Last Sunday was the first anniversary of Sachi and I meeting. We took the morning off, and then celebrated in the evening.

I had been preparing for this for a while. Every three months since we met, I would get Sachi another three small stuffed dogs, from a line put out by a company that had a large variety of breeds, nicely crafted. So before this anniversary, she had nine little dogs. For this anniversary–a yearly thing instead of quarterly–I decided to go whole hog. I found stuffed dogs at several different places, finally having to go down to the Ginza to find one that I wanted to top things off.

Here’s how I arranged it: when Sachi and I left for dinner, I made an excuse to run back in to the apartment (I intentionally left a fan running so I could go back and turn it off). That gave me the chance to leave the first present out on the dining room table: a small basket with two tiny stuffed dogs in it. Each of these came with a card with a note inside. When we came back from dinner, Sachi found the first dogs, and the note told her that the dogs “bigger brothers and sisters” were hiding under the bed because they were afraid of the fireworks.

This worked out really well, in fact: we unexpectedly got treated to two fireworks shows at dinner. We ate at a restaurant on the 58th floor of the Sunshine 60 Building, the view out the window looking down on our own building. It’s a nice place, with multi-course dinners; reasonably priced, but food and service equivalent to a more expensive restaurant. We arrived at 6:30 and left at 8:30, which happens to be the time frame for fireworks in Japan during the summer. One show started to the northeast, relatively distant–but it was pretty big, and was nice to watch. But then another show started up a lot closer, and that was even nicer. Almost all the way through dinner we watched the shows. So when we came back, that first note “from” the two tiny puppies made sense in a way I had not intended.

In any case, the note with the first two puppies led Sachi to the drawer under the bed, where I had placed six stuffed dogs, of the same kind I had given her before (she now has 15 in total).

Their note gave clues as to where the next dog was “hiding,” a floppily-stuffed yellow lab about a foot long. His note led to the back of the top shelf where we keep the towels, where I’d stashed his “bigger brother,” a two-foot-long version of the same dog.

The note on that one led to their “even bigger brother,” who was “hanging out in the closet.” I had that rather large 3-foot stuffed dog–the biggest version of the same dog–suspended from the coat rack in a closet Sachi uses for winter-wear storage. That dog directed her to ask me for the final dog.

Sachi loves Shiba Inu dogs. They’re kind of like small versions of huskies, the most common type being light brown with white underneath and some spots of white on the face. But finding stuffed Shibas is very hard. In Japan, Shibas are popular, but for some reason they don’t make stuffed Shibas much–and when they do, they do them rather poorly. But at the Ginza store, I found a very nice stuffed Shiba puppy doll, which was perfect as the final gift.

The notes on each had more than just directions to the next dog, but that will remain private. Needless to say, Sachi enjoyed them thoroughly–but later, she mentioned that I had better stop getting her dogs, as we were quickly running out of places to put them.

The exercise also proved difficult in terms of setting it all up. The anniversary was Sunday evening, but after Friday afternoon I knew that Sachi and I would be together all the time–so I had to set them all up before then. The problem: we have a small apartment–not too many good hiding places–and they all had to be in places where Sachi would not find them by accident. I could not even steer her away from the hiding places all the time, because Saturday afternoon I was out for six hours at the graduation ceremony for my school, while Sachi relaxed at home. And even though I did find good places, it was almost undone when Sachi text-messaged me at the ceremony, asking where I had stored the ironing machine. I knew exactly where it was: right next to the medium-sized dog on the back of the top towel shelf. I had to tell her that she couldn’t iron anything that afternoon.

Not that she was surprised; she figured that there would be stuffed dogs involved, and I’ve done the treasure-hunt game before. She just didn’t know the extent I had gone to. As we went shopping before dinner, she speculated on how many dogs, what sizes, and so forth while I kept mum. She only guessed as high as three dogs, though–not twelve. I kept the secret pretty well.

Sachi, on the other hand, is not nearly as good at keeping secrets. Two of the three times she has gotten me gifts, she has accidentally blurted out what she got me. This time it was at Eddie Bauer, just before dinner, when we were looking at clothes I could buy. I mentioned that I should get some new short pants. Now, Sachi could have said something like, “the shirts you’re getting today are enough for now,” or “I know a better shop to go to for that,” or something else which would not have roused my suspicions. Instead, she blurted, “I got you a pair already!”–and then was instantly annoyed that I had “made her” tell me what (part of) her present was. She couldn’t be mad, of course, but for a while we had fun while I teased her about not being able to keep a secret well, while she just as kiddingly blamed me for tearing the secret out of her. (She told me lightheartedly that I was “ijiwaru,” or being mean.)

It was a fun evening.

That’s it indeed. First free moment I get, I am putting in a block script in my image directory to keep Google’s image bot out. I’ve had it up to here.

When you have a blog with images, you stand the risk of being swamped by hotlinkers. Sometimes I take some nice shots, and I want to share them. But what happens is that some rather impolite person will find that image via Google, and without permission, without a link back to my site, without even visiting my site at all, they simply grab the address of the image and hotlink.

I have described before what hotlinking is. In short, instead of using an image that they store on their own site, they “link” to the image residing on my site; despite being an image on my site, it appears seamlessly to be a part of theirs. The problem: I get charged for the bandwidth it eats up.

Normally, it’s not a huge issue; usually, it’s a small image and is only accessed a few dozen times. That’s a pinprick; I would hardly notice it. A lot of times, people hotlink the images for use on forums or MySpace accounts; those are the worst offenders. But once in a while, someone with a high-bandwidth site decides to take a large image from yours and hotlink to it. That’s what happened here.

Someone in Ohio who runs a web site that talks a lot about “how to increase your site traffic” and boasts of their AdSense revenue took a 1280-pixel-wide image from my site, a photo of lightning I took a while back. They then used that image–badly, at that–as the background for the title header on their blog, so that it appeared on every single last page of their own blog.

In just the past 9 days, the image was hotlinked at least 17,792 times… meaning that in just over a week, this one person ate up almost four gigabytes of my bandwidth, or about 20% of the total bandwidth of my site for that period of time.

I would not have been quite as ticked off had this person innocently hotlinked without understanding… but the content of their site, one comment in particular, told me that they knew exactly what hotlinking was. Worse, this person quotes scripture on their main page.

So I substituted the image with a smaller version that contained a text message detailing my annoyance (no obscenities), and left an acerbic comment… but really, this is the last straw.

As I mentioned above, the first chance I get, I am cleaning house. I will leave a robots.txt file to steer Google Images (and whatever other image bots I can identify) away from my images directory. I am then going to clear out every file more than 100 KB–even smaller ones, if there are not too many. I might replace them with smaller/more compressed images, but that could mean too much work. In the future, I will post larger images, but I will yank them within a few weeks or months.

This is disappointing to me. I like sharing the photos I take, I want people to enjoy them. But when even a few bad apples take advantage of that and run hog-wild over my site resources…

It is just too much frakking trouble.

I woke up to receive this message in my mailbox:

Your account blogd.com has been suspended or a file disabled in it for the following reason:

CGI/PHP Overload
————–
Your account is causing high load on the server due to an abusive cgi script: …

That, my friends, is what spammers can do to you. Partly my fault, I guess; it has been years since I upgraded my blog software, and just as long since I have taken any evasive maneuvers in regards to my comments script. Fortunately, the web host only shut down the comment script file and has not suspended my account or shut down my scripting abilities altogether. So among other things on my “to do” list today, I’ll have to reshuffle my blog software to get comments working again, and then get to work this month on upgrading the blog software–either to the newest Movable Type, or (my long-term intention) switching to WordPress.

Pardon any inconveniences while this is taking place. Comments should be up again in a few hours.

Update: Comments are back up. More on other changes as I get around to them…

This just out:

In a new effort to crack down on illegal immigrants, federal authorities are expected to announce tough rules this week that would require employers to fire workers who use false Social Security numbers.

In a related story, in a new effort to crack down on illegal drug use, federal authorities are introducing tough new laws that require drug dealers to stop selling drugs to anyone who does not pay sales tax on a specific purchase.

I mean, seriously, the employers are the ones who entice the immigrants to come here in the first place; it’s not as if no one is offering jobs specifically to immigrants, who are coming over and passing themselves off as citizens. Forcing an employer to fire an illegal using a forged SS# truly is like having a dealer stop selling to a user: one is enticing the other to commit an illegal act, and forcing them to stop will simply cause both to seek the same activity elsewhere.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: illegal immigration will stop when, and only when, we crack down on the employers, the people who are creating the problem in the first place. But Bush has made it clear that he is absolutely unwilling to do this. Ergo the Bush administration will do nothing but harm–costly harm, in more than one way–with their various plans and schemes.

Unfortunately, as with the “War on Drugs,” the “War on Illegal Immigration” has a blindingly obvious solution, but one so politically unworkable that it will never be implemented, so instead we get treated to repeated garbage like we see today.

And I mean “Cool!” in two respects: first, that something great has happened; and second, in regards to the temperature of the apartment. The air conditioner repair guy came back this morning and fixed not just the machine he was supposed to, but also the one the moving company installed.

As mentioned before, the main machine leaked its freon and nitrogen gas reserves–as it turns out, a fitting had been left loose, and the gases had all escaped long before we moved in. He sealed the fitting and charged up the gases, and for the first time, the air conditioner actually works. And now that it does, I can note that it works really well. Sachi and I thought that the building makers had simply skimped and bought a really bad air conditioner. Had we thought to complain earlier, we could have avoided a lot of hot days in the living/dining/kitchen area.

While he was running some sort of vacuum test on the main unit, he took a look at Sachi’s air conditioner, the one that had been installed tilted to the right. He was not in any way responsible for that one, but just as a courtesy, he spent about twenty minutes working on it. It turns out that not only was the wall unit installed at an angle, but the tubing was done extremely poorly–the tubes inside the wrapped bundle leading outside were arranged such that the drainage tube had a notable upward slant, even though the whole bundle was level. Water was pooling inside the unit, and as a result, led to the entire inside of the machine being “sweaty.” Eventually it all dripped out onto the floor. So he unwrapped the bundle, reset the tubes.. and after five or six hours of running at full power, not a single drop has come out. Seems like that unit is fixed as well.

One of these days, the apartment will be perfect. We’ve still got the bath/laundry stink to deal with (likely due to evaporation in the pipes caused by the 24-hour bath-drying utility, which we can’t shut off), and those little flying insects are still massively infesting the apartment–likely breeding in the soil in Sachi’s potted plants. We have to re-pot the plants and then make sure that the bugs left flying around don’t get a chance to re-lay their eggs.

I had two DVD players, until recently. One was a Region-1 unit I bought in the U.S. maybe six or seven years back, and the other was a region-free unit I bought at Costco four years ago. Both units had been acting flaky, but after the move, neither one would recognize anything I put into them. So, time to get another player. After advising a friend to look for region-free players in Akihabara, and they reported success, I decided to try it myself.

I was also looking for a feature I’d heard about but not seen: a DivX-playing DVD player. DivX is a “codec,” or a method of compressing audio/video data to save space. What it means is that you can download audio and video files from the Internet, and the DVD player will recognize them and play them, just like your computer does.

I found the kind of machine I was looking for, and settled on the Pioneer DV-400VS.

Even better, the player I got has a USB port, so it will recognize files on USB Flash drives, or potentially on USB external hard disk drives. Since I got a 1 GB flash stick just last week, I can now use it to show up to 2.5 hours of video on the player, if I transfer it from my computer–without burning a DVD disk. Cool.

The player can handle DVDs made for any country (they were pretty outspoken about it at the electronics store, after Costco made a deal about how “it’s not legal”), and can handle just about any type of CD (Audio CD, CD-R/RW, VCD) or DVD (DVD±R/RW, Video DVD, Audio DVD)–audio, video, or data–so long as it’s got some sort of visual or audio media on it. JPEG photos will play as slideshows, audio CDs or mp3/wma/aac files play as music, and lots of data-stored video files (mpg/avi/wmv) will play just fine (but not all, of course).

Better yet, it has an HDMI port and progressive/1080p compatibility (upscaling), so it will work fine with the HDTV I plan on getting in not too long a time.

In short, it’ll handle pretty much everything I’ll need to throw at it… until it too breaks down in four or five years. Inevitably.

Sachi and I finally told the building’s office people that our main room’s air conditioner not working. Can’t say they don’t respond fast–before the day was out, they had a couple of guys come in and check out the unit.

While one of the guys was outside checking the troubled unit, I asked the other guy to come and take a look at our bedroom’s A/C unit, which has been steadily dripping water. That’s Sachi’s old unit, which the moving company (remember those great guys?) installed in the new place. As he walked in the room, he immediately saw the problem–the unit was tilted, ever so slightly, to the right, and away from the drainage tube, which is also tilted to as to bring the draining water, or some of it, back into the room. One of the guys tried to tilt it back the other way, but the thing keeps dripping; we’ll probably have to call the original installers back in to do the job properly.

Meanwhile, the two repair guys are looking at the main unit, the one in the living room, which comes with the apartment. That hasn’t worked since day one, and once spilled huge amounts of water out when we had our housewarming party. As it turns out, they guys found that there was no gas in the conditioning units. No freon, no N₂.

Now wonder it didn’t work. The guys said they were puzzled as to how the gas could have escaped. They claimed that all units are tested to see if they have the 1 kg or so of gases installed… but if a leak is so rare, then there was probably just an oversight to put the gases into the units, at least just in our place. One of 400 or so apartments in the building, you gotta figure at least a few will have problems like this.

I figure another month or two, and the shakedown might be over, and we might have a fully-functioning apartment.

Do I really need to point out how full of crap Republicans are about national security? They went into Ultra-Shrill mode for the past couple of days, pressuring spineless Democrats into handing Bush broad new warrantless wiretapping powers that allow him to even further violate the 4th amendment to the constitution; the law is so vaguely worded that virtually any communication could be eavesdropped on, so long as the administration can say that it is “directed at a person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States” [italics mine]. In other words, they can eavesdrop on any call, and then claim they had “reason” to believe it involved some foreign person. It no longer has to even be someone suspected of terrorism or any other crime.

Four or five months after a FISA judge made this change “necessary,” Bush and the Republicans in Congress ambushed the Democrats with a tried-and-true formula: drop it in at the last minute, block every attempt to attenuate the most radical and dangerous aspects of the bill, and then scream at the top of their lungs that Democrats were al Qaeda agents for even thinking of not giving the president the “necessary” powers, while not giving even the slightest hard evidence that such powers are in the least bit necessary. Of course, it worked, and Democrats are reduced to flaccidly saying that they will get right onto watering down that bill, after they get back from a month’s vacation. Yeah, right.

So, how serious is Bush, how serious are the Republicans, about keeping America and Americans secure? So much so, that they let 190,000 weapons bought with U.S. taxpayer money “accidentally” fall into the hands of insurgents and possibly terrorists in Iraq.

So rest assured: Bush and the GOP are hard at work making sure that you are safe. Really. They’re listening right now. Doesn’t that make you feel all secure and everything?

Republicans are trying to steal elections again. They have proposed that California’s electoral votes, instead of going all to the winner of the state like almost all other states, would be divided according to whomever wins each district.

While this sounds great and is, to a degree, in principle, it is vote-stealing because it is not a call for such democratic vote-distribution nationwide–only in the biggest electoral state in the union, which also happens to vote Democratic every election year nowadays.

If there was a proposal to do this nationwide–for every state to divide their electoral votes–I’d likely vote for it–though a better system would simply be to use the popular vote, a strict numerical proposition.

But that’s not what the proposal is for. If you suggested doing this in the South, especially in Texas, then Republicans would fight it tooth and nail. Nor would they ever propose this in California if it voted conservatively. They don’t want votes to be fairly and evenly counted–they just want to win elections, no matter how crookedly.

Not that this should be any surprise: Republicans tried this same tactic three years ago, and failed. (Though I am surprised that neither the AP writer not Kevin Drum seemed to remember this.) And I’m pretty sure that Californians are not so stupid that they’d let Republicans use Californians to steal yet another election.

If you don’t believe in Santa Claus and think the Easter Bunny is not real, or if you wanted to know if Harry Potter died or not before you read the last book, then you might want to know the secret identity of Fake Steve Jobs. I didn’t mean to know, but those Frigtards at Engadget had to spoil it right at the top of their front page. I won’t spoil it for you, but you can follow the link to the New York Times article which revealed him or her. I guess you can spoil it in the comments to this post if you want. But since I haven’t read the book yet, don’t tell me whether Harry Potter died or not, Bokay?

Oh, this is too precious:

Republicans accuse Democrats of moving too slowly on spy bill

An angry group of Republican House members accused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Saturday of delaying a vote on President Bush’s legislative priority — a measure amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Earlier in the day, House Democrats rearranged the schedule to place the measure in third place, after an energy bill and funding for the Defense Department.

This is ludicrous on at least three major levels: first, that the specifics demanded in the Republican version of the legislation are reasonable or necessary; second, that it is indeed an “emergency” and is needed now as opposed to later today or even tomorrow; and third, that the Republicans are railing at Democrats for delaying by a day or two what has been already delayed by the White House for months, at a time, when the Republicans in Congress are being massively obstructionist and stopping huge amounts of vital legislation with the filibuster for no better reason that it “works for us” politically. (That last was Trent Lott himself, who said in April: “the strategy of being obstructionist can work or fail … and so far it’s working for us. Democrats are the ones taking the blame for not getting anything done.”)

The fact of the matter is, this recent FISA bill is another “Patriot Act” bamboozle: claim pressing national security, say it’s an emergency and needs to be done yesterday, then wail on the Democrats like there’s no tomorrow, screaming that they’re putting the country at risk. And it’s working, of course.

He and other GOP leaders have said that the country will be at a greater risk of a terrorist attack if Congress doesn’t act immediately—and they have accused Democrats of “playing politics” by balking at some of the provisions the administration is seeking.

And so, from the CNN article:

Last night, the House rejected a Democratic version of the FISA bill, 218-207, with a two-thirds majority required for passage, but the Senate passed a Republican-sponsored bill Friday night, 60-28.

Some Democratic sources have predicted the House will pass the Republican-sponsored measure, and send it to Bush.

Republicans claim there’s a huge rush on this, and that the Democrats have failed to respond to it:

“There’s been a ruling, over the last four or five months, that prohibits the ability of our intelligence services and our counterintelligence people from listening in to two terrorists in other parts of the world where the communication could come through the United States,” Boehner said on an interview with Fox News anchor Neal Cavuto.

“This means that our intelligence agencies are missing a wide swath of potential information that could help protect the American people,” Boehner added. “The Democrats have known about this for months.”

Umm, okay… then what has the White House been doing? Or Republicans in Congress, for that matter? Apparently no Republican has seen fit to move on this in the same four- or five-month period. It has only become an issue in the last hours before August recess–when the White House and Republicans can conveniently pressure the Democrats into accepting a questionable version of the legislation.

One of the major sticking points: the administration’s insistence that Alberto Gonzales be given broad new authority to oversee warrantless wiretapping. Now, why on Earth would Democrats want to object to that? Hasn’t Gonzales proved himself to them yet? Why would they not be eager to hand over unprecedented power and authority to perform massive eavesdropping and wiretapping without oversight by any court or committee, to such an honorable, up-front, and honest guy like Alberto Gonzales?

Geez, what’s wrong with those Democrats?

Of course, there’s much more to it than just that. Read this article from Harper’s for a fuller picture of the fraud that the Republicans are–again!–trying to pull on all of us.

Things have changed. I remember when I was a little kid, my father used to work at SRI, a research institute, and took me in to work sometimes. I remember the big computers lining the walls of some rooms, the desktop calculators almost as big as some desktop computers today. But that technology, in the late 60’s/early 70’s, was still almost a decade from even starting to infiltrate the home.

I first worked on a computer at home around 1980, maybe 1981. It was an Apple III, a honking big thing intended to outclass the Apple II. Word processing then was like coding a web page today using a text editor–you had to type in style changes manually. The printout was from a dot matrix printer with a resolution of maybe 8 dots tall for 12-point text. Hopelessly primitive by today’s standards, it was top-of-the-line for home use then. Before that, my brother and I enjoyed using our father’s home terminal that connected to the mainframe at SRI via a modem which you activated by placing a telephone handset onto it (we played a lot of text-based Star Trek games on it). Before that, aside from trips to my father’s work, we got glimpses of the upcoming technology from our father, an engineer who did educational stuff for us at home like building a binary calculator on a plank of wood.

I bring this up to point out that I was privileged, in a way, to witness a transition. As a child, I grew up in an analog world, and have watched it change to a digital one. Very much like people who lived before the Space Age and after it, or before the Nuclear Age and after it. The transition that I and everyone else who has lived through it is much more significant. Nuclear power has ebbed in its importance and frightfulness; space travel has not changed us as much as many thought it would, especially after it was mostly abandoned after the Apollo program. The Information Age, on the other hand, has transformed how we live.

One important aspect of this is to remember that virtually all information can be made digital–text, numeric data, sounds, images, video… and perhaps more information when sensory technology improves in the future (touch, textures? tastes and smells?). Computers can then juggle and sort the digits, doing just about anything with the data, limited only by our imagination and what software authors can bang out. It is so early on in the Information Age that we have not yet even scratched the surface of what is possible.

I refer to it as the Information Age and not the Computer Age because computers (not counting hand-driven machines like the abacus) have been around for quite some time (the first ones were in the mid-19th century, running on steam; the first electronic ones came in the 1930’s); however, the greatest impact from computers has come with the Personal Computer, and the ability of computers to affect all our lives, not just researchers and corporations. In fact, the real impact came not in the 80’s, when more and more households got PCs, but in the mid-to-late 90’s, when computers started becoming ubiquitous, and the Internet started to get popular.

I remember researching an essay in high school. I remember going to the library and searching for books, using the card catalog. I remember looking through tables of content and indexes, skimming through chapters while standing between the book stacks, checking to see if the book had information which could be useful for me.

Today, I see my own students sitting down at a computer and pulling up Google or going into WikiPedia, and pulling out far more data, far more focused and relevant, in just a few minutes–work that would have taken me hours when I was their age, and which would not have been as fruitful. It is in this observation that you begin to see the impact of the Information Age, in just one of its aspects.

And yet, I still get badly-researched papers from some of my students–not because the technology failed them, but rather because they did only the minimal work necessary to bang out an essay. I shake my head and refrain from giving them the “when I was your age” speech; I don’t need more than the gray hairs I’ve already got to make me look like a geezer.

But look at what else there is. Ordering books and whatever else you can think of from Amazon or other online sellers. Finding a good restaurant (did that just yesterday–tomorrow is Sachi’s and my first anniversary since meeting), or checking movie times. Buying music, or videos online. Getting news from countless sources. To mention just a few of the more popular activities now possible using the technology.

Sure, most of that is stuff you could have done before; you could order through catalogs, look through issues of newspapers, visit local shops, or subscribe to any number of magazines or perhaps see them at the local library. But many of these older options included travel, cost, or both, and netted far less depth of information, far less wealth of choice.

Then there is communication; sending email instead of posting letters as I used to when I first came to Japan. Making expensive long-distance telephone calls instead of using Skype or other messaging software.

So much of this may be trite, stuff you know or have considered before. But it is part of an ongoing process so long and vast in the making that, I believe, most people overlook it and do not see the significance of the change. Instead, you get a lot of people complaining about the down sides, about viruses and spam and Internet-based crime. That’s falling off now–I remember back in the late 90’s and early 00’s when it was chic for the media to report on this crime and that crime committed via the Internet. Baseless in meaning–after all, they never ran stories about how telephones or surface mail helped propagate crime, any more than they focused on how criminals use cars. But the Internet, being new and big and scary, got the blame for people who used it instead of older media.

We seem to have transitioned into the realm of the digital without fully appreciating how it has changed us. And that is not significant just so that we can say “wow!” or wonder at gadgetry; it is significant because after seeing where we were and where we are now, we can get at least a vague sense of where we will be in another twenty or thirty years–time enough not only for digital technology to permeate virtually everywhere, but for transmission speeds and data storage capacities to make the unthinkable today mundane tomorrow.

But even more important than the technologies is how they will be put to use: what we’ll be doing digitally, what we’ll have access to, how technology will help us find, sort, evaluate, and execute. As much as computers and other electronics seem to have advanced, we are still in the infancy of the Information Age. The Internet has only been widely used for a decade or so; the GUI-based computer just over two decades. Barely enough time for us to get introduced to the field, and not nearly enough for us to discover what we can really do with it. What applications will be serving us in 2030?

In a few minutes, Sachi and I will be going out to see the latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie. I’m not too thrilled, and neither is Sachi. We bought advance tickets a month or more ago, and the timing was never right to go see it. This is our last chance before it leaves theaters, considering our schedules. Sachi is not thrilled because it has to be the late show, starting at 8:40 and ending not long before midnight. I’m not thrilled due to stomach cramps, which will ebb perhaps just enough to be tolerable throughout the show. But it’s a choice of going now or tossing the tickets.

Why mention this? Because in ten or twenty year’s time, our choices will be significantly different. We’ll probably have the option of seeing first-run movies at home on Ultra-HD video over the Internet, with the flexibility of choosing times and moods to fit our schedules far better than now.

That might not sound like much to you, but it appeals to me greatly at this moment. And that is just one, small, tiny corner of what will change between now and then.

Editor’s note: I wrote this yesterday, when I had zero time to edit and polish, so I did the editing and polishing this morning. A paragraph or image added here, words changed or tacked on there, the odd spelling error corrected. Sorry for the delay.

Just one last note on the whole moving process that I have neglected to mention until now. It has to do with the variety of levels of service you can get. Sachi and I both used movers to move stuff from our old apartments and bring them to the new place. To get a bit of a discount, we used the same company to do both jobs–to varying results. Sachi’s movers were cheerful and helpful from start to finish. My movers, despite being from the same company, were far from that. The lead guy was, if anything, sullen. As if he resented having to do the move. Granted, I did kind of push them on cramming stuff into the truck, and I did have them move a ton of stuff downstairs to the Sodai-gomi area–but all that was part of the contracted service, and it happened near the end of the loading time, when the team’s attitude had already been long expressed.

But there were lots of small details which kind of caught my attention. One was when one of the movers damaged the new apartment. He was hauling in part of a bookcase when he hit a doorway with it–denting the door frame and chipping off an edge of the bookcase. Rather loudly, too. Knowing this could cost us from our deposit when we move out, we asked that the moving company’s insurance take care of it. Last we heard–quite some time ago–the moving guy claimed that the company didn’t carry such insurance and that if we pressed it, he (the moving guy who did the damage) would have to pay for it out of his own pocket.

This is unacceptable on at least a few different levels. First of all, any moving company worth its salt would have either insurance or some system that could handle such damage. It’s not like this is an unexpected occurrence, after all–this has to be the #1 or #2 problem in the service part of the process. If the movers cause damage, they should be prepared to take care of it, seamlessly and without fuss for the client. But worse than that is to have the mover himself tell the client that he’ll be punished financially if we press them on it. That’s unprofessional to the point of scoundrel behavior–like they’re going cheap on us and playing on our guilt. Either we pay for damage we didn’t cause, or make this poor slob who probably gets paid a pittance shell out more than he can afford for us.

But it wasn’t just how the company itself dealt with the issue, it’s also about how sloppily the work was done. Case in point: when they moved my washer-dryer to the new place, they had to disassemble it. The dryer sits upon a brace that is attached to the back of the washing machine; it is attached to the framework with four bolts and nuts. Without them, the dryer would only loosely sit atop the frame, and would quickly nudge itself off and fall to the floor if operated.

After the movers finished up in the old place and I was getting ready to shut it down, I noticed the four nuts and bolts sitting on the floor near where the washer and dryer had been; they had left them behind. I picked them up and gave them to the chief mover, who did not apologize for having made such an oversight.

When they moved the stuff into the new place, they did not put the washer and dryer back together again, because the drainage tube was on the wrong side. Another bad point about the company: movers should be aware of basic installation of such stuff, washer-dryers in particular. Instead, they left us with the washer in the nook designed for the machine, and the dryer sitting on the floor nearby. What’s worse, the chief mover completely forgot about the nuts and bolts–again. He left the job with them in his pocket. That left us unable to put it back together, even if we did manage to switch the drainage tube in the way the movers should have done themselves.

We called the company the next day, and they said they’d send the parts to us as soon as they could. We expected them to arrive the next day by express mail or takkyubin, seeing as how we could not do our laundry without them. Instead, we got them more than a week later. Even by regular mail, it couldn’t have taken more than two days, usually just one–meaning that these guys took about a week before they sent them to us, with the brief note below:

By this time, it was meaningless anyway. As I described in a post about a month ago, our problem was solved by the Internet guy. That is, the guy who came to set up our fiber-optic Internet connection for the phone company. On his way out, he noticed that our dryer, which still sat on the floor (which is probably why he noticed it) was a model that required a part to be replaced due to a recall. I then asked him if he knew about washing machines, and he said he did–and the telephone company guy then proceeded, in just a few minutes, to switch the direction of the drainage tube. I then asked him what we should do about the missing nuts and bolts–and he simply opened up his small tool case and produced exactly the nuts and bolts we needed. Like magic. As if every Internet installation guy of course carries a set of nuts and bolts to fasten a drying machine to a washing machine frame.

That’s what really put the movers to shame: when the phone company guy can do the mover’s expected work ten times better. Yes, I know the phone company guy was unrealistically helpful and prepared, but still, that’s exactly the kind of work the movers should have been prepared for–instead of not doing their expected work and losing the same essential parts twice in one evening and then taking a week to return them.

Yeah, I know… whine, whine, moan, moan. I’ll shut up now, and maybe try to get back to political issues and and social commentary.

I almost missed the milestone: today is my fourth anniversary of non-stop blogging. 1,461 days (365 x 4 plus a leap year day) since August 2, 2003. That was a photo post on my college’s graduation day (we’re holding it on the 4th this year, keeping it on a Saturday). I noted the first anniversary, the second, the third, and then today is the fourth. Makes me wonder what’s be happening when I reach year five.

Today, I kept busy with a meeting at work (we’re getting moving on switching our internal email system to GMail, specifically Google Apps for Education), grading tests, and doing shopping outside. Tonight, there seems to be an O-bon Dance festival at Sunshine City–I can hear the music from here (150 KB mp3 audio), and you can see a bit of the setup between the buildings from our balcony.

That’s the Prince Hotel on the left, the NTT Building on the right, the Sunshine 60 Tower behind the NTT Building, and Shinjuku skyscrapers above in the middle. The O-bon festival is below and center. Closer up, it looks like this:

A very standard O-bon setup–you can see similar photos I took a few years back in Inagi. There’s always a square platform in the middle, lanterns and lights strung out from that central area, people dancing around it, a wider circle of spectators beyond that.

Later, Sachi came home and we went to what is now our usual yakitori place–not the mom & pop place, but the bigger restaurant around the corner. The one where there’s an old guy who comes in every night and monopolizes the waitress’ time with idle chat. Before we left, a group of seven or eight older men came in wearing garb that told us they were with the O-bon festival themselves. It seemed like they had gotten an early start on the drinking, and were ready to get soused. So after a few made bombastic and half-drunk attempts to speak English to me, we finished and left, with a friendly “goodbye!” to the O-bon guys.

You may recall a few months ago when Bush’s “Freshly Stacked™” Supreme Court issued a decision that changed the way pay discrimination is treated. Up until that time, discriminatory pay was actionable for 180 days after the last occurrence; if your employer started paying you less because of your gender or color say, twenty years ago, and you just found out with the last paycheck, you could sue them. But Bush’s court re-interpreted that to mean 180 days after the initial decision was made to discriminate.

Under this new interpretation, it is virtually impossible to sue for discriminatory pay differences. It would force workers to constantly demand to see co-workers’ pay amounts, constantly checking whether there is a discrepancy, and once one is found, leaves them virtually no time to resolve the matter out of court. It even rewards employers guilty of discrimination for breaking the law for longer periods of time–ironically, if an employer can come before the court and say that they violated this person’s rights for longer than 180 days, they get off scot-free. It also encourages employers to create hostile, segregated, and intimidating environments to keep workers from discussing their pay.

The message was clear: employers got a huge green light to pay workers differently based upon sex, color, or whatever other distinction they saw fit.

This was argued as being an oversight in the creation of the original law; it would be hard to actually approve of discrimination, but hey, that’s what the law says, so what are you going to do? The problem is, that’s not what the law said–it was one possible interpretation of what the law said, and was not a necessary one.

So why get upset? Just have Congress amend the law, and we’re okay again.

Well, aside from all discrimination suits now pending being voided and decades of lawbreakers given a free pass, there is the slight problem of getting such legislation past the Republicans obstructionists in Congress and the Bush White House. Just today, the House passed a bill that did the right thing:

To amend title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990, and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 to clarify that a discriminatory compensation decision or other practice that is unlawful under such Acts occurs each time compensation is paid pursuant to the discriminatory compensation decision or other practice, and for other purposes.

Great! All good, right?

Except, of course, that a lot of stuff has gotten through the House… but it’s the Senate where the Republicans are blocking everything, and this will be no different. Senate Republicans will use the filibuster (again, with utter hypocrisy) for the umpteenth time, and even if that hurdle is cleared, it stands to be vetoed (PDF) by the White House:

H.R. 2831 would allow employees to bring a claim of pay or other employment-related discrimination years or even decades after the alleged discrimination occurred. H.R. 2831 constitutes a major change in, and expanded application of, employment discrimination law. The change would serve to impede justice and undermine the important goal of having allegations of discrimination expeditiously resolved.

Yes, isn’t it horrible that an employer can be sued even if they have continued to discriminate for decades!

Translation: the White House read is that discrimination only occurs at the time the initial decision to discriminate is made. So, in principle, if I were to start refusing today to hire a black person based upon their race, and then continued to make the same decision every week for 20 years, I would only be guilty of discrimination the first time I made such a decision, and not the subsequent 1,041 times after that. Presumably, this is based upon the “I forgot I was continuously breaking the law” defense, that a business could not be expected to remain aware of an ongoing illegal activity beyond a certain time frame.

As I mentioned above, the decision was originally played as being essentially a typo, and that the Supreme Court regrettably had to point out that typo though nobody really wanted it that way–but the White House stance is now that they agree with the typo, they believe the typo was the best thing all along, and that the typo should be followed, because it wasn’t really a typo, it was actually a feature. It even goes so far as to claim that the Ledbetter Fair-Pay Act would be a “major change” when actually it would simply reverse the Bush Supreme Court re-interpretation, and bring the law back to where it has been for decades.

Really what the White House is saying is, “we like the fact that Roberts and our other stooges made it possible to discriminate based on sex and color and whatever else we like, and we want it to stay that way, otherwise it could cause all sorts of nasty legal problems for our bigoted corporate pals.”

My take: don’t expect fair pay to show its head again anytime soon–not until Democrats take a much bigger majority in the Senate and the White House as well. Which, hopefully, will be starting in January 2009.

I don’t think so. Even though the governor is a Republican and so the Dems would not pick up a seat, I’m pretty sure that Senator “It’s a Series of Tubes!” Stevens will not be strongly pressured to resign, even though the FBI raided his house in a corruption investigation. They may not have found $100,000 in his freezer, but they have already found corruption galore which led them to the raid in the first place.

Frankly, I think that both Jefferson and Stevens should resign. Neither will, of course, until they’re sentenced, and maybe not even then… but it’s about time that Republicans started recognizing that corruption is far from being a Democrat thing. Shockingly, even Michelle Malkin seems to realize this.

I stopped by a few electronics stores today to look for some gadgets. Usually the best stuff is to be found in the discount bins, but I was looking for a new mouse today as well. I have been using a Logitech Click! mouse, a dependable old variety that I got at Yodobashi a few years back for just ¥2000. It’s corded, but that’s the better alternative here in Japan; the good part is that it’s a nice, dependable mouse with four buttons (one is the scroll wheel, the fourth just below the wheel). But they’re getting aged, and my Logitech V270 Bluetooth mouse seems to have crapped out on me, so I went looking for a replacement. I wanted a mouse that (1) had 4 or more buttons, (2) was regular-sized, not that tiny “portable mouse” crapola, (3) tracked well on all kinds of surfaces, and (4) cost close to ¥2000.

What I found was the Sanwa Supply MA-G9DS. It has, surprisingly, seven buttons: two in the normal places, a scroll wheel button (also normal), and two buttons on the left side above your thumb–but the scroll wheel can also be pushed left and right for two more button actions. It’s marked as only working on Windows, but my Mac detects all seven buttons just fine. It tracks better than the Logitech (no skips so far, much better than any mouse I’ve used to date), and is simple. One strange point: the cable has a weird, almost metallic mesh sort of feel to it.

But I can live with that just fine. It even has a built-in USB plug cap–not that I’ve ever had problems with loose stuff in my bag getting into the USB connector. It costs ¥2680, but that’s close enough for what you seem to get.

Next, I was surprised to find that flash memory is coming down in price. Just a few years ago, 32 MB was the size memory stick you got for ¥2000; now it’s 128 MB. But they had a surprise in the store: an import, a Kingston USB flash stick… 1 GB, for ¥1980.

It was big enough (in capacity) and cheap enough that I decided to pick one up, just as a spare (I already have two 256 MB flash drives). I have seen cheap USB flash sticks at Costco, but none this cheap for this price, and certainly none outside of Costco. The same product does cost $13 in the US, about $3.50 less than it does here, but such low-priced stuff is not easily findable in Japan; it was certainly a bargain.

Finally, an old item at a new price: one of those F. A. Porsche-designed LaCie USB 2.0 external hard drives (250 GB).

I didn’t buy it for myself, actually (I already have two of the things), but for a friend looking for such a drive. My two have done fine for me over the past three or so years, and when I saw it on sale for ¥9800 ($83–$15 cheaper than Amazon in the US!) I recommended it to him, and he said to buy it. The image above is not the one I bought today, it’s one of my old ones–but it’s nearly identical. Small vents have been added to the back left side, and the power on-off was changed from a switch to a button, but it’s mostly the same.

You may not think that any of these are particularly new, fancy, or cheap–but remember, I’m looking for bargains here, not cutting edge, and this is Japan, where electronics usually cost 40-60% more than they do in the U.S. It was certainly good enough.

Big chink in the apartment armor: our neighbors on both sides smoke. Furthermore, they like smoking on the veranda (one mentioned something about the building being no-smoking, so maybe they have no choice but to smoke outside). We noticed this a few times before from the neighbors on the south side, but the neighbors on the other side just came in today–and twice in one hour I got a huge dose of cigarette smoke in my living room.

The problem: we keep our balcony doors/windows open quite often to ventilate and to cool the place down. If someone smokes out there, their smoke is drawn directly into our place via the wind, and suddenly it’s as if a smoker has entered the room. Worse, closing the doors and windows won’t help–it’ll just trap the smoke inside, which means that we have to experience the whole cigarette or series of cigarettes.

I am semi-allergic to cigarette smoke. I don’t know if it’s an actual medical condition or just a psychosomatic quirk, but the results are the same: when I am in the presence of cigarette smoke, my throat gets sore, I get nauseous, I get headaches, and generally feel like crap. Keep it up and I am prone to catch colds.

Which means that if our neighbors smoke on their balconies and we can’t do anything about it, I am royally screwed here. I will have to have Sachi find out more; I tried talking to the smoking neighbor as politely as I could, and she was polite back, but she used vocabulary I could not figure out. We’ll also have to talk to the administrative office downstairs.

I sure as hell hope that we can figure something out….

Trying to comment on all of the utter disgrace coming out of the Bush administration, not to mention right-wing politics as a whole right now, would be like trying to run commentary on ten different baseball games at once–which is one reason I haven’t tried to over the past week (aside from being busy doing two jobs at once in addition during our busy weeks). But here is a look at only a few of the stories currently out there.

Alberto Gonzales has been responsible for such dishonor and misconduct that, under standards that were in effect before the Bush administration, he should have resigned in disgrace long ago. But this is the Bush administration, more specifically Bush 43, under which you can stay in office until you are actually put on trial for a crime, so long as you abide by the conservative code. Now there is solid proof that Gonzales perjured himself repeatedly–he is contradicted both by the records and by the head of the FBI in at least one case–but of course the White House is trying to spin it so that it only seemed that Gonzales was guilty of perjury–and the “Liberal Media™” obligingly and promptly changed headlines from “FBI Chief Contradicts Gonzales” to “FBI Chief Seems to Contradicts Gonzales.” At issue in this case is whether the NSA wiretapping program was discussed when Gonzales and Andy Card made their visit to Ashcroft in his hospital room; Gonzales emphatically denied it, but FBI chief Mueller directly contradicted him. There is a long list of other examples where Gonzales perjured himself (when he wasn’t practicing his contemptible string of “I don’t know”s and “I’m not answering that”s), but the hospital visit is the spotlight case of perjury at the moment. The New York Times is now reporting that it’s not just the FBI chief–now, at least six officials and former officials are directly stating that Gonzales lied.

At the heart of all this is the warrantless wiretapping case, which in itself is a direct violation of the Fourth Amendment–something which might actually have been acted upon if the Republicans hadn’t been in charge of Congress at the time and squelched any investigation. I still say the Democrats should have, and still should start investigations anyway. But what the hell, it’s only the the Constitution and the Bill of Rights we’re talking about, right? It’s not as if the Bush administration hasn’t shredded those documents to pieces already anyway.

What else has been happening? We’ve found out yet again that a Bush political appointee blocked scientific reports that disagreed with the neocon worldview, this time preventing the Surgeon General from reporting on links between poverty and health. Yes, it has come to the point where something so blatantly obvious as the fact that poverty is not conducive to health is so politically damaging to the administration that the Surgeon General himself must be gagged and prevented from even reporting the matter, much less doing anything about it.

Meanwhile, politicization of the government proceeds unabashed. Bush has regularly appointed people wholly inappropriate for the positions they would hold–for example, appointing Steven Griles, a former lobbyist for the mining, oil, and gas industries, as Deputy Secretary of the Interior (he’s now serving a 10-month sentence for obstruction of justice); anti-union Linda Chavez, appointed by Bush to head up Labor, followed by another appointee who was a severe critic of Affirmative Action; Gale Norton, a property-rights advocate who said that companies have a “right to pollute,” to head up the Interior Department; and many, many others, including the current nominee for Surgeon General, a man who thinks that homosexuality is an illness that can be “cured.”

So, of course, the streak continues. Bush is now appointing David Palmer to head up the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The irony? He was himself the subject of “at least one complaint of employee abuse,” this while he was the chief of the employment litigation section in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Numerous veterans of that office decried Palmer’s nomination, claiming that he failed to protect equal employment rights for minorities, shutting down discrimination cases while at the same time pushing “reverse-discrimination” cases which favor white males.

More news on how badly the administration lied about Pat Tillman: new reports suggest that his shooting may not even have been an accident. The proximity of bullet holes in Tillman’s forehead suggest that he was fired upon with a machine gun at close range, as close as ten meters away or even closer–something which was also covered up. This is the second major revelation in the Tillman case since it was revealed that he was killed by friendly fire; newly released documents, in fact, say that there was no enemy activity in the area at all. Tillman’s death was lied about by a Bush administration struggling to overcome the news of Abu Ghraib; they took Tillman, who was a critic of the war (calling it “illegal,” and publicly planning to meet with Noam Chomsky, an Iraq War critic), and used him as a political prop to stoke patriotism to support the war. This new information has even sparked talk in far corners that the Bush administration actually had him killed to shut him up–but personally I see this as straying into “Vince Foster” territory.

Meanwhile, a soldier who served in Iraq is being pilloried by the right-wing chickenhawks for telling the truth, for reporting on the fact that war dehumanizes and that in a war, soldiers can find themselves doing things they would normally consider inappropriate–as if that’s not blindingly obvious. But right-wingers will not stand anyone “attacking the troops” (that, after all, is their prerogative).

Things are going so swimmingly in Iraq that the Iraqi Prime Minister is demanding that Bush remove General Petraeus. Why?

Well, in part because the U.S. is arming Sunni tribesmen in a feeble attempt to “fight al Qaeda.” This sounds great, but there’s a problem: it’s based upon fiction. In reality, al Qaeda is not so much a threat in Iraq, and would likely die off there once we leave. The real problem is the civil war. But in the Bush administration, politically contrived fictions are deciding policy, so in their worldview, the Iraqi civil war doesn’t exist, and al Qaeda is our chief enemy there.

So to solve the politically contrived fictions, we are arming Sunnis, who will use those arms to enflame the civil war. A perfect example of how political fantasies can destroy the balance of reason in reality. Bush seems to have found a general willing to enforce such madness, which is why the Iraqi Prime Minister is hopping mad, and is now threatening to further arm and support Shi’ite militias… which will deepen even further the civil war. Bush’s solution: to tell the Iraqi PM to “calm down.” Excellent diplomatic skills there.

Back in the U.S., more and more evidence is becoming available to prove that the Republican Party knowingly participated in “voter caging” projects in key election states in 2004. “Voter caging” is when mass mailings are made to voters, and any mail which is returned as “undeliverable” is then the basis for challenging that voter’s right to cast their vote. In one example, a large number of mailings were sent to mostly black voters who were college students; the mail was sent to the students at their school addresses during summer and was marked “do not forward.” In other words, the mail was designed specifically to generate unsendable mail, so as to deprive large numbers of these young people of their voting rights. Tens of thousands of such challenges were generated by the GOP via huge numbers of such mailings. You can watch the video report on the matter here on PBS NOW, which notes that the U.S. media is virtually ignoring the story, while it is making some headlines overseas. The Liberal Media™ strikes again!

So, what has the media has been sharply focused on in past days an weeks? Hillary Clinton’s cleavage and John Edwards’ haircuts.

We’re having our first major thunderstorm after moving in to our new place. In case I didn’t mention it before, I love thunderstorms. Got some good audio on this one, too, just haven’t processed it yet. To get the audio, I used my Canon S1-IS, which only records audio if there’s a pre-existing photo image. So I took some photos so I could fill in the audio.

Now, I did not even try to catch a lightning bolt. If it were dark, I could have–set the camera to take a 15-second exposure, and then take enough exposures, eventually you’ll get a few shots, like I did here, here, and here (I told you I loved these things–even after I was struck by lightning once.) But in daylight, forget it–you have to catch the lightning bolt within a split-second shot, and you have to be facing just the right direction to boot.

So imagine my surprise when I caught exactly that lucky break. I took a photo just as lightning flashed (it only did so once every few minutes), and even then I didn’t think I had gotten it; the little picture screen on the camera didn’t show it. But when I looked at it after I came inside, this is what I found:

If you look at the unreduced crop of where it hit, you see this:

So you can see, pretty sharply, the one place in Tokyo where you would not have wanted to be right at that moment.