Via Fake Steve Jobs’ diary, this is a pretty hilarious YouTube video of someone trying to use Vista’s speech recognition to write a PERL script. As FSJ notes, it may or may not be a comic play-up of the perils of using speech-driven software. Frankly, however, I was pretty surprised at how well it seemed to react to most spoken commands; at the same time, it plays up problems that would come from using such a system, such as knowing all the specific commands necessary to navigate the system or perform certain tasks–such as making capital letters, as shown in the video. It also rather amusingly shows how human interaction habits, such as saying “thank you” when a request is fulfilled, can muck up the process. In any case, it’s funny to watch. Enjoy.

Conservatives went all gaga when Democratic Louisiana Representative William J. Jefferson became the target of an FBI probe; couldn’t get enough of him, went on and on. Well, now that a Louisiana Senator has been caught with his pants around his ankles, you’d think they’d go even more nuts. Of course, it’s a Republican this time–so wingnuts like Michelle Malkin, who went batty over the Jefferson story, are curiously silent, as is Rush Limbaugh. Same with the other major blogs, like Little Green Footballs, PowerLine, The Neocon Express, Blogs for Bush, etc.; others, like Instapundit, have little throwaway lines on the matter. Those on the right who are speaking on the matter are essentially saying, “so what?” and excusing him because he’s admitted to it and apologized (only when it was clear he’d get caught), and besides, he’s from Louisiana, so he shouldn’t do anything so silly as resign or anything, just for breaking the law.

Not that liberals enjoy talking about their own scandals either, but at least they’re more up-front about them. When the Jefferson story broke, DailyKos instantly and roundly attacked Jefferson, and the story was well covered on left-wing blogs like Talking Points Memo, Think Progress, FireDogLake, Talk Left, and many others. Liberals were calling for his resignation, or at the very least that he step down from his committee seats.

And while Vitter’s getting few easy breaks in the press today, I do not recall outlets like Time Magazine giving big wet kisses to William Jefferson, like they are to Vitter by asking if he got “hustled” by the D.C. Madam and Larry Flynt–despite not even the barest shred of evidence existing to suggest such a thing. Not surprisingly, the Vitter story is buried deep in the back pages of Fox News’ web site, and the Washington Times doesn’t even have his story on the front page.

But you have to admit, when you’ve got a stalwart Republican who is staunchly against gay marriage and scores 100% with Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition on family issues who then gets revealed as an adulterer with a prostitution service, the old “why am I not surprised” factor does play into it a bit. One might even be more surprised that he was not caught indulging in a gay prostitution service, being anti-gay and all. Wait–no, that’s usually true with right-wing anti-gay preachers more than with congressmen. Gotta keep that scorecard straight.

Now that we’ve been living here for ten days, there are a few impressions of the place I figured I’d share.

1. The Size. Honestly, I felt it would be bigger. It’s 73m², which is just 11m² less than my Inagi place. But the hallway eats up a lot of that space. I dunno, maybe they’re counting the balcony in that as well?
2. The Bathroom Door. You swing it shut and let go, and it closes perfectly, ending with a firm but quiet click. They couldn’t have balanced it better.
3. Lamp Switch Tags. They put the TV, phone and Internet jacks in one side of the room, but the switch which turns that light on is labeled “Dining Room.” The other end of the room, devoid of any media outlets but with a wide bay-window view perfect for a dining table, is labeled “Living Room.” Hello?
4. Mirror Defogging. The mirror outside the bath/shower has a heated defogging mechanism; the mirror inside the shower doesn’t. Somebody call an electrician–they got that reversed, too.
5. Easily Maintained Kitchen. At first I fretted about the usability of an all-electric kitchen–I’m still not sure how well I’ll be able to cook popcorn, it’s hard to find the right pot that’ll work with the electric “burners.” But it’s a dead cinch to keep clean. Just wait for it to cool and wipe it all down. Sweet.
6. 24-hour Supermarkets. I have found no fewer than three within easy walking distance of the apartment now. One on our building’s 1st floor; another, Seiyu, on the other side of Sunshine City; and one more, Maruetsu, down Kasuga Boulevard a bit. That said, I thought I’d be using them a lot more during the odd hours of the night. Not yet, but it’s still early.
7. Convenience Stores Galore. Just how many can you pack into a neighborhood? It’s pretty astounding, really. Just Family Mart alone counts for a dozen stores within ten minute’s walking distance, mostly between us and the station. They seem more ubiqutous here than vending machines, fer chrissakes. Or would be, if there weren’t stupendous numbers of vending machines, especially when packed in groups of a dozen or more all along one side of a building along a block.
8. Soft “Hardwood” Floors. I was surpised how easily they could be dented in by the rollers on my computer chair. They seem more like soft plastic than hard wood.
9. Elevator Quirks. It doesn’t take too long to wait for one to arrive, usually–not too surprising with three servicing each floor. All too often there’s one on the first floor and one on a higher floor. But if one is coming your way, push the button quick–if you push the call button when it is less than five floors away, it won’t stop for you, even though you pressed the button about three seconds in advance.
10. Balcony Cleaning. I thought the windows would be hard to keep clean and the balcony floor easy. Strike that: reverse it.
11. Layout Hiccups. I thought that my furniture layout plan for the place would need revising; it only took a few tries on the computer to lay out the furniture the way I thought would work, in advance. And whaddaya know: it does. We’re doing wonderfully with stuff laid out the way it is. Cool.

One other thing–these places tend to frown on drilling holes in the wall, though they gave us a wall cradle for the air conditioner remote control which has to be drilled into a wall. More to the point, I need to ask them about drilling into walls to secure furniture in preparation for an earthquake–otherwise a couple of my cabinets are going to fall rather heavily onto my computer chair.

One thing about the new apartment’s view is that you get a look at city life from a height. Earlier this morning, I heard a crunch that most people with driving experience would unmistakably identify as the sound of a vehicular collision. I went to the balcony and saw this scene:

It was actually more dramatic when I first saw it, as the scooter driver (in a light blue t-shirt, wearing the white helmet) was laying prone on the ground about where he is in the photo above. I also felt a little guilty getting my camera, but as the taxi driver was clearly on his keitai calling for emergency vehicles, it wouldn’t make much difference what I did.

The scooter was crunched a little, but not apparently too badly; nothing was broken off in the collision. That’s not necessarily a good thing for the driver, though; he still could have been thrown down to the asphalt pretty hard.

A few minutes later, an ambulance could be heard. Pretty fast reaction, one would think, until you realized two things: one, there’s a fire station around the corner, and two… the ambulance sped by without stopping, apparently on its way to a bigger emergency somewhere else.

A few minutes later, though, another ambulance came and stopped for this accident.

Just yet another incident in the city. It is of note, perhaps, that the accident was between a scooter and a taxi. One can only guess who was at fault. The position of the scooter does not help, as it could have twisted and fallen any which way.

And that’s one of the problems of views like this: you usually don’t get to find out what happened. Like this shot I took the day before:

What the heck is that? Looks like a pretty big fire somewhere, as it’s pretty far off in the distance… but I didn’t see anything on the news on the web about a fire in Tokyo that day.

One of the things that I don’t miss from my old apartment, which I also mentioned before: the trash service. It would be right out the window, and with only a skimpy net to protect it, crows and cats and other creatures would make a mess out of it at the first opportunity, as you can see from this photo from my last week in Inagi:

As a result, we couldn’t toss our trash until late the night before, or early the same morning the garbage people came. It was a huge inconvenience–if you forgot, you’d have to keep the stinky bags in your apartment until the next trash day, or put them out days early and risk being visited by the garbage nazis for not being a good garbage neighbor.

Here in my new building, the same worries do not apply. There’s a trash complex down in the basement second floor, on my way to my scooter cage, where I can drop off any kind of trash, at any time I like. No birds or other critters can get in there, and you can leave stuff at any time of day or night. Sweet.

The standard burnable/unburnable bags get their own special room, with what may or may not be a compactor unit preparing stuff for easy haul-away. You go into a little room and there are these two biggish metal doors with large handles on them.

You open a door, put the bag in, and close it again. Some big noises follow, and your trash is somehow taken care of.

We’ve already had one hiccup in the building; the burnable trash door was out of service a few days ago, causing everyone to pile trash up at the room’s entrance. The next day, a notice was up telling people not to put in bags bigger than a certain size; apparently someone had gotten too ambitious and had jammed up the system.

For everything else, you use the special trash room next door to the plain garbage room.

Here, you’ve got your PET bottles with space underneath for cardboard…

More space for glass bottles, cans, and newspapers & books underneath…

And then in the corner, places for old clothes, milk cartons, and styrofoam trays.

There is also a place for unburnable garbage too big to fit in the regular trash room door, as well as for sodai-gomi–but so far no one is bothering with sodai-gomi stickers. People seem to be throwing out whatever stuff they thought they could fit but couldn’t. A nice, big sofa was there the other day, and disappeared fast. A washer-dryer unit is still down there, probably too big or otherwise problematic for these units. Someone threw out a satellite TV dish, apparently unaware that they are prohibited in this building.

What’s also interesting is that the special trash room is locked–requiring you to wave your key in front of the ping-pong-ball receptor, just like with the front door or bicycle room.

What’s more interesting is that you also have to use the key in order to get back out of the room–I guess people could access the place by coming in where the trash collectors enter.

They don’t have trash chutes here like you see in some U.S. movies for tall apartment buildings, but for Japan, it’s a very nice system.

Before leaving Inagi, I had to get rid of all my excess stuff. And I had a ton of stuff:

2 wood cabinets
1 metal cabinet
1 computer desk
1 computer monitor
1 plain desk
1 scanner
2 printers
3 phone sets
3 carpets
3 video decks
2 stools
1 ceiling lamp
3 gas heaters
2 gas stoves
1 suitcase
1 bed frame
1 hamster cage

I also had a fridge, air conditioner, a TV set, and a computer monitor. These items wouldn’t be picked up by the city–you need to use special recycle shops for those. I arranged to sell or give away most those by other means, however. But before they were spoken for, I had one of the city-recommended recycle shops come over and do an estimate. While they were at my place, I figured that I would have them check out everything else as well, and give me an estimate on how much they’d charge for each item. The answer was pretty shocking.

Even before that, I had gotten very bad vibes from Japanese recycle shops. When I lived in Nakano Ward many years back, I used a local recycle store to shop at, outfitting my apartment. I quickly found that they charged very high prices for used goods–so close to new prices that I eventually decided not to buy used stuff anymore. What I didn’t know was how badly they ripped people off on the other side of the deal.

After I decided to move out of Inagi, I went to a few different secondhand shops (they’re always called “recycle shops” in Japanese) armed with a printout of photos I’d taken of the things I was trying to unload. I soon learned that these people wouldn’t take anything that wasn’t in near-pristine shape–for example, no electronic goods more than five years old, regardless of operating condition. I guess I can see why they would do that–but then they said the same about furniture. My plain wood desk is a very nice one, unmarred and unscarred–plain but very nice. The store owner didn’t care if it was in pristine shape–if it was older than five years, he wanted me to pay him for taking it.

Only two items that I have interested these guys: a gas stove (with burners, the kind you cook on) and a gas fan heater. The gas fan heater is brand-new, just got it last year, and it’s a ¥20,000 model. One recycle shop guy magnanimously offered me a few thousand yen for it. That was the most generous offer I got. And he was they guy who looked most like a yakuza, punch-perm haircut and everything.

Remember the recycle guys I mentioned above who came in and did an estimate? They offered to take the gas stove and gas fan heater… for nothing. Everything else, I would have to pay to get hauled off. And their prices were outrageous. The total came to more than $700. And this was even after I would haul everything down to street level myself–all they had to do was drive up and take it away. They even tried to get me to pay them a fair sum for taking things like my old telephones–before I discovered that you can throw them out in the unburnable trash, for free. They had to know that, and so were really trying to rip me off.

Now, the city will come and haul big stuff off as well, except for refrigerators, laundry machines, air conditioners, and TVs. This is called “Sodai Gomi,” or “oversized garbage.” You go to your local market (supermarket or convenience store) and you buy “tickets” for a variety of goods. You buy tickets by how much they cost, and which ticket to buy depends upon a chart you can get at city hall. For example, the wood cabinets that the recycle guys wanted ¥8000 to haul off, the Sodai Gomi people would take away for ¥500.

When I tabulated the stuff the recycle guys said they would take which could also get taken away by Sodai Gomi, the difference was huge: the city would demand ¥12,500 ($100) for the same stuff the recycle guys wanted ¥62,000 ($500) for. Effectively, the recycle shop could just take it away and then have Sodai Gomi take it from them, and they make a cool $400 for an hour’s work–not to mention the extra hundred-plus bucks they’d make from selling my gas stove and heater to some sucker at near-list prices.

How can they get away with this? I really don’t know. I don’t know why anyone would use them instead of Sodai Gomi, but apparently some people do. Even without that, a lot of the stuff they demand I pay them to haul off would, I am certain, find its way into their shop anyway, and they’d probably ask top dollar (top yen?) for that as well. When I put stuff out for the sodai-gomi people to haul off, a lot of it disappeared the next morning, likely scouted and routed by the recycle shop guys, stealthily coming in with their ubiquitous loudspeakers turned off, stealing what they couldn’t get you to pay them to take.

What a scam. I decided that I would use them only for what I absolutely had to–an old computer monitor (they wanted 3000 yen for that, but no one else would take it). My gas stove I sold with my air conditioner–made 9000 yen where I would have had to pay as much to get it taken away. Everything else went to Sodai Gomi, save for a few other things sold via ads.

I still have that like-new gas fan heater; I’d be damned if I’ll gift those crooks with that nice little machine. I’ll wait until winter and then sell it via an ad. I should be able to get a reasonable price for it.

I’ll probably be doing this from time to time–giving you a look at what’s happening out my window, now that a lot more is out there to happen. What drew me out there this morning was a bit of noise. Now, there is noise–nowhere is free from it–but even when Sachi has the balcony doors open to air out the place, the noise from the street is pretty muted. In Inagi, it was so loud that I had to play loud music or TV in order to half-drown out the repetitive dullness and obnoxiousness of it. Here. it’s more like a faint sound that less annoys you than makes you wonder what’s making it.

Today, it was shouts from men that had me wondering what was going on. At first I thought it was from a construction crew downstairs, but then I discovered the real reason: we live a few block away from a major fire station, and they were conducting drills of some sort.

Actually, I am kind of surprised that we don’t hear sirens a lot more. There’s a fire station next door to where I work, and we get quite a bit of noise from that. Here, we’ve heard them a few times, but nothing to annoy or frustrate. Instead, we simply benefit from having such a public service so close (next-door to which is a major post office, open 7 days a week, 9 am to 9pm on weekdays, 9 to 7 on weekends). A lot of stuff like that is nearby now–the Ward office is halfway from here to the station, for example.

Next up is a potential convenience:

No, not the driving school. You might not see what I’m looking at here, but I include this wide shot with the balcony edge at right of frame to show the closeness. Here is a zoom-in of the previous image:

Yep, that’s the puppy. I pointed out before how the Narita Express train service goes directly to our station, and I may have mentioned the bus–but the bus service direct from Narita Airport stops just 150 meters from our front door. Hard to get better than that.

Lastly, I thought it would be kind of neat to show neighborhood shots from a height. Looking from the balcony, it is possible to take photos and have nothing but neighborhoods in the frame. For those of you who enjoy this kind of thing, 1200 x 900 blowups of each of the following photos is available with a click:

After spending the day unpacking and cleaning (we’re 80-90% there by now), Sachi and I went shopping, and picked up, among other things, a few nice comfortable stools for the balcony. In light of this, we decided to try a little outdoor barbecue. That is to say, we trotted out the gas-canister-driven burner and set up on a small table on the balcony.

Or, at least, that was the original idea.

I had just returned from a trip to Seiyu supermarket (which we have since learned is also open 24 hours–cool!) with the meat and some beer, when I went outside to set up the gas burner. And it wouldn’t work. I tried again and again, inserting and re-inserting the gas canister… and it still wouldn’t work. Convinced that it had somehow broken during the move, I went back to Seiyu and bought a new gas burner.

When we got it home, it had the exact same problem. Wouldn’t light up. Figuring this was too much for a coincidence, we opened up the instructions for the new unit–and then I flashed on the problem: the canister must be turned just so, with a notch in the canister lining up with a groove in the burner unit, for it to fire up. Sure enough, the old burner still worked fine. At least we can get our money back on the new one… but I feel like a royal idiot nonetheless.

So we set up the table and chairs outside and got ready to barbecue some yakiniku.

But the wind was too strong, and kept the hot plate from getting at all hot. So we turned the table in toward the building, sheltering it from the outside as best we could.

Even that wasn’t enough–so Sachi and I spent the better part of the evening covetously protecting the flame, lest the wind steal too much of the heat. Sure, it was stupid–we could have just gone inside and done things twice as fast–but being stupid was most of the fun. We were having a blast, just surrounding the burner and plate like fools, enjoying every scrap of cooked food that finally got done after three or four times longer on the plate than it should have taken, while holding out or coats like we were imitating Batman or something.

Say what you want about us, it was great fun.

This has got to be one of the strangest views from the balcony: a driving school. Not that driving schools are strange in Japan; what’s strange is that it is located smack in the middle of a heavily crowded urban center. A two-story structure, it is the lowest building in the neighborhood, surrounded by a towering Sunshine 60 complex (that’s the entrance to the Prince Hotel above it), and the dozen-story-tall NTT and post office buildings, as well as other tall buildings.

These driving schools do charge a lot of money–it usually costs about ¥300,000 ($2500) for a three-week-or-so training course–but it can’t be enough to really justify taking up so much space in a prime real estate location. This must be one of those throwbacks, something owned for so long with property taxes so low that it doesn’t cost the owner much to exist–but selling the land would incur prohibitive taxes because of that financial gain relative to the original purchase price.

Not that I’m complaining–were it sold, it would likely be replaced by yet another view-blocking high-rise. It’s just a strange anomaly, is all.

Other interesting bits viewed from the balcony:

You get to see how people use their roof space. It must be really nice to have this balcony in the summer time, when it’s not raining, that is.

Little bits of the city congeal to form pockets of light at night; this grouping caught my attention, far away enough that I could not make it out by eye. The “Pioneer” sign is now dark, a small while after I took the photo.

(Click to enlarge.) As I think I might have mentioned before, we can get a direct view down Sunshine 60 street, a pedestrian shopping street with theaters and other shops like Tokyu Hands.

I was wondering why people on a high floor of the NTT building were looking back out at me, until I saw closer up:

It must be the NTT cafeteria.

Sunday was a cleaning day for me. I left Ikebukuro on scooter and headed back to Inagi to clean up the place. Despite all the work over several weeks, there was still a lot left to do. Still junk on shelves and in drawers and cupboards, still items unboxed, so that was the first task. At the end of a few hours, almost everything was packed in a box or otherwise stowed away in one corner of the apartment, leaving the floors bare elsewhere. But not clean.

So next there was vacuuming, then cleaning along the baseboards and fixing up the little and medium-sized messes–gunk stuck to the floor, dust accumulated behind where the washer-dryer had been, etc. After which the place was halfway presentable.

One thing that you quickly become aware of when you clean out an apartment is the sheer mass of junk that has accumulated. When I started paring down my stuff several weeks ago, I impressed myself by throwing out a half dozen largish garbage bags filled with papers and other items that I decided to toss. Well, that was just the beginning, as it turned out. Right up to the last day, I was filling up bag after bag of burnable and unburnable garbage, loads and loads of stuff that I can’t understand why I kept, or can but figured I could do without. I don’t know how many dozens of trash bags there were in the end, but it was quite a heap.

And then there’s what is left behind. After seven years, a lot of stuff happens to an apartment, especially in a climate that ranges from hot and damp to cold and bone-dry. The humidity in summer mixed with the air conditioning, and the humidifier and heating in winter mixed with the cold on the other side of the windows, doors, and walls leads to condensation and other water-related badness that lends to the formation of mold. And so you start to see stuff like this:

And that’s not the worst of it. Near the front door, where the cold metal door drew condensation and the darkness of the closed genkan welcomed spores, there was a lot of damage behind this large cabinet I had by the front door. Here’s what it looked like normally:

It looked okay, really. I mean, the cabinet was hideous and the clutter was not pretty, but it didn’t look moldy or damaged or anything. But when it was removed, it was pretty ghastly behind it. (No, I don’t have a photo, sorry.) The wallpaper (or whatever that wall covering was) was coming off and was pretty severely stained with black and brown mold deposits. The thing is, how can you keep that from happening? Maybe I could have predicted it, but what could I have done on a day-by-day basis to keep it from happening? Haul this big piece of furniture out of place every month and clean behind it? Guess that water condensation was building up on any given day and move this honking big piece of wood across a confined space so I could reach behind and dry the wall off periodically?

In any case, by the end of Sunday, I had as much cleaned as I could. There were three or four spots with mold damage like I described above, and nothing I could do about it. The guy who calculated my deposit told me that the kitchen and bath would be cleaned for me, so no need to deal with that–thank god! Mostly left behind was the pile of boxes and other stuff I had set up so I could load it in a van the next day.

That night, upon returning home, Sachi and I had received the bed frame. While the air conditioning people came in to install the two we had brought with us (charging an extra ¥14,000 yen because our existing tubing wasn’t long enough, so they claimed), we started building the bed frame. The problem: the drawers below the bed were only on one side, and that side was the one with the furniture blocking it. But Sachi pointed out that we could just reverse the construction and put them on the other side. After mulling over the parts and the diagram, I came to the conclusion that her idea would work–all the parts seem symmetrical. And it did, after an hour or so of putting it together. We even had fun with it.

At the end of the night, we were sleeping in an actual complete bed with air conditioning around us. It was actually starting to feel like home. With tons of unpacked boxes, but home.

I am seriously considering writing a bot script for my images folder telling Google Image to stop cataloguing my photos for their image search. I’ve allowed it thus far as a courtesy to web surfers to enjoy the images I have on my site… but this is getting out of hand. A huge number of people are now hotlinking to my images. It seems to have become somewhat of a practice on the web now. The biggest offenders: people in discussion forums, and people on MySpace and similar social sites. People just hotlink to images rather shamelessly, and it’s getting out of hand. When I look at who is visiting my blog, it seems like one out of every twenty or so visitors is a hotlinker… which means they are not really “visiting” the site, instead they are swiping an image from my site, on my dime, and there is no link back to or credit for my site.

Steorn said they’d demo the Orbo in July, and it seems like that will finally happen. The alleged perpetual-motion free-energy machine will go on display, according to reports, at the Kinetica Museum in London. It will repeatedly lift an object, for ten days, in a clear plastic case with no battery or other power source in evidence.

According to Steorn’s CEO:

“The law of conservation of energy has been very reliable for 300 years, however it’s missing one variable from the equation, and that’s time,” said McCarthy.

McCarthy explained to Silicon Republic that Orbo technology works on the basis that occurrences in magnetic fields do not happen instantaneously, and are therefore not subject to time in the way that, say, gravity is.

This time variance allows the Orbo platform to generate and consistently produce power, going against the law of conservation of energy which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed.

Should be interesting to see what comes of this. It sounds fake and it sounds real. One hopes for real.

Update:…or not, again. Steorn cancelled the event due to “technical difficulties.”

Okay, I was wrong. There is a lot more to say about the Libby commutation, especially after reading more news reports. I go on for a bit here, but still there is so much more out there on this case that it’s hard to believe. One of the main conclusions is that Bush did not give Libby clemency to please his base–that would have merited a full pardon–but he did so to shut Libby up. The reasoning is that a full pardon would have erased Libby’s Fifth Amendment right to not testify on certain matters that could incriminate Cheney or the president. Not doing anything would have given Libby the choice of a prison cell or testifying. One can only imagine the communication between Libby and the Bush White House in brokering this deal–or perhaps it was all settled long ago, and Libby agreed to take the fall if he would be granted clemency before having to serve time in jail. Whatever the case, Bush’s actions clearly point to far more than “fairness” or even appealing to his base.

DailyKos has the goods on how Bush twisted the truth in his rationalization of commuting Libby’s sentence: he said that the judge “rejected the advice of the probation office, which recommended a lesser sentence and the consideration of factors that could have led to a sentence of home confinement or probation.” Except that the probation office recommended 15 to 21 months in prison rather than two years. But such a downward departure would only be warranted if the judge ruled completely in Libby’s favor, accepting every single argument on his behalf. In other words, Bush was faulting the judge for not swinging every single point of judgment fully in Libby’s favor. And Bush criticized the judge for being “excessive.”

What’s more, this judge is one that Bush appointed himself, and one could hardly make the claim that he’s been appointing anything but hardcore right-wingers.

People are also talking about how Libby deserved a lesser sentence because his career was “damaged,” “destroyed,” or “devastated.” Bullcrap. If anything, his career is now enhanced. Libby is now a conservative hero, and say what you want about conservatives, they take care of their own. Look at Ollie North and G. Gordon Libby; neither are wanting for anything due to their “damaged” careers. If Libby does not get a lucrative talk-radio gig or book deal, he’ll at the very least get a cushy job at a lobbying firm or a major corporation. Libby will live in the lap of luxury, and now that the prison term has been commuted, his penalty will be that he’ll have to visit a probation officer monthly for a few years. The financial hit is temporary, and will be more than offset by the goodies certain to come his way.

At the very least, Libby is still a felon. Normally I would hope for the right-wingers who support Libby to be at least a little embarrassed about all the slams about liberals and felons in elections… but we’re talking about right-wingers here, and so double standards are the norm.

Here’s one prime example: the right-wing blog PowerLine said,

The problem is that there are no formal or informally agreed upon standards with which to evaluate a president’s decision in these cases. One can look at the practices of past presidents, but it’s a very imperfect guide. For example, we wouldn’t want our presidents to emulate President Clinton’s practice of pardoning those whose family members contributed to his presidential library.

In the Libby case, there are several factors that militated in favor of commuting the sentence (and made out an arguable, though less compelling, case for a pardon). The two most important factors are Libby’s public service and the fact that, at the time Libby made the false statements in question, the prosecutor already knew the answer to the question he had come to Washington to investigate. Indeed, it seems likely that but for the high profile and political context of the investigation, the prosecutor would not have asked Libby these questions. In addition, it may also be relevenat that Bill Clinton was never prosecuted for committing perjury with respect to matters where, unlike here, the facts were not yet known.

Talk about revisionist history! First, they bring up the favorite right-wing cliche, “Clinton did it and worse!” Then they argue that Libby’s case was entrapment, unlike Clinton, where “the facts were not yet known.” Bull. Starr got tapes from Linda Tripp on January 12, 1998, in which Lewinski made references to an affair with Clinton; the next day, Starr had Tripp meet with Lewinski wearing a wiretap to get as much from her surreptitiously as was possible. Starr had fully half a year to develop that evidence before Clinton gave the denial under oath that he was impeached for–on August 17, 1998.

In short, the right wing justifies its double-standard by flat-out lying. Inadvertently, the wingnut just defended Bill Clinton while trying to attack him. And I would have to check out the suggestion that Fitz knew the answer to the questions Libby lied about, or asked them in an attempt to solicit perjury, as was so clearly the case with Clinton.

But in the case of the Plame leak, it’s not just the right-wing bloggers who are full of it. When the leak was first announced, Bush said, “There are too many leaks of classified information in Washington. There’s leaks at the executive branch; there’s leaks in the legislative branch. There’s just too many leaks. And if there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of. … we’ll take the appropriate action.” Um, yeah, right.

Again, some liberals are calling for impeachment; the downside, of course, would be the “Quayle Effect” of putting Cheney into office (which is really just a formal distinction anyway). Can Congress impeach both the president and vice president at the same time? That would do nicely.

So far, conservatives have been mute on the issue. If they agree with Bush’s action, they align themselves with him on an unpopular action which stinks of corruption and cronyism, thus damaging their credibility with the all-important independent voters; if they criticize it, then they risk alienating the Republican base, and thus harm their chances in the primary process. Look for statements issued after a longish wait to see how the wind is blowing, and even then statements which will be as lukewarm, vague, and noncommittal as is possible.

Except for Fred Thompson, who released this statement:

I am very happy for Scooter Libby. I know that this is a great relief to him, his wife and children. While for a long time I have urged a pardon for Scooter, I respect the President’s decision. This will allow a good American, who has done a lot for his country, to resume his life.

It would seem that Thompson is trying to be Reaganesque: folksy, warm, decisive, and unabashedly loyalist, even if it contradicts reason, morality, or plain common sense. Not very hard to see his game plan as being one of the Second Coming.

As a consequence of the timing of our move, we are seeing very little of the view from the new apartment. This is now tsuyu, or the rainy season. As a result, our view tends to be like this most of the time:

However, the view has cleared up from time to time–we saw the moonrise the other night, for example, made even nicer by the effect of some occluding clouds.

A few times, we’ve had a nice nighttime view, aided by the fact that lights penetrate the haze better. Here’s the view to the east, the same direction as the hazy photo above (click to enlarge):

However, there’s a cool little thing we didn’t count on: Kasai Rinkai Park. That’s the place where I go birdwatching sometimes. It has a big, lit-up ferris wheel, which by chance happens to be completely visible from our window; tall buildings stand in the way just to the left and to the right, but of the ferris wheel, we have a clear, open view. In the above photo, you can’t see it (even in the enlarged version), but if you look just to the right of the building with the construction tower, you’ll see a group of bright buildings. Zoomed in, it looks like this (click to enlarge):

The buildings to the left are still a bit of a mystery, but looking at my map book, Akihabara Electric Town happens to be smack in that direction, so I’m guessing that that’s what those buildings are. Here is the tightest zoom on the ferris wheel.

One of the nice things about it is that the lights change on it, like a giant neon wheel. They iris open, they spin, they luminesce in red, blue, green, purple, and white. And it’s not as tiny as the wide view above would suggest; with the naked eye, you can make out detail about like the second to last image above. Kind of a cool fringe benefit to the view.

This has another upside to it: Kasai Rinkai is on the far eastern edge of Tokyo, about twice as far away from us as the Sumida River–and the Sumida River is where one of the nicer fireworks displays is held every year. Since we can see Kasai Rinkai, that means anything that distant will be nicely visible to us. The possible bad news: like with Fuji, we might have blockage. The Sumida display might be just blocked out by that building with the construction crane on top of it. As far as I can figure from the map, the display will be either just behind or just to the left of the left edge of that building. Why can’t our building be the only tall one around here?!?

But there will be other displays almost as visible in that week. Tuesday, July 24 is the Katsushika fireworks display on the Edo River, and Thursday, July 28 is the Adachi Ward fireworks display on the Arakawa River; both of these are visible north of the Sumida display, and hopefully one of them won’t be blocked by some other building. I am beginning to wonder if we should have paid an extra ¥8,000 a month for that 26th floor apartment with the same layout, after all… but nah.

We’ll have to see what comes around.

Wow. Things are going pretty well. Both Apple Stores and AT&T outlets have almost sold out of iPhones after four days, selling as many as 700,000, and Apple stock, I suppose on this news, shot up about $6 yesterday. Probably the stock didn’t go up the first few days because there was worry about how people would react once they got the iPhones. But reportedly, the consumer reaction is very good–and raving reviews continue to come in, like this one from Business Week. [Update: reports are that the stock rose on reports that Apple is getting a 55% profit margin off of iPhones.]

Any viewers of this blog get one?

Already I am enjoying some of the new qualities of this apartment over those of the old. One is living in an auto-lock building. It just feels more comfortable knowing that people won’t knock at your door. Sure, they’ll buzz you from the lobby, but that’s not the same thing. First off, I can see them from the color video intercom without having to lean over the genkan and peer through a peephole, and second, even if I buzz them in, I still have a few minutes while they come in and take the elevator up.

That said, the elevators are not too bad. I have certainly tested them over the past several days, making endless trips carrying boxes and other stuff. You have to wait sometimes, but not that much. There are three elevators I can use, and it’s not common for all three to be busy. In fact, there is usually one near to where I am. And when you do get on, you don’t have to stop at many floors; so far, only one out of every twenty or so trips was punctuated by a stop at an intermediate floor for someone else. That is partly because two of the elevators are express elevators which skip the 3rd to 17th floors, and we live on the 21st floor.

The noise is also a lot better. I found out that there indeed is an election going on (the poster boards weren’t put up until recently, and are still not up in Inagi), and while I saw several loudspeaker trucks in Inagi while moving, I haven’t heard a single one here. Traffic noise is also very muted, and easy to even forget that it’s there.

I have yet to find a significant gripe that doesn’t involve normal moving or other startup woes. So far…

Update: Okay, a few small gripes, having just taken a shower: the water pressure, while acceptable, is not strong. And the mirror in the shower is chest-level, meaning that I’m going to have to squat on one of those little plastic seats in order to shave.

Still, the benefits still make themselves apparent at the same time. When dressing in the bedroom, I heard what at first sounded like the faint jangling of bells. But then I identified the sound as that of a jackhammer, extremely muted. The sound increased greatly when I opened the balcony door; the noise was not coming from the street, but from the top of the ten-story NTT building right below my balcony. Which goes to show how well the double-paned glass works.

One has to remember that the executive branch, unlike the judicial, is not expected to recuse itself when self-interests are present, which explains why Bush was able to commute Scooter Libby’s sentence and see to it that he didn’t serve a single day in jail for his part in destroying the cover of a CIA agent working to uncover weapons of mass destruction.

I would comment on this more, but you know the drill; when the administration so commonly does stuff that provokes the gag reflex, you get used to it. I will refrain from making porn analogies here. But suffice to say that such completely reprehensible partisan corruption is par for the course in this White House.

I’ve restrained from commenting on the iPhone recently for two reasons: there is already iPhone overload in the media, and I’ve been too busy to comment on it anyway. But overall, the iPhone news is very good. Almost all the reviews say that the iPhone lives up to the hype–which is pretty damned impressive, because the hype for the iPhone has been bigger than just about anything else in recent memory. Those are pretty high standards.

In fact, praise for the iPhone is so universal and the hype so positive that a lot of people seem determined to strain out criticisms so that they don’t look like one of the adoring masses. To be certain, the iPhone has bad points, but some people go a bit far. Take this review from the Seattle Times, which was at the top of the iPhone category on Google News. The reviewer lists five likes and dislikes. But the content of the review is telling, both that the good is better than the bad, and that a good writer doesn’t lock himself into round numbers for the sake of round numbers.

Like most reviewers, this guy likes are the touchscreen interface and the look and feel of the device, and then he goes on to the more personal likes of an iPod with a speaker and the interface for dealing with photographs. He winds up, tritely, with a universal observation, that the iPhone will spur other cell phones to have similarly cool features.

In his dislikes column, he covers the first point that everyone brings up: the EDGE network. This is the bane of the early adopter; you can expect iPhones in 2008 to be 3G (Japan and Europe are likely waiting for that); whether this is an upgradable feature is what will determine how many ticked-off early adopters there will be. And it’s a legitimate gripe, as are the points that the web browser can’t handle Flash (a plus in my book) or WMV as well as other media types. But all of these will certainly be corrected over time.

His other dislikes, however, are more telling of a writer trying too hard. He lists durability, battery life, network lock-in and Apple’s “smug attitude.” Durability first: this guy worries about a $600 phone made of glass. Apparently he didn’t read the review by PC World in which they subjected the iPhone to scratch and damage tests, and it performed amazingly. Not only was the touchscreen not marred by being jangled in a baggie with key chains, but it even survived being directly “gouged” with a key. They then tested the iPhone by dropping it on various surfaces from various heights, and again found that it survived multiple drops on concrete sidewalks from ear-level, save for a few mars in the metal bevel. So durability is not as much a problem as the Seattle Times reviewer thinks.

He then winged about battery life, but again, reports have been that the device will hold up to a full day’s worth of non-stop use–and let’s face it, even on a day of air travel, we wouldn’t use such a device every single minute like you would when reviewing it. Also, he didn’t mention actually running the battery down or how long it took, so he may not even have put it to realistic, everyday tests. But Wirelessinfo did test it, and found that while it fell short of Apple’s claims (such claims are always based upon energy-saving usage methods that no real-world users employ), it was still average, or a bit less than average, for the market–not bad for such a flashy, full-screen device. They were able to get 5 hours of talk time, 10 hours of music play, and 3 hours of web browsing. That means if you mix the three, you can talk for 100 minutes, listen to music for three hours, and browse the web for an hour before the battery runs out. Would you really use your iPhone that much in a normal day? Maybe if you live and die by talking on your mobile endlessly, but most people don’t, and if you do, you should get a phone with the longest battery life possible and then another device to do what the iPhone does. Furthermore, CNet reports a quick recharge time, so you probably could just carry a recharging cable in your bag and power up while you’re doing something else.

The third gripe is fairly relevant–if you get an iPhone, you are chained to AT&T Cingular. However, isn’t this true with a lot of phones? Not all, from what I understand, but I thought this kind of thing was pretty common. This is where I am unfamiliar with the market; someone help me out here.

But the fourth gripe: Apple’s “smug attitude”? Come on. If you’re reaching for something to complain about, surely you can do better than that. Apple has a damned good reason to be smug, if that is what they are. As for the “better-than-you attitude” and “controlling” behavior, this pretty well describes any company–hell, just look for any quotes by Steve Ballmer and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

In short, it seems the iPhone has a lot more good than bad going for it, and the bad will likely be handled over time. Many have pointed out that like the iPod, the first iPhones will look kind of lame in two or three years, just like my third generation iPod is now; at the time, it was great, but now? No color, no video, fat profile? Look for future iPhones that will step into faster 3G networks, can download music independent from a computer, can play lots more media types… so forth and so on. It’s version 1.0, people; get over it.

One last note: despite selling half a million iPhones in the first three days and garnering near-universal praise (the criticisms are mostly blended in with the praise but never overpowering it), Apple’s stock fell again, albeit slightly. It seems to be like that with Apple stock: rise with the expectation, fall with the release–even when the release lives up to the expectation. Go figure. Still, my shares are 30% higher today than when I bought them eight months ago, so I’m not complaining.

Once my friend and I had finished stuffing all the boxes we had brought in the apartment, we decided to go down to Pororoca and get some drinks and snacks. Of course, right then, the cable TV guy decided to show up. So my friend went down to shop for munchables, and I waited for the TV person–only it was just the guy who wanted to sign me up to the TV service. The technical guy came later. And while those guys were finishing up, the KDDI guy showed up and wanted to connect the Internet. And throughout this, the intercom was giving me some message that involved a graphic of a box. More on that in another post, though.

But that was the bright point of the day–I was still busy as heck signing stuff and had to stay nailed to the apartment, but everything was working. The first night we stayed here, we had Internet, IP phone service, and cable TV. Naturally, I made use of the Internet right away, but the cable TV, two and a half days later, is still not used. We simply haven’t had time.

Soon after the Internet was hooked up, my friend had to leave–just before Sachi came back. The KDDI guy was still working things out, helping us to try to figure out permutations of the system, and getting my email to work properly. As he was leaving, he happened to spot my dryer.

Let me go back a few steps and explain: my washer-dryer was delivered, but non-functional. The drainage tube was on the wrong side, and until that could be fixed, the dryer could not be placed on top of it. So it lay in pieces in the pre-bath area, where the KDDI guy spotted it. He must have eyes like an eagle, because he actually noticed the serial number on a label on the side of it, and immediately informed us that the dryer was under a recall order. He opened his keitai to check, and sure enough, it was under recall.

Now, his ability to spot this was even more impressive because that dryer is nine years old. But apparently there was trouble with hundreds of thousands of control panels on numerous units. So he called the center responsible for this, and made an appointment for us to have a service technician come out to us Tuesday (tomorrow morning) and fix it.

Now you may be wondering how the heck a KDDI Internet installer technician knew all this (we sure did), and it turned out that he had previously worked to repair washer/dryers. So I asked him if he knew how to fix our problem with the drainage tube, as I had already surmised that a fix was possible, but I didn’t know how. Sachi was looking at me and quietly mouthing “no, he can’t do that!” when the guy pulled out our washing machine and promptly fixed it for us. With much gratitude, we bade The Service Man from Heaven goodbye.

Soon after that, Sachi’s movers started to come in. Hers were a lot nicer than mine, probably because she didn’t tax them as much as I did, and they were working for a pretty girl and not some demanding gaijin. They were smiling and efficient, and soon had everything in. But by the time it was all done, it was late at night, and we just wanted to fall down and zonk out after a nice shower.

At which point we discovered that we had no hot water. The lady at the building’s Kanri office had helped me turn on the water the previous day, but she fell a step short. I asked her if we should turn on something called “Eco-Cute,” as per the instruction sheet, but she said no, that wasn’t necessary. Well, that was the hot water heater. At first, Sachi and I didn’t realize this, and spent a while looking at the voluminous instruction manual book that we got with the apartment. (I promise, I’ll have photos… as soon as I can take the time to take them!) But then I recalled the “Eco-Cute” thing, and sure enough, after we turned it on, the hot water started… after one hour.

That brings me up to Saturday night. Thrilling blogging, isn’t it? Well, scan past this if you’re not interested, as there’s more to come. I’ll at least see if I can condense Sunday and Monday into one post tomorrow.

I woke up around 6:00 am, and at 7:00, I headed north to Ikebukuro. After a short stop at the new apartment, I headed out to the rental car place, which, conveniently, was just around the corner from the new apartment. I was not able to get the reservation switched to the larger van the previous day; I was very worried that not enough would fit in the mid-sized van that I ordered. After all, I had a room full of boxes and stuff outside that as well. If less than half could fit in the van, then I would need a bigger van on Monday.

When I go to the rental office to pick up the van, I innocently ask what the charges are for bringing the van in late. Not that I intended to, but I was just checking. The lady points out that it’s something like ¥1,500 yen an hour. I ask, can I extend on the fly to a 12-hour rental instead of the six I had asked for? She answered “no,” and I said “okay.” I asked purely just to know my options.

I wait a few minutes for things to happen, and then a guy comes up to “help” me. He takes my official order, and starts going on about how it’s really bad and impossible to allow me to be late. Even though they posted the hourly late fees, he said it was not possible at all, and that I had to be back exactly on time. I replied to the effect of, “okay, okay, jeeezz… I was just asking!” And then the bastard tries to charge me for the 12-hour rental without telling me that he has switched me to the new time frame; I only notice when he asks me to pay the higher fee. When I point out that six hours will do fine, he relents, but only with more stern warnings about getting the van back exactly on time.

After doing the normal check-out-these-scratches dance routine, I am off and on my way–in the opposite direction. I have waiting for me an angel and savior, a co-worker who gracefully volunteered to help me move without my even asking. I went to downtown Tokyo to pick her up, and we started to head out on the expressway.

In Japan, there are no freeways; all the roads without traffic signals are pay-only. Since I wanted to make good time, we used them, and then I promptly made a wrong turn. I then discovered that it’s impossible to pull a u-turn on the expressway, and getting off and back on at an exit means you have to pay the $6 fee all over again, receipt or no.

After that hiccup, it was smooth sailing. It’s ¥700 yen for inner-city expressway driving, ¥600 for the outer reaches, and ¥200 for the bridge that takes me directly into town–in all, about ¥1500 ($12) in tolls. My coworker and I arrive at my old place and we start loading boxes. Lots and lots of boxes.

As I have mentioned before in this blog, the apartment building I was in has a frustratingly inconvenient feature: the elevator stops only between floors, making it necessary to walk up or down half a flight of stairs to get to the elevator. So we worked in shifts; I would take boxes to the door, my friend to the elevator; then after we loaded up the elevator, we did the same division between the elevator and the van, and loading stuff into the van. Her help easily cut the amount of time and effort by two-thirds, a real life-saver. It would have literally been impossible to do by myself, partly because of time constraints, and partly because the air conditioner was a two-person haul.

To my relief, we fit almost all the pre-packed boxes into the van–a relief because it meant that my Monday haul would not only be possible, but a bit easier as well. We got the job done and within three hours, we were ready to go.

Here’s where the speed bumps started coming into play. You see, I had to sell my extra air conditioner and my gas range, else get swindled by the recycle shop guys (more on that in an upcoming post). But the buyer that I found through online ads balked at the takkyubin fees, so I had to agree to deliver myself–a huge pain, as they were not even close to the expressway route. But it shouldn’t be a big deal, I thought–I had run the route on my scooter and it seemed a tad slow, but fine.

Apparently, all the traffic jams happen on Saturdays–or I was just unlucky. We got out to the Tama River okay, but then the road leading to the bridge turnoff was jammed up. I figured once we got on the turnoff to go over the bridge it would clear up–and at first, it did–but then we hit another traffic jam on the second road, across the river. We got to the place where the guy waited to take the stuff, and then were off again–straight into a longer traffic jam. Hopefully, I though, Kan-pachi Boulevard, a big, three-lane thoroughfare, would be more clear. What a fool I was to think that. There was an ever bigger traffic jam there. Eventually, we got in striking range of the expressway, and went for it–only to encounter yet another traffic jam there–apparently, there was a traffic accident five kilometers ahead of us, and it was yet again bumper-to-bumper.

Soon, there was only one hour left of my six-hour rental, and we were still blocked up. I called the rental agency on my cell phone, remembering the dire warnings the guy had laid down for me. I figured, what can they do to me if I’m late? Knowing that they couldn’t do much, of course… but still, the kind of talking-to the guy gave me had me stressed out just because I hate being late for stuff.

After a while, just before I was ready to take the first exit off the expressway and chance the local roads again, traffic sped up. It was still off-and-on, but finally the traffic cleared up as we passed the center of the city, and the way to Ikebukuro was clear. We arrived at the new building with a van loaded with boxes, with just 20 minutes to spare.

The building people were overloaded–it seems that everybody and their neighbors were moving that day (Sachi was due to move in later in the day herself), so we had to wait outside for a few minutes–but we had a plus on our side, which was that we were using a van, which was small enough to go to the basement level. Even at that, several people were using personal vans or takkyubin deliveries, but we lucked into getting one of the two loading spaces. We hurriedly unloaded all the boxes, and just put them inside the door on the loading area. When we were sure the van was emptied, I drove it back around the corner to the rental place–and arrived thirty seconds before the appointed time of 2:00. They didn’t seem too relieved or anything when I got it back on time, but frankly, considering traffic, I saw it as a minor miracle.

On the way back to help take the boxes up to the apartment, I stopped by the 24-hour supermarket, Pororoca, on the first floor of the building. As my friend and I were unloading the van, she had the idea that using a push-cart would be so much easier. Dim as I am, I had not even considered that, and probably would have struggled with each box individually. The building guard in charge of the basement area commented to her that if we told the people at Pororoca that we’d be frequent shoppers, they might lend us a cart. So on the way back in, I stopped by and asked–and indeed, they lent us a cart! And I didn’t even have to promise to be a regular shopper (residing in the building, I can only suppose they took it for granted).

So my friend and I took about six trips instead of 30 or 40 to get all the boxes upstairs and settled in the apartment. It was just past 3:00… and the rest is a story for tomorrow. Now I’m a day and a half behind in telling the story, which is understandable–I still have another day to go before I can close the Inagi chapter of my life. So part three is coming soon, telling of day 1.5. Sooner or later, I’ll get caught up with this, and can start blogging on the minutiae. Maybe I’ll wait for the little stuff until we have finished unpacking all of our boxes, though.