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!

One more shot

Spent the entire night at the lab again... I can't wait for this to be over. Unfortunately working through the night today was not too fruitful as I noticed that one of the acids I was using dissolved some nanoparticles I wanted to deposit on some silicon tips. I got hold a chemical chart today and confirmed that it is true that iron nanoparticles don't hold up against HF acid. Of an interesting note, everytime I mention what I research to girls in Japan, they immediately ask me if I know about nanoparticles in makeup. Supposedly, they have some positive effect and makeup with nano particles are really expensive (I might be on to something here!)

The submission date is Friday at 23:59 Hawaiian time, the last time zone before the dateline. I have until 18:59 Japan time to make the submission. I have one last shot, but it's going to be a bit of a pull to make it. There is one other material I can use but I have no experimental data on it. Meaning it's going to be a crapshoot.

Well, I won't be put off it too much if I don't make it to the conference in the end, it might actually be better if I didn't since the device isn't fully complete and there is plenty of informational gaps I will need to fill along the way. I am not sure if it will be working by then either. One of my friends at lab has mentioned to me that he's done something like this before but wasn't able to get his device working in the end, which wasn't too good for the conference. There will be other conferences I can present at... but still, it *is* France, and I've never been to Europe.

One way or another, I am going to take a few days off after the end of this mad work schedule. 12~16 hours/day at lab isn't a healthy lifestyle and I should be doing other things rather than just working; people become boring if they work too hard anyways. I'd rather be out doing other things for variety.

That wish will likely be granted as my schedule for December is looking quite full:

-There will be a meeting of Japanese people and foreigners tomorrow for some kind of international relations building event.

-I will be organizing a hot-pot event with lab members at home.

-I will be planning a large scale Christmas party and will be roasting some turkeys.

-A friend from Mito will be coming out to visit me for 6 days and a ski trip is in the works.

-I've located a social group online for Sendai that will be hosing an event in a few weeks, which I will be attending.

-A Christmas party is being organized by a friend of mine.

There will be, of course, more events popping up throughout December. I won't know exactly when but I can already forecast a lab party fitting into the picture somewhere and probably more events along the way that I'll end up being roped into. December will be a busy month for me indeed.

Work hard, play hard!

Doors

I just relised today that doors to houses in Japan open differently as compared to those in Canada.

In Canada, you pull on the door to open it from the inside.
In Japan, you push on the door to open it from the inside.

This thought was inspired while I was waiting outside of my friend's house today when I noticed myself taking a few steps back from the door to avoid being hit as it opened, something I never used to do back in Canada.

Some additional information

The support center was called last Friday to get an idea of what it is going to take to have this ACER TravelMate 4000 laptop of mine repaired, the news is in and it isn't pretty.

The support center told me that because my laptop is an overseas model, they are going to have to have parts shipped in for the repair. Their eta on the job is between 1~2 months for the repair! This is also coming from a company which has kindly noted that they have an international network of repair centers for cases especially like these! I hardly can imagine how these ACER repair centers can at all address people that might need repairs while on travel with a 2 month repair window.

I am still going to have to figure out how much this is going to run me. $400~$600, I guess I can make a bite at it. If it's going to cost more, I think I can nab laptops for about $1000 and under in Japan. Probably even cheaper for desktops.

That said, because this particular experience, I am very inclined to say that having a laptop as your primary computer is not recommended because when it breaks down, you're a fish out of water and at the mercy of repair centers to get your computer working. If this were an ordinary PC, I would have already located the problem, swapped parts and been on my merry way.

Now the next interesting problem is if Laptops could be customizable like desktops-- now that would solve a lot of problems and make laptops upgradable!

The Bad, the Good and ...

The bad:

The cold got debilitatingly worse.

Spent $20 on medicine that doesn't really work.

The laptop died.

The Good:

Backed up all experimental data and personal data.

Roomies went on a mid-night run to buy ginger and lemons for some home-brew cold remedies.

The Ugly:

The laptop is out of warranty and I am betting that it's going to costly to fix (but I'm going to have to anyways).

Still at it...

Woke up at about midnight and was in lab by 1:00 am.. I'm pretty much working in Pacific Standard Time now. Been in lab for the past 10 hours working on my samples still... with a batch of 8 (actually 32) in an acid wash. After that's done, I'll be heading home to get some rest as I've managed to catch a mild cold-- just a cough and a sore throat that's been building through the weekend.

Kuni has mentioned to me that I can buy cold medicine from the University clinic for about $1. Incredibly cheap. Then there is breakfast, that goes for $3 for a full meal. I keep meaning to bring my camera to take pictures but I haven't remembered to so far.

The weekend was pretty good. Had a hot-pot dinner at home with friends Saturday night and then had a second hot-pot at another friend's for the Sunday night with the left overs I had from the previous day.

Unfortunately, I haven't been resting right since going on this nocturnal schedule-- I usually end up sleeping for 1.5 hours at 8:30 am, catch breakfast, then go home and sleep until about 4 pm. Wake up, go to University for a little bit... catch dinner, return home by about 8:00 pm, sleep till about midnight and then return again to lab at about 1 am to work a long haul through the night.

I've got about 10 days to pull something off (ie. get some results and write an abstract) for the conference in France. This is probably one of the biggest conferences for my field and it would definitely be cool if I can make it out there for about a week (perhaps, 5 days?) with expenses fully (mostly?) paid to hang out with smart people in France... in particular Lyon (which is well known for the food).

It's work that I have to get done anyways. Better now than later (with the bonus of the conference). I can even use the results for my Master thesis. It's win-win all around. Can't wait for all this to be over though, I could use a good break.

Highly Disturbing -- UCLA student Tazed while attempting to leave the building

This is an excerpt taken from the daily bruin here:

UCPD officers shot a student several times with a Taser inside the Powell Library CLICC computer lab late Tuesday night before taking him into custody.

No university police officers were available to comment further about the incident as of 3 a.m. Wednesday, and no Community Service Officers who were on duty at the time could be reached.

At around 11:30 p.m., CSOs asked a male student using a computer in the back of the room to leave when he was unable to produce a BruinCard during a random check. The student did not exit the building immediately.

The CSOs left, returning minutes later, and police officers arrived to escort the student out. By this time the student had begun to walk toward the door with his backpack when an officer approached him and grabbed his arm, at which point the student told the officer to let him go. A second officer then approached the student as well.

The student began to yell "get off me," repeating himself several times.

It was at this point that the officers shot the student with a Taser for the first time, causing him to fall to the floor and cry out in pain. The student also told the officers he had a medical condition.

UCPD officers confirmed that the man involved in the incident was a student, but did not give a name or any additional information about his identity.

If this were in the newspaper, how many of you would simply think "how horrible" and then just go about your day? Unfortunately, we live incredibly insulated lives. My interpretations about tragic/horrible events have changed after watching a video of the event here. It is excruciating to watch even once to say the least; I cannot watch it again but I suggest that any passer by watch it at least once.

Despite all the Hollywood violence you've ever seen, all the killings, injuries, blood and gore, I hardly doubt that any of that will ever desensitize a person from the above video. I suggest that you all see this at least once, if you want to understand the real depth of an event like this, nothing like the watered down things you'd see on TV. I can hardly think that people watch the television show COPS for entertainment.

From the video, there were a respectable number of students in the building, most watching in silent protest. There were the handful that demanded that officers provide identification, but refused to do so. I find this incredibly hypocritical because these officers are the people that decided to taser a student for not producing identification while working at the computer lab.

I am sure that there are good cops out there, but this isn't a case about them, because it is the bad ones that need to kept in check. This is a much more serious problem than it seems.

I have followed up on comments written on forums about this and the troubling question that needs to be answered is this: What would you do if you saw a man on the floor being tazed multiple times screaming in pain? For the case of this video, the actions of the other students were exceptionally civil as many approached these officers demanding identification. No violence what-so-ever broke out and even one officer threatened one of the students that he would taser him if he didn't back off near the end of this video.

Trust in law enforcement has taken a significant hit. Should an event like this be repeated in a future point in time and I have no doubt it will likely result in violence. Working environments for officers have just gotten more dangerous as the likelihood being confronted by bystanders has significantly increased. If officers want to keep their working environment safe, they had better keep their bad officers in check, else others will end up doing that, whether they like it or not.

If law enforcement cannot be trusted then justice will be taken into many personal hands-- combat and "citizen's arrest" of officers becomes a very viable option. It is incredibly easy to see how an event like this will play out-- other officers will be called out to retrieve detained officers and things will likely get ugly from there on in.

I do not believe in centralized (video) surveillance and I think a case like this proves a point-- invest in a good camera phone.

One man stands between me and going home

It's about 3:40 pm now, I've been at lab for about 11 hours... I took a 1.5 hour nap in the morning to get a bit of a recharge. And now, I am waiting for a guy using a machine that I want to use to finish off a few more silicon processing steps before I go home, catch some sleep and wake up at about 6 pm to make it to a hot-pot dinner with a volunteer friend of mine.

After using the machine, I have about another hour of work to go heading home. Perhaps I'll make it back by, say, 5 to catch all of 30 minutes of sleep? I've done worse actually, but more for fun than anything else when I did a scooter trip to a beach party in Iwaki, slept on the beach then scootered back starting at 4 am to make a beach BBQ starting at 9 am! I got all of 2 hours (maybe even less) sleep that day.

There are of course more useful things I could be doing instead of sitting here, surfing the net and typing on this blog; like doing a paper search and getting some background materials ready to try and cut down writing time for the submittal of an abstract. But that would require conscious brain power that I don't have at the moment so I will relegate myself to some easy mindless writing.

Anyways, I should keep a stopwatch on me and time how much time I waste waiting or doing non-work related stuff. The results might be quite stunning.