Day trip to Yokohama

We went on another day tour, this time to Yokohama. On the way we stopped off at the man made island / parking lot / attraction, called Umi-hotaru, that forms the intersection of the tunnel and bridge sections of the Tokyo Bay Aqua-Line.
This thing is an engineering marvel. 10km long tunnel, and 4.5km long bridge (I guess they couldn't decide which to build, so they did both).


If you've got google earth check it out ( 35°27'45.93"N, 139°52'36.55"E).
We can actually see it from our house, on a clear day, and there is a ventilation shaft / tower half way along the tunnel section. This vent thing is actually another man made island that is very strange looking, from our balcony it looks like a huge disk shaped thing out in the middle of the bay. You can see it in a photo here.

We also went to a place called SeaParadise just south of Yokohama. The pic in the previous post was taken there in an area called Dolphin Fantasy. Really cool place, we only had a couple of hours there so we will have to go back again to see it all. And I wouldn't mind seeing the Aqua Stadium show again, dolphins and seals doing cool stuff.

Ive also just posted a couple of new photos on flickr. This one of the moon over Daiba, and this one of the Hanabi (fireworks) in Asakusa on the weekend.

Japanese people in photos

Seeing Japanese people posing for photos always makes me laugh.
For example:


Why the "V"? Didn't it go out of fashion long long ago (in a galaxy far far away...)?

Pretty (annoying) blue cables

Ive seen plenty of weird network problems. But this one is just to stupid:

Sometimes my network connection stops working, it shows up as "media disconnected" in windows. Try all sorts of things, eventually give up and reboot, problem still there. Eventually grab another blue cable out of the pile and plug one end into the computer and the other into the wall, and "voila!" everything is working.

So now I just think, OK, dodgy cable, no problem, move along. But wait...
a week or so later, same problem again! Now this time I went and got a brand new, still in the wrapper cable from the cupboard (you know, one that came with some piece of previously purchased hardware), plug it in, and away we go again. Nice, two dodgy cables, bit of bad luck there.

So fast forward another week, and after pulling nonfunctional computer apart (yes, my graphics card toasted itself, lucky there was an old one in aforementioned cupboard), network problem again! WTF!

This time I don't bother getting another cable, just grab one of the previous two, both still hiding conveniently under the desk, and plug it it... it works.

Why do my network cables just stop and start working like this? It does not make much sense...

I need a new "WTF" tag.

Lazy Sunday Shopping...

So after our funky day tour, today was some lazy Sunday afternoon shopping. A quick monorail ride from home and over the bridge to Daiba and into Venus Fort (there's an English link near the top).
Ive been wanting to try the camera on my phone for a while now, its not too bad, but the quality isn't brilliant... good enough for blogging though ;) And Ive got to say, damn its hard to hold steady.

So after a really nice lunch at the place below, which had some really cool ambiance, we spent the afternoon wandering around in the mall, pictures above. All I can say is, wow, what a cool place. Oh and hey, its full of shops, and its all on sale at the moment. Nice.

So it's the weekend... "Day Tour!"

So we went on a day tour. Its hot and its summer, so lets go somewhere with a pool. In fact lets go to a place that specialises in water. So we went to Spa Resort Hawaiians.

A day trip, a day trip bus tour, everyone else does them, so why not us? So off we went, on the bus at 8:30 am, a quick pit stop at a huge roadside "facility" (way more fancy than the ones in Australia!) and then at about 11am arrive for our 5 hours of fun in the pools. Check out the link above, it's a pretty cool place. It feels a little run down, and it was pretty crowded, but damn it was still cool.

This poster is in the front window of the entrance hall thing. I'm still not sure what "Doctor Fish" are, or what they do for you, and for 1500 yen I wasn't really that interested in finding out... especially when there were water slides, dozens of pools, hot tubs, onsens etc etc to play in.

So after a long day of swimming, well mostly lounging in the hot tubs, its back on the bus to head back to Tokyo. Another half way pit stop in another huge roadside thing, complete with Kitty vending machine. And then back to Tokyo by about 7pm.

One day tour complete.
Neat.

Photosynth has made progress

This is something I've been keeping an eye on for quite a long time now... one of the coolest imaging projects going at the moment (in my opinion anyway, but hey, your reading my blog).
So if you feel the need to heat up your graphics card a bit, then...
Main page is:
http://labs.live.com/photosynth/
Something worth looking at while your there:
http://labs.live.com/photosynth/bbc/

I cant wait until we can start creating our own scenes.

I obviously need a new camera.

Q: How do you know you need to upgrade your camera?
A: When a full resolution pic still isn't wide enough to go across the desktop without "stretching".

Damn 3840 x 1024 desktop resolution, I knew there had to be a drawback to having three monitors on my desk.

heh.

Typhoon and Earthquake... all in one 3 day weekend.

So we got the double whammy for the long weekend just gone. Saturday and Sunday was typhoon warning, it cleaned up Okinawa, but was a non event here in Tokyo, well we got some rain but that was about it. Then at just after 10am on Monday we had an earthquake. It was only about 3 on the Richter scale here in Tokyo, but it was over 6 in Niigata.

It seems that the nuclear power plant over there didn't fare quite as well as one would hope...

Even though it was only small here in Tokyo our building got up quite a rock and roll, up here on the 36th floor we were swaying around for a good minute!

Trains...

Coming from Sydney, and having been a cityrail commuter in the past (and as a result ended up being the first owner of such distinguished domains as www.f*ckcityrail.com etc) I was really worried about having to commute to work on a train. Even more worried when I found out I have to catch two trains to get to work. Even more worried having heard stories of how crowded the trains are in Tokyo...

What a pleasant surprise! Ok the trains are crowded sometimes, but they come every few minutes! Ive never had to wait more than about 3 minutes for a train. I don't even have to worry about timetables and such, because they just run like clockwork every couple of minutes. Pretty stoked at how quick it is to get to work, I spend more time walking to the station than I do on the trains - first train for one stop, then change platforms, second train for 2 stops, then into the lift (without leaving underground) up one flight of steps, then I'm at my desk. All done in about 30 minutes, 10 to 15 of which is spent strolling through the crowd to get to the station!

Also, Tamachi station, I have to walk through it in the morning to get to my station (Mita). Wow, to say it is incredibly crowded in the mornings is the biggest understatement ever. It is a non stop stream of people packed in shoulder to should all going different directions! And I have to get from one side to the other... so glad I don't have to go into that station, my station is nowhere near that crowded. Will try to post a pic of it soon...

Rainy Season

I'm confused. I keep hearing that it is rainy season at the moment. People are complaining that its hot and humid and rains all the time...
The only thing is that to me it doesn't really seem that bad, I don't really think its rained all that much (it rains for a day every few days, but not really pouring rain, just damp). Ok it is pretty hot and humid outside sometimes, but I've pretty much managed to avoid that. The only time I really have to be outside at all is the ten minutes walk to the station in the morning, then ten minute walk home at night (the building I work in has a train station inside it, so only need to go outside at the "home" end of the trip).
I suspect its going to get wetter and hotter yet, will have to wait and see...

Renting in Tokyo

So we've found our house, as mentioned before, but I thought I should explain how we found it. It was a very different experience to looking for somewhere to rent in Sydney.
We had two agents that worked with us (they both spoke really good English aswell), we told them how many bedrooms etc and price range then they send through a heap of floor plans. You pick some and say "hey, I'd like to see these ones", then they come and pick you up and drive you around all afternoon and show you the apartments! Not like Sydney where you have to do it all yourself, here you have the same person who comes to you each time and takes you out to see everything. It makes house hunting very easy! and there is so much to choose from aswell!
Ok, so I may have a slightly easier experience than some (being an expat on relocation arrangement), but still, damn, what amazing service. But when you do decide on a place you do have to pay "agent fee" (like a months rent) but still, pretty damn good value if you ask me.
It actually made finding a place to live fun.

Photos from our new apartment

So like i said in an earlier post, we've finally moved into our new place.

This is our funky new lounge room... Complete with strange swirly rug and funky couches. Oh and living in Japan would be complete without a nice TV!

The view out the window's not bad huh?
And it gets even better at night!

There's more photos in my photostream here.

never summer...

never summer...
Originally uploaded by k.blueice

This is another photo dredged out from our holiday in Japan. Don't ask why, I just like the photo. I'm starting to get a bit of a collection like this of my board on various mountains, might post the rest eventually. Anyways this one is the view from near the top of Happo-one ski field in Hakuba Japan.

We stayed there for a week in January... we will be going back!