Charles in Japan

Woot! New Firmware!

I just read that Ricoh released new firmware for my camera that fixes one issue I've had.  The GDR has a fairly fast lens for a compact camera and like many compacts it uses the aperture blades as the shutter itself.  The problem with this is that when it's wide open the fastest shutter speed is 1/2000th of a second and when it's bright outside that's too long.  You end up with an over exposed picture.  I keep forgetting to close the aperture or reduce the ISO.  Fortunately, now the camera will do that automatically.  When my brother was visiting me I ended up with quite a few over exposed pictures of Himeji castle, so this is a welcome enhancement.  I'm sure there is some other good stuff in there too, but this is the important one for me.

I felt it this time

A powerful 6.8 quake hit northern Japan early Thursday morning, well just after midnight.  It was about 280 miles from Tokyo, but you could feel it here.  I was in the nearby bar at the time about ready to home, but we stuck around and watched some video footage on the TV.  If you were right on top of it I think it would be scary.  I think this is the 3rd quake I've felt.  They happen a lot more often, but I think it might actually be more difficult to notice them if you haven't grown up with it.  Once you get attuned to it it's easier I'm sure.  To think how many millions of tons of earth was moving below my feet, it's really amazing and a little bit scary.  So much power pent up beneath our feet.  The building I work in I believe is 'certified' for about a magnitude 7 earthquake.  At least I think so, but I hope it's closer to 8.  With the 7.2 a couple months ago and the 6.8 this morning I feel a little bit less safe here on the 34th floor.  He have a hard hat and emergency pack on the back of every chair, but you kind of forget about them until you hear about a strong quake. 

It's the firework season right now in Japan and there are shows every week it seems like.  I think they just started recently.  There is supposed to be a huge display Sunday night in Asakusa, but everyone has told me it's extremely crowded.  So much so that it's really not fun.  I can't imagine the stations when people are trying to go home.

I love the new iPhone software.  One of my favorite Apps is a book reader.  You can download a lot of the old classics for me, but it uses a nicer rendered to make it easy to read.  I'm reading The Count of Monte Cristo again.  It's a little dim, but possible to read even in direct sunlight.  The electronic paper would be awesome.  The screen is small, but the form factor is actually pretty nice, especially considering it works as my music player too.  It's nicer the Palm V I used oh so many years ago.  I haven't really seen the ebook readers, but they seem a little large with a lot of space wasted for buttons or a keyboard.  The touch screen works very well.  It really makes me wish ebooks were a little more reasonable and flexible about the devices you could put them on.  The iPod Touch or iPhone would make a great technical reference.  The device really has a lot of promise, so much so that I think the current battery life is going to be the biggest problem for users even though it's best of it's class for 3G phones.  I expect the next big revision of the iPhone to exceed it by quite a bit.

Japan update

I gave up on the iPhone temporary.  It's too hard here to live without a phone and I'm sick of waiting.  Since I had insurance at least, I could get a moderately expensive replacement, but now I'm finally back online and can receive your emails.  I decided to go for something other then the typical black, white or pink (if you are female) and this one is bright shiny green.

My exploration of bars has slowed way down.  I have a few places I tend to go to.  If I went out with groups of friends more it would be easier to try new places, but when I'm by myself certain places are better.  Having people there who know you helps a lot too.  Social networking in this country is much more difficult then the US, so having someone to vouch for you makes a huge difference.  My contact list, short as it is after the phone disaster of 2008 looks a little more promising then my first several months in Japan.  My favorite yatai is shutting down after this summer, but he'll be opening his own store in/near shibuya.  Hopefully he'll be looking a little south of the station making it an easier walk for me.

Hmm, what else has been going on here.  It's hot, humid and miserable.  Trust me on this, you do NOT want to come to Japan in the summer.  If you do, explore Hokkaido and northern Japan.  They said Kyoto is even worse since it's surrounded my mountains.  I can't imagine it.  I'm covered in sweat just getting to work, and that involves less then 10 minutes of walking.  I open up my apartment everyday to keep the air moving through it so it's hot and miserable when I get home, but it cools off very quickly.  201 square feet works to your advantage there. 

The iPhone looks like it's going to be a big success here in Japan.  A little Japanese software is out, but I'd expect to see a lot more in the coming months.  Apple sold 1 million iPhones worldwide in three days.  That took them two and half months with the original phone and 10 milllion applications downloaded in the same amount of time.  Japanese input is rather different from the phones here and it will be interesting to see if it catches on. 

Friday night I'm planning on going to Odaiba and  hope it doesn't rain.  It seems to every time I go and I haven't really been able to walk around some of the parks there and enjoy the view.  Saturday I'm probably going to catch a movie and see the photography museum nearby.  Next Friday my company hired a yakatabune so we are all going out to party for two and a half hours.  What's available varies from plan to plan and company to company, but it's always all you can drink.  There are going to be 50-80 sober people walking on the boat and most are going to come off it very drunk I think.

Other then that nothing big has happened recently.

On the new iPod Touch/iPhone software

I haven't been able to get my hands on an iPhone yet, but I did spend the $10 dollars to upgrade my iPod.  I figured it was worth the money to try some things out and if I didn't like it would save me a lot of money and effort on the iPhone.  It's crashed a couple times, but it really is a beautiful piece of software.  Many of applications I downloaded are really well written.  I connected to my wirelesss lan and opened up the mapping application.  I knew they had some system to figure out your location based on IP address, but it was spot on.  Searching is beautiful, although finding directions doesn't seem to work well in Japan yet.  I'm sure other apps will be soon coming.

Apple released a remote application to control iTunes from your iPhone over the wireless connection.  Awesome.  Granted in an apartment my size it's not as useful, but it would be for most people, or especially at parties, if you do that sort of thing.  The Google search app is interesting.  The Typepad app for blogging is great, but better if I had a cellar connection.  Address book has search, Yay!  Twitterrific is nice too.  Everyone should use Twitter.  

I was really worried about the Japanese input at first.  It was running slow for a bit, but I think it was partially because I was using it wrong.  The iPhone uses something similar to how Japanese input text on the current phones, but a little different.  For example, the '4' key when you press it, starts with 'ta' and then goes to 'chi' 'tsu' 'te' 'to'.  So if you want the last one you have to press it 5 times (although I think there are some short cuts now).  To help with this, even if you press it once, it may come up with autocompletion for words that start with some of the other characters.  The autocompletion learns and it's pretty smart.  This can save a lot of time.  The iPhone always uses the character you input though.  This drove me nuts and it was slow.  You can press and hold a key, an the other 4 choices pop up around the center.  Nice improvement, but it's slow to appear.  Finally I just learned all you have to do is slide your finger in the direction of the pop up and you'll get that character.  You don't have to wait.  Much much faster.  I haven't used it enough to see how well it learns your habits, but it seems pretty good so far.

Once I get an iPhone and play around with it more I'll write some more.  Right now I'm tending to agree with one reviewer who said the iPhone 3G will likely have a bigger impact then the first iPhone.  The 3rd party apps and improvements in the existing ones make a HUGE difference.  The app store is a pleasure to use.  I had heard how much of an improvement that was over existing providers and searching the web I agree.  Sure, it's a bit more closed then other solutions, but developers can actually reach their customers.  

I've been using my iPod in general a lot more recently, for things like checking email and web sites since my phone died.  I was a bit slow on the keyboard at first when typing English, but it's actually really easy to use if you learn to trust it.  I'm not sure I believe all these reviewers and analysts saying that they or other business can't use a touch keyboard.  I think if they actually sat down with one for a while and learned to trust it's correction mechanism they'd really like it.  It's fast too.  It's light years ahead of the touch interfaces we are used to dealing with on a normal basis.  I think Apple really has another winner on it's hands.  

Raining Cats and Dogs

I haven't seen rain like this in a long time.  A few minutes ago I heard thunder.  Then it started to pour and they had some really really strong wind.  Suddenly the wind stopped, but the rain is pouring down pretty hard.  If you look at the weather map though, everything around Tokyo seems sunny.  Weird.  As long as this continues I've got a riverside apartment.  

Mid Japan Crisis

Disaster struck this Saturday.  I was making plans with Hiromi to go see the new Indy Jones movie.  (They call him Indy here, and if you say Indiana they kind of look at you strange.)  I had only seen one other movie since I'd moved here and that was Aibou, based of a Japanese drama and because my friend has free tickets.  So between text messaging and searching on the internet for a theatre I was doing some cleaning.  It was over due and my mom keeps telling me that just spending a couple minutes a day is all it takes.  Especially true when you live in 200 square feet, but that's besides the point.  Another tangent, making plans to see a movie here sucks.  In the US?  You just drive to the theater, if the one you want it sold out, catch it again in 30 minutes or drive 10 minutes to another theatre.  Easy right?  About the only time movies are sold out anyway are on opening day.  Not so in Japan.  Everything until 10pm is sold out by 10 in the morning.  More on the poor conditions of Japanese movies some other time.

I think we'd finally decided to go see the movie in Yokohama and a final couple of text messages should of cleared it up.  They were doing construction in my apartment so the water was off, but they'd just finished up a couple minutes ago.  (I thought this was the only day for my floor, but also on Monday, caught me by surprise)  I was doing a little scrubbing in the bathroom when the phone beeped in my pocket.  As I stood up, my arm caught the strap and the phone went flying toward the toilet, bouncing off the rim right into the bowl.  You kind of see it in slow motion, then you freeze for a second with the deer in the headlight look before quickly fishing it out and drying it off even as you see the screen dying.  This is when I realize that I still hadn't gotten the backup software working and if that phone went everything and everyone I knew here in Japan was gone.  And well, 3 days later, after letting it dry it still doesn't work.  With the exception of about two or maybe three people I don't know how to contact any of the people I've met in Japan.  Like most Japanese I lived through my phone.  Now with my life here almost reset back to zero I need to start making some friends again.  I know some of them may call or message, but based on past experience I don't have high hopes of very many.

Softbank won't replace the phone, but I'm not too surprised.  I think I'm going to wait for the iPhone and hope I can get at launch or quickly after.  One of the best things about it is that it makes a backup immediately.  I keep having some second thoughts about it though.  I wonder how many Japanese sites are really going to support it.  It's getting lots of support in the US and I think a decent amount in the US.  One example is the service Loopt.  If you haven't seen it, it's cool.  It uses the GPS features on your phone (or the signals towers) to determine your location, then you can find places or friends near you.  Great support on the iPhone, but no support in Japan.  There is a similar service in Japan, Mapii, but as far as I can tell from their site they probably don't support the iPhone yet.  The other kind of surprising thing is that many phones here have higher res screens.  Really you compare the feature sets and the iPhone doesn't look as good.  It's the browser and software that will make or break it.  If any of you know where I can buy a very cheap used phone in Japan please let me know.  I'd rather not have to rush into a choice, but neither do I want to wait too long.

All stuff about losing my contacts made me think more about my PC and how it's been acting a little (just a little!) weird the other day.  I went out last night and bought a 1TB external drive.  First think was to copy about 400GB of data off my 750GB drive and reformat in HPFS.  I was formatted in NTFS which I could only read, not write.  Now I'm moving some other files around trying to get all the files of the same type together.  I think I have about 500GB of music total, although a lot of it is duplicated.  Once I get a drive dedicated to that it should take a few weeks to get sorted out.  Hopefully before that I'll be able to free up of my 400GB drives to use for time machine to keep my laptop backed up.  This new drive gives me 3300GB of external drive space going by the drive manufacter's standard of 1000 is the new 1024.  Hopefully this will give me some new space for photos too.  My Aperture 'directory' on my laptop is about 50GB and I THINK most of the pictures are stored on an external drive.  I may be completely wrong about that though.

Oh well, that's my partial update of the disaster that was this weekend.  Just remember folks, PLEASE back up your phones and computers!!!

(And yes, I know now that the phone companies offer backup services of some type.  I just wish they told me when I bought the phone)

Update:  I just got an email from Mapii.  They are planning on supporting the iPhone the middle or end of this month.  Yay!!!  First good new this week.  I should also say I got an email from Loopt and they currently have no plans for support outside of the US.  BOO!!!  I'm not exactly sure what's involved, but with a lot of the backend seemly based on Google I don't think they have a good excuse.  Japan was also missing an application like this until Mapii came out, so I think they missed a huge chance in this market.  Brightkite is another interesting service that also doesn't support Japan, although I think they could.  Ultimately I think both Brightkite and Twitter will lose out to services that use features on the phone to determine your location, be it wither GPS or based on cellular towers.  I'm interested in their usefulness for finding other single drinking buddies.

FISA and Obama

I haven't really kept up on the FISA stuff.  They were posting about it on a daily basis months and months ago and it just got too much to read.  I wish I kept up a little better now.  There is so much flying around it's a little hard to figure out what's true and what isn't.  Basically they say Obama changed his mind and is supporting retroactive immunity for telecoms with this 'compromise' on FISA.  It also still seems to support warrant-less wiretapping.  Some people seem to say the bill needed to be passed so we could continue surveillance, others say our current laws around enough.  I'm not 100% sure which is right and the truth is probably somewhere in between.  I don't support Obama's choice on this either (with the understanding I have), but I'll still support him for President.  I do think he'll do the investigations he talks about, but I'd still like to know why this bill needs to be passed now.

That isn't really what I wanted to talk about though.  There will always be policy disagreements.  The problem is people are taking this like it's a betrayal by their best friend.  Vows not to give any more money to Obama, attacks against his character, making him look weak by attacking him similar to how Kerry was attacked, but by his own supporters.  Comparing him to Bush, Cheney and McCain.  Many vowing not to vote for him, or vote for someone else.  We should be able to criticize policy of our candidates without trash talking their characters.  We are just doing the Republican's work for free.

I just don't think these people get the big picture.  Come November and McCain victory are these 'democrats' going to be saying 'Ha!  That's what Obama gets for supporting FISA.  We sure showed him!'?  Is that satisfaction worth four years of McCain?  People need to take a moment and think about who they really want to win this election.  Realistically it's only McCain and Obama and if you aren't going to support Obama you are helping McCain.  Critique his policy, but do it in a way that doesn't tear the man down.

iPhone worries

I'm still not sure if I want to talk myself into buying an iPhone or out of buying one.  My chances of getting on in July are probably pretty high assuming the stores aren't sold out.  The more I hear about it the more excited I get, but there are still some worries here and there.  Will software come out for Japan and be useful here?  There are some interesting services released lately, but the tend to ignore the market outside the US which seems kind of silly.  I'm not sure if Japan has similar services available, but I need to figure out how to search for them.

There are little things like the lack of the keyboard, but I think typing Japanese will still be fast enough.  Looking at the interface they seem to lack a few things that might make it better.  Emotion icons are a big question mark, but everyone uses them here.  I hope it supports it.  Strangely the biggest omission on the phone right now seems to be infrared.  That is what everyone here uses to transfer contact information around with and half of them don't even know how to do that easily.  Bluetooth doesn't seem to be in use here at all, whereas it's a pretty hot feature in the US.  I'm not even sure how many of the phones have it here, but that's all the iPhone would have available, besides just emailing contact info.

I'll probably wait a bit later in the month anyway and see how much money I have.  I stopped by Akihabara yesterday and noticed they had a 'normal' washer that was only 44cm deep.  I think that fits in the space I have available and it's MUCH better then old style washers I'd have to use otherwise.  It's a couple hundred dollars more expensive, but I think it would be money well spent in this case.  I need to clean the box that is sitting in there now and I'll see about getting it.  The coin laundry is getting rather inconvient as I get busier so having a washer would be nice.