yodobashi 9 d. harvey norman 0 — hit akiba with rob on sunday & spent a large part of the day wandering about & drooling at various bits & pieces of gadgetry… hard to decide what’s #1 on my One Day It Will Be Mine, Oh Yes list… huge high definition flat panel TVs have their attractions… as does the 1.5 terabyte wireless network attached storage array… & oh my lord, the PS3 is so very, very, very tempting… let’s just say i basically wanted to buy every second or third thing i laid my eyes on… for those of you who haven’t seen yodobashi camera’s akiba store, think of the biggest electrical and electronics store you can think of and now stack seven or eight of those stores on top of each other… (& just between you & me, i still don’t think you’re quite getting it…) &, you know, that’s just yodobashi… the rest of akiba is more of the same but different… including the funky little backstreet shops…

could have been much worse — in the end i escaped with a laptop bag for the thinkpad, some assorted cabling, & a dvd player for the kitchen… not so much an astonishing display of willpower as being paralysed by choice… (&, of course, i was helped by the fact that the PS3 is sold out everywhere…)

better — we’re mostly over our various ailments i was whining about in the last post… hanachan is particularly genki at the moment… she’s starting to string more & more sounds together & has a few very clear words… & she seems to understand english & japanese, unless you happen to be trying to tell her something when she’s in the middle of one of her periodic attacks of selective deafness… &, i discovered the other day, she can climb up & down our vertiginous stairs by herself… i’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad…

congratulations alix & dave — nice work on the cryptic post alix… (for those who need a little bit of help in making sense of that, here’s the decrypted version via dave…)

metacruft: here = tokyo
28/11/2006 @ 02:22 | comments disabled

urgh — as weekends go, we’ve had better… as per usual, sumie & i both picked up whatever it was hana had late last week… i left most of friday night’s dinner in the kitchen sink on saturday morning & spent most of the rest of the day either in bed or the bathroom or staggering between bed or bathroom… sumie’s symptoms kicked in about 6 hours behind mine, & by midday saturday we were both essentially useless… sumie’s dad took on child-minding duties while we were out of it, which was a big help… today was a little better, i could actually eat stuff that stayed ate, & sumie eventually made it to that point in the late afternoon… sumie’s dad decided he’d racked up enough goodwill points yesterday & escaped to the shinjuku jazz festival… hana seems to be mostly ok, but she’s a little grumpy because the grownups have been even slower moving than usual & really haven’t been much fun…

metacruft: here = tokyo
12/11/2006 @ 23:39 | comments disabled

instructional poem

metacruft: here = tokyo | poems, poetics
09/11/2006 @ 16:47 | 1 comment

what’s cute & vomits? looking after hanachan at home today — she’s had a cough & a runny nose off & on for a few days now, & last night & this morning had the vomits… took her to the hospital this morning to see the doctor, & came away with approximately her body weight in various medicines… she was not a happy camper, but she crashed out for about three hours in the middle of the day & seems a little more genki for the sleep… our challenge for the next few days is to try to get her to actually take some of her medicine…

play time — now it’s time to play the game where she pretends she’s going to give you something then takes it away as you reach out to grab it… apparently this is funny even among infants…

metacruft: here = tokyo
09/11/2006 @ 16:42 | comments disabled

sigh — so far this evening, my japanese study has consisted of:

• twenty minutes of studying
• thirty-five minutes of convincing hana to go to sleep
• twenty minutes of studying
• ten minutes of working on the test i have to hand in tomorrow
• an hour surfing amazon looking for the supplementary workbook that accompanies my textbook (ok, finding the workbook only took a minute, on account of already having the ISBN, but you know how it is)
• ten more minutes of working on the test

interspersed with:

• reading some blogs
• downloading various plugins for firefox
• smoking too many cigarettes
• looking in the fridge
• drinking a litre bottle of iced coffee
• revising some poems
• avoiding the washing up

which i make out to be about an hour of actual study in the three & a half hours i’ve been sitting here… & i still have to do the washing up…

on the other hand — did i mention i can blog from the kitchen now?

metacruft: here = tokyo | learning japanese
08/11/2006 @ 00:44 | 1 comment

live! from the kitchen in ebisu! got thinkpad (thank you yahoo auctions!), got wireless LAN (thank you giant electronics chain, with an additional shout to the interweb for some english language drivers), got me to the kitchen to do me some blogging! yes, this is what passes for excitement in my tiny little brain… expect recipes & general musings on the state of the refrigerator in the weeks to come… oooh! iced coffee!

also generating excitement — vacation plans are beginning to coalesce… assuming my leave request gets approved, we’ll be heading to heat-blighted, insect-infested, sweat-inducing (obviously i just mean sunny) Townsville over xmas & new year… actual dates to be determined later this week once the verdict is passed on my leave request…

uh — did i mention i’m blogging wirelessly from the kitchen?

thinkpad — so yeah, i have solemnly sworn not to log into yahoo auctions for an unspecified (though implicitly understood to be a fairly lengthy) period of time… i mean, winning the auction for one thinkpad was kinda cool… winning the auction for the second one was sorta careless… although i think i already have a buyer lined up for numero duo, so it’s all good. & wow, i wasn’t really sure what i was going to get when i opened the boxes, but… these things are pristine… i was thinking, used laptop, probably had a hard life… not the case at all…

nerdflinger — so the one i’m gonna keep scored a new (bigger) hard drive so i can comfortably fit XP & ubuntu on it, & the previously mentioned wireless LAN card, & i’ve got some more memory winging its way towards me… apart from that, i’m doing open office, mozilla, the gimp, & jEdit to keep software costs to nil… oh, & i’m halfway through downloading visual studio express (VB.net & SQL Server) just for giggles…

babysat — sumie & i left hanachan with her grandad this morning & went to see a film & have some lunch… strange (& yet incredibly relaxing) to grab even a few hours without having to make sure hana hasn’t clambered up a display case or confiscated all of some slightly slower-moving child’s earthly possessions… (we saw flags of our fathers, which was, as you’d expect, fairly grim… the editing seemed a little disjointed, which i thought made it difficult to follow the narrative – or at least, for me, difficult to keep track of the supporting characters – whose gruesome & pointless death are we flashing back to now?)

elsewhen on the long(ish) weekend — friday’s monster hunt got ambushed by work (sorry rob), but in the afternoon sumie & hana & i went to the best named area in tokyo – jimbocho – to see sumie’s dad’s art school’s (enough with the possessives already!) annual exhibition, which was cool… we met yuka & uncle hiroshi & had dinner after viewing the exhibition, interrupted only by hanachan careering around the restaurant & the purchase of my new guitar… oh, & i found a beautiful 2007 diary that was obviously waiting for me to buy it… saturday…? oh yeah, went to the gym in the morning then looked after hanachan while sumie did some stuff on her own, then hana & i walked up to ebisu garden place to meet up with sumie for lunch & some more careering about… saturday night i got my nerd on & set up the thinkpad while sumie watched the remainder of 24… & then today, after the movie & lunch, we wandered past the big tsutaya at roppongi hills & i found myself a new little book on dada…

this week — i’ve been acting head of our group at work the last two weeks while the real boss has been away getting married… the fortnight has generally been ok… it’s been good experience, & an opportunity to get noticed, etc… (fortunately, most of the getting noticed has been positive… there’s been a couple of instances of getting noticed in a not at all positive way, but nothing immediately career-threatening…) mind you, i’ll be happy to give the big hat back to the real boss on tuesday & see my activity meter drop back to its usual level of Insanely Busy as opposed to Insanely Busy x 2…

metacruft: here = tokyo
05/11/2006 @ 23:08 | 1 comment

uh — another guitar seems to have followed me home… it’s a tobacco-sunburst, acoustic six string, with a single cut out &… (actually, it’s a cooder by takamine, but still… it’s very nice, & it was half price, so what could i do?)

uh, anyway — oh, & my two new (i.e. secondhand) thinkpads just turned up courtesy of yahoo auctions… & i have a new cardigan on account of i was walking past a clothing shop & they had a whole rack of vans stuff on sale… fortunately, i have not been in the immediate vicinity of any shoe stores recently…

metacruft: here = tokyo
04/11/2006 @ 00:46 | comments disabled