happylife

Dehumidifier

Tokyo is still in the rainy season. We don't have much rain except for the typhoon this year, but the air is so wet and heavy that we can easily recognize it. My house has a basement where a dehumidifier is working day and night. It looks like a magic because the machine creates water from nothing. Surprisingly, the built-in large water tank gets full in four hours these days. I can't help getting aware of the existence of the water in the air when I drain it away. The basement is now used just for a storage because it is unpleasant to live in. We know that it is a waste of energy to keep the machine always on, but there is no way. It is necessary to keep the room dry, otherwise every thing in the room would be soaked.

A simple keyboard

Most Japanese people use a so-called JIS keyboard on which 50 Japanese characters are printed in addition to 26 alphabets, numbers and special characters. It is so muddled and ugly because 2 to 4 characters are printed on each key top that I hate to use it. As Japanese language has 50 pronunciations, we can input any of them directly by hitting one key top, but as far as I know, few people are using it in this way. It is too complicated to remember all of the 26 plus 50 character's position. We usually use Romaji input method instead. In this method, each 50 character can be input by the combination of two alphabets and therefore we don't have to remember the 50 character's key position. We only have to remember the 26 alphabet position as most Western people do. What I want to say here is that the 50 characters printed on the JIS keyboard are useless for most people and most Japanese are still using the keyboard. As I am facing towards computers most of my time every day, it is a very important problem to chose which keyboard. This picture shows my favorite keyboard. It is very simple with no Japanese characters, no function keys and no ten-keys. They are all can be input by combinations of two keys. I think this two stroke combination is not disadvantageous in terms of the input speed because we have ten fingers which can be moved independently at one time.

I can't throw it away.

When I was cleaning my room, I found this old radio in the piles of gadgets. I couldn't throw it away though it doesn't work perfectly. It was almost thirty years ago when I bought this multi-band radio. I was in a junior high school and enjoyed listening to the world short wave radio programs with it until late at every night. I was addicted to listening to the bell sound of BBC, birds' song of ABC and so on. I felt an international atmosphere when I was listening to those sounds in large noises. I corrected a lot of so called "verification cards" which I could receive from each radio station in exchange for brief listening reports. Thanks to the Internet and its related digital technology, we can now get various foreign news reports very easily and clearly, but I think it's too easy to feel the reality in each report. A news report about dispute on the other side of the earth is in the same line of a local small fire. Now that we have lost the feeling for distances or scales of the earth, the short wave noise might have some meanings for us to retain the feeling. I'm thinking about repairing the radio someday soon and listening to the noise again.

Thin client system

It is one of the most terrible experiences that our PC breaks down. It is not only the matter of the hardware itself; losing the important data and software stored in the PC is occasionally way more severe. To tell the truth, I have a tough experience in which I had to close my small business owing to my PC crash. Making a periodical backup is indispensable and effective, but it is not enough. Actually in my past case, I had a backup file which didn't work because it was specialized only to a particular type of PC and I couldn't get the same type of PC in place of my crashed one at that time. It was really a lesson to me and I've changed my way to design and create a system since then. Important system should be run on the server and should not depend on any special environment on the client. My Windows PC broke down this afternoon, but my service is still running with no problem. Only the problem is that I have no Windows PC client now and I have to spend unexpected money for it.

A happy light and chime

This is the close-up photo of my cellphone. The upper light usually indicates the radio intensity; I can use the cellphone when it is green and cannot when red. It sometimes turns into blue with a chime and I become happy. What does it mean? The cellphone can use email and I have set a special email address on it. It is so special that even I don't remember it. I made a small program on my business server so that it can send a short message to my cellphone only when my client made a payment or inquiry. It is working as a signal of income for me and that's why I become happy with the light and chime. It is not only enjoyable for me but also it is very effective for my business because I can make a quick response to my clients. Of course, this kind of idea is not my original. When I was working for the ex-company, I was forced to carry a pager always with me and it sometimes went off notwithstanding day or night whenever troubles happened on the server. I hate the pager sound and felt it was like a dog collar, but now this sound I love to listen so much that I would be happy if it disturbed my sleep.

An ideal navigator

In the latter half of this trip, I rented a car with an amazing car navigation system. It was so great and useful that I could enjoy the trip without loosing my way at all. I didn't have to stop my car to read a map. All I had to do instead was setting my destination on the system by entering the name or the address of the city, the phone number of the hotel or just pointing out the goal on the map. Then the competent navigator automatically found the best route in a second and guided me with a voice navigation such as "In 500 meters, second left turn" or "right turn ahead." I though it was better than a human navigator because it never complains at me if I failed to turn. A quarrel between a driver and a navigator often occurs because of miscommunication, but this system never goes against the driver. If you can't read Japanese at all and you have to drive in Japan, it would be a good idea to rent a car with this navigation system because it has English language mode.

Everything into a cell phone

On the next day I came back to Tokyo, I got this cell phone at an electric appliance store in Shinjuku. I think that living in this country without a cell phone means a great loss. Not only the cell phone device itself is great but also a lot of great services we can use with the cell phone are provided for free or a reasonable price. This gadget has a slide-in keyboard, a full color VGA display and a built-in digital camera; it is almost a small computer. What we can do with this device is almost infinite. For example, I can use Google map in my palm. It's really convenient and pleasant to read and scroll a map and search a place or shop nearby. We don't have to carry a heavy and bulky paper map any more. As this cell phone has a full browser in it and we can easily connect to the Internet even from a washroom, a subway station, a restaurant or whatever. It is way more convenient than you expect to be able to use the Internet by just clicking a button on your cell phone. Furthermore, the happiest thing is that we can use all the services within a capped price and we don't have to worry about the telephone bill.

Noise canceling headphones

I bought an electronic gadget after a long break. I bought it from Japan on eBay; it's a kind of re-importation for me because I'm going back to Japan within a few weeks. Why did I buy it from Japan by paying an extra shipment fee? It was not that I couldn't wait until I go back to Japan. I'm not such a childish man who doesn't know patience. What I bought was Sony's noise canceling headphones and I need it in the airplane back to Japan. As you know, we usually have to put up with the jet noise all the time in the airplane. I often tried to enjoy listening to music on my iPod but I couldn't do it disturbed by the terrible jet noise. I had to turn the volume up to kill the noise, but my ears got tired with the too much volume and my neighbor didn't like it too. These headphones cancel the noise by two methods. One is that it has the same shape of earplugs and works in such way. Another is that it has a built-in microphone on each earplug and a sound in opposite phase is produced by the noise canceling circuit. I tested it in the middle of Downtown and I could surely recognize the effect; the traffic noise was just like the one in a snowy day and I was almost hit by a car coming close from behind.

Nintendo DS lite

As you know, Nintendo DS lite is the most successful product in portable game devices. It was put on the market almost one year ago, and since then it has always been in short supply in Japan. It is said that the demand is way greater than the supply, and if you dared to get it, you would have to buy it at a rather expensive price or get into a bundle sale in which you have to buy related software with it even if you don't like it. On the other hand in Vancouver, we can buy it at a reasonable price. To tell the truth, I bought one of them in Walmart at C$147.70 the other day. Considering the high tax rate, it is still C$20 to C$30 cheaper than in Japan. It might be a small business to purchase dozens of them in Walmart and carry them back into Japan. Fortunately, the North American model can be used in Japanese language. Anyway, what is the reason for this inverted situation? I think one of the reason is that Japanese people can easily get overheated and rush to this popular product, while Canadian people are staying in calm and mature.

The next camera

I think it's a quite natural feeling that we want to capture and record a beautiful scene. I have had this feeling quite often in Vancouver and have taken quite a few pictures. All of them are stored in my hard disk and I can browse them whenever I like. It's very enjoyable to recall the scene in the past days looking at the pictures. The quality of the image is one of the most important factors to enjoy the pictures in this way. Of course it's not the only one factor, but it's true that the better the picture quality is the more enjoyable it is. To get a better quality of pictures, we need a better and newer camera, and they are coming on sale every month in Japan. It's not that my present camera is bad, but I sometimes feel if it had better image qualities. For example, I found an ultimately beautiful crescent moon today, and of course I took it with my digital camera. This is the picture of it. I used a tripod but it's still blurred. It was the limitation of my camera. I'm thinking about purchasing the new camera after going back to Japan next month. Fortunately, as prices of new cameras are going cheaper and I can sell my present camera on the Internet auction, I don't have to spend so much money. Investigating new cameras is also interesting.