I was alerted by Weiran that Apple are trying out Safari Beta for Windows. It’s crap. Having tried installing it several times, it won’t even start (without crashing, anyway). So that has ultimately rendered my experience as somewhere between 100% bad and non-existent.
Cheaper Than A Box Of Chocolates
I just read an article written last year by Damien Mulley called "How To Use Google To Get A Girl And Get Laid". It’s quite tongue-in-cheek but nonetheless funny. It is incredible the extent to which Google can be a part of a person’s life, and to that end how much it can control a person’s life.
Soon after writing that article, Mulley received thousands of hits. Bastard – I want that! So prepared for a guide coming soon. In the mean time, I shall probably rip off hardwords.net because, unfortunately, Weiran and I decided it wasn’t working and that we should close it down. We’re working on new ideas for it. Suggestions gratefully received. 
Japan Day Eight: Tiger in the Parco (19.04.16)
We returned to Tokyo on the Shinkansen and arrived about 2 pm, so that we could checkin straight away. This time we were placed on the 22nd floor and should have had direct views of Mount Fuji in the far distance. In reality the weather never cleared enough for us to be able to distinguish Mount Fuji from the other folds in the Earth on the horizon. Having said that, the view was still spectacular.
We went back out, hitting the rain-soaked Shibuya shopping district. Our hotel lent us a couple of umbrellas and we headed off into the grey. We stopped at a nine-storey HMV store before heading to Parco, a mall split into three. Weiran and I visited parts one and three, and I think we were both impressed by Part Three. I bought a t-shirt by Laundry 038°, and Weiran got a t-shirt by Onitsuka Tiger. Apparently Beck got some shoes from there last week…
That night we ate at the hotel’s Szechwan Chinese restaurant, known as “Chen”. That was quite good, but I’m not really a fan of tofu. Nonetheless it was good.
Japan Day Three: Crunked (19.04.11)
We touched down at Tokyo Narita Airport at around 9 am. The baggage arrived quickly so we went to get our rail passes and tickets for the Narita Express train into Tokyo itself. We got to the Shibuya district of Tokyo and onto Cerulean Tower Tokyu Hotel at about 11 am. It was a little too early to checkin there, so we went off to Kitanomaru Park near Kudanshita Station, home of the Nippon Budokan, where many a rock concert is played (none during our stay, I believe!). There I tried some cold green tea, which is the most vile thing on Earth (at least it was at that point of the holiday…). We took quite a lot of photos there, including the cherry blossoms which were quite well established. At around 4 pm, we headed back to the hotel to checkin. I was knackered by this point: I had only managed three hours of sleep in the space of over two days, so I went to sleep.
Two hours later, Weiran woke me up, wanting to hit the town. I was reluctant but followed. We went to the bar at the top of the tower. We had a couple of Kamikazes (which I now know to consist of one part vodka, one part triple-sec and one part lemon juice). The taste wasn’t great, but they went down easily enough. I also had some other drink, of which I cannot recall the name, but can tell you tasted of lemons and was slushy. Weiran had a White Russian.
Inebriated, we headed into the city in search of further drink, as diagnosed by Weiran. We made it as far as a Japanese fast food place, where we had some pork in noodle soup. Although it was nice, I didn’t finish it, and the pork was a little undercooked for my taste. We gave drinking a knock on the head after that, and headed back to the hotel.
Thank God
I can’t tell you how good I felt on Friday. It was the first day in a long time where I felt alert and fully awake for my day’s worth of lectures. And I can’t think of any other cause than the excitement of going down to Kent.
In the next month (and a bit) I will have gone to Kent to see Pete and gone to Japan with Weiran. I keep reminding myself of those facts, yet still keeping my mind on my work. This is rather peculiar for me: usually any excuse for my mind to go off-topic it does so and often cannot be retrieved.
However, I made a bit of a mistake on Friday. I asked Rosie and Jayne to go clothes shopping with me. It could be a bit of an error of judgment on my part, not least since they promised to do their very best "Trinny and Susannah". Worse still, they insist that I try everything on, which isn’t something that takes my fancy… in fact it’s a bit of a pet hate.
Furthermore, I feel guilty enough spending money on effectively two holidays and then some clothes, while Mum stays at home or work with no holiday and not much money. I’m not sure what she’d think if I went out and spent a couple-of-hundred on clothes…
On Hold
Well, the British Airways sale has come, and there are no flights on sale to Tokyo for the time we want to go to Japan. So we decided we would go some other time. Actually, Weiran said “Let’s go some other time” and I said “ok”. Never mind. Although we do want to go to Japan and realise it will come to some expense, we don’t want to fork out more than our means, and seeing as my student loan is the primary financier of my trip, I don’t want to plunge myself into further debt than necessary.
So that was a bit of a blow. But not to worry. It gives me more time to learn some Japanese. I had neglected all my studies in the time I have been on holiday, so extra time to learn what is an extra-curricular activity can only be a good thing.
I have also registered with GCHQ, so I hope that I will receive notification if any posts arise. I guess the end of a year is as good time as any to think about the future.
Cultural Learnings
A random conversation led to Waz suddenly asking me “Wanna come to Japan with me?”. I was initially rather dumbstruck! I haven’t seen Waz in just about 3 years now, which is really rather shocking!
The main stumbling block is cost. The cost of travel in fact. It will cost the best (read worst) part of £500. And there will also be the travelling to London, and travelling within Japan.
I am also fairly sure that neither of us have actually been to Japan, and my knowledge of the spoken language would only sustain conversation for less than five seconds, and my ability to read kanji and kana forms will only allow me to write my name…
So I’m not sure whether these plans will follow a similar fate to poogasm.com, but it would be great to go to Japan!
Defragmenting
I love my analogies. I created one today to describe how defragmenter works on your computer:
Your computer goes obsessive compulsive, and arranges the cans in your kitchen cupboard so that you have baked beans in one place, spaghetti hoops in another, and custard elsewhere and so on. It also turns the cans so that the labels are at the front so the computer knows what is where so it can find its dinner more quickly… It also puts labels on where they have fallen off (which is rather clever) to speed up menu selection.
Basically the computer rearranges stuff so it knows where it all is so it can get the stuff it wants more quickly.
Meanwhile, it doesnt take a thing out of the cupboard, so in fact if you want something while the computer is rearranging your cans, it will still give it to you… likewise, if you add stuff, it will sort that out, too.
And if you run it again after you’re done, it will rearrange them again. The thing is, it is quite thorough… and you have hundreds of thousands of them. If it doesn’t seem to make your computer any quicker then you have got too many cans. Then perhaps some of them are out of date, and you should throw them away.
I’m half expecting Waz and James to tear my analogy to pieces, but so what? It works for one drunk man… 
Stranger Things
I was waiting for a website Weiran and I are working on to go live, when I got bored and so decided to wander around on the Internet. I rested at answers.com and looked around. My first stop was my old school, Borden Grammar School. At present there is only one notable “famous” person to have passed though, that being Sir Stanley Hooker, who worked on aerodynamics with Rolls Royce and helped them to revive them during the Seventies.
I wandered further, and I decided to look up Sting. I have read his autobiography Broken Music, but it does not go beyond the dawn of his musical career with The Police. Having not experienced much of his career since, I decided to wander through. I was also listening to Enya on Windows Media Player, and so things started to get a bit weird.
I was also clicking everywhere. I ended up reading about Quentin Crisp. He was an extrovert homosexual that grew up in a generally homophobic London for much of the Twentieth Century, and eventually moved to New York. He was Sting’s inspiration for Englishman In New York. It’s nice when things start to make sense, and you can understand the meaning behind things you have grown accustomed to and had just accepted as “one of those things”. I had simply thought that Sting was writing about a fictional character – and this appears not to be the case. I also read about his association with tantric sex. Apparently, he has not practised tantric sex, but rather it was a dinner joke gone a bit far.
So it’s now 2am, the site still has not gone live, and I’m tired, so bedtime for me.
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