I took another 10 day trip to Honolulu for work. As before, it was mainly work with very little play. I managed to make it to my old jogging grounds (Ala Moana Beach) one time for a decent jog. Other than that, I just popped into the gym after work, and went for dinner about two times. Not much has changed there, other than a bunch of new condos popping up. I can't imagine the investors of those buildings are having a great time, considering the sub prime debacle that's going on. I was able to get some decent shopping in. I brought back a stack of Apex bars from the gym, and bought some summer clothes. Not that I need any. The most ironic part of the trip was the first weekend I was there, there was an anime convention in the convention center about 100 yards from the hotel. Thus, the hotel I was staying in was at 100% capacity, of which 60% were in full on cosplay mode. Oh, joy. Unlike my last trip, I took the wife and kid this time. Apparently my son, despite a few whiney moments, is about the best baby air traveller on the planet. A middle-aged couple sitting a row behind and across from us continually waved to him, keeping him somewhat preoccupied. Over halfway through the flight, we went back to the can to change his diapers. One of the flight attendents held him for a while at which point most of the crew came to look at him. Said middle-aged woman was back there and well telling us how her grandchildrens' father is American, and how my son reminded her of them. She said he was amazingly well behaved. Definitely wasn't as smooth as my trip back to Texas in November, but from what I understand, way better than the average.

Upon our return we were greeted with some lovely Spring weather. The nights are kind of chilly but the days in May are so amazing. I love getting on my bike and riding around for no good reason. Spring and Fall in Japan make the winter worth bearing to me. Summer doesn't bother me all that much. I like to sweat when I excercise, and I don't go to any place of importance really, so I simply carry an extra shirt and change if need be. The general consensus amongst most people is that the summer is just too muggy.

I finally caved and ordered a PS3. I was in Borders in Honolulu and figured I might as well grab a BluRay version of anything I wanted to buy rather than a crappy regular DVD. As such, they had No Country for Old Men... the best movie I've seen in ages. I picked one up, figuring it was time to take the plunge. I ordered the 40GB Ceramic White model, which should be here soon. Senjou no Valkyria actually looks pretty amazing as well, so I've ordered that with it. My first new console game in ages. Hopefully it won't disappoint. There's a handful of BluRay DVDs I want to pick up as well. It seems that the Japanese releases of western movies are following suit in terms of price. New Releases are on sale as low as 3500 yen. Anime, however, is still painfully priced. Upwards of 10,000 yen for some release, although a handful of movies are in the 6500 yen range. Might pick up a couple of those, but I feel in the 10 years or so I've not watched much anime, I've not missed too much.

I added the poster section to the site (under the omake menu). They take a while to scan in and stitch, but I must admit, they're pretty cool. Hopefully I can get a nice amount of them, but the older ones are definitely hard to locate. Keep checking back as that section will grow. I also added two translations to the World of ESPGaluda section. One is a rather short one, while the other is a rather lengthy one with character designer Kado Tsukasa. Enjoy.

It's sakura time again, which means going to the park with every other person in Tokyo and looking at those white leaves. We went to Shinjuku Gyoen this year. While the weather was somewhat cloudy, it was still nice. Much warmer than most days of recent, and I must say, the park is amazing. The sakura trees have much nicer formations than in Yoyogi Park, which I jog through several times a week. Alcohol isn't permitted, so it's a bit more family oriented. Yoyogi Park has quite a few groups of people drinking, carrying on, and of course, smoking. After hauling the family out there, I realized that I left the battery of my good camera at home. As such, I was left to the crap camera on my mobile phone, and the slightly better but not great one on my video camera. So, my son's first sakura pictures leave a little to be desired. Thought about heading back on on Sunday, but it was pretty cloudy as well. There's always next year. I still don't understand the whole connection to Sakura and Japan. Yes, I know that it's unique to Japan (save the few that have been exported to places like Washington DC), but they basically bloom for a week, fall down and make an absolute mess. I see a much closer relation to Japanese food products than to Japanese life itself: something is sold for a short time, then poof - gone forever.

As I still have no truly useful file server, I decided to build a small Linux box with mirrored 1TB drives. I have a piece of shit NAS which of course (like all NAS devices) doesn't support NFS. Samba over ethernet gives horribly results. Storing my MP3 stash on it and using them from another machine breaks the MP3 software as it will eventually time out. Now, I have the nightmare issue of either faulty hardware, or a cocked up configuration. I'm not ready to blame either, and am getting little help from the Gentoo community. I've gotten some fingers pointing me into some useful directions, but nothing solid. Of course, in IRC you get faster help, but there's always that loser that seems to know everything, yet, nothing at the same time. It's really not their fault I guess. I mean, every tech-related online community has at least a handful (if not a majority) of pricks that really, truly think they're helping, but of course, have so few people skills that they are doomed to a social life restricted to chat rooms and forums. Yes, I realize the irony of writing that on a blog such this, but I actually do have something resembling a life. I also know how to speak plain English.

Turning my monitor back off of it's side, I've decided to play some older games that I've been ignoring. The trisynch can handle 22khz, so I busted out my Crack Down PCB. I've not played this since I was 13 years old. Pretty fun stuff, although it's definitely an acquired taste. Not sure if I'll clear it, as the last few stages are painfully difficult (not that the early ones are easy) but I'll definitely get some more use out of it. Some offbeat company put out a super play DVD of it and Gain Ground last year. Might pick it up, but it's a very non-trivial 6800 yen new. I would like to see how they do those last few stages though. Gain Ground is another PCB I'm after, but is not cheap.

Jiminy Christmas. I've had one of those months where most of my stuff just doesn't seem to get done. I took a trip to our Honolulu office to bump elbows with the other guys and to do some crap that required my presence, but I didn't leave until about midnight each night. Never getting over the jet lag, I did my same sleep schedule as I do here. That meant going to bed at about 4AM, waking up at 11AM. I managed to go out both nights of the weekend, one resulting in quite the hangover. Didn't even wake up until about 13:00 that day. It was fun, but it reminded me of what a joke clubbing/bar hopping is in Honolulu. The highlight of it was bumping into the Galaxy Soccer/Footballl team at The W in Waikiki. Beckam was standing about 3 feet away from me. He seemed nice enough, but they mainly kept to themselves. I barely got in anywhere because I was wearing a T-Shirt. I generally would never go into a club that had a dress code on principal alone as they always suck. There's not much of a choice over there though.

The AOU show came and went. It had a great lineup, but on such a limited schedule, I was only able to play Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu (which is excellent, by the way). The next day, a video of yours truly playing surfaced on Youtube (no, I didn't know it was being taken). Cave apparently got sand up their ass or something and had it removed, and gave the poster a proper scolding. There are high quality versions of it floating around though, if you do some searching. The game looks fun, although doesn't follow in the same vein as it's predecessors. I'm on the fence on whether to buy it. I can play it for 50 yen a pop down the street, but the game centers are so smokey, and I can only go during the busy times.

The weather is finally starting to get nice, although it's still cold. It snowed a total of three times this year, with two of them resulting in a playable level of snow. Both times I went to Yoyogi park and took some pictures of the Japanese take on the snowman. It's nice, but in a city like this, it turns to shit really quickly. Definitely not a winter wonderland. I was really looking forward to the coming of Spring and putting in some solid time at the park exercising. I went for a rather brisk jog yesterday, and was meandering to the jungle gym I use to do pull-ups and other various resistance exercises, only to find that it had been taken away. Now there is a big spot of gravel and nothing more. Why the fuck do you take something out of a park that's being used? To add insult to injury, they left the ash trays. As such, I think I'm going to bite the bullet and pay for a gym membership. Jogging in Hawaii, I realized that if I don't act quick, I will soon have a nice pair of man tits. At least then I'd have something to do at home.

I'm a little late for wishing everyone a happy new year I suppose. I got a little carried away with not doing anything for a few days, and didn't write any entertaining anecdotes here. Nothing too amazing has happened, really. It's been somewhat cold, with one day resulting in snow. As someone from Texas who has either lived there, Hawaii, or here, whenever I see snow in places other than a ski resort, I get pretty excited. Yoyogi Park was quite pretty as nobody had gone trapsing through it. Someone made a somewhat primitive snowman. Not bad for a weekday. I made a forum post showing all the pictures I took. The snow soon melted, of course, and made a complete mess. I was able to go for a jog the next day, and there was basically no proof it had ever snowed.

You might have noticed there's a new omake section. The arcade instruction cards. It's not necessarily for archiving purposes as I doubt they would look good printed at their current resolution, but it is better than nothing. There's about 60 up there now, with more to come. I assume it can, in theory, be as big as the arcade flyer section. The trick is finding them in good condition. Quite often they show up with the piss beaten out of them.

Since switching to a virtual dedicated server, some things have gotten better, but the site still experiences bottlenecks. Apparently they give you loads of space and bandwidth, and almost zero memory. Of course, this screws up everything. I've cut the site down to what I think is the bare minimum in terms of code. I'm trying to get rid of some shit processes that it doesn't need before I just throw money (and unfortunately, an entire weekend) at the problem. I think I will eventually have to take the plunge into a fully dedicated setup though. The good side is that it can be done almost seamlessly since I have full control over what can access what. Don't want to do it, but I don't think I have much of a choice. The only question is when.

Well, we're winding down the year here. Work will definitely be slower until 2008, friends are starting to head home for the holidays, and everyone in the country wants to go out and party. Everyone always talks about how conformed Japan is and how everyone does the same thing at the same time (Golden Week anyone?). Nothing illustrates it better than the entire month of December. Budgets are pretty much set, and all the work for the year is done. People will generally get their bonuses around now, and are forced to go out with their fellow employees and drink until the wee hours of the morning. My wife goes to Tokyo station on Saturdays from time to time. She generally pops in a cab and is there in about 15 minutes. Last week, it took her 45. She was of course fabulously late, and the driver simply blamed it on "December". As someone that no longer works in a company, I am exempt from all of this. However, I wouldn't mind a bit more socializing in my diet. The problem with going out with work people is that they are dictated to you, unfortunately.

One thing I had started to miss in December was a phenomonen I witnessed my first trip ever to Japan (which was September thru December of 1996). That would be Last Christmas by Wham! playing just about everywhere. When I moved to Tokyo about a year later, it seemed to be a thing of the past. On a break from this little entry, I went to the convenient store to pick up some booze. One guess what was playing when I walked in. Only thing was, it was being covered, and with a female singer at that. Oh, the joys of Wham.

In an effort to get my money's worth out of my DOJ:BL board, I put in a bit of time on it this past week and hammered out a clear. I bomb-whored at the end, but hey, it still counts. As everyone always talks about how hard vanilla is, I switched to that today, and at least got to the last boss. Maybe I'll clear it before Futari Black Label hits the streets next Thursday.

Every now and again I'm reminded of the downside of living in Japan: movies taking forever to get here. Not being in the movie loop (most of recent look like shit) I was unaware that a movie centered around Ian Curtis was around, much less directed by Anton Corbijn. Seems it's been extremely well received. However, still no mention of it anywhere in Japan. If it was Spring, I'm sure it would show up at the film festival. That's a little late for my liking though. PAL DVD comes out in February. Maybe I'll order it, draw a luke warm bath, and ready my straight razor: I'm sure it's a downer.