You make some valid points about the dangers of Big Government. However I'm not sure that the "conservatives" in power for the last five years in the U.S. share your reservations. Contact your Congress people and express your views everyone!
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the situation here in Japan is the same as in the US in regards to only being able to use handsets branded for your carrier. On the upside, our cell phones use plain ol' email instead of SMS. At least I thought it was an upside until the first time I tried to message internationally.
I recall hearing somewhere that the Japanese Yahoo Broadband ("Yahoo BB") is a separate company from the Yahoo in the US, and is just licensing their trademarks for brand recognition. I could be wrong about this though. The friendly article also doesn't mention this type of service.
This was the case a mere five years ago as well. Except at that time they had streamlined something so my Japanese girlfriend (attending college in the US) didn't need to leave the car to get her papers cleared for entry into Canada. We crossed over from Vermont somewhere.
I can't say I'm at all happy with the way the US is going these days. That's why I fled to live in Japan.
Alternatively, as long as your university doesn't have ridiculous rules requiring you to live on campus, rent an off-campus apartment and sign up with a commercial ISP instead. You might enjoy the change in perspective that living outside the bubble brings as well.
Kantango is a great web-based flashcard site for use by English-speakers studying Japanese. I wrote and added a search plugin for Firefox so I can easily look up all those unfamiliar words in people's emails.
Oh, and congrats on the newspaper reading! People studying Romance languages have no idea of the difficulties involved with kanji.
The OP didn't mention anything about his (or her) form of commute. Personally, I commute to work by bicycle, but I know most people don't have that option. On the otherhand, I hesitate to listen to recorded audio while biking down the streets, so I guess my ride has its drawbacks as well.
rsync is the perfect tool for figuring out "which of the 8,000 files changed." If you give it two directories it will copy the changes from one to the other. There are even ports for those of you running non-Unix OS'es. You can automate it, sync to remote machines, etc. Here's a tutorial on creating backup snapshots under Linux:
Maybe it isn't a concern for whatever personal data you are accumulating and backing up once a week, but for me, losing any of the photos I shot with my digital camera is usually an irrecoverable loss. That's why I back them up on a second hard drive on another computer after every dump from my camera's memory card. Now that I think about it though, I've been lax in off-site backups. Time to warm up that CDR drive.
This is slightly off-topic, but for broadening your musical knowledge I recommend you start listening to your local college radio station. Assuming you are in the US, and not too far from an urban area, you've probably got at least a couple stations with hugely varied programming available to you on your dial. A couple of my favorites: WRUW of Cleveland, and WFMU, a non-college indie station in New Jersey. Share eand enjoy.
It's going to be tricky growing substantial fruit or veggies unless you have a lot of cubicle space in front of a big window. Some herbs might be a better way to go. Mint is pretty hardy.
If you do have some good space, cherry tomatoes or hot peppers work well in pots.
Not very geeky, I know. For that I'll second the cactus suggestion made above.
Slightly OT, but I use one of those nylon neck pouches as well. Last time I boarded a domestic flight in Boston I had it hanging on the outside of my clothes, as I had just had to show my passport for the second time at that security point. The security guy manning the x-ray machine insisted that I actually take the pouch off and run it through the x-ray machine as well. In years of travelling, even since 9-11, I've never had that happen before. What could the x-ray machine see in such a small item that the metal detector wouldn't notice? I still didn't have to empty my pockets, apart from metal objects.
Whenever this eventually makes it out in the US, isn't it likely they will follow the same model as with Spirited Away? When that came out in Boston I didn't have any trouble finding a theater that was running the subtitled version.
On another note, I hope to see this here in Tokyo this weekend. Not sure how much longer it will remain in theaters. </boast>
Perhaps it's another only-in-Japan thing, but I've seen friends here in Tokyo with car stereo systems containing a hard disk for music storage. Admittedly you'd still have to burn a CD to copy the MP3s to the hard disk, but at least it's an improvement over FM transmitters. Plus you have an integrated music system.
On another note, did those car stereo systems with front mounted line-in jacks die out?
A couple days ago I was looking at an article about the Miss World contest (I watch it for the articles!). I was mildly surprised to read that although it was held in China, women from Taiwan and Hong Kong were allowed to compete as contestants from other countries. The Xinhua article I link to above mentions this explicitly in the first caption on the page. Perhaps this event is not widely publicized inside China and so is not considered a problem?
I'm afraid Mr. Jeff Duntemann is using some bad data in TFA, which reads:
Individual consumers and individual corporate shops can switch to a minority product, like the Mac (for consumers) and open-source tools like Linux, Apache, Evolution, and Mozilla for the corporate enterprise.
Agreed, all of those are minority products- except for Apache, which currently claims 67.77% of the market share over 21.25% for Microsoft, their closest competitor. But we already knew that here. Dare I say- Netcraft confirms it?
This reminds me of the story told by the guy who sold my friend a "parts" Jeep. It was an old vehicle (early 1980's) and had serious rust damage to the floor in front of the driver's seat. The owner had patched this with a board. One day he lent it to a friend, who happened to push down too hard on the accelerator pedal. This in turn got stuck under the board, causing the engine to accelerate greatly. Panicking, the driver put the clutch in to slow the car. Without any load on the engine it raced even higher and threw a rod through the block, destroying the engine.
Perhaps this is why this French fellow didn't try and put the car into neutral? And what's all this "he couldn't stop the car because he started it with a magnetic card"? I have yet to encounter this design, or any that doesn't let people turn off their ignition. People do panic in these situations, but TFA claims he drove for one hour under these conditions. Very suspicious.
First off, they're called "tenets"! They're not called "tenents" or even "tenants", both of which I've seen used in this thread.</rant>
Anyhow, I would like to contribute my little bit of success in the Japanese online dating world to counter this "sad and lonely online dating tale."
Anyone living in Japan and interested in online dating should check out http://asoboo.com/, and possibly http://friendfinder.japantoday.com/. The first is very cheap (Y500/month) and I've had quite a few dates from it. One relationship even became quite promising before she decided to give her cheating boyfriend a second try.:(
The other site is Y2500/month, although you can create a profile and be able to receive messages without paying. I haven't paid for this one yet, but still got one inquiry/date.
I'm looking for a long term relationship, but I think most people on these sites are searching for a short one, if you know what I mean. *nudge*nudge*wink*wink* My point is that there are plenty of options available here. Good luck to all you fellow geeks.
Two more great extensions I haven't seen mentioned.
Toolbar Enhancements adds many features to the toolbar. My favorite is that it allows me to put my navigation buttons in the tab bar, conserving valuable screen space.
AFAIK iTunes is still not available here in Japan. Fortunately I don't need to pay anything if I can get my desired ringtone in MIDI. A little conversion to my Mitsubishi phone's similar format and voila- I've got the tune of my choice. It's currently the Japan Railways default "train is about to depart" tune, FYI.
I was a member for more than a year around 2000-2001. At first I was receiving the discs at home, and one would not show up every two or three months. After 3 DVDs didn't arrive I switched to receiving them at work and only one failed to arrive there after 4~ months of usage with the different address. Never had any problems with DVDs going missing on their way back to Netflix.
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You make some valid points about the dangers of Big Government. However I'm not sure that the "conservatives" in power for the last five years in the U.S. share your reservations. Contact your Congress people and express your views everyone!
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the situation here in Japan is the same as in the US in regards to only being able to use handsets branded for your carrier. On the upside, our cell phones use plain ol' email instead of SMS. At least I thought it was an upside until the first time I tried to message internationally.
I recall hearing somewhere that the Japanese Yahoo Broadband ("Yahoo BB") is a separate company from the Yahoo in the US, and is just licensing their trademarks for brand recognition. I could be wrong about this though. The friendly article also doesn't mention this type of service.
I can't say I'm at all happy with the way the US is going these days. That's why I fled to live in Japan.
Alternatively, as long as your university doesn't have ridiculous rules requiring you to live on campus, rent an off-campus apartment and sign up with a commercial ISP instead. You might enjoy the change in perspective that living outside the bubble brings as well.
Oh, and congrats on the newspaper reading! People studying Romance languages have no idea of the difficulties involved with kanji.
The OP didn't mention anything about his (or her) form of commute. Personally, I commute to work by bicycle, but I know most people don't have that option. On the otherhand, I hesitate to listen to recorded audio while biking down the streets, so I guess my ride has its drawbacks as well.
Maybe it isn't a concern for whatever personal data you are accumulating and backing up once a week, but for me, losing any of the photos I shot with my digital camera is usually an irrecoverable loss. That's why I back them up on a second hard drive on another computer after every dump from my camera's memory card. Now that I think about it though, I've been lax in off-site backups. Time to warm up that CDR drive.
This is slightly off-topic, but for broadening your musical knowledge I recommend you start listening to your local college radio station. Assuming you are in the US, and not too far from an urban area, you've probably got at least a couple stations with hugely varied programming available to you on your dial. A couple of my favorites: WRUW of Cleveland, and WFMU, a non-college indie station in New Jersey. Share eand enjoy.
It's going to be tricky growing substantial fruit or veggies unless you have a lot of cubicle space in front of a big window. Some herbs might be a better way to go. Mint is pretty hardy.
If you do have some good space, cherry tomatoes or hot peppers work well in pots.
Not very geeky, I know. For that I'll second the cactus suggestion made above.
Slightly OT, but I use one of those nylon neck pouches as well. Last time I boarded a domestic flight in Boston I had it hanging on the outside of my clothes, as I had just had to show my passport for the second time at that security point. The security guy manning the x-ray machine insisted that I actually take the pouch off and run it through the x-ray machine as well. In years of travelling, even since 9-11, I've never had that happen before. What could the x-ray machine see in such a small item that the metal detector wouldn't notice? I still didn't have to empty my pockets, apart from metal objects.
Whenever this eventually makes it out in the US, isn't it likely they will follow the same model as with Spirited Away? When that came out in Boston I didn't have any trouble finding a theater that was running the subtitled version.
On another note, I hope to see this here in Tokyo this weekend. Not sure how much longer it will remain in theaters. </boast>
It's not quite what you describe but maybe it could be expanded.
On another note, did those car stereo systems with front mounted line-in jacks die out?
A couple days ago I was looking at an article about the Miss World contest (I watch it for the articles!). I was mildly surprised to read that although it was held in China, women from Taiwan and Hong Kong were allowed to compete as contestants from other countries. The Xinhua article I link to above mentions this explicitly in the first caption on the page. Perhaps this event is not widely publicized inside China and so is not considered a problem?
I just did.
Perhaps this is why this French fellow didn't try and put the car into neutral? And what's all this "he couldn't stop the car because he started it with a magnetic card"? I have yet to encounter this design, or any that doesn't let people turn off their ignition. People do panic in these situations, but TFA claims he drove for one hour under these conditions. Very suspicious.
Anyhow, I would like to contribute my little bit of success in the Japanese online dating world to counter this "sad and lonely online dating tale."
Anyone living in Japan and interested in online dating should check out http://asoboo.com/, and possibly http://friendfinder.japantoday.com/. The first is very cheap (Y500/month) and I've had quite a few dates from it. One relationship even became quite promising before she decided to give her cheating boyfriend a second try. :(
The other site is Y2500/month, although you can create a profile and be able to receive messages without paying. I haven't paid for this one yet, but still got one inquiry/date.
I'm looking for a long term relationship, but I think most people on these sites are searching for a short one, if you know what I mean. *nudge*nudge*wink*wink* My point is that there are plenty of options available here. Good luck to all you fellow geeks.
AFAIK iTunes is still not available here in Japan. Fortunately I don't need to pay anything if I can get my desired ringtone in MIDI. A little conversion to my Mitsubishi phone's similar format and voila- I've got the tune of my choice. It's currently the Japan Railways default "train is about to depart" tune, FYI.
Easy there chief, Methinks you need to read this How-To: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/ index.html
Whenever you notice something like that, a wizard did it.
I've got my own complaints regarding the movie adaptation, but that's another topic.
I was a member for more than a year around 2000-2001. At first I was receiving the discs at home, and one would not show up every two or three months. After 3 DVDs didn't arrive I switched to receiving them at work and only one failed to arrive there after 4~ months of usage with the different address. Never had any problems with DVDs going missing on their way back to Netflix.