Brentwood Bay

Is that where you're working this term, C♭?

Golden Week・ゴールデンウィーク

Starting tomorrow, I will begin my tour of Central-Western Japan.
I will be touring Hiroshima, Himeji Castle, Kobe, Nara, and Osaka.
Expect many pictures and blog posts. Most likely daily so I don't have to do it all at once. Especially with the pictures... you know how long it takes to tag everything?! haha.
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明日からゴールデンウィーク旅行が始める。
最初に、広島に行きます。広島に１日間半にいます。
広島の後で、姫路城に行く。1日間です。
あの夜、神戸に宿泊します。神戸に３日間にいます。
５日に奈良で１日間、速く観光します。あの週末、大阪に泊めます。
以上予定です。楽しみにしていますよ！！！
毎日、ブログポストと写真をアップロードするでしょう。。。たぶん。笑

Japanese Readers・日本人ようこそ

It has come to my attention that Japanese readership of my blog has been on the rise the last few weeks. I've been listed on a few sites that show when blogs have been updated, and get a decent amount of traffic from Japan (About 44% of all traffic originates in Japan).
So as such, I guess now I have to post everything in English and Japanese. Oh well, good practice i guess :P
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さあ、この数週間、多い日本人・日本に住む人がこのブログに来ます。先週火曜から今まで、来る人の中は４４％です。
だから、今から、全てのポストは英語と日本語で書く。大変！！けど、練習ですね。

翻訳しないポストに「すみませんでした」。今から頑張ります

Does anybody else find it funny...

... that GoDaddy doesn't sell .ca TLDs (Top-Level Domains)...

but they sell .am domains.

Can anyone guess what country the .am domain is representative of?

Armenia.

How weird is that?
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ＧｏＤａｄｄｙはカナダのトップレベルドメイン名を売ることがありません。
でも、アルメニアのドメイン名を売ることがあります。。。
何だ？！それはちょっと。。。ｗ

Sakura・桜

Sakura・桜！

I took a bunch of random Sakura pictures and have finally uploaded them to Flickr.
Link to Sakura Set
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フリッカに桜の写真をアップロードした。
桜写真先へ

New Apple Product・新しいマックブックプロ

I was surfing the internet, clicking links, reading blogs, and so forth...
When I stumbled upon the Apple Online Store...
"We are busy updating the store for you and will be back within the hour".
So, me having free time and being up at this hour decided to wait until the apple store was re-launched to see what new thing Apple comes out with...

The Apple MacBook Pro 17"
I WANT IT NOW!!! The funny thing is, it costs less to buy the 17inch macbook pro (which has a bigger display, larger harddrive, superdrive dual layer, THREE usb ports, and the FireWire 400/800) than the 15 inch macbook pro with an equivalent processor.

I once again re-iterate my accepting of donations to buy one of these machines :P
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今日、２１時３０分ごろに、アップルがマックブックプロ１７インチを発売した！
俺は欲しい！！！！誰が買ってくれますか？
寄付してくださ〜い！お願〜い致しま〜す！！！
マックブックプロページ先へ

Quiz Time!

Ok, so Jordan gave me this quiz. Now I will answer these questions. And nuts to continuing it on. It's hard with blogger :P

1. What's the best thing about living/working in Japan? The worst?
Japan rocks. I think some of the best things are the awesome cool technology like cell phones and FeliCa technology. Although there isn't much of the latter here.
The worst part is living in the middle of rice fields. it's boring. excessively so.

2. Do you feel healthier since switching to a Japanese-based diet?
Yea. For one, you don't eat nearly as much. Plus, the 30 minute uphill walk to work is probably helping :P

3. I know you're a devout Christian, but do you think that there's indeed "something spiritual" about the country?
Not really. Even though it has a 97% buddhist population, I would say no more than 30% are actual believers. Most people are very secular and only go to appease their grandparents.

4. Overall, how are you treated as a gaijin?
Not bad, considering I live pretty far from any urban area. haha. Although, there are a few moments where I feel discriminated against. And thats usually when there are other foreigners making complete idiots of themselves and screaming when I'm trying to ask for help. For the most part, it's not that bad.

5. On a scale of 1-10, how big of a Mac geek are you? (1 being "It's just my computer" to 10 being "I'm committing seppuku when Steve Jobs dies". Haha.)
I dunno, I'd say 5. I like Mac, and swear by it. But I'm no where near the level of mac fanaticism of most mac fans :

END GET!!!!

Red is in.

This past weekend I went to Tokyo again... Which I kind of shouldn't have, because Golden Week is definitely going to kill me financially... but oh well! I decided to check out a church down there since it is Easter Sunday and all.
Anyway, Saturday I had to wake up at 5am so I could catch a 6am shinkansen for Tokyo, so I could save some money on ticket costs (but it was a good deal!). And so I arrived at 8AM... and all shops don't open until 10pm. Darn.
So I pretty much had to kill two hours. Eating breakfast and taking the train to Shibuya killed 1 hour, then me walking from Shibuya to Roppongi hills another 30 minutes, and then walking up and down a street completely bored the rest of it :P
So eventually, the Vodafone shop opened up and I went in to go check out the new 904SH model, which was just released that day. It's a pretty awesome phone. Has the world's first VGA screen (and it looked really great, too), GPS, Mobile FeliCa, and this awesome vApplication that can give you astronomical data on the fly! That last point really makes me interested in it. But alas, I didn't buy it... yet!
I don't know if I will, but I want to!

Ok back to my trip. After the vodafone store, I went to the arcade to kill some more time before i met up with my friend for lunch. I played the Gundam card game again, and the other RPG card game I may or may not have mentioned before. 1500JPY, lots of fun, and an hour later, I finally decided to leave the dark atmosphere into the bright sunny saturday morning (evil sun!). Of course, I still had a ton of time to kill before I had to meet up with my friend, so I decided to try and find the Canadian Embassy... Which I did, after another 30 minutes of walking. The only problem is they are closed on weekends (so useless), so I ended up walking to the closest JR station (which was yet another 15 minutes) to go to Shinjuku. Essentially, I walked in almost a huge circle if I didn't take the train back.
(If you want to see it on a google maps, I walked from 渋谷駅 to 六本木ヒルズ to カナダ大使館 to 信濃町駅, which I then went to 新宿駅 by train).
Anyway, after I got to Shinjuku it was time to go get some sushi lunch goodness. That, once again, was awesome.
After that, we headed back to Shibuya (the circle is complete!), as he needed to go shopping for something. Unfortunately, we couldn't find it so we gave up and just went to the hotel to check in. After sitting in the hotel for about 30 minutes, we, with mostly my influence, decided to go to Yokohama to shop, since I know what he wanted was at the Yokohama World Porters. So off we went to Yokohama. Any excuse to go to Yokohama :) Such a nice city. If you ever are going to Japan, Yokohama's Minato Mirai District is definitely a must see. After he got what he wanted, we headed back to central Tokyo, since we had a reservation at an Italian restaurant.
It was really really amazing, and not too expensive either, unlike that French restaurant I was talking about a while ago :P. I really miss pizza, and was totally thrilled to be able to go again!
After pizza, I had an appointment to get a hair cut at some place outside of central Tokyo, in the more residential area.
Now, here's a funny story about trains in Tokyo. The private lines all interchange their trains every once and a while, so you get Saitama Railway trains on the subway line, Odakyu trains on the subway lines, etc. So the place I was going to was beside a small station, and getting there was fun... and confusing. First we went from Shinjuku to a small station (shimo-kitazawa) on the Keio line to transfer to the Odakyu line. Well, it seems we boarded the wrong train (the rapid instead of the local), because we zoomed right past the station I needed to get off at (this is what happens when you are in a rush and don't stop to read signs to make sure you are boarding the right train). So luckily it stopped at the station just after the station I wanted. We ran from one train to the one directly in front of it which was clearly an Odakyu train (I mean, it's just a private line at a small station that has only three platforms!). Hopped on this train, except when it started moving, it went in the wrong direction. And where did we end up? On the Chiyoda subway line. So essentially, an Odakyu train became a subway train. Talk about confusing! Eventually, I made it to the right station (because this time I actually read signs to make sure it was the right train) and got there about 30 minutes late. Sigh... After the haircut I was just too tired to want to do anything else, so we just went back to our hotel and slept.

Next day was pretty uneventful, I went to Church in the morning, ate ramen at an awesome place, walked around omote-sando hills (which is a really expensive and exclusive-type mall. really really nice), went to the Square-Enix shop (I now own a stuffed tonberry! woo), and headed back to Ueda. All the walking the of the day before and this day just really sapped me of energy, because I was so tired and didn't really do much. I ended up going home earlier than I originally planned. haha. I just slept on the shinkansen back.
Oh well, fun weekend none-the-less. I'll get a picture of my new tonberry up soon :)

Oh, and one more thing. My hair colour is now red. That is all.

Google Calendar has launched!

And it's about time, too :)
I managed to log into Google Calendar and try it out, and, despite the fact that its a tad slow right now from the entire world trying to get on at the same time, it works really well!

A quick rundown of features: Add events by clicking on a time slot in the calendar on the page, automatically resize events (to increase or decrease event duration), add alerts sent to your e-mail or mobile phone (currently US only though. It's a good thing my phone has an e-mail address ;), import and export calendars from Outlook and iCal or any other iCal format-based calendar application, share your calendars with others or make them public, and, my favourite, the Quick Add feature.
Quick Add is by far an amazing feature. For example, type "Lunch with Tanaka tomorrow at 12pm" and it will automatically add it to your calendar at 12 pm tomorrow!
As well, multiple calendars (like in iCal) IS supported, so that makes it all the better. So you can have one for work, and one for personal.

As well, the ability to share calendars of your choice (with say your friends, or group mates) definately is a selling point.
For example, lets say you have an "something ethusiasts" group at work, or a club at school. You can create a google calendar that has a list of all meetings and outings, then share it with your group mates! How awesome is that? What's more, you can grant different privelages for different users you give access to! Google clearly put a great amount of work into this!

Anyway, don't just take my word for it. Go try it out for yourself!
http://www.google.com/calendar
(Requires a Google Account. e.g. Gmail)

Update: I've added a few quick links to Google Help if you're wondering how to do the whole import/export thing

• Import from iCal


• Import from Outlook


• Export Google Calendar Data


• View Calendar Data in other Applications

Enjoy!

read more | digg story | Google Blog Announcement

Freedom!

Freedom!
Originally uploaded by mkeoshkerian.

Tokyo Weekend Goodness...
T minus 1.40 work days.

Test Update

Food!
Originally uploaded by mkeoshkerian.

So you know how I said I was going to grab Katsudon before my exam...
I opted out for this instead (^_-)
Oh... yea and as for the exam... I think I did pretty good... haha

Gundam GO!

Yesterday I finally brought myself to go to the Sega World Arcade in Ueda in the hopes of finding some sort of entertainment in this boring city. By the way, this was a 40 minute uphill walk from the downtown station (if you're wondering why I haven't been before :P), and I even ended up walking to downtown from my apartment (which was another 40~50 minutes).
Anyway, I had looked it up ahead of time so I knew where to go and ended up finding it pretty easily, even though I had to take a narrow excuse for a road with turns and forks everywhere to get there (it was either that or spend another 15 minutes walking on the main road). Once I got there, I looked around for a particular game I wanted to play... it's this Online Game that you store your character data on an IC (rfid) card, and can use other cards as items in game, such as potions. Also, a lot of the game interaction happens by touching the screen to pickup and use items. It's pretty fun.
So, as you probably have guessed by now, that game was completely monopolized by hardcore gamers (I really should have seen that coming), so I found another game which was also tons of fun.
It's some sort of game based on the Gundam Wing anime, and it's played using a set of IC cards on a table that reads location and stats of the cards and your players. You move your gundam characters across the map using the cards on the table, and the point is to blow up the other guy's gundam things.
I played 4 times: Once in a tutorial (where I surprisingly understood most of it), twice against a CPU, and once (accidentally) against another player somewhere in Japan (battlefield selection was part of the tutorial I obviously didn't understand… until I looked at the manual. haha).
So the first two actual battles against the CPU was pretty fun, I managed to win and at the same time make myself look like an idiot to all those hardcore gamers who sit there playing for hours... but I had fun, so I'm happy.
Of course, I wasn't so successful in my match against another player, where I proceeded to get myself killed in a minute or so (I only had starter pack specs!).

So in conclusion:
The game was fun, the trek there was not. Looks like this is going to have to be a weekend only deal.
At least next week I'll be in Tokyo... It should be pretty easy to find arcades. haha.

Victory Fanfare!

Tomorrow is my Econ 102 Exam.
And I think I'm going to do something very Japanese. Before the exam, I'm going to go grab some katsudon (カツ丼, which is fried pork with onions on a bowl of rice) before my exam. Japanese students (I think it's mostly men, though) eat katsudon before their exams because the "katsu" part of the word sounds like the verb "katsu" (勝つ), which pretty much means "to be victorious" and it supposedly brings good luck.
So, this being my only test I'll probably ever write in Japan, I might as well go ahead and follow in the ways of the Japanese :P

After the exam I'm going to do something very final fantasy-type nerdy. And that's play the Final Fantasy Victory Fanfare (which i have on my cellphone)... Fun times :)

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明日、私は経済学試験する。試験の前に、カツ丼を食べます！多分、開運がもらうね？
試験の後で、ファイナルファンタジーの「勝利ファンフェーア」を再生する。楽しみな？

また、今日の日本語のクラスにホワイトボードで以下のメッセージを書いた
「明日、経済学試験があるから、勉強しなければならない。けど、この漢字を習った。困る！！！！」
w

Atennnnnnntion! Boot Camp will now begin

How can I not blog about this?

Apple has released a beta of "Boot Camp", a utility that allows users of any Intel-based macs to run Windows and OSX. I know, I know... It's already been done by a third party, but not only is this official... now we have full hardware support, directly from the hardware makers. This is amazing.

If I didn't have three terms on University tuition to save up for, I'd be down in Tokyo buying one right now ;)

Also, I strongly re-iterate my request for a donation of a MacBook Pro :)

read more here

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今日、アップルは「Boot Camp」を公開した。このアプリはマックでウィンドズを利用ができることが成った。これはすごいです。今、ＯＳＸのきれいなインタフェースを使用、ウィンドズのゲームすることができます！
また、このアプリはアップルから配布して、ハードウェアドライバーがある。だから、全て利用性ができます！

何でも僕に「マックブックプロ」を寄付したいか？（＾＿＾）