Photos from Sapporo Snow Festival 2012

I'm interested to see how Google tying things together could make my life easier, so instead of rambling about another restaurant how about I try sharing some photos instead? I've put up an album of snaps of this year's snow festival on Google+ which I'm still kind of feeling out. STILL. I've been on there forever, or close to it.

So click on the following link and check it out. The album should be public and anyone should be able to see it, but I never take anything for granted.

Sapporo Snow Festival 2012

Back in Blog / A Solution to the Case of the Non-Existent Centenarians

Whuh? There's still a blog here you say and people occasionally stumble across it in (what I assume to be) their drunken, lurching quest for distraction on the internet? Shit, balls, expletives, I better start writing it again. Eight months off is probably enough.

PEOPLE! Have you heard about 'The Curious Case of the Non-Existent Centenarians'? I'm sure you have, my folks knew slightly more about it than I do when I spoke to them yesterday, including the juicy tidbit about the dude who was carrying his mother's bones around in his backpack. Aliens have abducted a significant number of the elderly in Japan!

Eh? Not abducted by aliens? Merely shuffled off this mortal coil undetected by local authorities, or had their passing covered up by their offspring due to social security fraud? Oh - well that's a lot more believable. Although rather shabby.

But fear not: Japan listens, observes and finds a way to make things better. Or rather appliance manufacturer Zojirushi does with the Mimamori Hot-Line range of hot water pots:

 

Some of you may not be following so well, in which case I direct you to the TV commercial on their website here. That too, I admit, is rather confusing, so let me break it down for you. The pot sends an email to a designated address when it's used, thus you know that your granny is still at least alive enough to make tea. In the advert the middle aged son at home checks his mail to find that his mother hasn't used the pot today. "Oh, she must have gone out," he sings (horribly) and of course she's come for a surprise visit, bringing his wife to attention because that whole Mother-in-Law thing is universal.

At work today someone also told me about a town in which these kind of human 'dead man's handles' are attached to TVs in elderly households, so if they don't push the button every day someone will come round and check on them. It's all remarkably smart, and while it doesn't solve Japan's elderly problem it certainly helps to have an idea of extactly how many of them there actually are...

Man vs. Machine: The Road to Victory

Yet again this Saturday post arrives in the Sunday mail, but this time alcohol is not to blame. Just take a look at this picture:


What does that look like to you? I tell you what it looks like to me... Victory. That, my friends is a Creative Zen Touch MP3 player - verging on obsolete - but given new life by a hard fought battle between me and Mother Technology. To Yuki, by the way it looks like a cassette player, but what does she know?

Technology: created by us to serve our every need. And yet now technology is widely acknowledged to be our greatest foe; and scuttlebutt on the grapevine names it as the agent of our eventual demise.

My MP3 player wouldn't work with Windows VISTA basically, and I was getting sick of the music that was on there so I resolved to fix it - or kill it in the attempt. Last week I almost accomplished the latter, leaving it crippled and useless for every purpose bar "paperweight". Then last night I had the showdown to end all showdowns, bringing it back to life, into the modern age and thus saving myself from having to buy an ipod.

What I did was update the firmware on the device so that it became PFS (plays for sure) enabled and Vista can recognise it as something other than a rock. You know what firmware is? I don't! I have no clue - I'm pretty sure it runs on good karma and well wishes and what I did last night was some kind of mystic incantation that has left some sort of net-God in possesion of three fifths of my soul.

What I did was this: I had to use Yuki's computer as it wasn't Vista and I deleted all the drivers and creative stuff off her computer. Then I deleted every Windows Media thing I could, then I deleted all the USB root hubs, then a box appeared on the screen saying "to complete firmware upgrade you must fight a bear". I clicked "yes" and the screen of the MP3 player lit up really bright, projecting a life-sized image of a bear onto the wall. Like a cheap sci-fi movie the bear stepped out of the wall, except it was all shimmery and blue like it was made of light, and it came towards me. It swung one of those big paws at me, but I ducked under it and slugged it in the gut. I punched it so hard that it exploded into pocky, dessert pocky to be precise, I ate all the pocky and the firmware upgraded.

Of course in doing this I also fucked up Yuki's internet so I couldn't post this last night, you know how it is.

Joys of the Victorian Age

You bozos think we're living the cushy life here in the 21st century huh? Well let me tell you they had it all sorted back in the 1880s. Take a look for yourself if you don't believe me:




Now look me in the eye and tell me that doesn't seem like luxury. Soap! Now there's a Yankee Notion if ever there was one.

This post, by the way, is one way of saying that I've invested in a scanner over here. Using it is something of a lottery since all the software is in Japanese and most of it won't display at all. It all comes up as question marks, which means I'm often clicking randomly on pop-up boxes with the options "???? (???) (E)", "??? (T)", and "???? (S)". I'm getting images off it though, and that's all that counts. It let me take these scans from an old book of Victorian era US engraved plates that I've had forever, and which I now fully intend to start strip-mining for ideas.

Also, it snowed for the first time in Sapporo today. Not enough to take a picture of but still... oh yeah.