happylife

Raise sentence

Hussein was executed yesterday after passed a death sentence a few months ago. I don't have enough information about what harmful things he actually did, but in terms of harmfulness, I think Bush deserves more the sentence. War is unfair and might is right. Anyway, I was pronounced a raise sentence from my apartment manager. The rent is going to increase $40 from next April. The marina rent is to be raised by $75 too. It is almost a death sentence for me without any income in Canada. I have almost decided to leave here in a few months, but I have not decided where to go next. Vancouver is sure a good place to live in, but prices are rising and Stanley Park was seriously damaged. It might be the time to change air. I am looking for a good city in the world to live in.

Boxing week

The next day of Christmas is called "Boxing Day" and it is a holiday in Canada. As some of my American friends didn't know about this word, it might have come from Britain. I don't know much about this day except for bargain sale. In the week of Boxing Day, we can see bargain sales here and there, and thrifty Canadians make rows in front of various stores. I drove to Future Shop in North Vancouver but didn't purchase anything because every gadget was still expensive for me. I strongly believe that Japan is the best place to purchase electronic gadgets. As I'm not interested in fashion or any other nonessential items, all I bought today was some apples, muffins and a bottle of milk. It wasn't different from my usual shopping at all.

A fragile city

This picture shows roots of a huge tree fallen and peeled off from the ground. It has a diameter of 4-5 times as long as the woman standing in the center. What a terrible scene, but I heard a more terrible story from my friend who flew over Stanly Park the other day. The trees around Prospect Point are almost swiped off just like after a forest fire, he said. As you know, Vancouver is made of a huge rock covered with a thin layer of soil. Each tree in Stanly Park stands on it and is forced to take root into the thin layer. This is a very unstable and fragile situation. We have to admit that it was rather lucky that the trees had not get fallen for more than a hundred years because we hadn't such a strong storm for a long time. It is estimated to take years of time and billions of money to recover the forest, and another storm can come again before the recovery. The damage which this park was suffered from was almost critical and it is definitely a severe loss for everyone living in Vancouver. I have to say that this city has half lost its value. I'm afraid I have no idea about what to do for the forest. We are all powerless before the Nature.

A vending machine

I found a vending machine in a shopping mall in Bellevue. The number and the kinds of vending machines are apparently less in North America than in Japan, though I'm not sure the precise statistics. However, the one I found today was what I had never seen in Japan. It was selling iPod! To tell the truth, I had known the existence of this vending machine in an article on the Internet, but it was for the first time I saw it with my eyes. I don't think it pays for the development and running cost, and actually no one was using it while I was looking around the machine. I think for most people, iPod is still a precious item which is sold hand in hand. This machine would have been set as a part of advertisement telling "iPod is so popular that you can purchase it from a vending machine like a Coke."

To play with Ikura

Ikura means a salmon roe in Japanese. The red point this cat is grazing at is not of course an Ikura but a light from a laser pointer. The keepers just called it Ikura and enjoyed it with their cats. Most cats love to chase this red Ikura and it is very funny to see them. If we draw a circle, they keep running after it until their heads get spinning. If we draw a vertical line on the wall, they stand on their two legs to reach the red point. I don't know any other toys which attract cats so much. I found that they are not tricked by this toy because they looked at me demanding more lights when I turned off the light. Cats are smarter than I had estimated.

To vist the U.S.

It was the Christmas day and I was forced to donate for the police again. One donation summons another donation is my Murphy's law. I have to take care to avoid the third one. Anyway, I left for my friend's place in the U.S. in the morning and arrived there early in the afternoon. As soon as my arrival, the Christmas party started with a lot of delicious food and some movies which were rather coarse. After we were almost full late at night, they took me to Bellevue which is the city located in the east of Seattle. There were few cars and people even in the downtown because of Christmas, but the roads were beautifully decorated with gorgeous illuminations. There were no shops or restaurants open except for a movie theater in the town. As we had tons of DVDs to watch in the house, we came back soon and enjoyed another movie until midnight. My Christmas in this year has finished in this way.

Quiet Christmas

Holiday season has become also in Vancouver. Though I'm not a Christian, I love Christmas like most people all over the world. I think that Christmas in Vancouver is much better than in Tokyo or in any other cities in Japan. It is literally holy and looks more mature in Vancouver while it is only noisy polluted by commercialism and drunken people in Japan. Fortunately I had no party tonight -- to tell the truth, I don't like a party -- and I drove around the city in the rain. Lots of houses were decorated with illuminations and they were blurred through the rain drops on the front glass. It was so beautiful that I took some pictures stopping at each conspicuous house. This picture is one of the most flamboyant illuminations tonight. I was impressed most by this house because plastic milk bottles painted in various colors were used as lanterns. Handmade illuminations looked as warm as the family in the house.

Gradation

Today I could enjoy the great sunset for the first time in these past months. It was the show I had expected for a long time sitting in the special reserved seat in my room. I think the beauty of the sunset is coming from the natural gradations of color. Though we can create or imitate gradations using Photoshop or some other graphic software, the character of the gradations is totally different. The Nature is so complicated and smooth that even the state of art digital technology cannot make the same things; it can only imitate. This picture is only the imitation and the real scene I enjoyed was way more beautiful. As I had been staying in my room facing towards the PC display for weeks, I really felt that the real world is much greater than the digital world. I have recollected that my dream was watching beautiful things as much as possible in my life, and my daily life in these past months was far from it. It might be the right time for me to change air.

Interference

I have been using a wireless router which I bought in Japan more than four years ago. As you know, the standard and the quality of industrial products is strictly controlled in Japan. This wireless router is not the exception. Of course it works here in Canada, its power seems to be weaker than any other routers used in my neighbors. As I live in an apartment which has eight rooms on every floor, and most of the residents are using wireless routers, I sometimes have interference. This is the list of wireless connections in which my router is shown in the top, but its power gauge is only 4 of 5. There are two other routers with full gauge in the list. Though my router is within one meter from my note PC, it is weaker than those of other rooms. Since the new resident moved into my neighbor room, the influence of jamming has become more terrible. I have to re-connect or change channels almost every day. What a pain in the a**!

AdWords

AdWords is a popular Internet advertising service run by Google. It is a so called text advertising system which is said to be way more effective than the traditional banner advertisement. Once you choose your budget, duration and key words related to your pages you want to promote, the system selects the suitable sites for your text ad and deliver them all in automatically. To our delight, the payment is based on the click counts; we don't have to pay for any view counts which were not clicked. It used to be the most powerful and reasonable advertising system. However, the situation seems to have changed recently because of the bad influence of spam sites which try to get illegal clicks in some ways. I made a small mechanism so that I can recognize where each click has come from, and I found that most of the clicks were coming from spam sites only to waste my paid ads. I was shocked very much because I don't know any other better way to advertise my site.