Thanks Mom

Thanks for the postcard. I got it today (Christmas). Thanks for the wishes.

今年も頑張ります。皆お元気でね。

明けましておめでとう。よいお年を

From Japan with Love,

Justin

Merry Christmas from Sendai

Seasons greetings and Merry Christmas from Japan. All is going well here and I hope likewise is the same to all my readers.

This year, I hosted a big Christmas bash back at my place with my roommates and friends. We had a count of 27 people, plenty of food, presents and fun. Special thanks to Kana, that pulled off a turkey this year in the last minute. I wanted to pull off a turkey this year but decided I couldn't because I didn't have a large oven at home.

Kana heard this and pulled off the unimaginable; I got a phone call at 12:00 pm on the day of the party hearing that she was on the hunt for a turkey. She had already hit 2 places but they were sold out. I said that a chicken would be allright and she needed a hand cooking it, apparently she said that she could handle it. And so she did, with flying colors!


She came through with the turkey!

Wow, I was blown away. Out of nowhere, we had a turkey for the party. Kana is awesome!


Left: Party hat for good times
Right: Special surprise visit from a mini-santa!

Good times ensued!

Hope things are as eventful where ever you are!

Pictures, here!

Maps of War

There is a company on the net called Maps of War that does work making animated maps of global events. One of them includes a map of all American conflicts (separated into groups when Democrats and Republicans were in control) and a second one mapping the spread of various religions since inception and over time. Very fascinating stuff.

Take a look here for the map of war, and the map of religion.

How I'm Spending Valentine's Day

I've finished the paper work a few hours ago and it's official, I'm going to France for a week. I will be participating on a University exchange program to check out some of France's Universities and a few companies in Lyon and Paris. I depart on Valentine's day from Japan on a plane into Europe, my first trip ever to that part of the world.

I had an omen that I would be going to France since I busted ass working on trying to get results to apply for a conference in France and unfortunately that fell through. I took the next few weeks easy, bought a new computer and spent my free time relaxing. Then just last Friday a friend of mine drops a flyer on my desk about the France trip, the deadline to apply was Monday. After thinking it over the weekend, I decided to go. Got the paper work together and here's how it turned out. Yay, France!

Time to start learning some French!

Doh, I suck

I am finally finishing off the batch of seasons greetings that I was supposed to send a long while back. I kept on meaning to do them but either things kept popping up or I got distracted doing other things. I took the day off lab to stay at home and work on the cards and fire them off... as late as they are.

Well I know for sure that improving execution is going to be high on my New Year's Resolution list.

The schedule for this week:

Saturday - House Christmas Party
Sunday - Another Christmas Party (If I have time to make it)
Tuesday and Wednesday - Skiing
Thursday - Friend arrives from Mito
Saturday - Start 3 day Ski trip (return on new years)

And I have paper work due today for a surprise announcement I will make later on.

Christmas Lights in Sendai and Happy b-day to Mayuko!

As of Tuesday, the main boulevard in Sendai had the Christmas lights officially turned on. I skipped out of lab early (at 5 pm!) and made my way out to the main boulevard armed with my camera. The kicker was that I left my battery back at lab... after so diligently deciding that I would charge it for today's event.

Well I made the trip back anyhow and I'll let the results speak for themselves.


Santa in a pickup truck!


The streets lit up in lights!

I've also made a small album of the event here.

Also, last week was Mayuko's b-day and a good time was definitely had! More so for us because it was a surprise! Even I was surprised, because the party was put together just a day in advance!


Presents! Presents! All miiiiine!

Cheers all around!

Pictures from the event, here!

Funny statistics

I was staring out of a window while eating breakfast this morning at the University cafeteria and was considering statistics I've heard in my life. One of which is funny, the other is a scary kind of funny.

First the funny.

I was reading the newspaper back in Canada a long while back and found a survey column and the question was:

How many relationships have you had?

Men -- 7
Women -- 4

Now one would have thought that perhaps men were more active in the relationship department. But if you think about the data, something is seriously wrong (for staticians, the sample size was 1000).

Let's do the math. Suppose you had a world in which there were 3 guys and 3 girls. Suppose each guy dated the same girl.

The average number of relationships for the guys is 1. For the girls, it's (3 + 0 + 0)/3, which is also 1.

Right? We should expect that the number of relationships between male and females to be about equal. What might cause this discrepancy? Lots of gay men. There is another possibility but the gay men one is funnier.

Next the scary kind of funny.

It is oft quoted that 50% of all marrages end in divorce. As a result of this, most of us would think that we've got a coin-toss change of making it all the way to the end with a partner. Let's suppose that this 50% statistic is true.

Suppose that every married person gets divorced and remarries. Need I say more?

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."
-- Mark Twain

Verizon offers refund, still doesn't admit mistake

I was surfing around and came across this, where the poster of the audio clip got an e-mail form customer support where they would offer him a 100% discount. Still no admission of their mistake what-so-ever (link here).

And I quote from the linked webpage.

In review of your account a previous representative has credited for the data charges in question for $71.79. You may take this amount off of your current amount due. In the future please keep in mind that it is .002 dollars per KB while in Canada.

I am still not impressed, or perhaps I am. Caught red handed on tape on youtube. It doesn't get anymore black and white. Not being able to learn from mistakes is one thing, if you can't admit to them... well, I'd just throw in the towel and walk away and let cold hard reality beat the crap out of them. The results speaks for it self.

"The truth hurts... only if you're stupid"
--Me

or the less crass version

"The truth hurts... only the ones that don't get it"
--Me

With context, the first one has more bite.

Verizon! 0.002 cent is not 0.002 dollars

Ladies and gentlemen, this is going to make you cry. Unfortunately Verizon does not know the difference between 0.002 cents and 0.002 dollars. An audio recording of the support phone call was taken and posted on the net, link here. I am exceptionally glad that with technology even average people are capable of taking recordings of telephone conversations because things like these are exceptionally hard to prove otherwise.

There is no other way to put it but after hearing this I was incredibly horrified that people as stupid as this exist and yet they still claim that they are correct in claiming that 0.002 cents is the same as 0.002 dollars. From what I've seen on youtube, the stats as of this writing is that atleast 120,000 people have already listened to the audio.

Sometimes I really wonder how do people like these exist. The other scary thing is that these people can probably vote too. Hmm, might make for an interesting premise -- do stupid people vote stupid people into office? This might tell you plenty about governments if it is true.

More Life in Briefs

Thursday:

Went for dinner with a friend at a nice Italian restaurant. Oddly, there is a such thing as "high class pizza." It was quite good with specialty ingredients imported from all over Japan. hung out over salad, wine and pizza. I'll be adding that place to my repertoire of interesting places to eat.

Friday:

YMCA Christmas party. I teach at the YMCA and was invited out to an "international Christmas party," slight problem was that there were only but a handful of international students and a whole horde of Japanese people. Not bad though, I did manage to meet an interesting person that works at a bar in Sendai as a bartender. Apparently there will be a new place opening somewhere around the train station and will get a call when it opens.

Saturday:

Another Christmas party. I found an event online a while back and decided to participate. Turns out that the event was organized by an English school and for kicks they put it online to let anyone join. Interestingly out of the 50 or so people at the event, I knew about 10 of them. Sendai, despite having 1 million people, has a rather small community. Well, those of you living in Vancouver and Richmond should know about that.

After the party, I went up and met up with another friend for some food who was introduced through another friend. Apparently she knows one of my labmates as her friend is his ex. As an interesting aside, turns out that she also knows another drummer friend of mine. we came to that interesting conclusion when our mutual friend dropped in and we simultaneously blurted out his name and then gave each other an odd look in shock. Yep, Sendai is a pretty small place.

Sunday -- Went to a museum with 4 friends to check out a German art exhibit from a painter born 100 years ago. Strangely I still find it hard to appreciate certain kinds of art. Especially abstract. I could take pictures drawn from elementary students and put them in this exhibit and you'd never tell the difference. Hmmm... how'd someone like to play an April Fool's joke on a museum?

Coming up:

Wednesday -- Hot pot party at home

Friday -- An event will probably materialize

Saturday -- Christmas Party (2 of them)

"I teach logic mutha-fucker!"

All I have to say is go watch this video. I love this professor!

"I don't know about you man, but I didn't see anybody steal anything."
"Except for that guy's dignity"

Man, I miss one-liners!

Back in Business

2 months to wait for a computer repair isn't at all a reasonable time frame for me to work with. Despite the lab ordering a spare backup notebook for pubic use, I decided last weekend that I would fork out the cash and buy myself a new laptop.

After much consideration and walking around the electronics department of a Yodobashi electronics store, I settled on a acer Aspire 5102WLMi notebook. "An ACER!?" you might ask? Well, after poking around the store for about 2 days and researching a whole bunch of features online, I decided that this notebook gave me the best bang for the buck.

It's got a dual core of Turion processors, 120 GB HD, got a multilayer DVD-ROM writer and an ATi integrated graphics chip (unfortunately with no onboard memory, however). For about $1100, I decided that it wasn't a bad price considering that I'd have to spend about $600 for a repair. Why not get a better computer? And so I did.

The computer is equipped with a Japanese OS and a Japanese keyboard. For the most part, the keyboard has the same layout QWERTY layout as most north American keyboards. The subtle difference is that some of the punctuation keys have been moved around. The @ , ' , " , \ and a few other keys have been moved around. The enter and the backspace key are a little smaller to. I have gotten used to the keyboard layout for the most part already. I was rather surprised to find how quickly I was able to adapt to the new layout.

I am not sure how it is for current installations of Win XP, but I had the most unfortunate experience having the "Cleartype" fonts enabled by default. What this means is that the font used uses some sort of sub-pixel approximation to increase the resolution of your monitor, supposedly making text a little more crisper. That was not the case for me!

After suffering for exhausted eyes for littler over 2 days, I was determined to figure out the root of this problem. Initially, I spent most of my time trying to change font settings of the computer but that didn't work to no avail. There is a Microsoft webpage out there that you can use a directX plug in to deactivate the ClearType fonts. Doing that has made a world of difference for my eyes.

When I do have some spare time, I am going to disassemble the old laptop to try and find out what went wrong. If I am lucky, I might be able to find the problem and make a repair. If not, well it will be for an educational experience anyways. If I actually can get the other laptop going, I would definitely like to try and turn it into a Linux box if possible. We'll see how that goes.

You"ve got to be kidding me

MTV went off and banned this video for being too violent? You've got to be kidding me, it's actually well done, compared to the other stuff with scantly clad people just dancing around for no apparent reason. Get some brains.

Oh and on a side note, went and saw the new Bond Movie today. It was great! Total revival of the series. If you haven't seen it, go and see it!

That is all!