happylife

A popular zoo in Asahikawa

My stomach ache seemed to have ceased and I managed to go out of the hotel room to enjoy a short trip to a popular zoo in Asahikawa which is located at the center of Hokkaido island. It was about a three hour trip including a two hour train and forty minute bus ride and I was OK all the way go and around. Generally I don't like a zoo because it is boring except for a monkey mountain and it stinks, but the zoo I visited this time is so popular that they have a lot of domestic and even foreign visitors from all over the world. The reason of the popularity is clear. It is designed and run so that any visitors would not be bored with animals just sleeping with their faces against visitors in the zoo. For example, every meal time of the animals are also the show time and we could watch how they eat. The orangutang have to cross on a rope and use a stick to get a banana. Seals swimming in the water could be watched through a glass tube. Even a leopard sleeping on a wire netting could be watch from under the net. I don't think whether all these things are good to the animals, but it is clear that we human can be entertained with them more and we can have a kind of friendness to them. If you are interested in this zoo, you can save money to get a special ticket at JR stations. It includes both the tounrd-trip train and bus ticket from Sapporo or the airport and the admission ticket for the zoo and it costs almost half of the regular price of all those tickets.

Detained at a hotel watching TV news

As soon as I checked in the hotel last night, I went to bed without taking a bath or even changing my clothes. It was before 6:00 o'clock when I waked up in this morning and I felt better with my stomach still sleeping then. However, when my stomach waked up after several minutes the yellowish fluid came out again. I decided to stay in the hotel room all day long. Fortunately, it was clean and cozy with a garden view full of green. I stayed there working on the Internet with my PC, listening to music, lying on the bed enjoying the green leaves and the blue sky out of the window and sometimes watching Japanese TV. As I have no TV set in my home room, it was almost after three years that I watched Japanese TV programs on purpose and I felt a strange feeling especially with news programs. Why do they repeat the same news reports again and again? After the system failure of an airline was reported hundred times in the morning, the self suicide of the current Minister was reported thousand times in the afternoon. There must be other important news articles which was hidden behind them. I think it's dangerous to depend on TV too much because they can easily control the viewers by limiting and altering information. Anyway, what is more important for me now is to get back my healthy and strong stomach to enjoy fresh seafood in this island. It's not the time for me to watch TV in the room!

A drip

It was the day when I was going to leave for Hokkaido, the north part of Japan. Everything had been set up; airlines, hotels and rent-a-car. It seemed perfect, but there is nothing perfect in the world, at least around me. I was suffered from a sudden and terrible diarrhea. I got a fever as high as 38.6 degrees too. It was Sunday and most hospitals are closed in Japan, but I fortunately found a hospital open on Sundays on the Internet. My mother drove me there and I got a drip injection. Thanks to the injection and medicine, my fever dropped down soon and I became to feel better except for the diarrhea. It comes unexpectedly with yellowish fluid wherever I am. I feel as if I was carrying a time bomb. Anyway, I could somehow got on the airplane and arrived at the hotel in Chitose. The weather is cool and beautiful just like in Vancouver and the forecast says this weather keeps on for a week. All I have to do now is to recover. I hope to enjoy fresh seafood as soon as possible.

Useless public libraries in Tokyo

The other day I visited a library in my neighborhood in Tokyo. I intended to use my work with my notebook PC out there but I couldn't do it for some reasons. First of all, there was only one seat where we can use our PC; it wasn't that there were only one empty seat but there was only one seat where we are allowed to use our PC. Of course there was no public PC and no Internet connection. I couldn't believe it was the public library in Tokyo which is one of the largest cities in the world. I was amazed at the sign which read "You can use your computer up to 2 hours only when you are making a document with books in this library." I think that studying with our PC has become one of the most typical usage of public libraries, but it has not been allowed yet here in most high-tech city. I can't help complaining that this is a sin of omission of all the related people including politicians, personnel of libraries, officials and residents who won't say anything.

Cleaning forever

I have not finished cleaning my room yet. Although the idea of step-by-step cleaning was mentally good, but my room looks now more messy than before because I can't throw away any garbage just when I want. The garbage policy in Tokyo is so strict that I guess more people are forced to live in a more filthy room. We have to live in a small and messy room in Tokyo. I don't think it would affect better in any ways. The most strict rule is applied to personal computers. If you have a set of old desktop computer including a monitor and printer, not only you have to pay more than a hundred dollars to throw them away, but also you have to follow a series of procedures; calling to the maker of your PC, purchasing a ticket, packing them with the ticket to send to the designated recycle center. I think it will take at least one week. Unfortunately, I have numerous PCs and their peripherals in my room and office. What the hell should I do?

To unlock the iTune's DRM

More and more people including me seem to change the way to enjoy music. It has become more popular to download music instead of purchasing CDs. Actually I have not bought any music CDs for more than two years. The more people shift to this style, the less sales of CDs cannot be avoided.  I don't know whether it is good or bad, but I can say it is the trend. The combination of iTunes, iPod and its music store is the most successful service around music in the past several years. I was surprised to find that I have purchased more than 200 songs from the music store. One problem of this service is that the songs are all copy-protected and we can't copy them without limitations. I don't intend to make illegal copies but this limitation had been an unpleasant and stressful thing for me until I unlocked them yesterday. If you have some song files with DRM(Digital Rights Management) and you are feeling unpleasant, QTFairUse6 will let you happier. All I had to do was executing the unlocking program on the PC with iTunes and waiting for thirty or more minutes before all the protected files were converted into unlocked files.

Where am I?

What do you think this tiny box is? I bought it about two years ago in Vancouver and had been using it everyday. It has two telephone ports and one TCP/IP port on the back. Yes, it is an IP phone adapter which can hold up to two telephones on the Internet. IP phone itself is not a brand new technology and of course we have various similar services in Japan, but the great point of this adapter is that I can keep my Vancouver phone number starting from 604 with it. I've brought it from Vancouver to Tokyo and it is now plugged into my network in my room. It means that if you know my Vancouver number and call it, I can receive it. I can also call Vancouver local number as much as I like for free. It is sometimes interesting to make or receive a phone call and pretend as if I was in Vancouver. If there is a problem, it is that there is a time lag of 16 hours between Tokyo and Vancouver. If I forgot to turn off the adapter, I would be waked up in the midnight. The phone call received while I am sleeping is set to recorded into a WAV file and forwarded to my email so that I can check it after getting up in the next morning. It's very convenient.

Pandora closed

As I mentioned before in this blog, I was a fan of Pandora, the greatest music radio service on the Internet. As soon as I came back to Japan, I was shocked to know that the service was closed except for in the U.S. due to a license reason. Although Tim Westergren, the funder of Pandora says that he has an ultimate goal of being able to offer the service everywhere, it must be a hard way especially in Japan. We are living in the transient period from the old analog records to the new digital data distributions. The copyright law in most countries are behind the new technologies and and we sometimes encounter such unreasonable situations. I think that the transient cannot be stopped by anyone and sooner or later the happy world is to be realized where all the people can enjoy any music they like for free or almost free. I hope the old world people who are clinging to their established interest give up and the happy world for consumers or listeners comes as soon as possible.

Step by step

I don't like cleaning. It might be what I dislike most in the world. I don't like my surroundings to be messy either. Between these two contradicting things, I often feel a strong stress. Happy people who are good at cleaning and whose room is clean, sometimes say that keeping a room always clean is the best way. They say we should always take care not to make things into a chaotic situation. It is quite true, but what should I do if my room is already filthy enough? I'm now experimenting a simple method to make my room clean; to clean my room step by step. I cleaned the bottom part of a bookshelf yesterday and the second part today. I'm thinking about cleaning under the desk tomorrow. In this way, my room is getting cleaner day by day; very slowly but steadily. It might take a few more weeks until my room becomes perfect, but I already feel happier because the situation of my room is apparently improving. To clean the room all at once in a day, you have to have a lot of energy, but step-by-step cleaning doesn't need so much. I hope this method works well and my room and my office becomes clean before the rainy season starts.

Where is the blue bird?

This is a picture I took from my ex-balcony in Vancouver two weeks ago. I can't believe it was only two weeks ago. The environment around me has totally changed. I'm now living in the middle of a concrete jungle and it is difficult just to find the sun. If I want to enjoy the sea view, I have to travel more than a few hours. Sure the life in Tokyo is convenient and pleasant; the food is great, the prices are lower, the services are sufficient and women are generally beautiful. However, in spite of all those things, I have to say Vancouver was way better than Tokyo. I found that the clean air, the beautiful scenery and the comfortable distance between people were more important than any other small things for me. I'm thinking about how to manage to realize my happy life in this bad environment for a while, but if failed to do it, I would go out of my home town again. I don't know whether I can find out "The blue bird" in this city. I'm afraid I can't have confidence.