's a little troubleshooting guide which has some typical questions including something to the effect of 'I plugged my telephone cord into the router and I can't connect to the internet'. The Linksys answer booklet gently says, 'you can't dial-up using this router.'

To be honest, I don't have an issue with the fact that some people don't know about computers or how they work. In fact, I support anyone's desire not to learn something they have little to no interest in. I start to have the problem when all the things you buy have to be designed to accommodate those who can't be troubled to either read a manual or hire someone who is willing to read one to set-up their computer so they start plugging in random cables hoping for the best.

In the end, I threw caution to the wind (well, not exactly, I only did so after my friend, Shawn (who is insane but knows a bit about networking), and my sister, Sharon (who is sane and knows a lot about networking), reassured me that both of them felt there'd be no problem) and just did what I was inclined to do and manually configure it all. The only glitch was that I couldn't find the MAC address for my husband's notebook as it's not printed conveniently on the back of it (like my husband's more accommodating Palm T|X) and couldn't locate the right tab on the Linksys web-based configuration interface to scan for it. My sister managed to help me out though and now things are running smoothly. In fact, they are now better than smooth as my husband's notebook is running faster on wireless than wired. Previously, he used to top out around 600 kbps but now is getting a little over 1 Mbps on downloads (with other computers on the network also running). I'm not sure why that should be but he's pleased regardless.

My Food Is Safe Now

Our new refrigerator arrived today and looks pretty much the same as the old one on the outside (if you're not paying close attention). We purchased it from Yodobashi in Shinjuku because it was close to where my husband works and not significantly more expensive than going to Akihabara. This model cost about $500.

One thing we might have done to save money if we were inclined to go to the trouble was to go and search for a shop that was selling "last year's model" of the same refrigerator for between $100-$120 less than this year's model. If you're in the market for a major purchase and you can either wait until shortly after a new model comes out or search for older models on-line (at places like Rakuten, for instance), you can often score a discount. At least two of my students have mentioned saving money on large purchases by going for last years model. One student bought a car and the other a large, flat screen T.V. for tidy discounts.

In our case, we valued expediency (and our free time and energy) over a little money so we took the path of least resistance. As far as I can tell, the only difference between last year's model and our model is that ours has a lever to tip ice cube trays over while inside the refrigerator rather than having to take them out and crack them open. This feature works very well but it wasn't a factor in our decision to buy a new model.

One thing we did notice when the delivery was made though was that Yodobashi's delivery people seem to be less service-oriented than the shop we bought our old refrigerator from in Akihabara. When they arrived, they clucked their tongues about not being able to remove the old refrigerator from the tight space. Since I've moved that refrigerator in and out of that space and I'm a woman with a bad back, I thought they were being big babies.

When they finally tried it, they removed it rather easily. When they put the old one in, we asked them to put squares of wood under the feet so as not to dig ruts into the linoleum (because this is what the landlords want done) but they refused to do it claiming it wasn't possible. While I'll admit it would not have been easy, it could have been done but we let it go.

The delivery men were about to run off before the refrigerator was even plugged in but they thought better of it when they came back to get the blanket they used to move the refrigerator across the middle of the floor without scuffing it up and they saw me struggling to do it. After they left, I noticed they managed to scuff up the floor in front of the refrigerator regardless of the blanket. Since the floor is new, I wasn't too pleased about this but I guess it's more of the landlord's problem than ours.

Empty Coke bottles allow us to filter our own water and then chill it rather than fork over money for bottled water.

On the bright side, they did everything in about 10-15 minutes and were out of our hair so I could load up the fridge with our food. They were good enough to call 15 minutes before they arrived so I was able to remove it all shortly before they came. Since this is a 2-door refrigerator and our old one was 3 doors, I had to do some rearranging and it wasn't easy. I never liked the big drawer in the bottom of the old fridge so, I like this layout better. I especially like the crisper being smaller and making it easier to keep vegetables and fruit in a tidy space rather than chucking them into a cavernous drawer the size of the entire bottom of the refrigerator.

Every jar on the second shelf but one (sesame oil) contains a spice. You can tell I cook a lot...or am too lazy to throw out old spices. ;-) If you don't want your spices to cake up into a block in summer, you have to keep them refrigerated. The foil packet is yeast.

I also like having another shelf at the bottom and a wider shelf in the middle. The old one had relatively narrow shelves which accommodated milk cartons but were not wide enough for 1.5 liter bottles of soda. This one clearly has a shelf designed for larger soda bottles but they are too loose for milk. The cartons tend to shift around when the door is opened and closed.


One thing I don't understand about the design though is why the old refrigerator had 16 slots to hold eggs and this new one has 6 when these machines are designed specifically for the Japanese market where eggs are sold in 10-packs for the most part. That isn't even a proper egg tray though. It's just a little piece of plastic with 6 holes in it that you can remove if you like.

Those are Krispy Kreme donuts on the second shelf on the right. They're waiting for a moment of indiscretion followed by a quick trip to the microwave.

The freezer is actually somewhat better than the old one and seems no smaller (we lost size mainly in the refrigerator section). Our old freezer was essentially one shelf and one little boxed area next to the ice cube tray. Having only one shelf forced us to cram packages of plastic-covered food in there on top of each other in a relatively large area. Things were very slippery and one wrong pull often sent several (usually heavy) items plummeting onto the feet of the person routing around in there. This freezer has one more division so things are separated out a bit better. Hopefully, there will be fewer crushed toes in the future.

I'm hoping this new refrigerator will be less wasteful energy-wise than the old one since it was produced with energy saving in mind for environmental issues. I'd still have preferred a taller, bigger one but you have to go with what fits in the space you have.

This Old Fridge

Our 14-year-old refrigerator has been sputtering for the last few years and, as of last night, we decided that it would be the height of imprudence not to retire it before it dies completely. In the summer, in particular, the motor tends to overheat in the un-airconditioned kitchen and it sometimes can't run long enough to keep the refrigerator cold enough. On occasion, the ice in the ice cube trays will start to melt when this sort of thing happens.

This morning, I noticed that the indentation in the handle to the mid-section of the fridge pictured above was full of water. The reason was that entire thing had stopped working overnight and water was dripping out from thawing food in the top. After a bout of complete panic at the notion of a large investment in frozen food dying a premature death, I got the refrigerator to start working again by a combination of shaking it up a bit and unplugging and re-plugging the power cord. Plugging and unplugging it caused it to start running each time the power was re-connected.

At the moment, it seems to be in good working order again without any intervention from me but the motor has made clunking noises on occasion and made some again today. Even if I was willing to try and string it out longer, I'm not sure it'll survive another summer in its current state. So, we're pretty much going to have to add the refrigerator to the list of aging appliances that we're going to have to replace.

While this may sound like a simple (albeit expensive) thing to do, like everything else in Japan, it's rather complicated. Our apartment is literally "full" of furniture and cannot accommodate anything else. The kitchen in particular is set up as efficiently as possible. There is absolutely no way to re-arrange any piece of furniture in order to fit in a larger one and there is nothing we can sacrifice to make space given that we have almost no built-in shelving.

The refrigerator we buy to replace the one we have must, therefore, be exactly the same size as the one we currently own. Unfortunately, my research has shown that the standard size for a relatively largish refrigerator in Japan is now around 60 cm. and our refrigerator is 54 cm. I think the actual usable space is up to 56 cm., but that'd be an incredibly tight squeeze. The main problem for us is that we need what might be considered a "big" refrigerator in Japan. Most of the 54 cm. models are the short type that are more often used in college dorm rooms in the U.S. or used for people who live alone in one-room apartments in Japan. For 2 people who buy a lot of fresh food, those short ones just won't suffice.

Of course, we also don't want to pay too much for a new fridge since our plans for remaining in Japan are fairly uncertain. We may leave relatively soon or may stay a bit longer but we are living each day with an eye toward departure, not an eye toward staying. However, we know from my brother-in-law's experience that a used refrigerator is not a good option. Also, I doubt very much that a used one would easily fit our size needs (narrow and tall).

This picture of our possible future fridge is stolen from Sharp's product page.

I did some research and think this model by Sharp may be the best option. It's 54 cm. wide but about 14 cm. (5.5 in.) shorter than our current model. Hopefully, the fact that it is 7 cm. (2.8 in.) deeper than our current one will make-up for a little of the capacity lost from the reduced height. It's also relatively cheap for a mid-size refrigerator at ¥54,800. I'm also attracted to the 2-section design more than our 3-segment design because the drawer at the bottom of ours has always been hard to dig into and unwieldy to clean.

My husband will look into this model and do some in-store research and hopefully we can get this resolved quickly in case the old one gives up for good this weekend. I can't say that I'm looking forward to the replacement in any way. It's bad enough that it's going to cost us but we also have to make special arrangments and pay to have the old model hauled away by the maker (Sanyo). In fact, I had hoped to buy another Sanyo so that this process would be done in one step (deliver the new one, remove the old one) but Sanyo does not make a model of the right size for us.

Boy Toy

My husband has had an iPod for several years now. He's been wanting a video iPod with a large screen for well over a year now. Unfortunately, Apple has not been forthcoming on the full-screen front. He also hasn't been all that keen on Apple's DRM or file type limitations for video or music.

Since joining a local health club, he's been desiring a portable off-line web reader in addition to having something which can play video so he can entertain himself with it while using a recumbent bicycle. He's been using my old Visor Prism (a gift from my sister when she graduated to a Treo) to read eBooks and such but it's age and smallish screen size limited the ability to perform the tasks he wanted on it.

After doing a bit of research and factoring in everything he wanted, we decided on a Palm TX. The screen is 320 x 480 pixels and you can re-orient it from portrait to landscape depending on which works better for your needs. The screen is really quite gorgeous and looks far better in real life than it does in the picture I took of it (above).

I've only had it for a day and so far have figured out how to at least get some .avi files to play on it using TCPMP and how to do off-line web reading using Plucker. We were going to use wireless to connect it directly and save content off-line using the Palm itself but our wireless situation sort of fell through when we encountered the cable internet disaster I previously wrote about. We may yet go wireless in the future but it'll have to be through my purchasing a new router and setting it up myself using our existing FLETS connection.

At $300, it was a bit expensive for an electronic "toy" but my husband doesn't buy these sorts of things often and never impulsively. In fact, I always encourage him to buy any "toy" he wants because he works so hard and spends so little on himself. So far, he's been very pleased with the TX. It's far closer to an actual hand-held computer than we've had before.

This is another one of those things that we had to get family assistance to buy. Palm doesn't sell direct to Japan and they also do not appear to sell any models in Japan. Their Japanese web site seems to only be a support site.

Replacing the Mac Mini's Hard Drive

The box Other World Computing sent my new drive in. The sticker that says you should reject the parcel if the seal is broken is interesting.

In a previous post, I mentioned that my Mac Mini's internal hard disk had failed. Rather than pay for repair, I opted to do it myself. I've done these types of repairs in the past on other Macs though they were all bigger than the Mini. In the past, I've replaced the hard disk on a PowerPC 6300 and the CD-ROM drive on an orange gumdrop-shaped iMac. Neither one really taxed my prowess but I do have a great knack for breaking off plastic tabs on the cases any time I open up a computer for upgrade or repair.

The drive I purchased was $89. It was somewhat more expensive than a precise duplicate of my former drive (a 4500 rpm, 80 GB Toshiba made for Apple). It's slightly faster at 5400 rpm and somewhat bigger at 100 GB. The folks at Other World Computing are absolute peaches and I'd highly recommend them if you're in need of upgrades or replacement parts. I e-mailed them to verify the compatibility of the drive I wanted to order and their response was fast and friendly. I ordered very late Tuesday night. The drive arrived around 5:30 on Friday via Fed Ex. Shipping was a reasonable $26.


The hard disk was very well-packed and arrived safely.


The drive itself is safely tucked into an anti-static packet. It rather looks like dinner for astronauts. You know, the type where they rip off the end and suck out the contents in the gravity-less environment?

Getting the case open was supposed to be the hard part. It was actually quite easy and I didn't even break any of the tabs. I was lulled into a false sense of security.

Anyway, OWC includes a section on their web site which has instructional videos for performing a wide variety of tasks including installing a hard drive and RAM on a mini. If you watch the video, you can pretty much see exactly what I did.

My installation went almost precisely like the one you see there except for the part where the competent fellow performing the tasks smoothly removes the screws and moves on to the next task. In my case, you can add about 5-10 minutes of extreme frustration for each screw as I attempted to remove screws held in by the approximate gravitational force of a collapsed star. The gentlemen narrating the instructional video mentions that he had already taken that particular Mini apart before. I'm pretty sure that was because the instructional video would have taken an hour if he'd have had to take the screws out before they were pre-loosened.

This also might explain why Apple's tech people have to charge so much. They probably are sitting in the back somewhere swearing and attempting to get enough torque on their screwdrivers to remove the screws necessary to repair the computers they work with. I'm guessing they also probably need several days off to regrow the skin on the tips of their fingers and get workmen's compensation during the healing process. I'm guessing they also have to pay for wholesale replacements when they've totally stripped the head off of most of the screws and have to rip the plastic frame apart to get at the innards of the computer.

Once I finally got the screws out and the drive in, I then had the chance to fight with getting the screws on the fan back in. All the itty-bitty other incredibly short screws just refused to go into their crevices and fell into the guts of the computer instead. The fan screws simply refused to go back in at all. With what little skin I had left, I pushed them in as far as possible and gave up. It took an hour and a half to do and at least an hour and 15 minutes of that was dealing with the screws. I do not exaggerate.

The moment of truth was at hand. I booted up the Mini and loaded the disk utility to erase the drive and it was there for erasing. Hurrah! I did it right and didn't hose my computer. I formatted the disk and prepared to install OS X.


Then, I hit an impasse. See the big red circles with exclamation points in the screenshot above? Those are OS X telling me I can't install the OS on my new hard drive or boot from it. Does it tell me why? No, of course not! What fun would that be!

So, I feel my blood pressure climb and go back to the disk utility and format the drive again. It won't work. I format it using every option available (except UNIX) including MS-DOS format. I partition it a few times in case 100 GB is too big for some reason. I search the internet for advice and find no joy. I erase again and again. Still no happiness.

Finally, I decide to restart. When I restart, the drive has magically become a bootable installable option. At the risk of further angrying up the blood of the Mac faithful out there, I have to sarcastically thank Apple for not telling me that it may be necessary to restart after formatting in order to make the drive bootable.

God, I miss OS 9.

To Web Cam or Not to Web Cam

image lifted from Amazon U.S.

My husband and I recently purchased a web cam so his family can see him when he talks with them via Skype. After considerable amounts of research, we decided on a Creative Labs Ultra notebook camera which is a tiny little thing that clips onto a laptop display.

Despite the fact that it was relatively cheap (about $70 from Amazon in the U.S. or Japan) the camera seems to work fine but the facial tracking had to be turned off to stop it from appearing that an earthquake was constantly in progress and the lighting in our bedroom is distinctly yellowish so the color looks a bit off.

I was happy to see that the camera came with software and manual in a variety of languages so I didn't have to hesitate to buy it in Japan. While you can usually download the software in English if the same product is released in both Japan and an English-speaking country, this is not always the case.

Generally, I'm not a fan of the notion of web cameras for several reasons. In this case though, it was purchased to allow my husband's parents and his mother in particular to see him when they talk. He and I don't go back to the U.S. very often (that's a dramatic understatement - I haven't been back for 16 years) and his mother is currently in poor health and the camera allows his family to see him without the plane trip back.

One of the reasons I don't like web cameras is that they symbolize the next level of privacy invasion. I think that the insistent ringing of phones and doorbells are bad enough without the idea that someone gets to see you any time they call you. With family, it's a little different because you don't have to look particularly put-together for them to see you but, with others, I dread the day when video phoning becomes the norm and everyone feels they are entitled to peer in on you if they decide to call and you decide to answer.

I also developed an early aversion to the notion of web cams because my former company dabbled with the notion of teaching lessons by telephone simultaneously with web camera transmission. This was back when ISDN was the fastest connection available. The cameras we used showed a sequence of poor quality, jerky images at a size which made any notion of "eye contact" or demonstrating pronunciation ridiculous.

What was worse about this idea was the fact that the company wanted the teachers to be on camera but the students didn't have to put their mugs on the screen. In other words, this wasn't about the illusion of face-to-face teaching at a distance, it was about letting the students watch the gaijin monkey perform. In the end, the company gave up on the idea before it ever got started because of the logistical issues. Most students didn't want to be tethered to a computer during a lesson that was done easily just with a phone. Also, the fact of the matter was that the work we did required a great deal of database entry during a conversations. We would not really be emulating eye contact because we had to spend so much time looking at the screen or keyboard to do the work.

I guess that my take on this really shows my age since YouTube is full of people who can't wait to upload videos of themselves talking about their lives or doing dumb things. While I think that video or pictures should be mainly for an audience of people who know you and have an emotional attachment to seeing you, it seems that others feel its just as good to put themselves out there for the amusement of strangers. Perhaps living in Japan where I often feel my mere presence often amuses strangers has seriously put me off of any such notion.

Ordering from Amazon Japan

Awhile back, I posted about my phone caterwauling at random intervals (most likely due to demonic possession). After stabbing phone-shaped voodoo dolls, calling in a telephonic priest, and just plain ignoring it and hoping it would eventually go away, we gave up and ordered a new phone from Amazon Japan.

Dealing with a Japanese web page when you don't understand most of what is written there can be rather daunting but Google's automatic translation services can help. Well, it can help a little. Anyone who thinks technology will eventually replace human translators should find any non-English page and apply a Google translation to the page and try to understand the mishmash that results.

Fortunately (or unfortunately), I am familiar enough with bad translations of Japanese into English and can decode the translations fairly well. I can read a little of the Japanese (and my husband who studied kanji can read more than I) but not enough to get much of a sense of things so even bad English is better than only Japanese. Once you get through registering with Amazon Japan, they have your address and credit card information so you only have to get through the important stuff once and then just log in and buy, buy, buy thereafter with just a few clicks. If you can't read it yourself, you can get a Japanese friend or coworker to get you through the hard part, just don't forget your user name and password.

Given that Amazon Japan is as cheap or cheaper than most shops and delivers the next day in most cases, it's a pretty good place to turn to first when you need something. I've even been recommending that my students give it a go and they are pleasantly surprised. You'd think they'd investigate it on their own but the Japanese are more suspicious of on-line buying than Americans. Most of them who buy goods on-line have them delivered C.O.D. rather than use their credit cards.

it's an angelic iridescent white...hopefully, the demons will be put off

My new phone is not incredibly dissimilar from my old one functionally except for one important point. It lacks the "door phone" functionality that was malfunctioning on my old phone. If it goes wonky, it will have to do so in a different way. As an added bonus, it's supposed to allow you to talk on the cordless handset and the wired handset at the same time. So, if my husband and I want to, we could talk to someone at the same time.

Of course, this is "in theory" since neither of us are phone slaves to begin with. To illustrate this most shockingly, I'll reveal that we don't have cell phones. This point tends to flabbergast most Japanese as they can't seem to go anywhere without their phones glued to their ears, vibrating in the bags, or melded to their hands so they can peck out text messages during any spare moment. Personally, I only grudgingly keep any phone at all so I can receive calls from my student referral agency and students themselves. I can't understand the appeal of being at hand for anyone to interrupt you at any moment.

I Get Well, the Computer Gets Sick

I've been struggling to recover from my cold for nearly 3 weeks now. There was a secondary infection or viral issue that grabbed hold of me about 5 days ago because my immune system was down. I'm pretty sure this has something to do with herpes simplex (the cold sore virus) having infected my nose and possibly the lining of my throat as it flares up in precisely the same way when it happens. At any rate, it's really painful and causes swallowing to be extremely difficult but I think I've seen the last of it as of today.

Unfortunately, just as I'm well enough to really start getting back on track, my PC contracts a virus. I've dealt with lots of viruses on the silly thing before. In fact, Gaelicum.A seems to be a semi-permanent visitor despite my shooing it off the drive once a week or so. This time, it was the Parite virus and I wasn't able to clear it off my external hard disk.

You other computer geeks know all about this kind of external disk. It's the sort you buy because you have all sorts of crap you just don't want to throw out but aren't sure is worth burning into a permanent archive. You stuff it full of things you occasionally deal with or random back-ups and generally use it as the equivalent of a huge, messy closet. You know you should sort it out and back-up the important files but you can't be bothered because that sort of organization would actually negate some of the value of having such a drive.

Unfortunately for me, this drive developed some sort of problem awhile ago which I never got around to dealing with. It couldn't be defragmented and it couldn't have any disk checks ran on it from Windows XP. My sister tells me she believes it has a bad sector but the drive has never shown any difficulties aside from refusing to have checks and a defrag ran so I ignored it. Essentially, one of the shelves in my closet was broken and I ignored it because the other shelves were just fine.

This bit me in the ass today because none of the Parite virus removal utilities can run properly to clean the disk. They all hit the same roadblock because of whatever has gone awry. Now, I have to deal with it. Instead of spending my first day of near wellness playing Guild Wars with my sister as I'd been looking foward to since just before the virus reasserted itself, I'll be spending it trying to sort through and burn all the data on a 160 GB drive to DVDs. As it is, I've already lost some of the data to infected files which I removed entirely so I guess that's sort of a "plus" as I don't have to question what to do with them.

The annoying thing about this problem is that it's exactly the sort of issue that I used to be able to run to my Mac to fix. It was my knight in shining armor when the PC refused to fix itself. If the PC wouldn't fix a disk/disc error, a Mac utility would. Now that the Mac OS and Windows speak much more similar languages, it doesn't work. In fact, the Mac would see the drive as "read only" when I removed it from the PC and plugged it into the Mac. It also refused to let me burn files from the drive. When the PC and Mac were near strangers waving their hands at each other and using sign language to convey the general meaning of a problem, the Mac would just work out what needed to be done and fix it rather than get just as confused by the problem as the PC. Those days are gone thanks to Stevie-baby and Mac OS X.

All of this was so frustrating that, once I finally got it set up to start doing burns, I decided to go off and do something more enjoyable, like clean the toilet.

Here's a fun geek fact, btw. "Disc" is used for CDs and DVDs (optical media) but "disk" is used for hard drives, removable media, and thumb drives. There is a spelling difference and it has meaning! It's not just some arbitrary difference.