Christmas holidays, December 2004

Wow, what a huge holiday! Dave and family drove all the way down from Yokousuka to stay with us for a week or so and it was absolutely fantastic! I'm surprised my kidneys are still functioning after the week long drinking binge, but we all survived, and I have photos to prove it!
(At about 630Kb worth of thumbnails I can see my 10Mb/day of free bandwidth being chewed up pretty quickly, so if that happens you'll likely just be looking at empty boxes or something)

It's become an anual tradition to visit a local park in Sanda with some cool playing equipment. Here Amy takes the small roller-slide thing.

...Ace doing the small roller slide...

...and Tyler doing the small roller slide thing. This is all just a warm up for the super-happy-fun-slide further up the hill.

Amy on the super-happy-fun-slide which starts at a good few meters above the ground and ends a good 10-20 meters down the hill.

...high speed Ace action...

...and Tyler. The fun wasn't for kids only though...

Uncle Dave in hot pursuit at the top of the slide.

"weeeeee!!!!!" he he he

No it's not a set from the next Star Trek movie, it the futuristic tower across the road from the park. A good example of modern Japanese architecture - taken straight out of the pages of a Manga comic. To do this day I have no idea what function it serves, other than my suspicion of it being a mind control device similar to those employed by the Tripods...

One day, Ashton, Nana and Masako came over for some Mexican food Misaki put on (inspired by our friends Sean and Akiko). The only pic I took with Ashton and Nana in it didn't turn out because I'd sat the camera on a stool which reflected the flash back at it and under-exposed the background.
Who else thinks that Tyler and Ace could easily pass as brothers?

Smooshed faces section:


Misaki snapped this shot of hilariousness from outside one night, and it now serves to introduce the smooshed faces section.

...uncle Dave gets in on the smooshed faces action with Amy...

You don't have to teach kids how to do this, it's built in. Just give them some transparent material and it's only a matter of time.

A nice shot of Ace and Tyler, partners in crime in the making.

Snow section:


We'd been enjoying quite pleasant weather, unseasonably warm for december actually, and then suddenly one day it just decided to dump down with snow. Here's an artsy shot out our back window.

This time showing the winter wonderland in the background more clearly. It took several days for all the snow to become dirty slush and finally dissipate. It snowed a bit again last night, but that's all we've had so far.

Tyler and Misaki ventured outside to investigate. Tyler was captured in this shot in his hilarious inherited funky snow suit - "noooo.... don't look at meee!!!"

It was only a few weeks ago that Tyler posed in the same place as this picture in his Hichigosan suit on a pleasantly warm and sunny day.

And to conclude the snow section I give you Misaki's artsy photo of a snow covered grating in front of our appartment. Snow might bore a lot of people but for a guy who grew up in the southern hemisphere it's still a novelty to have a white christmas.

The Beattie clan, together in Japan for the last time. The next time we'll all meet will be back in Sydney as Dave and Michiko are relocating soon.
We had a great time guys, thanks heaps for coming down to Osaka and we're looking forward to catching up again soon in Aus!

Coming soon:

• Mochi-tsuki - sticky rice making


• Daibutsu, Nara - the great statue of Budda

RIP Dimebag Darrell

I was shocked to discover today that a well repsected and admired member of the music community, Dimebag Darrell, was killed recently during a performance with his band Damageplan.

I met Dimebag at a music Expo in Darling Harbour, Syndey during my guitaring days and despite his intensity found him quite approachable. On the first day of the show he was promoting some guitars he had helped produce and causing so much raucous that he could easily be heard from the other side of the large auditorium. Phil, Matt and I returned on the second day, guitars in hand, and took a classic photo with Dimebag, flanking him on either side with our freshly autographed guitars, and struck classic heavy metal poses, while Dimebag grabbed the nearest axe and shoved the trademark Dimebag V of it's head under his beard.

I would like to remember him for the life and energy he shared with us all through his music and his own interesting life, and I give my deepest condolences to his friends and family, and to the friends and family of the other victims of the night's tragedy.

May I also take this opportunity to raise the issue of gun control in America - how many more lives must we suffer the loss of?

Rest in peace.

Another Japanese moment...

The largest christmas tree in Japan, at Universal Studios Japan

I was recently asked by the Principle of Tyler's Pre-school to act as this year's Santa Claus, and of course I gladly volunteered. Arrangements were made for me to meet with him this morning after dropping Tyler off to discuss the day's schedule, and so after getting Tyler settled we got together and I discovered that he speaks quite good English.

I followed his car in mine to his Kindergarten, which in Japan is comprised of childen aged 3-5, or by this stage of the year many are in the range of 4-6 years old. We went inside and entered the warmth of the staff room, where I met their part time English teacher, Hellen. The Principal then took me upstairs to a large hall, where some of the children's mothers were working as volunteer Santa's helpers by packing christmas gifts into bags which were then placed into large white sacks for distribution by yours truly.

Archway in a temple's grounds.

At this stage I was introduced to the Kindergarten's principle, who supplied us with schedules for the day, and we sat down on the steps leading up to the hall's stage to go over them. (yes, I know this is all very dull I did this, and I did that kinda thing, but it's leading up to something...). They day's events had been planned out to an accuracy of 5 minutes in true Japanese efficiency, and included were diagrams outlining Santa's entrance to the stage, which was to be executed by no less than a professional magician!

We took to the stage and walked through Santa's magic entrance before returning to the Principle's office to try on the Santa costume which they were providing, complete with new rubber wellies bought to spec (27.5cm). After the successful fitting we reclined in his leather sofas to watch a short video demonstrating the magician himself performing the magic entrance, follwed by some Japanese green tea and a few minutes light conversation.

The Principle putting his cup down was the sign that the proceedings had drawn to an end, and so I followed suit and then went to stand up. While I was still in a half-squat he stopped and said:

"Oh... your zipper is open."

I looked down and observed that this was very true. For a brief moment I took the time to wonder when exactly it had come undone?

Was it while trying on the Santa costume? No, I just pulled it on over my jeans...

While we were sitting on the steps in the hall or practicing the magic entrance? Not likely...

Was it open while I introduced myself to Hellen? um...

Maybe Tyler's teachers had failed to notice it when I had dropped him off all of an hour or so ago...

Most likely, after waking, grabbing the closest bundle of clothes to the bed and making the brave dash across the fozen floor to the heater, I had in fact in my haste to don a warm woollen jumper simply pulled on my jeans and in my haste forgotten to... um, oh dear.


Well, I've never been known to show an aversion to public expositionism - I said "Oh, excuse me!", turned around and then showed them a little magic of my own... tada! Zipper up! After some brief, awkard chuckling we left the moment behind us.

Merry Christmas!

BBQ in Setsukyou

A couple of weekends back we drove out into the mountainous countryside of Setsukyou for one last BBQ in the river valley near Nana and Ashton's place before winter comes into full effect and makes it unbearably cold. As it was, we were pushing the line a bit by daring to venture out so late in November and so we had the full run of the place to ourselves.

The intrepid explorers arrange themselves around their impressive display of outdoor BBQ equipment, complete with table and chair. Impressive because we carried it into the middle of the river and set up amongst the huge bolders laying strewn around like so many toast crumbs.

The BBQ is immediately put to use with a plethora of gourmet food stuffs.
A Japanese BBQ is much like any other, with the exception perhaps of containing more green-matter and vegetables and a multitude of various thinly sliced meats in place the usual plate-sized steaks and bulging sausages seen slowly carbonising on Aussy BBQ's.

Nana and Beet converse on the topic of confucian vs. western educational systems before a sample backdrop of the multi-coloured leaves of autumn which covered the slopes of the surrounding mountains. The Japanese language has a single word to describe the beautiful phenomenon, but if there's an equivalent in English it either never entered my vocabulary or the brain cell containing it perished from one of the many cold bottles of Bass ale enjoyed throughout the day.

Tyler grins with toddler bliss, rock in hand, as he contemplates the magnitute of finding himself with seemingly endless entertainment at the river's expense.

Ashton was there to make his own photographic record of the day's events. This image was captured before he misteriously took a plunge beneath the chilly waters and had to return home for a change of clothes, but his trusty camera survived unscathed.

Tyler thinks better of taking a dip himself, or possibly is simply taking a break from trying to dam the river with pepples to consider the virtues BBQ'd sausages.

Satomi and Meiki discover the secret of successfull child care - bribe them with snacks. Meiki is allways worried that Tyler doesn't like him, but just look at that happy face! I'm sure he loves you man.

As testament to the abilities of our new camera, I managed to snap this shot of Tyler and Misaki playing with a dog while perched atop a boulder from the other side of the river using a good 300mm or so of zoom. It's a bit blurry, but not too bad for a hand-held job.

The brave campers soldier on into the evening and brave the cold to enjoy the last remnants of the day's BBQ'd morsels. Good night Setsukyou, see you again in Spring!

Masko and Misaki bask in the warmth of Satomi and Meiki's appartement after having invited ourselves over to continue the festivities. Thanks for having us over guys, and sorry for getting a bit roundy and disturbing your landlord...

Ashton, Tyer and Satomi quickly remind themselves of the comforts of home as they sit in appreciation of the cartoon channel. You'd think Tyler would be the most excited at this stage, but I'm not so sure....

Meiki broke out a bottle of his Chinese wicked strength sake equivalent, called moutaijiu (as best I can recall), which at 53% is more like vodka than rice wine. This jubilant picture is an accurate representation of the general mood after a happy day's eating, drinking, and merriment.
Cheers guys, thanks for a great day!

Hichigosan

With Tyler's birthday approaching in a few weeks, we dressed up in our suits and visited a local temple to celebrate his hichigosan, the first of three significant ages - 3, 5, and 7.

(Click on the images to enlarge them in another window)

Here we are all suited-up ready to brave the terrors of spending the day in formal dress with a nearly three year-old larikan.

Just before leaving Tyler treated us to a rare pose of total niceness in his cool little suit which Misaki's mother had hand-made for him.

(This is his default pose when caught in front of a camera - his impression of Calvin, from Calvin and Hobbes)

Upon arriving we discovered that the temple was absolutely beautiful. As per tradition, we first washed our hands with water supplied by several handy aquatic dragons.
Misaki and Tyler radiating cleanliness from behind the washing area.

It's happy water. Clean hands are good.

Of course, Tyler found it necessary to stick his arm into the sacred waters, suit and all, but shortly after a priest, resplendant in his ceremonial robes, emerged from the temple for the commencement of his holy lunch break.

We arranged ourselves in front of the temple's entrance for another group shot before heading inside for a little hichigosan ceremony.
It was consise, but impressive - the priest and his attendants were dressed in full traditional kimonos and there was serene music playing which seemed to eminate from the temple itself.

Tyler with his gift from the ceremony looking quite chuffed about it all. That's at least the 3rd occasion we caught him looking normal and nice.

The temple grounds had the ability to transport your imagination back to ancient Japan with it's beautiful gardens and ideal location on top of a hill. Outside the main temple were several smaller shrines like this one.

It was a really nice day. The atmosphere was peaceful and relaxing and the temple grounds could easily provide another day's worth of photo opportunities.

How to fight SPAM

Spam and eggs, spam bacon spam and beans, spam spam eggs spam sausages spam spam...

SPAM is a problem which plagues the internet and is a constant source of daily frustration for many people. When we think of spam, we usually think of unsolicited email recieved by our email clients, which do have an increasing ability to filter it out of our inbox, but what would you do if you started recieving just as many emails to your handheld or mobile device, or even worse, to your mobile phone?

Mobile phones too

It is mobile phones which are the very victims of a plague of email spam here in Japan. It's mostly being sent by dubious advertisers of porn sites and the occasional money scam like insurance sales . I just upgraded my mobile phone, which I recieved for free on the conditional that I accept a completely new phone number and email address, so this time I chose a nice sensible address based on my name. Stupid! I recieve typically 5-10 junk emails a day to my phone. Or at least I used to...

Fight back

I got fed up with it and decided to fight back. This is how:

I started keeping a record of all the emails I recieved, making note of the date, time, and the URL contained within the message. The email address of the sender is irrelevant, as it can easily be faked, but the URL gives us what we need to track the senders down. There's a wealth of information available on how to track the source of an email using it's header information, but unfortunately mobile phones don't store the headers for obvious memory space reasons.

Tools of the trade

From the URL it is possible to contact the company hosting the offending website, as well as the company used to register the site's domain name. There are some simple tools available to users of UNIX variants to achieve this, and becuase I'm a linux user myself I'd recommend downloading a MEPIS live cd if you're a windoze user for quick, easy access to these tools. MEPIS is a complete Linux operating system, with a beautiful user interface, which is downloaded as an ISO image, burned to a CD, and used to boot straight to Linux from the CD with automatic hardware detection without affecting the operating system you chose to afflict your hard disk with. Get MEPIS and then we can make war against the spam senders.

Battle plan

The machine that goes "ping"...

From the URL of the link to the website in question we need to optain the IP address of the computer hosting it in the search for the site's webhost. To the front line we send the ping command. Ping will send a packet of data to the url, time how long it takes to come back, and display the result with the computer's IP address.

:~$ ping www.love-shot.info

PING www.love-shot.info (210.189.74.34) 56(84) bytes of data.

64 bytes from 210.189.74.34: icmp_seq=1 ttl=51 time=17.0 ms

64 bytes from 210.189.74.34: icmp_seq=2 ttl=51 time=17.3 ms

64 bytes from 210.189.74.34: icmp_seq=3 ttl=51 time=17.0 ms



--- www.love-shot.info ping statistics ---

3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2002ms

rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 17.013/17.126/17.336/0.211 ms

Gotcha! Hello 210.189.74.34...

The route to victory

To find the most likely company hosting the website we use the traceroute command. Traceroute displays a list of all the computers on the internet forming the connection from our computer to the website itself. One of the last in the list will obviously be the webhost itself. With the IP address obtained from our ping skirmish we send traceroute on a reconnaissance mission:

:~$ traceroute 210.189.74.34

traceroute to 210.189.74.34 (210.189.74.34), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets

 1  YahooBB218125049254.bbtec.net (218.125.49.254)  6.166 ms  5.696 ms  5.313 ms

 2  10.36.253.49 (10.36.253.49)  6.357 ms  6.258 ms  6.289 ms

 3  10.36.0.123 (10.36.0.123)  6.107 ms  5.737 ms  6.141 ms

 4  10.36.0.105 (10.36.0.105)  6.538 ms  6.089 ms  6.362 ms

 5  10.2.4.161 (10.2.4.161)  7.102 ms  7.025 ms  7.532 ms

 6  10.2.3.162 (10.2.3.162)  7.910 ms 10.2.3.166 (10.2.3.166)  7.332 ms 10.2.3.194 (10.2.3.194)  24.458 ms

 7  61.200.82.65 (61.200.82.65)  7.331 ms  7.242 ms  7.390 ms

 8  61.207.14.49 (61.207.14.49)  7.841 ms  7.892 ms  7.693 ms

 9  210.163.253.245 (210.163.253.245)  7.919 ms  7.470 ms  8.175 ms

10  61.207.0.25 (61.207.0.25)  14.995 ms  15.313 ms  15.516 ms

11  210.145.252.146 (210.145.252.146)  15.714 ms  15.429 ms  14.912 ms

12  219.160.10.122 (219.160.10.122)  16.274 ms  15.919 ms  15.954 ms

13  210.173.176.231 (210.173.176.231)  14.994 ms  15.367 ms  15.234 ms

14  ge-0-2-0.tokdcbr01.idc.ad.jp (158.205.192.206)  15.769 ms  15.495 ms 16.696 ms

15  Giga1-1.tokdcas08.idc.ad.jp (158.205.188.190)  15.469 ms  15.598 ms15.507 ms

16  158.205.175.226 (158.205.175.226)  16.194 ms  15.895 ms  15.739 ms

17  61.115.225.245 (61.115.225.245)  16.774 ms  18.600 ms  17.730 ms

18  210.189.74.34 (210.189.74.34)  16.240 ms  21.210 ms  15.734 ms

In the last few lines we see ge-0-2-0.tokdcbr01.idc.ad.jp and Giga1-1.tokdcas08.idc.ad.jp. We ignore the subdomains ge-0-2-0.tokdcbr01 and Giga1-1.tokdcas08, and instead verify the results of our search by sending our browser to www.idc.ad.jp... Hello Japan-based Cable & Wireless IDC.

A friendly reminder

From here I decided to email the company, referring them to the spam I had recieved and the URL of the site they were hosting, and ask them nicely to please remind the owner of the site that sending unsolicited email advertising is illegal. Webhosts take spam very seriously, as it is a gross missuse of their bandwidth, so they replied thusly:

We will communicate the complaint to the sender and strongly

request them to respond adequately.



In order for you to obtain an effective result, we would

like to have your messages and e-mail headers that you have

received.



Sincerely,



--------------------------------------

Cable & Wireless IDC

Net-Abuse Team

Ah yes, the email headers... As I mentioned earlier, mobile phones don't store the headers, but mine allows me to store the email as a VML file and transfer it to my PC via infra-red, which I did and then passed it on in reply. A few days later I was pleasantly surpised to recieve this email:

We asked our contractor to take care of this issue.

They committed they'll warn their customer to refrain

from sending spam.



If you are still getting the email regarding the site,

please let us know that.





Respectfully,



-----------------------------------------

Cable & Wireless IDC Inc.

Wow! I wasn't getting any more email advertising the same site, but from the records I was keeping I was able to determine that the majority of spam I was recieving was advertising sites which were all being hosting by the same company, so I sent them the entire list asking that they check their billing information for correlations in the contact information of the sites in question. So far I'm still spam free!

The war might be over, but not every battle was won

I was very impressed with the success of approaching the site's webhost, and I thank C&W IDC for their co-operation. There's more in a domain name than just an IP address, and with it we can also find the comapny used to actually register the domain name itself and the apparent conatact information of it's owner, but I found this approach much less effective.

Whois that domain name?

The whois command searches the Internic whois database for information related to a domain name. The whois database is where the information needed to direct a browser looking for a domain name like love-shot.info to the computer hosting it is stored. Each domain name is asociated with a Domain Name Server (DNS) which converts the domain name to an IP address.

:~$ whois love-shot.info

NOTICE: Access to .INFO WHOIS information is provided to assist persons in

determining the contents of a domain name registration record in the Afilias

registry database. The data in this record is provided by Afilias Limited

for informational purposes only, and Afilias does not guarantee its

accuracy.  This service is intended only for query-based access.  You agree

that you will use this data only for lawful purposes and that, under no

circumstances will you use this data to: (a) allow, enable, or otherwise

support the transmission by e-mail, telephone, or facsimile of mass

unsolicited, commercial advertising or solicitations to entities other than

the data recipient's own existing customers; or (b) enable high volume,

automated, electronic processes that send queries or data to the systemsof

Registry Operator or any ICANN-Accredited Registrar, except as reasonably

necessary to register domain names or modify existing registrations.  All

rights reserved. Afilias reserves the right to modify these terms at any

time. By submitting this query, you agree to abide by this policy.



Domain ID:D2875814-LRMS

Domain Name:LOVE-SHOT.INFO

Created On:19-Sep-2003 10:00:24 UTC

Expiration Date:19-Sep-2005 10:00:24 UTC

Sponsoring Registrar:R117-LRMS

Status:ACTIVE

Status:OK

Registrant ID:C3651911-LRMS

Registrant Name:Aihara Kousuke

Registrant Organization:Kousuke

Registrant Street1:Chiyoda-ku

Registrant City:Tokyo

Registrant Postal Code:1020071

Registrant Country:JP

Registrant Phone:+81.0331645635

Registrant Email:Aihara1954@hotmail.com

Admin ID:C3651912-LRMS

Admin Name:Aihara Kousuke

Admin Organization:Kousuke

Admin Street1:Chiyoda-ku

Admin City:Tokyo

Admin Postal Code:1020071

Admin Country:JP

Admin Phone:+81.0331645635

Admin Email:Aihara1954@hotmail.com

Billing ID:C3647544-LRMS

Billing Name:Speednames Billing

Billing Organization:Speednames A/S

Billing Street1:Rejsbygade 8A

Billing City:Copenhagen V

Billing Postal Code:1759

Billing Country:DK

Billing Phone:+45.33886300

Billing Email:billing@speednames.com

Tech ID:C3647543-LRMS

Tech Name:Technical Hostmaster

Tech Organization:Speednames

Tech Street1:Rejsbygade 8a

Tech City:Copenhagen

Tech Postal Code:1759

Tech Country:DK

Tech Phone:+45.33886300

Tech Email:hostmaster@speednames.com

Name Server:NS1.ASCIO.NET

Name Server:NS2.ASCIO.NET

Name Server:NS3.ASCIO.NET

love-shot.info would appear to be registered to an Aihara Kousuke of Tokyo, but this information is not likely to be correct. What we can rely on is that the name server (DNS) is correct - ASCIO.NET
The Tech Email refers to the company or individual which actually entered the domain name into the whois database, and in this case it is listed as hostmaster@speednames.com. Checking the Internic's list of domain name registrars reveals that speednames.com and ascio.net are in fact one and the same: InterNIC Registrar List

Yeah, but it's not our problem...

Contacting the domain name registrar and asking them to discourage the owner from sending spam was less successfull than the same approach when applied to the site's webhost. The responsibility of the registrar is simply to register the domain name, collect a small periodical-fee to keep the name active, and that's it. What the site itself is used for is really none of their business, and they have no right or power to do anything about it. I was hoping they might sypathise with my cause and at least send the owner a friendly reminder, but no.

Don't suffer in silence!

If you have the means at your disposal, taking the same kind of non-confrontational action may well have similar positive results. The more individuals who stand up to spammers the less able they may become to continue operating, so please do what you can. If you're recieving email to your PC you have even more resources available from the information contained in the email headers which may well lead to the originating email address or computer itself.

In the meantime, on my to-do list of future projects is a site which allows most of this process to be automated and offered to anyone for free.

Weather in Japan

There's another typhoon blowing in, and as I'm scheduled to train it into Osaka this evening I found myself searching for recent satellite images to see how close it is. Typhoons are usually preceded by several days of constant rain before the final assault of tumultuous winds begins, which is due anytime this afternoon. I need to know when it's going to hit because they actually stop the trains when the worst of it is upon us, and I may well find myself stranded in Osaka, or even un-able to get there in the first place. I love storms! Another perk is that the majority of people don't much like being buffeted by wind and rain of an evening, and so prefer to stay home where it's warm and dry, rather than say, going to their english lessons...
Here's a link to some animated sattelite images of the weather in Japan: Japan Meteorological Agency

a nice place to work?

I just got a hit to this ste from someone using the query "why japan is a nice place to work". I'm scared. I dearly wish I could find that person and tell them about what working in Japan is like. Not that I'd launch into a tirade about how terrible it is, becuase whinging and complaining hasn't gotten me anywhere but into trouble recently, so I would have this to say: working in Japan is nice if you are a single, white (sorry, it's terrible but true), native english speaker with a fairly dynamic personality who isn't too harsh on the eye and doesn't mind working from 12pm to 10:30pm 5-6 days a week for a farily substantial sum of money (typically 250,000 yen these days).
Otherwise I have no comment. Come over and find out - some of the best things you'll discover are beer vending machines on train stations, and $2 cigarette packet dispensers on every street corner. Yes, it's true, grab a couple of 500mL monster cans of Asahi super dry for the trip home. You'll like that at least.

SLA Eikaiwa

Yes, I'm still alive. The website needed a bit of a resurrection though becuase a lot's been happening and it got away from me a bit. I've mostly been working on an online system and accompanying website for SLA Eikaiwa, an english school with 2 branches in Osaka: SLA Eikaiwa

So my other projects got put aside, and in the meantime the domain name for the server hosting this site's images and also AutoLinkback expired. It was generously donated by a friend who runs his own hosting company, DataFly. Things are winding down a bit now, so I might get it together and get AutoLinkback set up again.

Got a new phone with a half decent camera in it so there may well be more Tyler pics in store. In the meantime while we survive earthquakes and typhoons Japan isn't being too bad to this man, not too shabby at all.

msn

why does msn keep sending people here looking for chicken pocks? and who searches for stuff about it anyway? strange search engine of the evil empire, yahoo and google know where it's at

Auto Linkback

If you take a peek over to the right you'll notice a box of reciprocal links and search engine queries which have lead people here in the past. It's part of my latest project which I'm calling Auto Linkback. By simply adding a JavaScript snippet to any site you too can have automatically generated referal links. The possibilities are endless. I'm gearing it towards being a companion tool for weblogs. What you see running here is my first prototype. It needs some work, but over the next days, or weeks I'm planning to develop a website to deploy it with a full member configuration system and remote administration.
It's just cool to see what kinds of things people have been searching for that brought them here. It also gives a feel for what the search engines think your site is about.
I can see privacy issues being raised by people who don't particularly want their search queries immortalised on every search result they visit, which is why members will easily be able to configure how many hits to display, or not to display them at all. Loging into the main site will give complete detailed stats anyway. Besides, the queries are completely anonymous. Fun for the whole family!

geek

for want of a better place to put this, I feel the need to make a record of my endeavour to finally after maybe 2 years upgrade my linux distribution.

I was running the stable "potato" distribution of Debian. At least I think it was potato. Anyway, I use Firefox, Thunderbird, Bluefish, Quanta and a bunch of stuff that doesn't have up to date packages in the stable branch, so I was just forcing them in from the testing branch, and in the process I killed kdelibs4 which took quanta down with it. I decided it was time to upgrade to the testing branch.

I just followed the debian upgrade guide using dselect and while it took my a day and a night, all said and done it wasn't that hard. I first had to add testing repositories to my /etc/apt/sources.list and then run apt-get update. That was a mission actually becuase my sources list was all messed up, but I got an updated list in the end. Then just did dselect update, dselect select, dselect install. And then dselect install again... and again... and again... in the end I ran dselect install 6 times before it finally decided it was finished and offered to clean off all the .deb files. Reason being that there were some minor errors along the way. The first being that sawfish-gnome wouldn't uninstall. I had to find it's pre-remove script and comment out some guff to get rid of it. Then it was just the occasional dependency problem which all got sorted out in the end.

I then had to go back into dselect select to get back all the stuff I was using from testing, becasue for some reason it all got removed in the update process, but it was totally painless getting it all back, was I found and selected them. I found it easier to search debians packeges which tells you where the package your looking is located, like utils, graphics whatever. I few more runs of dselect install later and I was back in action. After setting everything up and being quite impressed that kde apps were back, and anti-aliased, and decided to try a reboot. (I'd been basically upgrading the entire system all day, but that's no reason to reboot linux...)

Reboot, bios check, LI...
Strange, reboot, bios, LI...
For some reason lilo had been shafted. I have windoze on a partition and linux on some others, but lilo was dead. I booted from a linux rescue disk which then booted from the hard disk automagically. I then just checked my lilo.conf file to make sure it was ok. Lilo itself had been updated in the process, so it needed to be run again to update the mbr. Ran lilo, rebooted, and all's well.

I'm now a firm proponet of dselect, which calculated all the dependencies and instead of just telling you about it goes and downloads and installs them for you. All I have to do now is geat UTF-8 working with Quanta and I'm away...

I noticed from my referral logs that someone stumbled across this site looking for pics from Larks in the Park. Well I stumbled across the Porkers web site and who's melon did I spot in their very own crowd shot? Well, I don't remember that guy waving his shoes around in front of me, but the guy in his undies is unmistakable, especially after having jumped up on stage at one point and going the full monty. Porkers!!!

all better, apparently...

There was some confusion this morning when I arrived at the clinic with Tyler. They seemed to think I should have visited the doctor again, so I ended up calling Misaki and passing my phone to the good people. (it really sucks not being able to use the local language effectively sometimes) Turns out they thought we should check to see if he was over his chicken pocks, already. Huh?! It hasn't even been a week yet, but anyway, to the doctor we went.

Dr. Tada's great. He's a rugby fanatic and named his clinic the Wallabies after the Australian team. A while back he brought the Wahroonga Tigers to Japan for an exchange with the local team. So he takes one look at Tyler and says, yep - he's better... can I see his bcak too?... yeah he's better. (that's my translation anyway). Ok, so he's fully recovered apparently and back to the kindergarten tomorrow.

No wonder I can't remember having it, it was nothing for Tyler. Not itchy at all, just some spots mainly on his back and tummy, and a few on his arms and legs. Nothing on his face at all really. I've heard of some kids getting them in their throat and horrible stuff like that.

chicken pocks!

Tyler's at home with me today with a case of chicken pocks. It's not a bad case, and except for the spots on him you wouldn't know he's sick to look at him. But it's very contagious, so I'm landed with looking after him. Actually the deadline for my project was going to be tomorrow, but the specification was changed so now I've got till the end of the week. Still there's not much work going to be done with a spotty 2 year old couped up inside with me all day.

Larks in the park

Yesterday we met up with Ashton and Nana for a free live event in Osaka where we managed to catch The Porkers live! It was so cool to get out, meet a whole bunch of cool people and get some grooves on down to the ska-core. Still recovering, and well worth it. ahhh...

got photos!

Now we're cooking with gas! Cheers Blogger, they finally decided to provide free image hosting. Truth is I haven't been taking a lot of pictures recently, not even a single snap the whole time I was back in Aus, but I have a massive archive of pictures from the last few years here. I haven't even been writing much so this is perfect really, a picture tells a thousand words, or so they say.

Beet desecrating a sacred statue at Kyomizu temple in Kyoto, December 1999.

Remeniscance...

I've been here for 3 years and the first part of my linguistic skills to suffer is my spelling. I usually just bash a word I'm unsure of into Google becuase it offers you suggestions if the spelling's wrong, like "Did you mean '....'?" kinda thing. Whatever. So I wanted to check remeniscant, Googled it, and this site came up #2! Crazy, check it out: Remeniscant

More than that, there are only about 250 pages in Google's database that match. Guess the majority of people these days are looking ahead. That's something positive.

Back in Japan

Been back for a week or so actually. It was great to be back at home. I didn't take a single pic the whole time I was there, because it's my home and it was so real I just wanted to live it. So now I'm just letting my coffee kick start my metabolism before the day proper begins. I still haven't settled into any particular kind of schedule as such since getting out of the school, but my mornings are fixed. Still up at 7:30 and taking Tyler to the kindergarten. He was really excited to see all his friends and be back on the first day, but everyday since that he hasn't wanted me to leave. It was a good bonding experience for us to fly to Aus by ourselves, and I can really sense that his development improved exponentially just in the few weeks we were there. His english pretty much rocks now that he's spent some time in a country where pretty much everyone speaks it all day. The more people I speak to about going freelance the better I feel about it, definitely the right thing to do. Since getting back I've gotten into my projects with renewed vigour and it's all starting to look more realistic and less scary. Now I'm doing it I just have to wonder why I didn't start earlier. The weather was nice when we got back, but now it's really starting to heat up. The humidity is the killer. Just driving home early this morning it was already a little hotter than I'd prefer, but now that I don't have to get around encased in a woolen suit I'm actually going for walks everyday and soaking up as much of the sun as possible and enjoying it. A big thanks to everyone for everything during our stay. It was good.

not in japan!

I'm about to pick up Tyler and then head off to Aus together for a couple of weeks. Misaki is actually joining us for the last week. I'm so already there!

mobeet

So a couple of days before I leave for Aus, where my fantastic japanese mobile phone is completely useless, I get set up with mobog which lets me posts pics taken with the camera in my phone right here on this page, anytime. I mean, I see come completely wierd, strange, amazing and fantastic things here, so it's going to be fun being able to take a snap of it and have it instantly appear here. For a while anyway. See how it goes.

coming to aus

It's true, I'm coming to Aus with Tyler in tow. We leave here on the 21st and arrive on the 22nd. Staying until the 6th.
Looking forward to kicking back and getting away from it all.
see you soon

I'm thirsty. Added some links. Got a buiz meeting tomorrow. Got plane tickets to Aus.
The weekend has finally caught up with me. Sleepy. Must... keep... typing... urghf... zzz
Hey wait, it wasn't the weekend at all, just a middle of the week all-nighter to celebrate my last day at work.
Ok, so it was the weekend. It still is the weekend by definition, as I intend to continue weekending until May.

stylin'

Treated myself to a bit of css goodness, but the thing is that with all this styling, I'm more than likely to exceed my 5Mb daily bandwidth limit. Should that happen you'll more than likely be looking at a bunch of neatly arranged boxes of varying shades of grey and coffee brown with no images in them. Whatever.
Not much else to say, other than that I'm soon to be free of the shackles of the suit and tie, liberated from the rigours of daily commutation on over crowded trains, and also relieved of my salary but that's not the point, the point is that I am no longer a salary man!

The Beet Foundation

What is a foundation anyway? Well, there's a Beet foundation, and it's bloody great.

CLICK

pics!

You might have noticed that I've added some Tyler pics. It's only taken me a couple of years to get around to doing it. I'd better not put too many up though because my free webhost has a 5Mb daily bandwidth limit. I guess next time I get around to it (next year?) I'll just rotate the the pictures. Hooray.

Tyler story:
The pants I put on him this morning had really loose elastic around the waist, but I thought I'd chance it anyway. While I was getting his things ready at the kindergarten, he was doing his usual thing, running around and being funny, but I noticed he was being a little crazier than usual today. When I looked I discovered that his pants had fallen off, so he had taken off his underpants too and was running around in circles half naked and giggling hysterically. Funny guy.

little bit of soul

King's X allways get me through, especially this song:

Put a little soul in your pocket
Put a little soul in the street
Put a little soul in your rhythm
Put a little soul in me

Put a little soul in your lover
Put a little soul in those sheets
Put a little soul in something
Put a little soul in me

Just a little bit, just a little bit
A little bit of soul

Put a little soul in your music
Put a little soul in your groove
Put a little soul in your vision
Put a little soul in you

Put a little soul in your living
Put a little soul in your time
Put a little soul in your religion
Put a little soul in mine

Just a little bit, just a little bit
A little bit of soul

Put a little soul in the things
That you love to do
Let it all go if you want to
It'll come back to you

Just a little bit, just a little bit
A little bit of soul

311

emotions are elastic
they stretch out and back
stretch out and back

sometimes they just snap
they don’t go back
they never go back

psychofunkadelicgrungealism

Need the ministery of my massive studio style headphones to get me through the train ride to work this morning. Going to take a break from industriously making use of the time and instead catch up on a bit of reading, and close proximity musical terrorism. I'm not even sure what day it is anymore, it's all just blended into the same blurry indefinition of "busy".So today is a day to stop, take a step back, and try to remember that I'm still alive. Easy to forget sometimes. It's warming up a bit here, and you can feel it having an effect on everything. The welcome rejuvination of the sun. That's not to say that the wipers on our car don't need replacing from being dragged across shear ice on the windshield, but the days of winter are drawing to an end. A little early too. Global warming, hah! Green house effect? Who cares? That's an honest question, because I do! But, what am I going to do about it? Well, if you happen to keep an incinerator on the side of the road which is used primarily for burning off packing plastic, carpet, and other generally carcenogenic toxic horrors, you'd better keep a close eye on it in the wee hours of the morning.

Note: this blog in no way condones random acts of drunken vandalism, even in the name of environmental protection

hello

Been a while hey. Haven't been posting much recently because I've taken on some freelance programing work which uses the last few remaining seconds of my free time. I get most of the work done on the train actually. I'm going to use the money to buy a domain name and some server space, register a business in Aus and take the first tentative steps towards business ownership. No specific plans for it yet, just get established and go slowly and carefully from there.

Everything else is cool. Actually it's still really cold here, but this has been a really mild winter for japan. It's only really snowed once!

qrio

Has anyone seen the new sony robot? I saw it on tv, and was completely taken aback, it's brilliant! Even if it is remote controlled, it's range of movement is increadible! They're claimiing it has sufficient AI to conduct conversations, remember people's voices and faces and stuff, but all the PR aside, it really is some increadible enginering. The future is apon us, and let's just hope it doesn't turn out like japanese manga or qrio's decendant's will be head-hunting vampire cyborg sex maniacs. Don't worry, sony's dream for the future is a fun, friendly companion who can play with you and make you happy and joyfull. I can feel the love already.

QRIO - it's great

I think they're planning to release a version early next year that can open beers and make toast. I've allready pre-ordered a couple.
Oh yeah - they're tiny! About 2 feet tall.

remeniscant capcicums

It's extremely late, but this is really the only chance I get to do stuff like browse through my archives of photo's from the last few years. Man, since 2000 so much stuff has happened. I was just thinking of everyone and wondering what you're all up to now. sleepy time...

happy new year!

Wey-hey, what a great holiday! Dave, Michiko and family came down to stay for a while. Great times were had, many photos were taken, much video footage was recorded, copious quantities of beverages were consumed and fun was had by all.

Many special thanks to all who sent messages and gifts to us! We've sent over some cards and photo's and stuff, which will be arriving soon. A little late for christmas, but anyway. We bought a new printer, so photo's may, or may not arrive more frequently from now. I'm still working on convincing Misaki of the importance of upgrading our video card to a model which includes firewire so we can edit some of our video archives and send some of that over too.

So, how was new year's eve in the rest of the world? Dave and I were graciously allowed to rock into Osaka for a few hours which we spent at a friends place enjoying good food and good company before missioning back to Sanda in an attempt to ring in the new year with the family. Well, just like the best laid plans of mice and men... we arrived in Sanda just in time to hear the temple bells sounding the arrival of 2004, after terrorising the unfortunate occupants of the train we took home for half an hour or so with our raucus and jubilant celebrations. We were a little dissapointed by being unable to purchase any fireworks for the occasion, but it was a good night all said and done.

So, I'm looking forward to catching up with everyone some time this year. Stay in touch. I've found a free web host, so should be able to get some gfx on this page soon. Meantime, enjoy the festive season and have a happy new year!

Merry Chrismas!

Isn't it? Wouldn't know over here, it's just business as usual. Turned on the TV and didn't see a single Santa, snow flake, chrismas tree or anything to indicate it was actually christmas. Stopped in at the supermarket on the way home to pick up a few things. They have a huge tree out the front, and they've been playing christmas carols for a while now, but otherwise nothing especially christmasy, no "meli kulisumasu" katakana-english equivalent of Merry Christmas from the checkout girls or anything. Not that I feel the need to have a winge about it or anything, I don't really care, but I've been asked what christmas is like in Japan, so here's something similar to what might be an average Japanese take on christmas:

Santa-san lives in Scandanavia, or somewhere in Northern Europe.
On Christmas eve he sneaks into your bedroom while you're sleeping and leaves a present on your pillow for you.
On christmas day you can look forward to a romantic dinner with your partner, after work.
No, it's not a public holiday.
Yes, shops and businesses are open as usual.
No, they're not particularly crowded, and nor were they on Christmas eve.

I have my own Santa costume which I will don this evening to impersonate the fat happy chappy himself and try to give Tyler a little bit of fanatasy to enjoy while he's young enough to believe it. So however you spend you're day, have a nice time, and have a "beli meli kulisumasu!"

snow!

It's amazing, the weather doesn't make gradual transitions here, one day it's kinda cold, the next day it's dumping with snow, right here in sanda! Woke up this morning because I was too cold, despite the mountain of fleecy blankets and doonas I was sleeping under, and after fighting the reality of the fact that I'm not going to be able to get back to sleep I thrust open the curtains to reveal a scene that confirmed my suspicians - a white christmas wonderland! The thing I love most about Japan is the increadably accurate weather forecasts. Still dumping down out there, it's great. Took some pics, but I can just never be bothered uploading any to my geocities page, and blogger doesn't host images for you, I don't think.

Holidays! It's good, good, oh yes.

streaming tunes

Found a cool site full of streaming music - Digitally Imported. Get winamp if you haven't allready got it, or the X Multimedia System XMMS if you're using a real OS and enjoy!

miserable failure

he he he... this is too funny, or just plain stupid - at the time of this posting the first result from google when searching for "miserable failure" is a very prominant and interesting person, who would have us believe that he's anything but a failure. check it out The most hilarious thing about it is that the page itself is a .gov! It's official then.

Anpan Man pachinko game

Although Tyler's bday was actually last monday, we got all the family together for a celebration on the weekend. It was actually a weekend event - arrived sat arvo, stayed until late sat night while most of the relos stayed at Misaki's parents' house and waited for us to return the next day for lunch. Tyler got a horde of presents, nearly all with a Thomas the Tank Engine theme except for the Anpan Man pachinko machine someone gave him. (seriously! it's very realistic...) I've never played the real thing, but from the kids version it seems that Pachinko is nothing more than a vertical pinball machine with a few minor differences. Firstly the objective is actually to sink the balls into different sections of the board, and secondly, instead of only having one ball in play at a time, they're launched in a constant stream with a dial on the front which allows you to vary the velocity of the balls and thusly aim them towards the different goals. It's actually quite entrancing, but it must take a special kind of person to spend a day in a Pachinko parlour immersed in a white wall of cacophanous sound, flashing lights and a think plume of cigarette smoke. Not behaviour I'd encourage in Tyler. Anyway, it's cold and we're running late today, so gotta go do the salary man thing...

Shirahama

We spent the weekend at Shirahama, a healthy 2 1/2 hours away by train. It was great. Saturday we began our adventures by taking a tour in a glass bottomed boat. Shirahama is a really nice ocean town, and the scenery is beautiful. We then went to some amazing cliffs and got very close and personal with some huge waves surging into an ancient cave which looked to have been inhabited by a community of boat building samurai sea farers, although it was difficult to get any conclusive information. Next we took a plunge below the waves in a funky observation tower which lets you walk around on the sea floor and observe the local marine inhabitants. Saw a few fish and stuff. Tyler went crazy and just started running around the bottom of the tower in circles. After checking into our hotel it was time for the main attraction - a traditional japanese hot spring. We booked a family onsen, so we wouldn't have to be seperated as is the custom with the public baths. It was really nice - outdoors, night time, natural surroundings, and the bath itself was chiselled out of a sandstone boulder. I really enjoyed my first onsen experience with Misaki and Tyler.
We arose on Sunday and began with a huge buffet breakfast before heading out to Adventure World - a big safari park kind of thing. We spent the day getting friendly with all kinds of animals and creatures and all had a great time. Tyler really loved it. Misaki and I enjoyed spoiling ourselves with catered meals and no cooking or cleaning. It was a really nice weekend.
Today is Tyler's 2nd birthday. Thanks to everyone who sent messages and presents. He doesn't actually know it's his birthday as such because we didn't have time to do the presents thing this morning. After such a fun filled weekend it was kinda hard to arise to a freezing cold monday morning. I'm guessing he's going to have a mini party tonight. This weekend is his official party with all the family and stuff.

cold!

The season's seem to change really suddenly here. Up until a few days ago it was still quite comfortable weather, but now it's freezing! I can't feel my toes. It's moments like this that I'm reminded of my designs to build a steel capped pinky toe protector. Really missing my knee length ugg boots at the moment.
We're off to an onsen tomorrow for a weekend trip. Onsens are natural hot springs, heated by the abundance of volcanic activity under the precarious collection of islands that Japan is comprised of. At least they're supposed to be natural - I wonder about that when I see them located in the middle of a city. That's probably something different, somthing which could be described as a public bath kind of thing, and I don't think they make any false claims about their source of heat. (man my toes are cold!) So we're getting up early and training it out into the country side somewhere for my first onsen experience on the morrow.

good weekend

not bad at all really. Bit cloudy and rainy, so we watched a bunch of videos and did some shopping and stuff. Bought a little pine tree to be our christmas tree. We watched The Ice Age with Tyler to see if he'd be interested in seeing Nemo at the cinema. They're both graphics animations. He was actually quite interesting in Ice Age, especially because he loves elephants I guess. He lost interest in it at one stage and tried to start playing with other stuff, but he eventually settled down and watched most of it with us. I'm guessing he'd probably stay with us right through nemo because it's a lot more colourfull and the screen's a lot bigger and everything. I stilll haven't seen revolutions yet, but anyway.

thinking and wondering

"so won't you take me for a ride
and let me know I'm still alive
somtimes I wish I didn't have an answer or a clue to anything
all this wondering, and this thinking, and wondering what I'm gonna do"

- King's X

cheesy toast

managed to begin the day by sleeping in and making misaki run late. i'm determined to have a good day anyway. cheesy toast is good. um, that's about it really.

wednesday

worked. did stuff. and stuff like that.
felt pretty good, especially after listening to sean lennon and ben harper on the way to work.
managed to end the day by upsetting misaki with my lame japanese comprehension. it started well..

fixed!

Got the car back yesterday, and it's good as new! And for much less than Toyota quoted us originally to replace nearly everything in the vicinity of the impact. Very glad to have that over with. We're planning to go for a drive to an onsen for a weekend soon to relax and put it out of our minds for good. Feeling good now.

happy birthday Dad!

Today's my dad's birthday.
Sorry I didn't call this morning, and I guess it'll be a bit late by the time I get home tonight, but I hope you have a really nice day. Happy birthday dad.

car

Today's a national holiday, which means that Misaki's at home with Tyler, but I'm on my yway to work anyway. At least we got to sleep in today. And the car's in being fixed. Yay! I think it might be finished today, or tomorrow or something. Finally an end to the whole saga. We're going to drive to an onsen for a weekend after we get it back.
Hungry. Time for breakfast.

sunday

Went to a mates house to meet his 2 month old daughter with some people. Very cute. Had a few beers, a bit of a chat, some delicious sushi and a really time all said and done. Caught up with Masako too. She was toting some really nice pics from Aus and England. Really nice. It's cool to see pics like that and think 'hmmm.. that'd be a really nice place to live - hang on a sec'. One day.

washing

it's the weekend. It's cold. We're going to have trouble drying all our washing so Misaki's just gone up to the coin laundry. Why do we have so much washing to dry? Tyler had a bit of a yak last night, maybe from coughing too much, or maybe from eating something bad, but he's fine, no probs. Thing is, after expelling half his dinner in the bed, we changed the sheets and gave him a shower, and then he brought up the other half. (this is really lovely reading isn't it?) So we're on a washing mission. For a little guy he eats a lot. Here's something you don't need to know - if you think nato smells bad while your eating it, you don't want to know how it smells after you've started digesting it!
cold

er...

Had bacon and eggs for breakfast. Quite enjoying my morning so far. I'm going to get some time to work on my projects today, so maybe that's why I'm actually quite relaxed. Nothing's getting to me at all today, it's great. Pot of coffee for company. Groove salad providing musical accompanyment. A nice weekend planned - taking the car in to be fixed on Sunday and heading over to a friends house to hang out.

thursday

Had an open house at the school. Quite good really - met lots of people. Then had to grab a few quick beers afterwards with the lads. Another diligent day, all said and done. Fell asleep listening to Spiderbait on the way home and had to walk back in the rain from the next station. Didn't mind really.

wednesday

Had to leave early for a special meeting about an open house the school was planning for the next day. Then had to head over to the other campus to teach there until late. Then had to grab a few quick beers afterwards with the lads. A very diligent day all in all.

umami

Read this: umami. A point is made about language governing your perceptions and interpretations. I've often thought the same. It's late, better crash. bye

diligence

Decided today that I should make an effort to write something here every day, reguardless of how mundane or uninteresting it might be, for example: "woke up. picked nose. worked. came home. ate. picked nose. went back to sleep."
Somedays interesting things happen, so just to be prepared for that eventuality I'm training myself into good habbits.

Here's todays thought of the day:
My spelling is noticably deteriorating after only a few years in a non-english speaking country.

And another thought for free:
Japan isn't such a great place to study japanese - no time. Or no energy, hard to tell the difference really.

Most interesting recent activity:
Made tacos for dinner last night. (you know things are getting bad when you have to start talking about what you eat)

One more bonus thought:
I noticed an ad in the train tonight for one of the biggest name brand english schools in Japan - Nova. Couldn't read all the details, but the price looked like 200,000 yen. That's the best part of 3000 bucks, I guess for a year's lessons. That's pretty serious about studying english, even if most people do get the money from loan agencies.

Ed on the Farm 2003

Decided it's about time I got a link to Ed's hilariousness on the farm up finally. Here it is:

Ed on the Farm 2003

I am debian

find out what kind of OS you are

www.debian.org

that's much more betterer

Took the car somewhere else for another quote today. Less than a thousand bucks! So they don't feel that the support bar is bent enough to replace, and it's a little worrying how they can do they whole job for less than toyota quoted us just to paint the bonnet, but it's so cheap that I'm not asking any questions. It's not damaged structurally and the air conditioner and radiator are fine too, so as long as it looks ok when we get it back I'll be well chuffed.

When it's all fixed up we're going to clean it up a bit (it's festy as inside - full of Tyler's toys and stuff) and go for a weekend trip somewhere.

prang!

I've done it again - I went and drove our beautiful car into some nob who decided he had the sacred right to force his way through the traffic in front of us. Naturally, becuase the front of our car connected with the back of his, the insurance companies will probably find us at fault. Maybe we could have avoided it if instead of giving him the horn in anticipation of him perpetuating his nobishness, we had just stopped abruptly. But stopping suddenly is exactly what he did before even completing his turn through the traffic because as could be expected, he didn't actually check to see if the road he was turning into was clear. It wasn't, he had no where to go, and he expected me to hold back and allow his royal self to wave the rules of right-of-way. Well, we were only traveling at a brisk walking speed, so his car isn't really damaged. The front of ours has definitely looked better though. Took it in for a quote yesterday, and it was highway robbery! I guess he based it on the assumption that the insurance would be covering it, so he estimated a price which would cover replacing pretty much the entire front half of the car, for about $AU4K. The bonnet's bent, the front grill's pushed in a bit, and the support bar across the front's sitting at a bit of an angle, but the radiator fortunately wasn't damaged, and nor was it's mount. There's a small dent in the top of it's outer casing though, so he suggested replacing the entire thing. Also the compressor for the air-conditioner is conveniently located between the radiator and the front grill, but fortunately it also appears to me not to have been damaged. He feels that an alluminium pipe connected to it is bent, and so, guess what? Yep, better replace half the air-conditioning system too. Having the replacement bonnet painted to match the car is also quite expensive, but I'm ok with that. What I can't abide is the fact that almost half the total cost of the quote was labour! It's all neatly itemised on a nice printout, like 'removing front grill - $50, looking at car and scratching chin - 1 left testicle'.
Well, live and learn. People driving like that has been one of my pet hates for a long time now, but I've allowed myself to become a victim of it. Should have just stopped as soon as I saw him start trying to push through, but it happens so often here that you never expect any grief from it. At least we're fairly well cashed up at the moment, so it's not going to be a problem for us, but it just had to happen right at the same time as I was thinking of finally upgrading our poor old pc. Bugger.

thankyou sony

Just invested no small amount of money in a pair of sony headphones. They are good. They're a closed back design, which does mean that the people around me can travel in blissfull ignorance of the free-sprited chaotic tones causing the bones of my skull to resonate at low frequencies (I think my sinuses cleared up significantly the first time I used them), but the up side is that it also blocks out ouside noise so effectively I can immerse myself in my own private world of musical appreciation and forget all else around me. Definitely money well spent. A lot of money well spent.

farewell yoga

Yesteray rocekd, but when I arose this morning I discovered to my horror that my trusty Yoga brand headphones have had one of the speakers detached from the headband! My trusty tools of anarchy are no more. I'll have to begin an immediate search for a new assistant in anarchistic activity, preferably with a retractable cord.
What else can I say. I'm at quite a loss. Salary men in Osaka will be able to commute in their preferable morbid silence once again, but not for long, not for long...

good day

Yesterday was good. We played with the other baby who lives in our building for about an hour, went out for some lunch, and on the way back Tyler fell asleep. We both had a nap for about 2 hours when we got back. In a classic case of bad timing Misaki had to stay back a little bit, even though we'd planned to go out for dinner, so I gave Tyler his dinner at home and then we waited for her to get back. Did manage to go out for dinner in the end. Tyler was having a great time, bouncing off the walls basically, lots of fun.
Back to work today, but not to teach, I'll be programming all day which I'm quite looking forward to, I'd have to admit. We're finishing early and then heading out for an un-official farewell for one of our comrades who's returning to France after 6 years or so here. So today should be another good day. Tomorrow's basically the same, except in the evening we're having a halloween party. Then Sat night's the officially sanctioned school organised farewell. All in all, I'm not doing any actual work as such until next week. I might even allow myself to relax enough to have some fun. All good and true, but I think I've been a bit tired an grumpy at home recently, so I'll have to be carefull not to let Misaki feel left out. This Australian is doing his best, but as they say, you can take the tiger out the jungle, but you can't take the jungle out of the tiger. I wear a suit and tie, stand in silence on crowded trains, come home late and look very much like any other salry man, but...
Actually no suit today, bit of a mufty day for me. Tomorrow too, which means I don't have to strap the bloody thing back on until next week. It's such a relief, I hate and despise it. Just to spite the uniformality of it all I occasionally wear a massive pair of studio style headphones on the train and broadcast RATM from them as loud as my eardrums can endure in order to corrupt peoples minds with my western individuality and contempt for conformity. It's also a good way to keep the space around you free of salary men. hmmm... today might be a good day to do just that.
mmmuuuha-ha-haaa (evil laugh of conspiratorial anticipation)

day off!

I've got the day off!!! So here I am at home with Tyler. Misaki's pesimistic about my chances of having a good day looking after him, but we're doing ok so far. We've had breakfast, played with trains, I've just hung out the washing and now he's occupying himself with a Thomas the tank engine video. He just pulled the tape out of one them so we had a bit of an episode while I tried to explain to him that you can't watch videos with the tape haning out of them, but he got it in the end. It allways ends in tears. No, I'm looking forward to the day together. I am a little worried becuase last night I was a bit too tired, managed to tick Misaki off some how and still haven't managed to get myself back into the good books completely, so I'll have to be carefull to take it easy today. Tyler usually takes a nap in the morning and in the afternoon, so I'll get a chance to put my feet up and forget it all later. Yeah, tired, maybe becuase of teaching for 4 hours straight last night. It's not good. I'm trying to sleep on the trains these days, instead of reading or doing a bit of programming as I had been doing before being hit with a nasty cold recently. Right then. Better head out and let Tyler burn off some energy. Luckily there's a Toys'R'Us just across the road from our place which is allways convenient, and our favourite park isn't too far away either. I'll take my camera with us just in case. I was looking at my geocities website yesterday thinking about what to do with it. If Tyler takes a long enough nap today I'll try to get something up. Laters

getting better

Finally my temperature has returned to normal. At least it was just after I woke up this morning. Haven't checked since, but I think I'm on the mend. My sinuses also seem to be recovering. They're no longer manufacturing a constant stream of horrible green festyness. I can actually breathe quite comfortably now. My only persisting symptoms are a mild case of the sniffles and a wierd headache behind my eyes when I move them around. Again, I think all would be solved by a good day in bed, which I'm just trying to hold out for until the weekend. I'm going to make it.
Healthyness.

sick

Sick. Got a fever which hit 38.8, my sinuses have been killing me for the last week, and this morning I transformed into a horrible, grumpy, mean, irritable, snappy, nasty monster and scared Misaki and Tyler. I thought I just had a cold, but actually I'm really sick and I'm not very good at it because it doesn't happen to me. I don't get sick. I'm very healthy. There's nothing wrong with me, I'm fine, I... I think I'm dying! Help! By the time I realised what was going on Misaki had allready had enough. We had to cancel our plans to visit my friend and meet his new baby daughter, and we decided I should stay home and recuperate while Misaki and Tyler go to her family's house tonight for a sports festival tomorrow, which was our plan originally. I've eaten, taken some medicine, showered and am feeling better than this morning. My theory is that while I was never sick at home, I'm often sick here because I'm probably being exposed to viruses that I've never come into contact with before so they effect me really badly and it takes me a long time to get over them. ooh, hungry - think I should eat some toast? Better, I guess. Right, so, I'm fine, or soon will be, and as I head off towards the toaster remember, being healthy is easy to take for granted until your head becomes a congested green slime factory.

still alive

Still alive. working. eating. sleeping. stuff. We've been doing stuff this month - went out on the weekend with some people who had a 5 year old daughter. She and Tyler got along really well. It was nice to watch them playing together.　Otherwise we spend as much as time possible on our days off relaxing and doing nothing, hanging out in shopping malls, eating out as much as possible. yeah

hello

Well, we just had a really nice weekend. Saturday was Tyler's Undoukai, or sports festival. It's an anual event for Kindergartens in Japan, and a really big thing for a lot of parents. Every family was represented by at least one video and one still camera, many accompanied by a variety of accessories like tripods, lenses etc. Lots of fun.

Saturday night we went to a special function we were invited to by our family doctor. Turns out he's the president of the Sanda Rugby League Football Club and is in some way affilliated with the Wahroonga Tigers. Saturday night was a special welcoming ceremony for the Tigers under 13's who had just arrived in Japan for a 10 day stay, right here in Sanda. So we went along, met a few people, had some food and drinks and heard the Australian national anthem and Waltzing Matilda being sung in Sanda for the first time. Very cool.

Since the Autumn equinox the weather's cooled down and dried out a lot. It's very pleasant now, about 25 and low humidity. We spent yesterday in the park enjoying a bento lunch and letting Tyler run around. He's able to recognise colours now, and can repeat anything we say, in a fashion, once at least. But I sense the terrible two's coming. He's very determined and persistant and doesn't take well to being made to do something he doesn't particularly feel like at the time. He's usually very good, and not a problem at all, but sometimes he might decide he wants a couple of toys he's picked up in a shop, one in each hand, and will protest bitterly if we suggest he parts with even just one of them. But he's a lot of fun to play with now - he loves hide and seek and chasing each other around the house. He's learnt the names of a lot of the Thomas the Tank Engine characters too.

email probs

On firday night my company's email server started returning 5.7.1 relaying denied error messages whenever I tried to send mails to foreign domains. Possibly they've set up some anti spam filtering or something in light of the recent virus activity Microsoft has blessed us with. Anyway, I've hijacked misaki's mail server temporarily to stay in touch.

29...

Hi! I'm 29! As of today actually. Misaki made a nice cake for me last night, and at work they brought out a cake and stuff and gave me a really nice card. I missed a call from Dad this morning, Nan sometime later, but managed to catch up with Phil and Masako when I got home from work. Nice to talk to you guys. Misaki's crashed, and here I am, one year away from 30, celebrating with my tall can of Kirin Ichiban. I'm a bit shocked actually - it's all happened so fast, but It's all good.
At least I'm not a 9-5er, technically speaking anyway. It's not much compensation for the wierd schedule I have, but it's all better than normality. I guess. If I didn't have to wear a suit everyday I'd have no complaints. So that's another year in the life of Mark Beattie...

been a while...

about a week actually. Well, since last week the most interesting thing we did was go out last saturday night to an all-you-can-eat/all-you-can-drink beer garden with misaki's work friends. Fun. Sunday, Misaki took Tyler to meet some of her friends and their daughters, who loved Tyler to pieces. I was left at home to my own devices and so was forced to spend money on the car stereo. Just an adaptor so I can use my MD walkman. The desktop pc died, bringing an end to my efforts to burn cd's to listen to. It's funny, Misaki complains about not being able to check her emails, but then hassles me when I mention upgrading it. The thing wont event POST anymore! It's so old and smelly that to justify spending any money on it at all I'd have to completely replace most of the core components. Fine with me, but Misaki's smart enough to know that once the upgrade process begins it's a never ending vicious cycle. Again, fine with me, but she's the one thinking about where the money comes from.

music

Beet likes to listen to Groove Salad while blogging. He also enjoys Flaresound Jazzybeats. You can listen to them too!
Groove Salad - Soma FM
Jazzmusique - Netmusique

coffee coloured

I dug up my style sheets from the international coffee club (ICC) and replaced the site's green-pea colour scheme with my coffee colour scheme.
It's good.
Enjoy it.

W3C