Slashdot | Battlestar Galactica Season 2 This Summer

I SOOO can't wait!!! :D

This show is awesome - great special effects, realistic spaceships and maneuvers, great acting, intelligent writing. I thought I would be waiting a lot longer for season two! For anyone who hasn't seen it, start with the 2003 miniseries and then season 1. My dad said he didn't see it at the video store, but you can easily find it on isohunt.com.

I Want One!

Gigapxl Project

Peace peace peace peace hate

I think Kate's put up most of the pictures she's going to put up, so feel free to check them out.

Hiroshima felt a lot like Vancouver. Some of the intersections were dead ringers for West Broadway, or West 4th. And the southern part of the Peace Memorial Park bears an eerie resemblance to SFU. The Pond of Peace leads to a path, flanked on either side by large lawns and tall hedges, which in turn leads to the Peace Memorial Museum, a long concrete building with a vertical slit motif, held up from the ground by concrete pillars. Behold: the Academic Quadrangle's long lost twin.

The Peace Memorial Museum and the Memorial Hall were both well worth the trip. We visited the Memorial Hall first, which has no entrance fee. The Memorial Hall contains the Hall of Remembrance, which presents a panoramic view of the city from the hypocenter, and sounds of water echo from the circular fountain in the center, which represents both 8:15, the time of the bombing, and "consolation to A-bomb victims who died begging for a drink". There is more to it than that, but I don't think I have the words to do it justice. Let's just say it was an experience I won't soon forget. The Memorial Hall also contains a searchable database of the names and, where possible, faces of the known victims of the A-bomb (they are still collecting names), as well as a library and exhibit of testimonies of survivors.

The Museum (entrance fee 50 yen) wasn't quite so artistic or sublime as the Hall, but it presented a wealth of information. The museum displayed artifacts such as time pieces frozen at 8:15, historical background about Japan's actions in the role and the development and decision to drop the A-bombs, explanations of the physics, exhibits showing the effects of the bombs on the city and its people, and on and on. I was really quite impressed by how fair, unbiased, thorough, and nonjudgmental the exhibits were. Japan is all too often amnesic about the war, or outright revisionist as in Yasukuni shrine (a controversial place which honours Japan's war dead and sells books such as The Alleged 'Nanking Massacre'). The Museum was a welcome contrast.

Although photography wasn't forbidden, and there were things worth capturing on film (or memory card), taking pictures felt a bit, well, sacrilegious. I did take one picture though, of the visitor's "dialogue notebook" that people can write in after going through the museum.



Everything in the Memorial Hall and Museum is worth remembering, and that comment is worth remembering, too, I think.

Hiroshima

We're back from our three day trip to Hiroshima. Here are some highlights. Kate's in the process of editing our pictures and putting them on deviantArt.

Every trip in Japan has to involve food in some way. You can buy magazine style guidebooks to pretty much every region in Japan, and each one devotes pages and pages to food. Hiroshima's local specialties include oysters and okonomiyaki with noodles. Kate benefitted more than I did. On the one hand, she likes oysters a lot more than I do, and on the other hand, she can eat okonomiyaki without dying. The word "okonomiyaki" means, roughly, fried (stuff) that you like, and yet a key ingredient is egg, which I don't really like at all, since it kills me.

Of course we did plenty of sightseeing. Miyajima came highly recommended, and was well worth it despite being about an hour and a half away by street car and ferry. A fact that seems to go unmentioned in a lot of the websites about the place is that the island is populated by lord knows how many deer who are all quite small, oh so cute, and almost entirely tame. They only give you trouble if you tease them with food.


The running of the deer

Other sights included the archerific Kintaikyo bridge and Hiroshima Castle. But of course most of our attention was focused on the Peace Memorial Park. We visited once each day. On the first day, we walked around the park checking out all the memorials; on the second, we walked through at night; and on the third we went through the Memorial Hall and Museum. More on that tomorrow.

New shoes!

I bought new shoes, which is quite the accomplishment for me. I think this may be the first time in my life I've bought shoes for myself, having grown up in a bedroom directly over the shoe section of the family store.

I also worked a bit with those shoes, so when I was in the Shibuya ABC Shoes, I took one look around and started pulling boxes off of the walls for myself, even taking one or two pairs off of the display shelves.

Well, I think I flustered the hell out of the sales staff. They kept asking if I needed any help. At that point I was committed, so, my identity as a foreigner firmly established (Kate was around to help me with the whole buying clothes thing, and I'd been jibberjabbering with her in English), I went full speed-ahead with gaijin power.

In my defense, I was doing everything perfectly. When I was done trying on a pair of shoes, I put the box back together neatly, and returned it right where it came from. The staff had nothing to complain about!

Eventually, though, I had trouble finding where they kept one of the styles, and so I had to ask for their help, and they promptly took over. And I mean took over. At one point, I reached for a shoe a sales person had retrieved, before he had finished undoing the laces for me, and he actually shooed my hand away. The nerve!

P.S. Battlestar Galactica is awesome.

Suspicions confirmed

One of my Japanese coworkers overheard me talking to one of the Japanese staff at another school over the phone and told me I sounded like a Japanese person... just one who isn't very good at speaking Japanese. Which should be encouraging news, I suppose, but, as I mentioned before in comments, this just confirms my hunch that a lot of Japanese people probably take me for a Japanese guy who's, you know, differently abled in the head. I told my coworker as much, and she (being nearly as willful as a strong-willed western woman) told me I should preface all my Japanese conversations with something to the effect of, "Just so you know, I'm not a stupid Japanese guy, I'm a smart Canadian guy. OK?" Well, it could make for some interesting encounters at restaurants I suppose.

I think I'll start wearing my Canadian pin again.

Mozilla Firefox

Just downloaded it. So far so fast! :)

Bring 'em on!

Meanwhile at my workplace I'm looking at dealing with a series of fairly serious personnel problems, all of which have developed within the past 3 days, including, but not limited to, a developing feud between English- and Japanese-speaking staff.

But, hey, I'm still in a very good mood. I am virtually unflappable. If the feud turned into a shooting war (I have reason to believe that one of the participants is an NRA supporter), that still wouldn't even come close to flapping me. In fact it would help break up the day.

I've been asked to visit the Chicago campus round about the end of March--the trip would either be mostly or entirely free, and I'll probably end up taking it. I considered trying to work a swing through Canada into the mix, but this is going to be hard enough to coordinate with work as it is. If any other schools pipe up and ask me to drop by, my schedule is going to become one heck of a pickle.

Moving

I am moving schools - I've been transferred to the flagship school of the region! When I first found out today, I told Toby - "it's like being told you're getting the Enterprise when you thought you'd be getting the Excelsior!" Hee hee ;)

Battlestar SFU

We finally got around to watching the new Battlestar Galactica, starting with the miniseries. We watched the first hour or so of that, and we're impressed! The action is gritty, as is the storyline, the effects are good, and the fighters use realistic kinematics! (Well, some of the time.)

Also, the colony of Caprica (as seen in the first half hour or so) is SFU's Academic Quadrangle (I taught tutorials on the grounds of an interstellar bazaar!), with occasional shots of Convocation Mall, Freedom Square, and the Library.

In other news, on my way to the station after work some French guy asked me for directions to some hotel. The trilemma of available languages had me so baffled--should I tell him in Japanese that I can speak English? Should I tell him in English that I can speak French? Or say in French that I can speak French? Or maybe I heard the accent wrong and he isn't French at all! I ended up just shaking my head. I couldn't have helped him out anyways (I had no idea where his hotel was), but I could have been so totally globalized and I missed my chance.

Bdlawaaaaaahhhh!

That's what came out of my mouth, more or less, when I read the email stating that I've been offered admission to the University of Chicago.

I woke Kate up and just about scared her to death. Oops. But, in my defense, I am really really happy.

Weekend update

1. I bought a kanji textbook. Don't let anyone fool you: Japanese by osmosis can work! But after over a year, I've discovered that it can only take you so far. Eventually you have to go beyond stock phrases such as "the train is coming soon, please stand behind the white line" or "the train to Kawasaki is coming soon, please step behind the yellow line and wait there". Every once in a while I feel like a complete idiot. Like today when I should have told the travel agent (see below) that I'd like to pay by "furikomi" ("payment via direct deposit"), but instead I told him I'd like to pay by "furikae" ("money transfer", and completely inappropriate in this context). That was egg on my face, I tell ya!

2. My school had a sayonara party for a Japanese staff member who'd been there for about 2 years. We went to an izakaya, didn't let her pay, and then tried to give her the money that was left over after we gathered the funds. She was horrified by the idea, so I explained that this is an important custom in the West, and refusal would be entirely insulting to us all. By the end of the night we made her cry--because we were so very nice to her, not because we were messing with her, but it was great anyway.

3. We booked and paid for a 3-day trip (Feb 16-18) to Hiroshima today. We got a really good deal, through a travel agency affiliated with our company: a package including shinkansen fare plus two nights in a hotel, with a 5% employee discount, came to less than the normal cost of the shinkansen tickets alone. Actually, now that I think about it, they gave us the discount without taking any time to check whether we were actually employees or not, so if you're thinking of touring around Japan and are willing to pose as an English teacher I think I have the agency for you. (Come visit us, we're lonely!)

4. The latest episode of 24 downloaded via BitTorrent about 5 times faster than we could have watched it. We were quite impressed. Maybe someone from Japan was uploading, because we've never gotten that kind of speed from any source back home. You guys are so low-tech!

5. Karaoke is serious business, OK? (This is from sometime in November, not long after we moved schools. I'm not sure what song I was singing then, but it sure as heck wasn't stupid "Arms Wide Open".)

Slashdot | UPN Officially Cancels 'Star Trek: Enterprise'

So long, Enterprise. The last few episodes were downright boring. I wish they could've gotten it together and done Star Trek the way it should've been done.