I have a new blog over at www.desl.jp that is in both Japanese and English.

It details my return trip from idyllic Misakubo to Glasgow.

I think the default is Japanese so just slap the British flag and the English will appear.

So, my XPC and my iPod have died this week.

The XPC is the computer I use to watch TV and movies. It started acting up last week, then decided it didn’t like sleeping, and now it just refuses to even post. The problem with XPC shit is that the mobo and the case are all one unit, and it’s so old I can’t get a replacement that doesn’t need a new CPU and ram. And they are fecking expensive.

So I had a look about and the HP HTPC slimline thing seems a decent replacement. It’s a bit bigger so I’ll have to reorganize things but it’s a full machine for about the same price as a new XPC case and mobo BEFORE the cpu and memory. It also comes with a Lightscribe drive which burns the titles on the top of the DVD’s you make and Vista so I can see what all the fuss is about and connect it to my 360.

So having to buy that I was going to get a cheap mp3 player to tide me over “Until Apple could be arsed releasing a Touch with decent storage space and web apps like the iPhone”

So what have the bastards at Apple gone and done this week? They have only gone and released a 32gig Touch with the web apps like the iPhone haven’t they.

Gits.

As they say in Japan “Mayoteiru” which is a much easier way to say “I’m swithering between doing it and not”

The computer must be bought, Japanese terrestrial is just a bit too bad to suffer for more than a few days. I can’t even listen to music or watch DVD’s!

But the iPod. It’s soooooooo expensive.

DAMN YOU APPLE!!!!!

I think I may have a worlds first on my hands. How cool is that?

I may be the first person to install an LG WUXGA screen in a MBP and got it to work.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=4813971

Was where I got all the information, I found it when I was replacing my gubbed screen. When it was actually pretty easy to swap the screen out I hunted around that thread for information and then got myself the best screen on ebay.

Nobody on the board had got that screen to work before, but that was before the new version of OSX was released. I thought it was worth a $200 gamble, and it payed off!

This screen isn’t as shiny as the one I replaced, it’s a second hand piece of crap to be honest but the increased resolution is great.

You sit so close to a laptop screen, and can’t really get further away from it and still use the machine, the extra pixels make it much easier to do things.

Leave as many comments telling me how L33t and H4×0r I am as you want. I don’t mind.

Well, I am now a movie star.

It’s official.

I made a movie this week. It has 6 scenes of me doing different things, then the students watched it and had to write down “Donny is ~ing” 6 times.

Proper SFX going on with a blue tarpaulin and an assistant who can’t pan a shot to save her life. We also couldn’t get the zoom right to have me on an all blue background even after me hanging 20m of sheet so I am all digital-zoomed and blocky. Still. For a first attempt its pretty reasonable I thing, and the kids got a kick out of it too.

edit: Yes, there is a big black ending of nothing. No I don’t know why and no I can’t be arsed to fix it and re-upload

Yeah, go for the cheesy title why don’t you.

Anyway, I went back for the funeral as it happens. Thanks to the, really quite depressing, “New Year Rush” on the funeral directors the funeral was on Monday. So I arrived in Scotland on Saturday night and left on Tuesday morning. I am still trying to catch up, but I dropped right into a 11 day no holiday marathon at work. I don’t get to sleep-in until next Sunday.

I am glad I managed to get back for the ceremony. Even if I did make the mistake of flying Virgin which has the worst economy class I have ever been in (that includes Air France and fucking Ryanair!) and even had the cheek of selling places on the exit-row for 75quid a pop! I thought that was against some rule or something!
Then on the way back not only was my flight from Glasgow delayed some utter plonker managed to crash the bus that takes you between terminals in Heathrow! Delayed for another hour waiting for them to work out that maybe using one of the other buses for that route might stop a riot.
When I got to the check-in desk the wee bitch said “The flight is locked down, I can’t put you in the computer. You’ll have to make other travel arrangements.”

I got a little annoyed.

I said something along the lines of “Get on the phone and get the password to open it back up again or get the person responsible for inter-terminal transport down here to explain his incompetence to my face. Your choice.” There may have been a few four letter words thrown in for good measure.
It took the uppity little bitch one dirty look and 30 seconds to get me on the flight. When I saw how easy it was for her I couldn’t believe just how much of a little Hitler-wannabe-bitchmonkey she actually was. Fucking Virgin Atlantic.
Avoid like the plague.

At least the flight was empty on the way back, everyone who knows avoids the useless twats at Virgin when they can it seems, so I got a few seats to stretch out on.

In other news I just watched The Hunting Party IMDB with Richard Gere and it was shockingly good. I mean, really enjoyable to watch. Funny, good characters and a bit of a bite. Recommended.

Bugger. It’s sleep time. I still haven’t made the pictures of 10 monsters with different numbers of body parts I need for tomorrow.

G’night.

There has been a death in my family. One that has been both coming for a long time, and inconceivable. My grandmother died today, probably due to a cancer the NHS decided was too expensive to test for.

I think I have just decided to be an Expat for the rest of my life.

I don’t want to be angry or incriminating. So I will focus on the here and now. Here are two thinks I have learned:

1. Russians know how to grieve. Bruskie, beer-with-vodka is a good forget-the-world drink.

2. Replacing the vodka with cheap whiskey works fine.

3. Replacing the cheap whiskey with expensive cognac tastes like utter shite. Seriously, probably the worst crap I have ever drunk…still have half a pint in front of me. It’ll go down.

The Expat life is great, until death. To my Expat friends, have you decided how it’ll work when a family member slips out of this realm of existence?
I don’t know when the funeral is, but I have checked the flights and I can’t get a seat at all for at least a couple of weeks. The funeral will be held next weekend I assume.
So what to do? Write something to be read in my absence, reminding the whole extended family that I’m not there? Send some impersonal pile of flowers that mean nothing? Give a pile of cash to a children’s charity in her name; something that I am sure she would appreciate having spent most of her working life with orphans…

My numbing drunkenness both helps and hinders now.

OK. So it is decided. I will give the price of a last minute return flight from Japan to Glasgow to the orphanage she used to work for. Even just typing it makes me feel better. I’m going to suggest that my family put what they would have spent on wreaths and other things Gran would certainly have thought overpriced to the same cause. I was looking at flights before I wrote this post so I’ll be putting at least ¥75,000 into the kitty. Maybe more, the more I think about it the more I want to donate enough that she gets a plaque or something at the site. I probably can’t afford that much, but I’ll look into it.

Still have quarter pint of crap in front of me. Must not call exes for company. I think I’m going to repeat that continuously until I fall asleep. I came very close to making a bad phone call there.

Being an Expat is only good in the good times.

D

Yeah, original title, neh?

Anyway, I have been meaning to post lots of things, tug of war results, festival pictures, random musing.

I’ve just been busy. The pictures are no longer on my laptop, HD too small to store them all, so uploading them in school with the nice corp 10meg QoS upload (used for…nothing at all in school) is more of an arse, so I’ll get round to it someday.

The random musings are slow ‘cos I upgraded to MacOS Leopard on my laptop and lost WordpressDash, the handy little blogging widget that let me hit F12, type some random crap and have it fly up to my blog without having to think about anything. I have to install that again.

I also have to say sorry to the couple of people who didn’t have comments shown ‘cos I was too lazy to moderate, once you have one approved once you can post without problems. Askmet is good but even with it’s 99.9% catching rate that 0.1% still means about 20ish viagra spam comments a week to wade through. And they mount up when you are too lazy to check.

At the moment I am thinking of what to get myself for Christmas. I have decided to forgo a Christmas holiday. Not only have I left it too late to book anything but I want to try to get my driving license sorted out over here…although with the bureaucracy in this country and the holidays around new year I’m not even sure if it is physically possible. Why didn’t I move to a country where the officials are more easily bribed?

So I am swinging between a PS3 - I have an HDTV and have yet to put any HD content on it. Or an Xbox360 (same reason, but no MSG4…but with decent online games) or a www.beermachine.com (but they don’t seem to ship to Japan, or answer emails)

Suggestions on a….comment please.

Don.

Edit: Xbox360 comes in at 2.5万円 (about 130quid) with some random game called Trusty Bell (not Trysty Bell as I Freudianly typoed). PS3 is about 5.5万円….360 in the lead so far.

Just a quote from Bash.org (which I just discovered) that made me laugh. Then I am off to bed.

I just spent about 10 minutes taking an online IQ test that popped up onto my screen.
Then, when I was finished, they made me fill out all this registration stuff before giving me my score.
How’d you do?
Judging by the fact that I game them my email address to find out a number representing my intelligence that they semi-randomly calculated, I think I failed.

I did actually laugh out loud at that…I need sleep.

Being an alcoholic is all about numbers.

I mean, someone who drinks a can of beer everyday may feel they are addicted, where someone who drinks 10 every second day my think they are fine.

I fall into the second category. I drink every day, I heavily every second day (on average) but I am not an alcoholic. I am pretty sure that if I left this town I could cut down…not that I can test my theory here. Its impossible, I get dragged into drinking for every possible excuse.

School event = drink
Town even = drink
Town area event = drink
Tug of War practice = drink
Work late = drink
Go to work early = drink
Don’t go to work late or early for a day or two = drink

You get the picture? But, really, I’m still in control. I worry about my friends in Korea. Apparently they drink 1.8x more than the nutters in Japan.

Good luck to your livers.

Well, that’s summer and the Misakubo Festival over.

So I’m now skint AND in need of a new liver. I’m hoping to get some time on Monday (it’s a holiday here) to get some pics up. Maybe. Don’t hold your breath.

Anyway, this post is about stupid mac shortcut keys. I can’t find any shortcuts to switch between the open windows of an application - only to switch between applications. Which is really annoying if you have two Illustrator documents open and want to flip between them to make a new version of a board game with some of the same images for example.

I googled and found that apparently alt+~ or ctrl+` were supposed to work but they didnt seem to on a JP keyboard. I got a third party bit of software to take over my alt+tab keys but it doesn’t order the windows by most recently in focus so makes you tab 8 times each time you switch between documents in Illustrator.

Grr. I’m going to have one more wee look before I start to make some bingo cards then I am going to curse the apple gods.