A new, beachfront venue!

Here I am, back in Japan again! My friend moved to a nice beach-view condo near Kamakura - on the other side of the peninsula from Yokohama. Most of my visit is already over; there was soooo much to do that I have been a neglectful blogger.

What can I say about visiting Japan once more?

The food is still yummy, the good life is still relatively affordable, folks are polite, trains will get you anywhere you need to go for a reasonable fare, and people will do their best to try to understand a foreign tourist who only has 20 words of japanese and can't get the syntax down right to save his life.

So, I hope to fill in this year's blog entries with news of the trip, pictures and random stuff, but I fear that I will have to do most of it after the fact when I am back home.

More computer fixing adventures in Yokohama

I am back in wonderful SW Ontario, but my friend's immanent move to Yokohama has led me to revisit this blog and update a few things:

When we last left the "build-a-bilingual XP computer in Japan" thread, I had just gifted my friend's brother in Yokohama with a $60 P4 2.4ghz rebuilt Fujitsu, running XP-pro with English and Japanese login settings. Felt good to know that if I ever moved to Japan, I would not be completely helpless. Did I mention that this was only half the battle?

It seems that Brother-san's nicotine encrusted Sony Vaio sub-desktop did NOT have a plebian 15-pin vga connector on it. OOOPS! So we just do what I do back home: grab the first monitor one sees at a junk shop or mooch one off a friend that is upgrading, or garbage pick one - right?????

Wrong!

Space is at a premium in Japan, chucking an old monitor out in the trash without expensive disposal license stickers is illegal - and your neighbors will shame you to death long before the some official busybody shows up with a ticket. Of course that means that no junk store will ever accept your used wonky PC system - even for free. As well, the japanese consumer does not like dirty, scuffed- up used gear, AND, you will not find a dinky PC shop close by, so forget it and buy a new, overpriced machine!

Also there is the issue of Brother-san's old, wonky computer. Sony VAIO; cost a bit in it's day: P4 1.3GHZ, could use some ram, good enough net-crawler if de-junked and given some more ram, but dammit - it keeps shutting down after 5-15 minutes! I had instructed him on how to clean the power supply and blow the dust out of the case - and he had been a real good sport and had done it. Might as well fix it! It would cost Y2000 to legally throw it away!

I had to follow through. A matter of honor (or honour as we say here in Canada)...

I had spent 35 minutes figuring out that the power supply fan was not turning, and that it was shutting down when the internal temp sensor tripped. After all this, I finally paid attention to the bios boot-up messages and HOLY CRAP! in perfect english the thing was warning me to check the power supply fan! DUHHHH! Facepalm.. Thank you Sony. Wonder why the warning was in English. Nice to get a confirmationof my diagnosis though.

Following through; cleaning the power supply had not cured the fan problem. (and yeah.. lots of safety warnings about how a PC power supply can throw 600V at you and store a nasty jolt after being unplugged - adults here, not sticking fingers onto hot stove element, etc. . .) Time to find a generic 3 wire 70mm pc fan and swap it in. Again, just look by the side of the road, and ...

Oh yeah; one does not do that here!

Did I mention that in sunny SW Ontario, scrap PC bits can be found by the side of the road - if you get to them before the metal scrappers snag them., at used stores, in dumpsters behind University buildings, at the municipal dump xfer station, etc.. Why does cheap waste disposal correlate with easy civilian re-use opportunities, while a strong recycling/ high-cost disposal regime mitigates against re-use and repair??? Oh well, never mind.

It was time for a morning PC PARTS RUN! wheeeeeeeeeee!

Now I must say at this point that my friend was being really, really, Really, REALLY patient with me. Perhaps she was getting a kick out of watching me interact with her brother, because she endured not only a trip to a huge electronics/ PC parts store, but a trip to a gigantic combined HARD-OFF, BOOK-OFF and GARAGE-OFF store! Gahhhhh! piles of too much stuff! Clutter! Tomorrows expensive gomi, today!

Brother-san was enjoying it! He got to drive us around Yokohama, and it had been an age since he had set foot in a Hard-Off store. So there we were, looking for a vga monitor, a 70mm fan and some ram. Found a nice 16" LCD for Y3000, some ram for the Sony for Y500, and a usb external CD burner for Y500. (buy it for the case! Put a newer superdrive in it, use on either machine when a dvd burner is needed, or stick a hard drive in it as a backup drive!) But no 70mm fan (3 wire). Even had the nice folks at the counter plug it all in to prove it worked - which was a good thing as our first monitor choice turned out to be a dud, even though it had been checked before putting it out on the shelf.

Onwards!

So now we had to go to the dreaded PC/Electronics chain store - the one with the 2 page flyers full of custom cases, motherboards, big screen TV's, etc, etc.

First mistake: telling the saleguy that we wanted a power supply fan!

OOOPs! No store in Japan is going to sell you a part that involves you sticking your pinkies into a clearly dangerous "no-user-serviceable-parts!!!!!!!" situation. Was I Bakka? As my friend translated, I quickly recovered: Bad translation! got it wrong; I need a Case Fan! Oh.. ok.. those are safe, this aisle over here... Y1100 later we had our part -even had the right connector!
The store had the full complement of high-end PC parts for building an ultimate game machine, etc. Cases, power supplies, mo-boards, the whole mess: I felt at home. Omnilingual!
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnilingual , www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19445)

. . .As well, a small moral victory: on the other side of the store in the refurb section was an identical Fujitsu mini-desktop, refurbed, worse specs that ours, going for ($180) no monitor included. My friend gets to watch me and Brother-san do an exaggerated victory pantomime, and later endless re-enactments of the exclamation I made when I saw the price for the store model. Brother-san thinks my GAHHHHHHH! noise was a hoot.

After a fine lunch at a reasonable buffet restaurant, a ride back to his place, and a bit of poking around with a screwdriver and some pliers, Brother-san now has 2 workable computers! I also brought the old wireless router that was left after I had done an upgrade for my friend (and for me too! I needed a fast wireless connection to her internet service for my month's stay) and now used the old one to do a quickie file xfer of MY DOCUMENTS over to the new beast, giving Brother-san a quick tutorial on setting up a home network.

Well, at least he can now give it away to some friend, or sell it off to HARD-OFF for Y500 ($6) without having to pay to dispose of it. I recommended installing it in their mom's room and setting the google Chrome homepage at a Youtube search for "Enka". Perhaps I went too far.

What did I learn? D.I.Y. is still very much a niche market in Japan. Almost as weird as cosplay.
And there are lots of strong structural reasons why. Fortunately with a first-world supply chain, and robust online retail and used markets, a determined tinkerer can waste hours fixing obsolete PC iron. Heck - If I this had been a Tokyo-based operation, we would have run wild in Akihabra. Rakutan, Amazon.jp and Yahoo.jp could have also supplied the parts needed, if we had another week to waste on this project.

"My job here is done!"

We had much more fun in Yokohama after playing with junk PCs. I got to see a nice local Setsubun ceremony (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setsubun no bean throwing - please! safety first!) and spent an afternoon in Chinatown just before Chinese New Year's celebrations, ending up with an evening stroll along the harbour-front and a walk-about on the teak-wood "starship hull" cruise ship port. Remember the trekkie movie when they have to go out on the surface of the saucer section? Now imagine a dock/ building roof/ walk-way thing that is kind of like that, only made of ultra-precisely fitted together teakwood 2x4-ish planks that streches 2 long city blocks! Wow! NO SK8TBRDS Allowed!

Yokohama is NOT the comfy little bedroom community half-way between Tokyo and Narita airport that I have grown fond of -it is an exciting Metropolis with grown-up big-city attractions (and inconveniences) Next time, I will be going there. 2 hours by train from Narita. I had better learn to pack light! I want to ride the big ferris wheel!

Ps: my friend and all her folks and friends made it through the horrible 3/11 quake and aftermath. She had been planning the move to Yokohama for a while, and was not to be detered by the catastrophe. I wish her a safe, uneventful, easy move at the end if the month!
And to all in Shizu Station, who put up with her friend, the tall ambling gaijin - I thank you, and I will miss you!

More about snow monkeys

As if there aren't enough pictures of the snow monkey hot spring on Flickr,
here are mine:
(assuming the flicker embedded slide show trick works...)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/58896081@N04/sets/72157625805638429/

Of course, I am back home now, in frozen SW Ontario, trying to catch up with all
the stuff at work, and at home that was put off.

But I still have a few more posts for THIS trip, which I will get around to as
soon as I can catch my breath and do the dishes, laundry, shovel the snow,
back taxes, stuff at work, morestuff at. . . . WAugghhhH!!!! I wanna go BACK!

No crying...

More info about the hot-spring snow monkeys:

They are Japanese macaques - and really quite common in rural areas of japan.
This bunch found a hot spring, took it over, and became a tourist draw.
Their cousins in town pester shop owners, raid stores and hissss!!! at
visitors to temples. This group however are just relaxing.

The Visitor's center, a few hundred yards away has lockers so
YOU DO NOT BRING FOOD, (hanging out of your pack-sack,
like some thick headed tourist, to the hot spring - lest the
enterprising monkeys relieve you of it..

Check out the Live-Cam at:
http://www.jigokudani-yaenkoen.co.jp/livecam/monkey/index.htm

After we got back to Chiba, we cancelled the Kyoto trip..

Who needs 400 year temples after seeing SNOW MONKEYS !!!!!

A Computer running XP in Japanese and English. . . Hooray!

While recovering from the snow Monkey visit (OUCH! Sore muscles!) I might as well crow a bit about a minor tech challenge victory I scored during the first week or so I was here. . . building a scrap PC, tracking down a copy of Windows XP pro, and forcing the whole setup to be bilingual Japanese + English, and legal. Wow! Yawn!

Ok. I was getting over a severe case of bronchitis/ mild case of walking pneumonia, and my friend was occupied with family matters and had no time to babysit me. When I heard her complain that her brother foisted off booking the flight of visiting relatives onto her, because his computer was too slow to do the online reservations, I though: "why not?"

Getting a "junk" PC was the easy part. The local HARD OFF used tech store had some for 6kY (appx 73CA$) but the 40gb hard drive and 256M of ram looked anemic. A night of browsing on Yahoo auctions found a nice 2.4ghz celeron Fuijitsu with no hard drive, cdrom only 512Mb ram for 1000 Y. (12.20CA$) delivery and COD brought that to 2300Y (28 CA$) Thank You and Kudos to SUPERJUNKPC who sells on Yahoo.co.jp auctions. A google search turns up that these were common office machines in JP 6 years ago, and are a plague on the land.

The hard drive, a 200GB western digital IDE came in at 1,500Y delivered. Add a keyboard used, from hard-off for 100Y (and about 1200Y worth of other stuff including blank CDs, and misc. not used) and we are ready to go. Best of all, the beast had the all-important (if you care about such things) Windows XP Pro COA / License sticker on it, meaning that it is "allowed" to have a copy of Windows on it.

.. Of which I do not have.

Time to get a bit grey market. The way I see it, software piracy is a matter of intent. Since I intend to stick XP on a machine licensed for it, no harm no foul. You think differently? You are either an ex- USA and Canadian lawyer, who has practiced copyright law in Japan, and is fully versed on current case -law, and has a lot of 2k$/hour time on your hands, or you are an ignorant greasy little net-troll who can go piss up a rope. I mod comments anyways, so no posting for either of you... Neener neener neener!

The challenge is: Get the machine all set up, but it has to be in Japanese, which I do not understand, and I have to set it up in English, which the intended user does not understand.

Step One: grab any XP Pro cd iso one can find in dark places, as long as it has SP3 slipstreamed into it. We need the SP3 because the hard drive is bigger than 120gb. Burn the iso, pop into the machine and install.

Grrrrrrr! stupid thing installed with a pie-r8 serial number/ license key!! grrrrr! Can't connect to the net like that! Find an XP key changer, use it to get the legal license key into the beast.

Step 3: Find some drivers: At least the lan driver so it can connect to the net, and the video driver. We hope the automatic driver search can find the rest. OH.. one more thing.

Grab an Anti-Virus program and get it into the machine, via usb key BEFORE hooking it to the net. AVIRA runs in japanese, is free, and doesn't steall too much processing power.

Install, reboot, install, reboot etc.. Curses to Fujitsu for not putting the sound drivers up on the net. Find some other drivers for another machine, unpack the installer with win rar, point the manual driver install at the directory one unpacked into, and yes, yes, yes, done..

Now for the Japanese part. Thank all the gods of Japan, and one demi-gawd in Redmond that this particular piece of Fujitsu office - iron came with an XP Pro sticker. XP pro is the one thing that can ran multiple languages, and in that I mean. . .

JAPANESE MENUS...

That's right, not just typing Japanese in, and seeing it in the browser, but having ALL the menus in Japanese, even the context menus and help balloons.

For this one requires the XP Pro MUI aka the Multilingual User Interface pack.

The idea was that in your office, Joe Blow logged on at the workstation at 6pm and got English, and Joe Takahashi logged in at 6am or whatever and got Japanese.

The full MUI pack is 3 CDs and hard to find, even on rapidshare (hint). You need only the one CD image (iso file) that has Japanese on it ...

Hey.. this would work for Bulgarian too, or Russian, or?

Yup, in fact the worldwide demand for local language XP installations is what helped me find this

stuff without TOO MUCH trouble.

A Usb key with the root of the CD image and the Japanese subdirectory was all I needed to install the MUI. Yup it worked fine with SP3 English in. Just for fun I ran SP3 Japanese too.

Then the MUI Japanese help file updates.

Finally, connect the the interwebs, update everything watch the Microsoft legit-check bless the beast and then switch over to Japanese.

Done!

Did I mention one needs a working machine with a cd burner, hooked to the interwebs to track all this stuff down? At least Japanese high-speed internet is very very fast - it will take longer to figure out the advantages of using google.ca instead of google.com (which will auto-forward you to google.co.jp and put EVERYTHING IN JAPANESE grrrr!!!) than it will to download your stuff.

There were a few more glitches with the hardware, of course, but that's the official way to do it.. The bios "forgetting" that the hard drive existed had nothing to do with the XP install (pull bios battery, wait, reset the bios, put the coin cell back in..)

Also stuck in CCleaner (run in Eng, then toggle over to JP, set to auto-clean at start),

and a few other tweaks and to have a serviceable light use XP machine, that wont get into too much trouble.

Hooray...

So, for all you gaijin teaching English in Japan, who want to know how to do it, and how to set your machine to be either Japanese menu or English .. Just follow these steps, and read the details on each software bundle you snag.

You can either run as one user and ride the Region and Language options tab in the Control panel, or set up two USERS, one Japanese, one English and practice using XP/JP for work.

Damn! looks like Bill got one right.. And don't mention that fashionista Jobs. . .
50$ would get you a used 2nd gen. 4Gb ipod. . .

The machine that changes history is the machine the masses can afford.

All over the world..

Monkey Onsen HAI!

http://www.jigokudani-yaenkoen.co.jp/livecam/monkey/day0/11/main.htm

Tired as heck! More later..

WOW!

Yahoo auctions, resolved. . .

Of course, the best way to pay off a bunch of outstanding debts on Yahoo.co.jp is to find someone (like you friend’s niece) who has a Japan Post savings account and a Japanese credit card. (All hail Mayu! resolver of yahoo messes!). The aforementioned Kuroneko dodgy currency xfer method worked well too. My friend has declared an absolute moratorium on further Yahoo purchases, and as I am approaching my Air Canada luggage weight limit, I better comply. Future posts may involve “How to send big heavy parcels via Japan Post Sea Mail for $50, because I need to get that extra 10kg of STUFF home.

Meanwhile, I have been a busy gaijin! Visited Yokohama for a day! Did some shopping, was fêted and filled with Asahi’s best beeru at a cosy neighborhood eatery by my friend’s brother and generally had a BLAST. Did some computer maintenance, and tried to get my friend’s brother to hose out the power supply of his woefully underpowered pc. Left a replacement with him too - which will be the subject of a future extra special Dai-gaijin exclusive: “How to build a bilingual Engrish-Japanese XP professional pc system for under $50, using only yahoo auctions and your neighborhood Hard Off store.” STAY TUNED!

For now, getting ready for a long train trip to the legendary Monkey Hot springs near Nagano - home of the previous Winter Olympics.

http://myoko-nojiri.com/snow_monkeys/index.htm

http://www.jigokudani-yaenkoen.co.jp/livecam/monkey/index.htm

I swear I will not jump in with the monkeys!

Japan Post is a Bank too!

Ok.. so most japanophiles know that the post offices in Japan also serve as a local savings bank.

Wow.. they do everything, including deliveries on Saturdays and Sundays!

Us furreign visitors can use our alien bank cards at their ATM’s and pull funds over into yen, and only pay a small (yes, get used to it) $4-5 fee. Savings account depositors can also transfer money by ATM or internet, to each other fee of charge - a method that is popular for paying sellers when you go nuts on Yahoo.co.jp online auctions.

As a foreign visitor, You CANNOT set up a savings account, not without the residency card, as well as your passport.

That means that when you want to transfer funds to pay off that Yahoo auction, it will run you a Y525 fee, and a personal session with a confused JP clerk, far more embarrassed about their lack of English, than you can possibly be about your lack of Japanese.

OUCH!

To get even with them, I am sending all in-japan correspondance by Kuroneko letter at 80Y ea. - Black Cat Courrier/ Transport (kuro neko = Black Cat) doesn’t freak out when your letter is a bit over the strict edo era weight limits that JP imposes. Every 5th shop in the area serves as a kuroneko dispatch, and the local Kombini (Family Mart) is open late. They will ask you whats in the letter.. you are not supposed to tap 500 +100 Y coins into a card to send to people, to pay off your Yahoo auctions. So just say “CARDO” and shrug.