And Sometimes Why

Author: David

  • English Speaking Businesses in Matsuyama

    This has been around for a while now, but I’m not sure anyone uses it regularly. I started it the first time I needed to see a doctor, using a list I got from MIC. Since then, I’ve added a few places I’ve found (and removed one when it closed). If you find any new places that do speak English or listed places that don’t, email me at David@DavidHed.com.

    I even made a permanent home for it here on my blog, up there to the right. Here’s the link if you want to go there directly: http://www.davidhed.com/blog/english-speaking-businesses-in-matsuyama/.


    View English-speaking businesses in Matsuyama in a larger map

  • Down the Rabbit Hole

    An idea I’ve had kicking around in my head for a while is a desktop wallpaper of the earth, with a realtime display of night and day as the world revolves. For whatever reason, I started looking into it last week.

    I found a couple of web sites that display about what I was looking for (1, 2, 3), but hacking Windows 7 to display web content on the desktop isn’t really my style (Active Desktop functionality disappeared with Vista’s Sidebar and 7’s Gadgets, I discovered).

    Anyway, while reading about how one of the sites generates the images they display, I discovered a few programs that do what I was looking for, and after reading through the descriptions it seemed the perfect program was Xplanet. It’s used to create many of the maps on Wikipedia, enough to warrant an internal page with a tutorial on how to create maps for Wikipedia articles. It can display images from any point of view in our solar system you’d like, and of course anywhere on our planet, and update your wallpaper automatically. It’s fantastically versatile, but because it was built to run under Unix, it’s a bit quirky.

    First off, you need a Unix command interpreter dll (fortunately included with the distribution) to even run the thing under Windows. Because it was initially designed to run under a command line-driven OS, it literally doesn’t have a GUI; the exhaustive documentation and help is all text-based- which was my first hook, a nostalgic intellectual exercise in command-line switches and parameters, replete with config and batch files.

    I’m not sure if you’re like me, but when I get a new gadget I explore all the features to see what there is and what I can use. I even started thinking about tossing together a VB configurator that would write the config and batch files for you.

    In learning all of Xplanet’s features, I found myself exploring forums dedicated to the program and discovered that there were multiple interfaces people had already written for it (1, 2, 3). I even found a program dedicated to periodically downloading current cloud maps. It might not surprise you then to learn that most of my free time over the last week has been consumed by learning and configuring Xplanet to my liking. I enjoy projects like this, where learning some new bit rewards you with a small change, slowly shaping the output toward your ideal.

    You can see a screenshot up to the left of how it looks right now. I’m still not 100% done; I want to explore using a gamma adjustment to lighten up the clouds just a smidge so it’s easier to see the landmasses underneath. It’s close enough to share though, so if you wonder why I haven’t been online for the last week or so, here’s your reason. And if you have any questions about Xplanet, feel free to ask. 😉

  • Sick again

    Yesterday was an interesting day. After a sleepless night of chills and sweats (which was repeated last night as well), I woke up with a fever of 37.9°C, and begged off work (and a party tonight I’d been looking forward to for months).

    Yuko happened to already have a doctor’s appointment in the morning, so I went with, to see if they could fit me in. The doctor was delighted to have an opportunity to use his English, and even though he apologized multiple times for his poor skills, I had no trouble understanding him. (Doctors here all have to learn more English than the average person, I’m pretty sure it’s because medical record-keeping is all done in English.)

    I noticed something other people have observed too; because Japanese doctors don’t speak English in their daily lives, they use technical terms for everything. For instance, when he wanted me to breathe in and out, he asked me to “inspire and expire,” and though the phrase isn’t as unusual in clinical settings, he also explained that he was going to “palpate [my] lymph nodes.”

    He then gave me a really unpleasant flu test that involved swabbing my throat with a long flexible plastic swab designed to scrub your throat just below your tongue. After nearly throwing up on him a few times, he used the swab on what looked like a pregnancy test (the same test pictured above left with someone else’s results). Even though I didn’t test positive for influenza A or B, he suggested it was a false positive because it was still pretty early, and prescribed me a small battery of drugs, including Tamiflu.

    When I went to pay for my visit and prescriptions (a total of about $35, thanks to my government-run insurance), I discovered that I didn’t have enough cash on me to pay the bill. Like most Japanese businesses, cash is all they accept. They very nicely pointed me toward the nearest Ehime Ginko ATM (there isn’t really any meaningful ATM interoperability, so you generally have to use ATMs owned by your bank), and even had me take the drugs though I hadn’t yet paid for anything.

    On the upside though, it was a great day for exotic JDM Subaru spotting. On the way to the doctor’s office, I saw an early 2000s Legacy B4 Blitzen, the result of a collaboration between Porsche and Subaru. Then on the way to the ATM, I saw a (2004?) Impreza S203, basically a super souped-up factory STi.

    I hope I can sleep well tonight and wake up sans-fever.

  • Hey Mister Postman

    If you live in Japan, your Christmas packages might have been delivered by this type of Japan Post delivery motorcycle. These are the standard delivery vehicles for mail and small packages, thousands of which crisscross the country daily.

    I spotted this Japan Post Honda Cub outside EPIC, the Ehime Prefectural International Center, idling where the driver left it to go inside for a delivery.

  • Christmas Eve

    Yuko and I just had a great Christmas Eve dinner. Christmas Eve is a big date night in Japan, even more so than Valentine’s Day as the occasion for a romantic evening.

    I didn’t get the memo until it was almost too late, literally only a few days ago. By that time, it was too late to be sly about figuring out where she wanted to go and making a reservation. We ended up eating in a Japanese restaurant on top of the tallest department store in town, after I made a deal with Yuko that if she made a reservation anywhere she wanted, I’d pay for dinner.

    After dinner, we went to “Betty Crocker’s,” a dessert cafe near the center of town, where they happened to have a live jazz duet performing jazz standards and jazzed up Christmas tunes. I was a little disappointed the staff wouldn’t let us sit closer because those tables were for larger parties, but I understood.

    It was nice to relax in the ambiance the live music created, and if I go back it will be for the music, certainly not the paltry selection of sweets and basic coffee and teas they have.

  • Kuwabara Apartment

    This is my old apartment in Kuwabara. It’s owned by ALS Matsuyama, my former employer, so when I left the company I had to move out.

    It’s not a bad place, cozy-small, but the kitchenette was hard to work with sometimes. There was only one electric burner, built into the counter next to a sink smaller than most bar sinks, and the fridge and microwave were both dorm-sized.

    I salvaged an unused plastic filing cabinet from work to use as a makeshift pantry because there simply wasn’t any suitable space otherwise.

    The apartment was definitely built for a single person to live in, though at one point I had a 30-something couple and their infant living next door. I always wondered (a, how they kept the kid quiet at all times and b,) how they managed to keep from killing each other in such a small space. Maybe that’s why they moved out.

    If you look closely, you can see four of my five bins for sorting refuse. If you look REALLY closely, you can see that the stereo has a front-loading slot for MiniDiscs.

    If you’re interested, here’s a slideshow of the rest of the apartment:
    http://www.davidhed.com/blog/2010/12/23/kuwabara-apartment/

  • Solid Left Elbow

    Bloody SinkToday, while walking back from the park with my class of five and six year old kids, I witnessed one of them take an elbow to the nose hard enough to cause blood to start pouring out of both nostrils at an alarming rate.

    Our school is situated in a very sleepy residential neighborhood, with a convenient local park just a couple small blocks away. Every day we can, the two bilingual classes at MSP walk the three or four minutes to play for about half an hour at the park. It’s also a convenient time to teach the kids how to safely cross the road, and we practice at the small intersections along the way.

    We have a chant that goes “Look to the right, look to the left, look to the right again. Are there any cars? No there aren’t, put your hand up.” The kids put hands to brow like they’re peering off into the distance, and swivel around to look in the direction they’re mentioning.

    Well today, one pair of energetic boys was standing a bit too close to one another, and when it came time to “look to the left,” the left elbow of the boy in front caught the nose of the boy behind him with enough force to make a lovely squishing sound, like someone had just stepped on a wet sponge.

    His immediate reaction was remarkable, face contorted like he’d just smelled the awfulest stink he never thought possible, followed immediately by two matching rivulets of blood running down his face, while the rest of the class quickly huddled around him.

    To his credit, there were no real waterworks, replaced instead with almost a sense of embarrassment at having everyone looking at him while he bled out. I walked the class the last block back to school while my assistant helped him apply wads of tissue to his face.

    That was about 11:30am. As we were getting ready to go home today at 2:30, I checked the tissue plug we’d left in his nostril to staunch the flow that hadn’t stopped before lunch.

    You guessed it; still bleeding.

  • Dual Temperature Vending Machine

    Japan has hot drink vending machines (think cans of hot coffee), which is neat but unsurprising at this point. I think this is the only dual-temperature vending machine I’ve spotted so far, though.

    The drinks above the red line are hot, and the drinks below the blue line are cold. In the winter here, you can easily find hot tea in plastic bottles, as well as the aforementioned hot canned coffee.

  • It’s the Little Things #6

    I took this picture at a small neighborhood market near my apartment.
    I took this picture at a small neighborhood market near my apartment.

    In Japan, eggs aren’t sold by the dozen, they’re sold in packs of ten.

    They’re sometimes even sold in packs of four, though mainly at convenience stores. Also at many convenience stores, you can buy just one hard-boiled egg.

  • Sister Cities

    Matsuyama’s sister city in the US is Sacramento. It’s not a huge deal here, but most people know it because there’s a street named after Sacramento, and there’s a big plaque (albeit somewhat washed out now) in front of the main post office announcing that its sister post office is in Sacramento.