September 2007 Archives

I've been trying to figure out where to dive in New Zealand, and its been tough. There are quite a few dive locations on both major islands that are compelling. But I think I finally have my answer. The Poor Knight Islands. Located off the tip of the North Island, this national park has some of the best diving in the world. Even Jacques Cousteau called it one of the top ten dive sites in the world. besides the wonderful underwater life there are two wrecks that look interesting. Both the HMNZS Tui and the HMNZS Waikato were sunk near these islands for the amusement of SCUBA Divers. With so many diving options to pick from it'll be tough figuring out what to see and do. Such is my life.

I am clearly going to have to blow a large amount of money diving these areas. The pictures I've seen online make me want to stay there my entire vacation... Now if only I had a nice underwater light for photos. If only my birthday was coming up soon. Oh well.

While watching the series premier of The Bionic Woman I was confronted with a slight... problem. A kernel panic. My first one on my new Macbook Pro. Apparently not even a new Macbook Pro has enough power to hold back the Bionic Woman. Na na na na na na na na...

And I liked the show too!

I used to drink Dr. Pepper constantly as a child. Not the best choice of drinks for a growing boy, but man did it give me a caffeine kick. When I moved to Japan I was saddened to find that Dr. Pepper, as well as my current go to drink Sprite, were nearly impossible to find in my area. It took two years but I'm just not finally seeing Sprite show up in stores and Vending Machines. But alas, no Dr. Pepper. Until yesterday. When I came across some. And my goodness, has Dr. Pepper been sexed up for the Japanese. Just check out the three types of bottles you can buy in Japan!

It still tastes the same. No amount of sexy anime girls with guns stuck in their breasts is going to fix that.

Japan and its random museums. While taking a break for lunch during my sports festival this Saturday I stumbled across this gem. Fukuyama's Paper Airplane Museum. I'm not kidding. For 100¥ you can look around at the hundreds of paper airplanes. Or make your own.

They do have a nice looking sign!

Frog airplanes. Oh yes. The do fly.

I was quite impressed by the many cool designs.

This room had its own mini wind tunnel so you could test our your airplanes. Like this mini Spirit Of Saint Louis. Gotta love that.

While I am surprised by this place, I'm also not surprised. Though what got me is how a little place like this could have three people on staff all day.

In two years I have never gone to a school's sports day. The last Saturday school event I went too was about two years ago, a culture fest, where I saw a play in which a girl killed herself with a giant cardboard razor blade. So when i decided to go to my school's sports festival this year I planned to keep an open mind.

Sports festivals are something every school does once a year. It consists of kids running around, doing team relay games, and doing choreographed dance moves. This takes one full Saturday (or Sunday) to accomplish. Preparations on the other hand take weeks. Last Friday alone I sat inside (in the nice cool staff room) while my kids spent all morning, four hours to be exact, outside practicing their dance moves. They had been practicing like this all week. In the very very very hot sun. And people think Japanese kids spend all day studying.... ha!

Sports day started at 8 am. Natalie and I showed up around 11 or so. After the 10 minute walk from the train station to the school I was soaked with sweat, and was surprised to see that none of the kids had fallen over from heat stroke. I was unsurprised at the fact that we were the only foreigners there, and that we got quite a few nasty looks. But I usually expect that.

After watching the kids run relay races for well over an hour, we took a break for lunch, and then returned to watch the dancing. Oh yes. Dancing. >

I think I included video from all four dance sets. Nothing is more fun then sitting in the sun watching your school kids do dance moves for you. Dance moves. Seriously. The poor guys. After the dancing we made a break for it. The thought of sitting in the sun for another 5 hours (oh yes, it went into the evening) did not appeal to us. I just hope no one died of heat stroke.

These are they type of news stories I like to read about. USB drives and Domo-kun all rolled into one. I would buy one, except that I wouldn't know which one to buy. I'd have to buy all three models. Curse you cute Japanese electronics! (Plus my unnatural love of all things Domo-kun!)

Its not even been a week and already I'm planning my new dive. I lie I lie. I've been planing this Okinawa Birthday thing for a couple of months now. on October 5th I'll be flying from Hiroshima to Naha, the capital city of Okinawa. For the next 4 days I'll be diving my heart out in the world famous Kerama Islands. Unless a typhoon or something comes along. I look forward to this for two reasons. First I'll be diving in a really beautiful area and seeing some really interesting wildlife. Second, because this is Okinawa, i'll have no trouble fitting into any of the dive gear. Unlike the rest of Japan.

But the Kerama islands were not my first choice. My local dive shop highly recommended the Southern most island of Iriomote. Which according to Wikitravel is considered to be the Galapagos Islands of Japan. Remote. Lightly populated. Great diving. Hiking. Kaiaking. Wonderful. Unfortunately it would have costed me an extra $300 (36,000¥ to be exact) to take a second flight down there. Money I don't have. Even though they have a manta ray feeding ground down there which is apparently the bee's knees to see. Maybe next year if I can save up some cash. After I buy a nice big diving light for my camera.

It should be fun one way or another.

I spent some time today and uploaded quite a few new pictures into my .Mac Web gallery. These include pictures from my Fiji and Fuji Rock trips this summer, as well as my most recent diving trip. I'm still enjoying using the simplicity and quickness of the new iPhoto/ .Mac/ Web Gallery combo. Its a nice feel. Plus its quick and fancy looking, so I can continue to impress my family members with what appears to be super cool computer skills. Little do they know...

I also put some new Domokun pictures up. Awesome!

So I've been back at school for about a month now, and has it been hell. Which is probably why I've not written about it at all on the blog. While in many ways I love my new setup, I also am having issues.

The Good
The best thing is that I now only have two junior high schools I regularly go to as well as to elementary schools which I only visit once a month. This is great, as last year I had four junior high schools I went to every week, and the year before I had six schools. Plus I'm quite pumped for the elementary school scene. The second great thing is that both my schools are quite close and my commute time and cost are low. The last two years I've been averaging about 45-50 minutes of commute time a day. With half my schools being over an hour of commute time. This year both my schools are decently close. One is a 20 minute bike ride away, which gives me easy access to decent lunch places nearby. The other is a 5 minute train ride and a 15 minute walk (or if I was crazy a half an hour bike ride on a very busy road). But no matter how you look at it my wake up time had shifted from 6 am to 7 am. Its so nice.

The Bad
When the weather gets bad my bike ride and walk will suck. One of my schools is right by the river, so the humidity has been killer in this unusually hot summer.

The Ugly
But weather issues pale in comparison to the fact that one of my schools is in the "inner city" of Fukuyama. The kind of school that causes other people to go "Wow, you go there how often?" and "How bad are the kids?". Bad, in a weird way. Most of the kids seem to be the average, discontented, disillusioned, Japanese junior high kids. The kid that stares off into space all day or sleeps because they were up until midnight doing juku studying. But there seems to be a group of kids that are a bit out there. They're not hard to spot, as you can usually see them walking around the hallways doing nothing while class is going on. Not in uniform. Talking on their cell phones. Joking it up. I wouldn't really mind all that much if they didn't occasionally stick their heads through the window and try and talk with kids who are actually in class. The worst part is that when I asked a teacher what the deal with the kids was her response went like this: "Some kids don't want to study, so we tell them to go home, but they don't want to go home, so they just walk around." Translation: "We have no control over these kids so we let them walk all over us." I don't give a damn if the kids don't want to learn English, but I can't stand it when they disrupt or encourage other kids to disrupt when I'm teaching.

Plus I had to take a box cutter away from a kid last week who was carving something into his desk. Teacher did nothing about this. And I'm positive I saw a drug hand off happen.

So goes half my week. At least I get to make fun lunches with the special education kids every so often.

For my first dive in Japan I traveled six hours to Kashiwajima in Kochi prefecture. Or if you read the 日本語 it would look like this: 柏島。I took this trip thanks to Live Scene dive shop here in Fukuyama. They were the ones nice enough to deal with one silly, and large, foreigner. We almost didn't dive this weekend thanks to a typhoon that was barreling towards Japan. In order to safely dive the trip was moved up from Saturday to Friday. So on a very rainy Friday night, around 9 pm, six Japanese people and one awkward American piled into a very large van and drove six hours to Kashiwajima.

The thing that surpassed me the most about Kashiwajima was how busy it was. We stayed at a lodging house for divers, appropriately called FIN House, which provided us with the comforts of home and a place to store our equipment. They also served a mean meal of Japanese food. Besides all the divers around there seemed to be very few locals out and about. Granted, this wasn't a very populated island, but the lack of activity was kind of sad.

Our first dive on Saturday was at noon. The weather was quite sunny, though clouds in the distance looked threatening enough. The first dive was a shallow dive, only 18 meters, and was only a 5 minute boat ride from the docks. At first I was a bit disappointed by the apparent lack of wildlife. That was until we hit the slope. Among the rocks was a plethora of sea life, and my personal favorite of the weekend, eels. I probably saw around 10 eels on this first dive, as well as some fire darts and a little happy yellow spotted puffer. If you watch the video at the end of this post, the first minute is just me swimming along at the first dive spot as well as a large school of smaller fish.

After a fun filled meal of Japanese food (rice balls, miso soup, spaghetti) we loaded up our equipment on a different boat and headed to another dive site. Our second site wasn't too far away from the first spot, but this spot was much more rocky. Ok, so every dive spot was rocky, just in various quantities and sizes of the rocks. We swam out to a rocky slope and down to around 26 meters where I had the luck to see not one, but two ribbon eels. These small and brightly colored eels made the entire trip worth while. I managed to take a few good photos before someone's wayward fin scared him away. The video also has a short clip of the second eel we ran across. Somehow I was able to pull off this wonderful macro photo of a really small shrimp. In case you're wondering, yes I did crop it and do some slight color correction. Also on this dive I saw several Lion Fish, as well as a Lion Fish hanging out with an Octopus.

Upon exiting the water we entered into a world of pain as a heavy rain had started. Not a fun time. Luckily we were already wet anyways, and were finished diving for the day. After a hot shower I settled in for a long futon nap, and then some fun filled bad Japanese bonding time with my co-divers.

The next morning we got up early for a 7 o'clock dive, which was good as the weather was decent. For this dive we took a 15 minute boat ride out to a large, rocky, wall with a decently strong current at a depth of 25 meters. This area had quite a few larger fish as well as a decent amount of soft and hard corals. As opposed to before where there was hardly any. It was a fun dive with a large variety of fish.

After a fun filled Japanese breakfast we headed out to our last dive around 11. This dive had us drop down into a rocky area and then swim out to a large flat sandy area. This was a treat for me as it was the first time in this type of environment. I was able to observe some some really interesting camouflaged fish and shrimps. My favorite were the Goby Shrimp relationships. Every type of Goby is paired up with a certain type of shrimp and they hang out in the same hole. I spent about 5 minutes just watching these two shrimp move sand and shells out of their hole while the Goby stood guard. After awhile we headed into some large rocks and took a group picture. Notice how cute we all are.

After exiting I noticed two things. First it was raining again, and second that there were ten other boats on the water servicing divers. I had no idea that this area was so popular. Live and learn I guess. We packed up our equipment, showered, and in my case bought a couple of t-shirts. Then it was off we went in the rain for another 6 hour drive back to Fukuyama.

A couple fun filled things about diving in Japan. When we did our dive logs we all got little maps of the dive sites, to which we drew our dive paths on. Handy if you want to do dives later one. Maybe it was just my dive shop, we we played fish bingo. As in when you spot a certain type of fish we got to put a sticker on our bingo card. Its easy to shock Japanese people by asking if they have eaten the various types of fish you saw when diving. I was surprised they hadn't.

While Kashiwajima probably won't make it on any Top 100 SCUBA Sites, it has quite a few interesting things to see. The ribbon eels alone were worth the trip, and I would do this trip again next year. Plus it was a good opportunity to hang out with some really nice Japanese divers and get a look at the Japanese diving scene.

Next on my dive schedule in Japan is Kochi prefecture. On the 15 of September I'll be taking the great leap into diving with a local dive shop. I've been trying to find a dive shop that will accommodate me for several months now, but have met with limited success. Of the 4 shops in my area 3 gave me horrified looks when I said I needed to rent equipment from them. Apparently these shops don't carry things in my size. Often I've wondered if half the reason why these shops don't want to deal with me is the language barrier, as these dive trips are much more then diving. Eventually I found a dive shop in town that had things in my size and while apprehensive about me, agreed to let me go on one of their dive trips.

After picking a weekend dive trip that I wanted to go on I begin the long and tedious task of assuring the shop that I was worthy of going along with them. They were kind of worried about me. first came the emails asking if I could eat Japanese food. I assured them that raw fish and wasabi was ok with me. すしはいいですね！わさび大好きです！ Then came the questions about sleeping. Was a Japanese futon going to be ok with me? Would I be too tall for them? Again, I assured them that I was ok with sleeping on the floor for a couple of nights. The odd things about all these questions was that I had made it quite clear from the start that I had been living in Japan for two years now, and from that they probably would be able to guess that I could handle basic nuances of Japanese life. So after this fun filled email exchange I was left with one final task before I could join this trip. The equipment test.

So Saturday afternoon I took a train across town and visited the dive shop. But instead of the usual guy there was a middle aged lady running the store. Seemed the usual guy was off diving this weekend. She had been expecting me and had some equipment for me to try on. The mask and fins worked out fine, despite my overly large foreigner feet. The BCD was a bit tight fitting on me, no thanks to my slight sushi belly. But not too bad overall. Lastly was the dreaded wet suit test. So there I was in the dive shop with a small Japanese lady holding a very large wet-suit and asking me to put it on. Now I usually have issues putting on wet-suits in general, and the idea of flopping around on the floor in front of this very nice lady made me a bit shy. The situation went from bad to worse as it became apparent that the suit would be a snug fit and would require much help on her part. So for the next 5 minutes we pulled and tugged and soon I was boiling alive inside this wet-suit, which seemed overly padded for the weather and water temperature we would eventually be in. I was more than happy to take it off, which then required more help. So there I was, on the floor, with a small Japanese lady pulling on my wet-suit legs trying her best to tug it off. Oh yes it was just a tad bit awkward. It looked a bit like the picture below, except not as ugly. (With apologies to Bill and Julia)

I used to think diving in Japan was super expensive. It is, but not as bad as you would have thought. I'll be paying 62,000¥ (around $500) for my trip next month. This includes 4 dives, the bus ride down there and back, hotel for two nights, several meals, 4 boat dives, and equipment. While expensive for Asia as a whole, where for the same price I could have done 10 dives in Fiji with equipment, its not too bad in comparison with say the US. Especially when you factor in the cost of travel, hotel, and food. Plus the fun filled experience of a weekend of speaking awkward Japanese is priceless in its own way.

On that note, if anyone knows of any helpful webpages about diving in Japan let me know. I'll be diving in Okinawa this October for my birthday and could use some suggestions.

One of the many reasons I've loved having a Mac in the past was the fact that there were hardly any games you could play. Seriously. When a game did come out on the Mac it was usually a really good one. No, I am not crazy. It was a form of self-restraint. Without the ability to play games I wouldn't be tempted to play games all the time. Thus I would be more productive in life. Seriously. It was a good excuse.

With the advent of Intel Macs that excuse is now gone form my life. Playing any number of PC games is now just a dual boot into XP away. So after getting my new Macbook Pro a couple of weeks ago I loaded up XP on it and tried something I'd always wanted to. Half-Life 2. The results were surprising. My Macbook Pro played the game splendidly.

I was surprised because of the numerous bench mark tests done on the new Macbook Pros when they first came out. Tests such as this one on gaming and this one on VRAM showed sort of sad results while playing games in OS X. Luckily Windows XP actually plays games far far better then the OS X version of the same games. Happiness for all Macbook Pro users.

But bench marks as a whole suck. Its like the old saying "A picture is worth a thusand words." Except instead of a picture we have quite a few youtube videos of people running popular games in XP on a Macbook Pro. With frame rate goodness. Go go Macbook Pro.

Half Life 2

Bioshock

Battlefield 2

Now if only I didn't get massive motion sickness when playing new games.... sigh...