Using Rikaichan in Firefox 3.0 Sunday June 29

For those of you that speak Japanese, are studying Japanese, or otherwise have any need to instantaneously look up Japanese characters on web pages, I recommend Rikaichan.

I was using Firefox 2 when it notified me on June 22nd that a Rikaichan update was available. I installed it, as normal, and then a few days later updated to Firefox 3 when it came out to the general public.

At that point, Rikaichan stopped working -- or rather, the installed Japanese-English dictionary was no longer appearing as a compatible plug-in for Firefox 3.

Should anyone have the same problem and stumble upon this page, simply uninstall the dictionary (leave the plug-in itself), and then re-download and install it. This fixed my installation, and I am sure it would sort out the bugs in yours as well.

Versioning. Sigh.

The trip to Hokkaido Sunday June 22

I've already uploaded the pictures, but I have yet to put comments on them. For those of you who don't know, I just completed a 5-day cycling tour in Hokkaido with some coworkers. 5 days, 715 kilometers (that's 444 miles for those of you who don't speak metric), and over 7,500 meters of vertical climb.

Yeah, I'm not going to lie. It was hard. But truth be told, it wasn't as hard as I imagined it may be.

I first bought my road bike on March 2nd, and I set out on Day 1 of the journey on June 1st. 90 days isn't particularly long -- I am slightly amazed at what the mind and body can do in a reasonably short amount of time when one sets one's mind towards a particular goal. Jon was joking that when I first started in March, a day's ride of 70 kilometers seemed like a big deal. Now, that's a nice healthy ride, but nothing I couldn't easily handle. Heck, I do 22-25 a day when I go back and forth between work.

Observation number 2: Hokkaido is much, much larger than I had originally imagined. Certainly, in context of the US, Japan itself is small, but when you deal with Japan, Japanese roads/traffic, and mountains, you start feeling like something 100 miles away is very, very distant-- because it isn't easy to get there.

Originally, I had thought we'd be going all the way around Hokkaido. "All the way around must be something like 500 miles," I thought. Wrong-- we did a big loop that encircled only about one-fifth of the size of the entire island.

This only means one thing I suppose: I need to go back and do a different tour!

You are not worthy of this cab ride Saturday April 19

One of the best things about my company is that approximately once every six months, most people in the company who have been there for any length of time (there is a qualification, yes) convene and talk about management-assigned topics. Essentially, the senior management says, "we have identified these points as things that need to be explored in our future, now talk amongst yourselves," thereby allowing most people in the company to have a say in the future direction. That's cool.

Even better, this meeting usually takes place on a Friday, whereafter we usually have a great dinner and drinks. Last night was no exception. I found myself in a karaoke room at 1:30am with a few brave souls, slightly tipsy, rocking out to my colleague's excellent rendition of "Me and Bobby McGee". No, really, she's a professional singer. I'm not being sarcastic. It is really good.

As anyone who has been in Japan longer for one Saturday night should know, 1:30am is well past the time the trains stop running, so anyone who stays out that late must be in for an all-nighter until 5:00am, or must take a taxi home. In the middle of the night, from Ginza, where our office is, it's about 3,500 yen to get home. That's about, at the current rate, $35. Split down the middle with a colleague, it's not so bad.

So, 3 of us were standing in a slight drizzle at 1:40am, searching for a cab. There are plenty of cabs in Ginza.

Finding one that will pick you up may be another issue.

We were on a back street, and there was a cab slowly approaching us. I attempted to flag it down; I could see the driver's face. He was focused straight ahead, hands slightly tense on the wheel, to the extent that it was unnatural and clear that he was avoiding us. The light at the intersection turned red, so he stopped. I walked towards the vehicle and looked at him again. Still nothing. I then got in front of the cab itself, and flailed my arms with a smile on my face. By this point, I had given up on getting in this cab, but I just wanted to make my point.

He rolled down the window and spoke.

"What are you doing? Get out from in front of the cab... it's dangerous!"

"We'd like a ride. Your cab indicates that you're accepting passengers," I shot back.

"I'm going home--" he said.

All cabs in Japan have an LED in the front window that indicates their current status, and it is very easy to see the difference between "out of service" and "empty".

"Your sign says 'empty', if you're going home, why doesn't it say 'out of service'?" I asked.

"I'm going to Chiba, I'm going home," he said, assuming that we did not live near Chiba, so we would have to accept his answer.

During this whole time, I continued to stand in front of his cab. He cocked the wheels and attempted to inch past me, but I moved, and my knees were on his bumper. This aggrevated him further, but like my father, don't mess with me when I am right. As a licensed cab operator in the city of Tokyo, you have an obligation to pick up anyone who wants a ride. Period.

Back to the Chiba excuse, it turns out that one of the 3 of us does in fact live in Chiba.

"She's going to Chiba," I said, pointing to the Japanese co-worker who was with us. I figured he would take her, as she is Japanese. I was wrong?

"I'm going home! Get out of the way!"

I couldn't let this clear discrimination stand.

"What? You don't like foreigners?! Is that it? If you're out of service, put that on your sign. This woman is going to Chiba, and you're going to take her there."

By this point he had inched the wheels to the extent where if I didn't re-position myself, he could "get away". I'd already decided I wouldn't want to reward this jackass with my money anyhow, so I moved back and he went off on his way.

We caught the next cab. He was a nice guy, and I made sure to tell him the full story. He sounded sympathetic, and I truly believe he was. He tried to explain it away: "you probably live in the city, and he wants someone who lives far away so he can get a higher fare," he offered with empathy.

Like many other things in Japan, there are rules that everyone follows, with little exception. At the same time, there are rules that no one follows, with little exception.

I decided yet again after last night that as long as I can possibly avoid it, I will never ride in another taxi in Japan again. Sadly, this isn't the first time I've promised that to myself.

Broke into the Old Apartment Monday January 28

As you know, the blog has been offline for awhile. We apologize for the inconvenience. Hereon begins the story, the excuse, or the events of the last two months.

Simon told me over six months ago that someday, he would propose to his then-girlfriend, and at that point, I'd probably need to move from my cozy 6-mat room to bigger and greener pastures. I had just moved in fall of 2006, so needless to say, I wasn't particularly exciting about having to repeat it. I had already discovered it to be time-consuming, fruitless, and aggravating process as a foreigner.

To make matters more complicated, Simon had spent a long time finding our apartment. The rent market in the area I was living is a sizable 10-15% higher than what we were paying, and there are a minimal number of layouts like the 3-bedroom plus combined living/dining layout we had. I was later told by a real estate agent that the "rate of return per square meter is higher when landlords divide up a unit into smaller studios". Thus, in an expense neighborhood such as mine (which I had never known it to be), 3-bedroom apartments are rare.

Thus, to begin the search meant looking at housing websites for months, finding nothing. An occasional phone call to a real estate agent either found (a) the place already gone, (b) the place did not rent to foreigners, and/or (c) they wanted 4-6 months' of rent up-front. And more than half of that never comes back to you in the form of a "deposit". Faced with the idea of paying so much rent up-front, I decided it was best if I get roommates to help cover the costs immediately.

December 2007. I am soon to go back to the States for a trip, and Simon has pretty much told me that he'd like to have his girlfriend move in by the time I get back. Slightly desperate, I posted an article on a "roomshare" group on Mixi, or Japanese MySpace, looking for suckers who'd want to live with me. To my surprise, I received a mail from a Korean guy who was, appropriately, looking for a place to live at the same time I was. He is 30, pretty straight-up, and seemed like the kind of guy that I could live with.

We met on a Saturday morning in mid-December, and we searched for apartments all day long. This is one of the most annoying tasks I can think of. As if seeing many, many places with some annoying real estate agent wasn't enough, I also had to consider the feelings of a person I barely knew in finding an appropriate place. Yet, somehow, by the end of that day, we had found The Perfect Place. 3-bedroom, cheap, in a beautiful, quiet area in one of the nicest areas of Tokyo. 10 minutes from Shinjuku, 15 minutes from Shibuya. Yeah.

So, I forked over a month of rent, signed all the paperwork (save the contract), and went back to the States for a holiday. During the break, I coordinated with the real estate agent as to when I could move in. That's when the trouble began to start.

I was scheduled to return to Japan on January 4th, and despite making a down payment on December 21st (the room was empty, mind you), the real estate agent was telling me I couldn't move in until at least the 7th. That would be 3 days of no-place-to-live. He made it very clear that around the New Year, it was hard to assemble the staffs necessary to clean and put the place in order (a seemingly-required process for moving in Tokyo, as all of the real estate agents have contracts with these vendors with built-in kick-backs. If you are wondering who pays for the cleaning, take a guess).

So, when I came back to Japan, sure enough, I was sleeping on the couch. I had told Simon I would move out, so I found my room no longer. All of my stuff was in boxes in the living room, and I was sleeping on a small fold-out bed in what was now "Sayaka's (Simon's fiance) office". The 7th became the 8th, and there it was -- the day before I was supposed to go pick up the keys and sign the final contracts.

The phone rings, which is never a positive sign. Seriously. Whenever the phone rings, something's going to happen.

It's the real estate agent.

"I just got a call from the landlord, he said that he wants to see me at the place; I am not sure what it is about but I am going now. When I find out, I'll give you a call; I am sure everything is fine," For those of you that don't work in sales, "I'm sure everything is fine" means "I have no idea what is happening right now but I am just praying that this sorts out cause I need that bonus, hey, pass me the joint".

The next morning, i.e., the day I am supposed to pick up the key, I called the real estate agent to ask what the meeting was about.

"Oh, I think everything's fine. There's just one thing that needs to be sorted out, and I am meeting the landlord today at 4pm to discuss. I'm also meeting the rental company at 1pm." (Yes, the rental company and the agent are different companies, which means you pay even more in commission and fees!) I asked if there was any problem with my situation. "Oh, no, it's not a problem for you at all; it is just something we need to sort out before you move in," he said. Fine enough. I went back to work.

To cut to the chase, I got another call at 6pm. I had intended to pick up the key after work. The van with all of my stuff was loaded.

Apparently, the landlord of this place owns 3 other apartments, and has refinanced each multiple times. He is about to go bankrupt. The debtors are going to repossess his properties in an effort to collect on their debts. This means that in a few months' time, he may not own the apartment any longer. As a non-owner, he can't very well rent it to me.

Now, the real estate agent works on commission, so he had been promising me the moon to keep me warm, as he needed to buy time to run around between the rental company and the landlord to see if there wasn't some way that he could make it work. For example, if I were to move in immediately, it may give the landlord the burst of capital he needed to pay off some creditors, for example.

Legally, if I did move in, I would have 6 months' to find a new place, should I be asked to move by a new owner. With all of my stuff in the van ready to go, and not having a place to live, I told the real estate agent "fine", but he told me that as an agent, they collect a fee, and he cannot very well collect a fee on a property that may be repossessed in 2-3 months. It's against their principles, he said. So, it's against principle to do something (rather, to allow something, as he had already done the work) to help me out in the short term, but it's fine to neglect your job, not check up on the landlord until the day I am supposed to move in? What a work ethic. That's a fine time to be taking the high moral ground.

I knew from the beginning this guy wasn't that smart. Lesson learned to go with your gut feeling. I should have kept looking. Lucky for him that he introduced me the perfect place (which, it was now clear why the rent was cheap: the owner was doing anything and everything to get someone inside).

So, there I was. No place to live, no prospects, and a full work schedule. That was January.

There's something about old data Wednesday December 26

Last year, when home, I ran out of time to deal with the old Dell that was sitting in my Dad's basement. Inside it lay three hard drives -- full of information I could have never fit on my laptop when I went to Japan -- and I was determined, someday, to get it all back.

I bought a 300GB portable drive this year, so I simply brought it back with me to the States. The old Dell, unfortunately, won't turn on, so it hasn't been an easy procedure: I rooted the drives out of it, re-installed them on my mother's PC, and am now gleefully copying data (old CDs, MP3s of when I used to be on the radio, etc).

The most interesting part, though, is looking at the state of the data. These drives haven't been powered on since August 2005. The last pictures, the "latest" music, the projects for work: it is more-or-less a snapshot of my life 30 months ago. Somehow that's fascinating.

However, the best data, from University, is long gone after a hard drive crash. It was early in life that I have learned to back up early, and back up often. It is not a question of if a hard drive will crash, but when. At my Dad's house, Sharon labored to scan in and print a whole album of family pictures. I asked her if she had backed any of it up. That's a painful story waiting to be told.

Friendly reminder. If you have data you can't afford, or don't want to lose, buy yourself an external USB hard drive for $100. Better yet, buy two, and keep one locally, keep the other one in a safety deposit box at the bank.

And you think I'm joking.

There is one other alternative, professed by some I know: never keep any data worth so much effort. Keep your life simple. Food for thought.

You have to go there to come back Sunday November 4

My former coworker in our Osaka office got married in Hawai'i to her fiance recently; since no one could attend the ceremony she scheduled a party back in Osaka this weekend. Yuiko's sister lives in Kyoto (30 minutes from Osaka), so I decided to make good use of the weekend and get out of Tokyo.

I only get two precious days for my weekend, so I decided to make the most of them. I find that when I travel by bullet train, I can't really sleep. Credit this to the cool scenery, to the fascination with a train that travels at that speed; either way, if I had left on the first train Saturday morning, I'd arrive tired.

If I had taken the last train (just after 9pm) on Friday, I'd have arrived in Kyoto late, and not been able to do anything interesting on Friday night other than ride in a train. Enter "Galaxy", the aptly-named sleeper-car train from 1986 that leaves Tokyo station nightly at 11:00pm, arriving in Kyoto at 6:45am. I'd never ridden a night train before, so I decided to try it out.

The space was sufficient (although Nathan may have had trouble?), there were clean sheets and a clean pillow cover; it is definitely worth the price (about $12 more than the bullet train, all said and done). The key point I missed, however, was the arrangement of the bunk beds. There are two levels, top and bottom, and two sets face each other in each berth.

What this means is that if you travel in a group of any less than four people, you'll be sleeping near people you don't know. There are curtains, so this wasn't a privacy issue, but for as great as the Japanese are about technology, they have not yet invented "snore-blocking curtains". Across the berth from me was the stereotypical drunk salaryman old guy who, upon falling asleep, snored loud enough to wake me up, many times. Any of you who know how I sleep, you can understand how severe this snoring must have been to have woken me up.

All said and done, I'd do it again. Preferably with four people, but it was a nice experience, and in certain ways, it's a better use of time than the bullet train.

Yesterday, I spent all day in Kyoto on Saori's (Yuiko's sister) bicycle. I went to Kyoto in just May for a wedding, but I was only able to spend an afternoon here, and with Yuiko and Teja, so I didn't really get to just wander around by myself.

Kyoto is full of temples. Once you've seen one, they get less interesting, admittedly, unless you're a history or architecture buff. The eastern side of the city is full of important temples, so there is a regular tourist industry for Japanese nationals and foreigners alike. I have some pictures to support this.

Last night, Taijiro (Saori's boyfriend), Saori, and I went to Kodaiji, one of the more famous temples, as it is lit up at night, quite beautifully. I asked Tai-chan, after a full day of exploring the city on bicycle, "I understand that Kyoto is famous as the first capital of Japan, famous for its temples, famous for this and that, but what interests me when I visit somewhere is not how people used to live, but how they live now."

About five to ten percent of Kyoto's population is students, according to Taijiro. Every year, a quarter of those people leave the city, and a new batch comes. This is starting to sound like a good recipe. There are lots and lots of tiny Western-style cafes where one could read books, study, or just hang out. Some of these cafes have French bakeries attached.

Tai also pointed out another key point: what has made Kyoto stand out in the past twenty years? The Protocol.

The city is trying very hard to market itself as a leader in environmentalism; the city buses run on recycled cooking oil (this is relatively old technology, actually), they are aggressive in recycling, and when I went to a cultural fair yesterday, all of the food was served on ... real plates. My kind of city. Maybe I should move to our company's Osaka office and commute from Kyoto daily?

In closing, I'd like to return to the title of this post. It had been quite awhile (July) since I had "gotten out of town"; I don't count the Great Wall of China. Even though it was a fantastic experience, it was with people from work, for work, and about work (as much as we tried to not make it about work). Todd and I have long discussed this basic principle of life; in order to maintain a reasonable amount of happiness and balance in our lives, sometimes we just need to leave town, go somewhere, do something, and come back.

If you go alone, it's even better. Todd?

You have to go there to come back, and in doing so, I recommend the Galaxy sleeper train. In groups of four.