chidade.net

Early wake up to get on a train for Kamiooka, my old stomping ground. Arrived earlier than expected, curse my Type A-ness. Still, it was good to wander around Yokohama for the first time in a year. Aah, the More’s Building. How often I’ve emptied my wallet there. Check out the old arcade, nothing worth trying to win this morning. I totally own at the UFO catchers.

Anyway, onto Kamiooka. Oh gods, my old eikaiwa *shudder* Quick, look away! Don’t make eye contact! Yay! T & M! Reunion! Have an ice kohii at there place because even at 10.30am, the sweat is already running down my back in torrents. Damn tsuyu.

Hadn’t really looked at the Lonely Planet’s pages on Kamakura. It’s so close to Kamiooka, I’d been there before during the 10 months I lived here, but unfortunately my camera was stolen soon after and I wanted to get more photos again. T & M wanted to go along because apparently the hydrangeas are in bloom all over Kamakura at the moment. That’s….such a Japanese reason to go somewhere XD

But anyway, I basically thought that all there was to see was the Daibutsu, or Giant Buddha. It’s about 800 years old and quite spectacular. It used to be housed within a temple but a tsunami had washed away the building, leaving only the temple. It must’ve been a heck of a tsunami. Kamakura is on the shore but the Daibutsu is still about a kilometre away from the beach with big hills in the way.

I knew that there were more temples around Kamakura, but I didn’t think they were going to be that special. I had been to the main one at the top of the shopping street which was quite nice but….you know…..just another temple. T had some ideas about where to take me in Kamakura though and I was happy to let him lead. I just wanted to have photos of the Daibutsu and the rest was up to them.

First, to the most famous hydrangea temple in Kamakura, Hase-dera. Heh, they’d never mention that in the Lonely Planet. No, all that they say about this place is that “it has the largest wooden statue in Japan carved in 912″ - feh! How is that important compared to the hydrangeas?! There were hundreds of small statues of Jizo which were very cool. I took a couple of shots which I’m proud of. May submit one to Metropolis. It also has an impressive view over the bay.

It was CRAWLING with people all over Kamakura, but particularly in Hase-dera. M said that there had been a special on the television about Kamakura’s hydrangeas, and since it was a sunny Saturday, absolutely everyone in the Kanagawa and Tokyo region wanted to see them today *rolls eyes* So there was a 40 minute wait to go for a walk along this Hydrangea Path within the temple grounds. It wasn’t the ONLY place you could see them, mind you. They were growing out of cracks in the pavement! So we decided to skip it and move on the Daibutsu.

Daibutsu, photos photos photos - finally saw a squirrel! I seriously need to smuggle some into Australia. Okay, photos done, NEXT!

T said he wanted to take me to Zeniarai Benten, so off we went - got lost - got lost again - gave up an caught a bus to the station - had lunch - revived - then got proper directions - and finally we walked up this hill to find a great big tunnel bored into the rock with a torii gate outlining it.

This shrine has now been added to Chidade’s Awesome List™.

First cool part is the tunnel in the rock. When you walk out to the other side, there are many red torii gates to walk through, like Fushimi Inari in Kyoto, although not as beautiful. The shrine is in a tiny little gully that is almost completely closed off by hills all the way around. There are two ways to get in: the tunnel, and a back entrance if you climb the stairs over a smaller hill. So the surrounded and hidden feeling to the place is another cool factor.

Finally, you go into a cave carved into the side of the hill where a natural spring wells. And there……you wash your money. Zeni-arai means “coin washing” but these days people seem to wash paper notes. Out of greed? I don’t know but I washed 1000 yen. T & M told me to keep it in my wallet and never spend it, like a lucky charm to make me rich, but I’ve read other sources that say the idea is to spend money that has been washed in the springs and it will return two-fold. I think I’ll just keep it as a souvenir.

Such a unique tradition - washing your money in the spring to bring fortune. And the Lonely Planet never mentioned this! Zeniarai Benten is listed on their map but not described. Odd, given it’s uniqueness and apparently it’s the second-most visited shrine in Kamakura (awesome link found via Frangipani).

Anyway, Zeniarai Benten: now on my awesome list, along with Nijo-jo in Kyoto, Gyokusendo Cave in Okinawa, Zuigudo underneath Kiyomizu-dera in Kyoto, Takeshita-dori in Harajuku and all of Akihabara, heh. Hmm, maybe I should set up a page of these places.

The next place we visited was just a short walk away from Zeniarai Benten if you take the back route. It’s called the Sasuke Inari Shrine. Cool, because it does the multiple torii gates thing, has dozens of statues of foxes (because Inari is a god of foxes, among other things), has a cool name, but mainly because, despite being less than 50km from Tokyo, it really seems like you’ve founded a hidden little shrine in the middle of the forest, untouched and unvisited for years. Completely not the case, but the atmosphere is like that.

After that, we headed back to T & M’s for a much needed shower before off to the izakaya for a massive party. About 6 old students, 2 old friends and assorted were there. To summarise the night, I’m going to borrow Circus Girl’s blogging style again:

To the station! I need to pick up S and his mystery friend! You! It’s you! *glomp* I’ll be right back, I need to find S, T keeps me company, he never arrives, never answers my texts, eventually call him and find out he’s already at the izakaya, WTF? Well at least I can make a grand entrance now with all the other guests there, get cheered, take a bow “You bastard, you never emailed me”, debates on email, shut up and order a drink! I’ll have a sour, a sour what, uhhhhh, apple? Yes, Apple Sour, “Minna san! Omiyage desu!”, yaaaaay, boomerang makes me an accessory, canned kangaroo! No really! I think we should open it right now, muaahahahahaa they totally fell for it! Wow, M-chan’s English is awesome now! So is S’s! Heh, so the new gf is a Hong Kong expat too, eh? I detect a fetish. Beer! I don’t drink beer? BUT I’LL DRINK THIS BEER! Wheee, room is kind of spinning, I can haz foowd now pwease? TUNA!!! where’s the salmon? “It’s fish but it doesn’t taste like it”, “K, I’m probably drunk enough now”, mmm, cheezy, what, it’s over already? BUT WE JUST GOT HERE!! Okay, back for some drunken Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii! Buh-bye some people, I’ll see you in a month! Bottle shop stopover, beer beer beer, girly drink, H lives in that big building? Really? Can I see? Get taken up to the viewing platform, “YOKOHAMA I MISSED YOU!!”, wow don’t want to drop my camera down there O_o, okay, onto T & M’s place, photo slideshow time! Man, I should really do this on my Wii too, catching up, drinking coke and vodka, what a combo, getting pretty woozy now, how did I get so drunk so quickly? *glomps Canadian*, why is the Billy Banks exercise DVD playing? More gossip, YAY! A’s here! Omiyage! “Sorry, I’m a bit drunk”, catching up, ok, so this is how you play Rayman, I love that song, um, are you ok? Sleepy? “Where’s he going to sleep?” (With me!!!) “He should be on the floor in the hallway” (?!) “and A can share with you” (No, he can sleep with me, really!) “Ok, we’ll set up a futon in the lounge room” (Awwww) Brush teeth, “Oyasumi“, unconsciousness.

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I’ve been accepted into university. I’ll be attending Swinburne University of Technology’s Hawthorn campus for another three years of I.T. training. I’m relieved in a way, because I’ve technically been on holiday for the last two years now and my brain has been dribbling out my ears. I need to have a regular schedule again. 4 hours of evening classes 5 days a week in an eikaiwa didn’t count. They were complete no-brainers.

So, I have two weeks left before orientation. Surrounded by 17 and 18 year olds who are going to go batshit insane over the free alcohol. Vodka lost it’s novelty for me a while ago. I wonder how I’ll cope surrounded by kids?

Anyway, I digress. What I was going to say is that I have 2 weeks left to get myself organised for school and my tight budget that begins February 19th. So, while this list is probably quite boring for you, dear readers, deal with it. What follows are the system requirements to be able to install the upgrade to Chidade: version 3.1.

• Purchase replacement Razr V3x and mod it so that it has all necessary ringtones, images and the Final Fantasy victory fanfare as the SMS alert.
• Install the calendar syncronisation program that’ll keep my Google Calendar and keitai in sync, via Outlook.
  Note: this will require installing Office 2003 at last.
• Deauthorise the iTunes on Akiba and convert AAC files to MP3 then backup on PC.
• Backup Akiba and reformat, see if you can get an English OS instead. Learn how to actually operate the tablet features since that’s why you bought the bloody thing.
• Try and get Joomla installed and running for the Aug. website eventually so they don’t hassle you for free web design work during the semester, the tightwads.
• See if you can get a good chunk of the planning done and some psuedo-coding for the fundraising website.
• See if any of the textbooks you spent thousands of dollars on during the first degree can be recycled for this second one.
• Upgrade the blog to Wordpress 2.1 Ella, which looks very spiffy.
• Get Chidade to job level 50 and bloody job change into a Blacksmith already!

Two weeks should be enough to get all of the above done, except for the fact that this weekends seems to want to rip me apart with social engagements. Good grief. I don’t think I’ve ever been so over-booked.

• St. Kilda Festival
• The inaugural Discworld convention and gala dinner Nullus Anxietas - the first outside the UK. Yay! I finally get to do what everyone else already seems to have done - meet Terry Pratchett!
• Snark’s 25th birthday and party
• Madman’s free open-air cinema again on Saturday night. This time, it’s the awesome Read or Die
• R’s Shindig and catching up with Mi
• An old high school friend’s birthday party
• K’s Singstar party

The Gala Dinner, K’s party and the school friend’s birthday party have already become victims. Most of this weekend is going to be taken up by Nullus Anxietas, I guess. Hopefully St. Kilda Fest and Madman get a look in. Ross Irwin and the Soul Special are playing at the festival.

Gah! Busy!

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It’s Matt’s 25th today. For his present, Snark and I got creative and painted a chibi Kakashi from Naruto onto a pair of Levi jeans we bought. Got the idea when I saw Vic Mignogna’s jeans at the Madman birthday party.

More photos here.

Kudos to Snark for doing all of the actual artwork, nee-san for helping to cut stencils, Na for finding out what size jeans Matt wears in an amusing way and to Mi, Y and K for contributing funds.

I’m so making myself a pair of Spike Spiegel jeans.

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Today was the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, or JLPT, which is held around the world every year on the first Sunday in December. It was my first ever go at this exam, after studying Japanese in Year 6, a semester in my final year of university and after spending 10 months in Japan itself. Needless to say, I attempted the lowest level. Needless to say, I’ll fail miserably.

I didn’t study as much as I’d have liked since my adopted onee-san is currently in Australia and living with me until she gets her own digs. This means I’ve been spending a lot of time with her and travelling a bit. She’s helped me study a bit but memorising kanji is something that’d I’d have to do myself.

Ah well, I’m not too fussed. I didn’t need to pass this exam. I won’t be working in Japan anytime soon. I basically just did it for myself, because I’d like to watch, read and play Japanese media without the aid of subtitles one day. At any rate, I used today to get the jist of how the exam works so I can try for Level 3 next time.

I learnt one thing though - even if I had studied everything that I had planned to study, then I still would’ve had trouble today. It’s very fast paced - 40 questions in 25 minutes - and of course everything is written in Japanese. The main thing I’ll need to practice is reading hiragana and katakana quickly.

Anyway, now that my so-called studies of Japanese can be relaxed a bit, my next goal is finally clocking Final Fantasy VII. I can’t see the obsession with Sephiroth, personally. Vincent is clearly the better bishie. In human form, anyway.

One last thing tonight: Thoughts go out to Duane’s family. Duane was a former Rover who died tragically today. He’ll be missed in Scouting circles. Rest in peace.

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‘I hadn’t seen The Cat Empire live in over 18 months. I hadn’t seen any of the side projects (Jackson Jackson, The Genie, The Conglomerate, Peaking Duck, etc etc) AT ALL. That second point was a sticker for me, since I’d been listening to the side project music more than the Cat’s music for a while now. I wanted to see them live, dammit!

So, yesterday, after by chance reading on the .info forums that both The Genie and The Conglomerate had gigs coming up, I dragged S along (complete in Scouts uniform!) to Transit in Federation Square to see an acousticised Genie.

Ryan and I had exchanged a few comments over MySpace about Japan so when I noticed that Transit had Asahi on tap, I ordered a round for the band with a message: “Hope you enjoyed Japan -Chidade”. I wondered how good Ryan’s memory was, would he remember it was me from MySpace?

The tracks I had heard on The Genie’s MySpace had about a million of Ollie’s keyboards featured. I didn’t read the bulletin post too carefully, so I was expecting more of the same but instead, they had a very acoustic, jazzy, swinging sound. Will had brushes on the skins for half the night, Ollie was on a baby grand, Ryan alternated between his upright bass and the standard electric one.

The songs were fun too. I think a lot of them were covers of TV show or movie themes. The only two I definitely recognised were Dr. Who in the second set and Indiana Jones (bloody awesome) in the third. In the first set there was this track that S and I agreed sounded like the theme song to some corny 70s TV show, not unlike The Wonder Years, but we couldn’t pick it. There were plenty of melodies that we knew we recognised, but couldn’t place a name to.

I think they played a little bit of Me Babe Dubbin’ Out but because Ollie didn’t have his dozens of electric keyboards with him, the sound was very different and moved on quite quickly.

The night consisted of wine and snacks (mmmm…olives), bitching about men and discussing music. S and I had a good night. We hadn’t really done anything together since I came home from Japan. I promised myself that I’d get out more often when I arrived back home in Melbourne. Last night I finally started keeping the promise, heh. Only two months late.

Music finished up, boys started packing up. Approched Ryan to ask him about whether there was a CD to buy yet.

“Were you the one that bought us the drinks?”
“Ahh, yeah, that was me”
“Oh thanks! Good to see someone from MySpace here”
“Heh, well, yeah, but I don’t like admitting I have a MySpace in public”

So, I have become an official MySpace stalker. Oh, gods.

My MySpace bashing seems to have gone over his head, though. I told my sister this. She says that everyone thinks that MySpace is the shit. Except us, that is. So, I think I should explain why MySpace is teh suck:

Firstly, as an amateur web designer, I can tell you that it is horribly designed. It isn’t intuitive at all, it can take several clicks to get to where you want to go. Clicking on “Blog” will take you to your friends’ blogs when in fact you wanted your own blog, for example.

The URLs are ugly and open for hacking. Plus, MySpace doesn’t even stick to the URLs it assigns to people. When I right-click on Jackson Jackson in my friends list and choose ‘Copy Link Location’, I expect to get www.myspace.com/jacksonjacksongs when I paste again. That what MySpace says is their URL, after all.

Lies. Copying the link location and then pasting gets: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=58996280

They don’t need this information in the URL. At least, it doesn’t have to be visible! LiveJournal manages to do without! And it can still tell whether I’m logged in and a friend of the person. Bad design. And not very good security protection either.

It gets worse. I’ve decided to crosspost my blog entries at chidade.net there. An automatic syndication isn’t possible, despite Wordpress plugin developers’ best efforts. So it’ll be a manual syndicate update everytime I make a post on my homepage. Livejournal can do it automatically with a Pro account.

Anyway, this means uploading my old blog entries with a backdated entry. For some reason, MySpace doesn’t want to let me backdate any earlier than January 1st, 2006. Why? Who knows. They do deem it necessary to let people post with dates in the future though! I can date my post as far as ahead as December 31st, 2010! Why?! Who knows! I could understand if they didn’t want me to backdate any earlier than my signup date with MySpace, which was May 2006. But no, they chose these arbitrary dates within which my blog entries can be dated. I don’t know what this will mean for my 2005 entries. They either won’t get cross-posted at MySpace or all given a January 1st date with a header proclaiming the real date and how MySpace sucks.

Ha, keep in mind that you can search for entries on my blog homepage from January 1st, 2000. Such bad design. It could be easily fixed if they took time out to debug the damn site instead of rolling around in their mountains of cash, Ducktales-style.

Even if you have no clues about web design and you don’t care if the website is standards complaint (it isn’t), the website still effects the average web user’s experience. There are dodgy cookies throughout, heaps of advertising (some of it the insidious adware/malware variety) and even having an automatic popup blocker, AdBlock and FlashBlock plugins on a Firefox browser doesn’t save you from being bombarded with advertising. After spending a few hours on MySpace, I always feel dirty, like I need to wash out my web cache.

Then there’s the people spam, on top of the advertising spam. People I don’t know message me to ask for a cyber or to sell me something. Or chain letters. Gods! Changing the settings to “paranoid” still allows some people to message me. It’s tolerable at this level. Mainly it’s just bands that ask me to listen to their stuff. It also happens rarely. But it’s still unsolicited advertising.

One more thing about settings: they could be better. I get an email (most of the time) notifying me of a new blog post by someone on my friends list. A notification system for Bulletins or page updates (particularly when there’s new songs or concert dates, for bands) would be more useful. As it was, I could have missed last night’s gig if it wasn’t for someone on the .info forums - MySpace needs to be checked thoroughly everyday it seems, to make sure I don’t miss anything important. And I don’t want to waste time on that. It needs a better and more customisable notification system.

The system in general could do with some tweaks! Well, the server anyway. 20% of the time, loading bands pages causes their music player to have a “Loading Error”. 40% of the time, clicking any link gets “Sorry! An unexpected error has occurred!”. If the link does choose to work, then it takes a long time to process! And why can’t MySpace actually remember that I’m logged in everytime that I check the checkbox to remember that I’m logged in?!

Character encoding is just useless. Copying and pasting from my webpage to my MySpace blog has somehow magically removed punctuation. It only reinforces the belief that MySpace users are uneducated teenagers that think “you” is spelt with one vowel.

There’s many more reasons that I dislike MySpace, but the last one I’ll mention is how it encourages people to be idiots. As Ryan himself says, people feel the need to make “myspace layouts that are so clever that they’re entirely illegible”. LiveJournal has the preset layouts to help curb this. If you really want complete control over your LiveJournal layout, you pay for the pro account. Presumably you’re a bit better with web technology then than the average 14 year old emo kid that wants to get attention with suicide notes or animated backgrounds of sparkly stars.

ANIMATED GIFS SHOULD NEVER BE THE BACKGROUND IMAGE, PEOPLE!

There are some things that I like about MySpace though, despite the several paragraphs above. It’s the only community website I know of that has a musician focus. Bands and artists can set up their own webpage (but then again, imitators can set up pages too, and not just for musos) and network with their friends/collegues/inspirations. They can put up a gig calandar that I can add to my own calendar (though I’m notoriously bad for not using calendars). Because of the networking culture of the site, I found out about Jackson Jackson, sodomy county and Martin Martini and the Bone Orchestra (I will definitely be at that gig with The Conglomerate!), as well as several Japanese indie bands.

The same seems to apply for comedians and general friend networking (although meeting people from MySpace frightens the bejeezus out of me), which is useful. But with a bit of extra work, the same can be done at other networking blog sites like LiveJournal. You wouldn’t need to be restricted to 4 songs or videos or whatever either.

MySpace has its uses, but its design, layout and spam/idiocy culture makes me cringe everytime I visit it. So, Ryan, I love your stuff, but I can’t forgive you for obliging me to sign up for this piece of tripe! MySpace needs a huge makeover! From the ground up! I spent so many hours wandering through this site getting frustrated and I want them back! Damn you! *shakes fist*

Oh what the hey, I can’t stay angry at that mop of hair.

Just buy me the drink next time and we’ll call it even.

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On Monday, I received an email on my phone that said “WE ARE HERE!” with an attached photo of Cairns Tourist Bureau.

Okay, that’s nice, but who are you?

Oh! Holy crap! M & T from Yokohama! My old students! They’re in Australia? Why didn’t they tell me?! One excited telephone conversation later, and I make plans to meet them in Sydney to give them a guided tour of the little I know. Yay! Yokohama friends! I’ve been feeling massively homesick for Yokohama lately and seeing M & T would probably only make matters worse but the weekend looked like it was going to be lots of fun.

Every day up until I left for Sydney, I received emails with cameraphone photos of things like shrimp-on-the-barbie, Ayer’s Rock and Fosters beer. They seemed to be having fun. After some misunderstandings, frustrations and drunkenness, Mi and I finally met up with M & T in seedy King’s Cross on Saturday. That place is kinda scary. It was even scarier when I learnt the next day that M & T decided to wander around there arter midnight! Anyway, hightailed it to George Street promptly, where we ate at a nice Spanish restaurant and caught up on the last few months and talked about their holiday so far.

“Did you see any Australian animals?”
“No, but I ate emu, kangaroo and crocodile”
“Ehhh~?!” (I reverted to my Japanish pretty quickly)
“I didn’t see anything!”
“Even at Ayer’s Rock? Or in the Daintree Rainforest?!”
“No! Nothing!”
“Okay, I’ll take you to Taronga Zoo tomorrow. You can see some Australian animals that aren’t on a plate”

I hadn’t been to Taronga since I was…oooh…6 years old? So I was looking forward to it. First we looked around Circular Quay to take happy snaps of the Opera House and Harbour Bridge. Then the zoo, where those animals have a better bloody view than most human residents of Sydney.

After that, an accidental round trip on the ferry (they need to make signs that say ‘DARLING HARBOUR’ not just ‘Aquarium’) to have another nice meal where I discovered that I actually quite like oysters (Dad will have heart failure when he hears it). It seems that Australian seafood is much cheaper and better quality than in Japan, so M & T had been gorging themselves.

They wouldn’t let me pay for anything either! Two dinners, lunch and Taronga Zoo admittance! I felt quite bad. I know I was the guide but it wasn’t that much trouble that they had to pay for me. The best I could do was buy them a round of drinks at the pub >.< Gaah! Must go to Japan and buy them lots of meals!

It was a great day-and-a-half with them. I had lots of fun with Mi too, going on an Ikea adventure and learning just what household objects can double as a hammer when assembling furniture (note: solid glass candlestick is best). Cheers for looking after me, mate.

But, Chidade, what about that other part of your weekend? The one you were really looking forward to but blew up in your face and left burn marks so bad that no amount of Vitamin E cream seems to make it better?

Ah, well. Actually, I'm feeling kinda liberated now. It was like the last few weeks in Japan when my eikaiwa’s bullshit had reached new heights and although I loved Japan dearly, I couldn’t stand working there anymore. One day, I had a realisation that I could resign and go home. I was due to go home in two months anyway. Just quit! You have no obligation to go through this bullshit, and it seems like they will do nothing to help you out no matter what your own dedication is. So quit! It was a fucking fantastic feeling to hand in my resignation.

The same applies here. So much stress and frustration, but I had the same realisation - I don’t have to put up with this. I have no obligation to go through this bullshit, and it seems like they will do nothing to help me out no matter what my own dedication is. So walk away. No more bullshit! It’s very liberating.

Those burn marks will be gone soon.

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My job, which is at best filled with a bunch of incompetents, at worst is a fascist totalitarian regime, has this week lost one of the good guys.

There were only maybe four people I genuinely liked at my job, and now the best one has gone “home”, which is really where the heart is.

Ja ne, Magic J.

It’s been short, but hella fun.

I really hope it’s not the last time we see each other.

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