October 2007 Archives

Halloween in Japan. A time of fun filled drinking and dressing up. I was planning on going as a domokun this year, but lacked the motivation to make a costume. Yup. I'm being lazy. But I was able to spend some time at my traditional halloween party with a lot of other friendly gaijin!

Happy Halloween everyone!

So much so that I walked into a Halloween party this weekend and some random guy said "Hey, is your name Joshua Zimmerman? I saw your Fukuyama Videos online!" When you have the only English source of information about Fukuyama on the internet its not surprising that someone will find you. Whether you want them too or not.

I really should make a video show casing the wonders of the city. Or just the horrors of Fukuyama, which you could probably turn into a feature length film. Stay tuned for the first Fukuyama Horror Fest! coming soon to a computer near you!

There are only so many English teaching schools in Japan, but it seems that there will soon be one less. NOVA, one of the largest in Japan, is more or less going bust and leaving all its foreigner employees high and dry. Nearly 5,000 foreign English teachers will be without jobs in the next couple weeks. Most of them have not been paid for at least a month. Among those is my old college room mate Nate who has been working for NOVA for about a year now. He's one of the lucky ones. He has money saved up. Many are not so lucky. Stories and pleas for help have been going up all over the internet. People who can't pay their rent, have no money to fly home, or are unable to find a substitute job in a market now flooded with teachers.

Just today at my local cafe I ran into a girl who is working (worked?) for NOVA. She's been in Japan a total of one month. Even when the company was clearly facing complete failure they brought in new batches of English teachers, many of which are unable to pay for a ticket home. At least in Fukuyama this girl has a decent chance of finding some work as there are so few native speakers around and a decent demand for teachers.

If anyone was to ask me about NOVA teachers a couple of months ago I probably would have said some rather harsh things. I don't hate them, its just the way things go between people of different social and work groups in the ex-pat English teaching community. But I extend my full sympathy and respect for you guys for dealing with this complete bullshit situation. I can only hope that it somehow works out for each and every one of you.

(At least on the upside there are now around 400,000 ex NOVA students who need private lessons.)

I tend to stay away from Pet Stores in Japan because they make me want to buy overly expensive pets. Who wants to pay $700 for a kitten? Especially when the $700 is a kitten on sale. But my friends had told me of a very odd Pet Store out by the Fuji Grand Mall that I just had to see for myself. It is the Pet Store of Infinite Sadness.

The first thing you'll probably notice when you walk in are the owls that are in more or less direct sunlight because someone put them in front of a window. I'm no expert, but owls are nocturnal, and probably don't enjoy direct sunlight all day long. next to the owls is a monkey, also in direct sunlight in a window. This poor monkey is on a stand, attached to to a 6 inch chain. Thats right. He's not in a cage, not behind glass, he's chained down with a radius of about 6 inches to move around. No wonder he was looking so odd.

The puppies and kittens were to be expected in Japan. Very small cages and very little air flow. Its become so natural for me to see them like this that I didn't even snap any pictures. What I did snap pictures of was the Wallaby who looked emotionally distressed and another monkey chained down to a post. Both did not look very good.

Who in their right mind would pay nearly $3,000 for a monkey who has ben mentally and emotionally tortured. But it gets even better. What got my friend Chris all pissed off were the birds. The cages most of them were in were about half the size they should have been. Most of them had their tail feathers cut off so they could fit in the cages. Looking in their cages, most of them appeared to be sick, which caused a very bad smell in the store. But the tropical big birds had it nice compared to other, smaller, birds. They were in insect cages. The same cages that are sold at my local hardware store to host insects and frogs contained two or three birds. Some looked as if they couldn't even turn around.

On the floor below the birds were whole host of weird pets. Hedge hogs, game hens, ferrets, pigs. All of them stuffed in cages too small, and all appeared to be lacking any sort of human contact. I don't understand how a store can charge $700 for a kitten, just a regular tabby cat, and then turn around and not take care of these expensive pets. Who in their right mind would buy animal who were treated this badly and who all appeared to be suffering from mental disorders because of it. inhuman treatment like this in the US or Canada would be treated very harshly and make local news. But here in Japan its the sad status quo.

This is why I'm never going to go into another Pet Store in Japan again.

In the past I have done such silly things as drive an hour and wait in line to buy a copy of an OS software release. But with the release of OS 10.5 I decided to scale it back a bit, and just ride my bike the 20 minutes to a local store and pick up a copy.

How unsurprised I was to find there was no line of people. No fan fare. Not even a free shirt for those loyal Mac addicts who came out to buy a copy. Oh well. At least I didn't have to put up with some of the insane lines that formed elsewhere.

At least Deo Deo was nice enough to put a sign up telling people where to pick up their copy. They even had a nice little display set up at their front counter. So there you have it, my Mac OS 10.5 buying story. At least I got it before all my friends did. (Thank you time zones!)

When I was a child I loved RC toys. But because of the price the only RC toys I ever had were cars, never planes. I had to rely on those little rubber band powered wood ones or big gliders. Recently small RC planes have hit the market, many in Japan. I've lusted after the cheap, but chute, Aero Soarer for more then a year now. Never quite feeling the urge to spend the 3,000¥ and actually buy it. Luckily someone bought it for me on my 25th birthday. Nice.

The plane come in a nice plastic case (if you bought the slightly more expensive case one) which contains the plane and the IR remote/ recharger. The plane only weighs about 3.5 grams and is almost entirely made of light weight foam. Though it feels like it should break in your hands, it doesn't. And holds up well in crashes. Below is the video from the Aero Soarer webpage.

Well that looks all fun. One charge gets me about 30 seconds of flight time off the little guy, enough to do some laps around my apartment. Rather nice seeing how it only takes 30 seconds to charge up. Heres a video of me showing off the Aero Soarer and explaining everything.

Its a fun little toy. Though it seems hobbyists have hacked it and through the use of a different battery setup can get as much as a half hour flight from it. On a side note, the manual is funny. The Dos and Don'ts on the front page include wonderful pictures. Please do not let ninjas throw the Aero Soarer. (Click the below image to see it super massive big!)

How I love Japan. now back to crashing my airplane!

So today is my 25th Birthday. Woop de frickin da. 25. So anti-clamatic. But it is official, I am now most certainly in my mid-20's. Its always weird moving into a new demographic setting. At least I still have my good looks.

To celebrate I had a nice birthday-four way party with Talia, Phil, and Matt. One weekend, four birthdays. Whats weird is that Matt, Phil, and I share the exact same birthday. The Fukuyama BOE must have weird luck getting 3 JETs with the same birthday. Or someone is having a laugh over it. But to celebrate about 30 assorted ALTs gathered to eat, drink, and sing 80's music. Fun was had, dancing was done, and domokuns were given as gifts to unsuspecting friends. All in all, a good time.

Now its just a long, downward slide until I reach 30. The shame.

I'm always in awe of how ugly my city can be. Sure, I probably would say that about most any large modern Japanese city, but Fukuyama more then most. I don't know if its the congested traffic by the train station. Or the heavy smog and industrial pollution that hangs over the city. The place is just not very inviting. For most people the first and last thing they see in any major Japanese city is the train station. Many cities take pride in their modern and efficient train stations. But Fukuyama is not your average city. The train station in Fukuyama probably hasn't changed in 30 years. The layout is congested, both with people and cars. The structure looks like it was made out of scrap concrete and the remains of a bad car accident. And the color makes you feel as if you were transported back in time to 1970. Except you had a really bad designer doing hyper 70's color motifs. Its just not pretty. In the past two years the city has had near constant construction happening in and around the station. First they tore up the main area in front of the station, causing a massive bottle neck of foot traffic, in order to build a pay underground bike parking area. While at the same time shutting down the nearest and biggest free bike parking area. Great. Now a year later they got the area nice and cleaned up before they started ripping apart MORE of the front entrance. So for the last half year they've been digging a massive hole in the front of the station. I had no idea what it was, until this last week. At first I thought it would be this wonderful structure.

The idea that the city was going to build a beautiful and inspiring classical entrance to the station made me jump for joy! Heck, the trees alone made me take back everything bad I'd ever said about the city. Until I realized that this isn't what is actually happening. The above sketch is part of a petition to get the city to build the above structure. In reality the city is building what looks like a small underground paid parking lot, which is more or less going to be useless to 99% of the people in the city. The drawing I saw at the station made it look like the new parking would handle around 30 cars, and would do nothing to help the horrible car and foot congestion that plagues the station area.

Though I should feel happy, at least the city is fixing the faulty load bearing support columns in the station. That makes me feel great and safe.

Last weekend I had the pleasure of going to the Takehara Bamboo Light Festival. Its like carving a pumpkin, except with bamboo.

I've also go this short video clip of a break dancing guy in a panda outfit, but I need to find the right music to set it to. Oh yes. Dancing panda.

For the longest time I was dreading the process of upgrading to Movabletype 4.01. I seriously had nightmares. I kid you not. See I have been using Movabletype for exactly 4 years. Version 2.x something. This was back in the day when I decided that running Mac OS X Server off a computer would be the best idea ever, and back when installing Movabletype took me a good hour. That and I always messed up something along the way, which caused me to get super angry and erase everything so I could start the whole process over again. Lets just say that it was an extremely unpleasant experience. But it seems that the development crew responsible for Movabletype has gotten their act together and made it super simple. As in simple enough that I could get my mother to do it with a bit of help over the phone.

There are really only 5 steps: Download MT 4.0. Upload Mt 4.0 to your webserver. Move a directory. Check permissions. Run the install script.

Crazy easy. In fact it was so easy, that by the third time I installed it (each was for a separate webpage) the entire process (minus the long ass time I waited for the files to upload) too under 10 minutes. Plus the new setup script almost had me jumping for joy.

Besides being super easy to install, MT 4.01 has some other great benefits. For one, its now completely free and open source. Meaning anyone with some webpage and a MySQL server can run it. The interface is much more streamlines and improved, though on the downside it is a bit sluggish in some browsers. Better default templates, user management, spam control, plugin support, and being just overall easier to use makes me glad I actually took the plunge and upgraded.

So I'm now 100% moved over to Movabletype 4.01 and thinking that I've made way too much work for myself. Not only did I install MT 4 for my blog, but I also did two separate installs for my new diving blog, joshuadives.com, and my new domokun travel webpage, domotravels.com. So heres the work I've got ahead of me. First I need to put all my domokun pictures on domotravels.com. Then I need to post all my old diving posts from this blog onto joshuadives.com. Plus I need to post some photo fun SCUBA photo albums and video eventually. Then I need to go through about 4 years worth of blog entries on this blog and go all crazy giving them categories. Then I need to get my butt into gear and make proper designs for all these pages. Something I'm rather bad at. Plus there is also the several nonblog related pages from my old version of this site that I need to move over into the new template as well.

Long story short: Its a good thing I don't have any money right now because it gives me an excuse to work on these pages.

You may notice some changed to the site. They're a bit obvious. I just upgraded to MT 4.0 on my blog, and for the most part, it went rather smoothly. Only a few problems, mostly with the old template I was using. Which is to be expected I guess. This is a good of time as any to work on a new blog template or overall theme going. The problem is I'm way too picky. Which means it could be a while before I get to a final version. Plus I'm working on launching two other sites as well, which require their own designs. Good things I have no money right now to do anything so I should have plenty of time to screw around with a webpage and get my ass in gear. But until then, enjoy the fancy default template with a fun filled cityscape of Tokyo at night.

If you have some helpful blog designing tips, please send them my way. Seriously. I'm horrible at this kind of thing.

I hate this time of year in Japan. I shouldn't. The weather is finally cooling off. School is in session. New TV shows to download. Everyone seems happy. Except for me and the mantis. For this is the time of year the mantis die. Sure, they may just be large predatory insects to you, but to me they're beautiful creatures. At this point of the year the mantis have grown very large and are ready to mate. So they're quite active. Which means they're moving around. Crossing roads. Which is why every day on my bike ride to and from school I see many mantis squashed on the roads. It makes me sad. Very sad. So sad in fact that I will stop and move mantis out of the road when I see them. Call me insane. Call me silly. But I like saving them. Which is why I have a photo of one on a stick below.

This guy (girl) was wondering around in the middle of the road so I decided to stop and move him (her) to a bush. Where he (she) would be safe from bikes, scooters, and cars. Sure, I can't save them all. But I can save a few. And thats what matters.

When traveling around Asia I am always astonished by the children and the waste of talent. I see kids wanting to learn. Wanting to better themselves. Wanting to make their country, life, world a letter place. Its sad when these kids belt out better english then any kid I meet in Japan. Motivation. What also kills me is how the modern world moves right above them. I guess 50 years ago you could learn from books what anyone else in the world was learning. But computer are now making that nearly impossible, which is why I love and support the One Laptop Per Child program. This program has created a super low cost computer that meets the needs of children in the developing world. Seeing this astonishing review of it, and the wonderful features that it has, I wish I had money to buy some and send abroad. The possibilities are endless.

Kudos. Galore.

I should be in Okinawa right now. Diving. Enjoying underwater creatures. Taking fun filled photos. Using my new (second hand) diving light. Basking in warm sunshine. But no. A typhoon has decided to hit Okinawa. If you look at this fun image I snagged from weather.com you'll see a big red circle in the lower left hand corner. Thats where I was going to be. The weather was so bad that on Thursday all boats to then islands I wanted to go to had been shut down. So I bit the bullet and paid a hefty cancelation fee on my plane tickets, which beat paying a lot more money to sit in a hotel watching it rain all weekend. Oh well. Theres always next year.