happylife

Global Tower in Beppu

When I arrived at Beppu for the first time, I found a strange tower in the mountain. It looked like a rocket launcher which launches scheduled space air ship in sci-fi movies. On the day, I visited the tower, paid three hundred yen at the entrance and climbed it by an elevator. The observatory was at the altitude of 100 meters and was covered with glass windows and wire net ceiling so that we can feel the outside air directly. I'm not acrophobia, but my legs tickled a bit. According to the explanation, the tower forms a part of a virtual sphere which has 1 kilometer of radius. It was built as a part of business convention center named "Bcon center", but there was no one except me both in the tower and in the convention center. We can often see such wasteful buildings especially in local cities. In most cases they are built by using tax for the benefit of particular people including politicians and local power. It has been said that the local economy in Japan is exhausted, but I think it would be better by stopping such a waste of tax.

Shabu Shabu

It is no more than one century since ordinary Japanese people started eating beef, but we are now enjoying it almost every day. While the standard Western menu items such as beef stake or hamburger are very popular among us, we have developed our original menu items using beef. Sukiyaki is probably the most famous one, but we have some other great variations. Shabu Shabu is one of them. It is considered to be one of the highest class and therefore the most expensive menu items in Japan. Paper thin sliced beef is served on a large dish and we pick up one piece of them with chopsticks and dip it in boiling broth for our selves on a table. "Shabushabu" is the Japanese onomatopoeic word which we hear while dipping and shaking the sliced beef in the broth. As you can see in this picture, the beef has a lot of fat which is well scattered in the lean meat. Different from most Western people, we prefer this marbled beef. Some farmers in Japan massage calves giving them a lot of beer in order to get better marbled beef. If you came to Japan, I recommend that you should try Shabu Shabu instead of Sukiyaki.

Ah and Uhm

Kyusyu is an old island located in the south of Japan and there are quite a few temples and shrines scattered all around the island. To tell the truth, I'm not a Buddhist nor a Shintoist except in case of a funeral and a wedding ceremony, I'm not so familiar with this kind of theme, but I at least know that most temples have a pair of statues called the "two Deva Kings." They are standing at an entrance gate of a temple. The most interesting thing for me is that one of the gods is always saying "Ah" and the other one is saying "Uhm." According to Wikipedia, "Ah" means the start of everything and "Uhm" means the end of everything because Japanese syllabary table starts from "Ah" and ends at "Uhm." Apart from the religious meaning, "Ah and Uhm" is sometimes used to describe how a pair of men are acting cooperatively without a lot of words. When one of the men said "Ah" and the other one responed to what his partner wanted, we call the situation "Ah and Uhm breathing" in Japanese.

Server down

My business server has been down for about ten hours and I couldn't sleep at all last night. Fortunately, all the data had been perfectly backed up and the damage was limited. The reason for the problem is clear; the hosting company of my site was closed! I had to find another company, acquire the new domain name, transfer the backup data to the new server, configure the system so that it can run perfectly on the new environment, and make an announcement to my service users. I had to do all the things in a very short term. It was extremely hectic and of course I don't like to experience such a thing again, but it was surely thrilling and exciting. Anyway, the old server was in Texas and more than 80 percent of my users were in Japan. I was thinking that it was a kind of waste of the Internet resources because most of the data had to be transfered via the submarine cable under the Pacific Ocean. Now, the new server is in Japan and
waste of resources would be reduced.