On Saturday a bunch of students from the OMF language centre hit the slopes at Teine with all our gear and our resident snowboarding instructor!  JP and Nora came to Japan from Germany with OMF and JP shared his testimony at a Olympic themed night for students last week telling us how he came to faith after breaking his back and missing out becoming a professional snowboarder.

It was a great day and thanks to JP for teaching us what we really should be doing!

Snowboarding 2010

Back in 2006 Google made a For-China version of it’s site called Google.cn (.cn being the TLD for China),  Now it had a chinese language version of it’s service for sometime, but it was being blocked by the Great Firewall to avoid people finding things on the internet that might not agree with the governments official take on national and world events, or even worse, might make them look bad.  So, in order for Google to have a workable presence in China, they have to censor their results in a fashion that pleases the Chinese authorities, and so they decided to do that through google.cn.  This move brought a lot of flack their way from free-speech activists and other people who don’t like how China works.

So basically, as I understand it google.cn is the site that gived the filtered results and the rest of google doesn’t.  Google doesn’t seem to offer its other services through google.cn and presumably they aren’t part of the agreement with the Chinese government like search is.  But by using proxies and routing connections through other countries, clever folk can access Gmail and it offers pretty secure (SSL) and pretty anonymous (no name etc required) email based outside China, a good thing for folk who might be trying not to get noticed or found protesting against their government.

But the disjointedness to me is between Google’s findings (that “someone” was attacking their services from China) and their response  (to remove filtering from their in-China search).  Why does removing the filtering balance out the attacks?  And surely Google must be aware that China will just ask them to leave or just block google.cn…  Perhaps Google is planning to remove themselves from the Chinese market and simply wants to make a big noise about doing so, while squarely pointing out the attacks made by ”someone”…  And I think good for Google.  They are a corporation, not a government agency, and they can withdraw from China if the fancy takes them.  If other corporations followed suit, China might think twice about it’s policies on censorship which in turn would mean it would have to think twice about abusing people’s civil rights as there wouldn’t be anywhere to hide.

But the truth is that out here in East Asia Google isn’t the same big deal it is in the ‘western world’.  Here in Japan no-one talks about Googling things, not many people use gmail, harldy anyone is on picasaweb, Blogger isn’t the blogging site of choice, Android has still to make any real appearance, YouTube is used a bit, but isn’t as clear a winner…  The big internet mogul in Japan, and in most of East Asia, is Yahoo!  In Japan Yahoo! provides search, online auctions and shopping, maps, news and weather, online TV, financial information, entertainment news, games and more.  On top of that it is one of the largest internet service providers in the country, it is in cahoots with my mobile phone company, Softbank, and my future parent’s in law even use Yahoo! as their telephone provider for their home.  the most common email address out here is @yahoo.co.jp.  Google is even advertising on TV to try and up it’s market share here, I never saw a Google advert in the UK, they didn’t need them.  If this is anything to go by China won’t worry about google leaving, there will be some other company that everyone uses.  If Google left Japan, most people probably wouln’t notice anything other than improved efficiency at the office because there is no YouTube.

So yeah, that’s my take on the whole thing…   Perhaps a well intentioned, if frustrated, move by Google, but will it have any of the effects people are talking about?

But!  Be aware I am no expert on China or Chinese politics, quite the opposite, but my mission agency’s background is in China, originally being the China Inland Mission before being kicked out and deciding to serve the rest of East Asia (including Japan! ) and so there is still a lot of interest in and prayer for China within the organisation…  So the story is of a little bit of interest to me, but this rant is the extent of my reporting ability on the subject!

So Emily gave blood on her own, and went all woozy in the middle of it. I think she has a bit of a blood phobia, she broke out into a sweat at the sight of it and took a little while to recover. We had planned she wouldn’t look at them doing it and maybe that would be ok, but the distraction she found was the next bed over which, of course, had someone lying in it giving blood! So that didn’t help so much! But all credit to Emily, she continued and gave her quotia!

Afterwards the lady at the desk kindly informed me that soon they will be revising the limit on people who have been to the UK so that those who have been for upto 30 days will be able to give blood, I explained that I had spent 14 of the 16 forbidden years living there.  Interestingly it is specifically the UK, if I had been born and raised 75 miles south on the same island, i.e. in the Republic of Ireland, I’d be certified BSE-free for giving blood in Japan!
I guess I will just have to keep my blood all to myself!

P.S.  Extra bonus points to anyone who can tell me where the post title comes from!

The 3D was especially interesting to me though as I studied stereoscopic technology when I was at uni for my final year degree project.
The technology the cinema we went to was the same shutter glasses tech that we used at uni, it means wearing a bigger set of glasses, but it’s an easy install for the cinema as there is no need to polarise the on screen image, as long as their projector is up to it. If 3D takes off the way some people think it will this will probably be the most common way to retro fit prebuilt cinemas to display it… If you understand what I mean you’re doing well

But yeah, the sensation was just as it was when I was at university, and it was pretty good there. The drawback still comes for me in focus, in 2D my eyes can tell how far away the screen is and know how to focus(ish) to watch, plus I’ve had plenty of practice. But in 3D the image looks closer or further and my eyes want to focus that way, but the screen is the same distance and so focus doesn’t change, I think this is what tires my eyes. It was a bit of a talking point when I we studying 5 years ago and still seems to be.
But actually as I relaxed into the movie and forgot to take special notice of the 3D it became easier, though my eyes were still tired by the end, but that might be because it was a late show that went on to almost 1am!
Emily enjoyed it, but the glasses were a little awkward over her regular glasses and she felt a bit motion sick during the longer action scene in the middle…

But definately see it in 3D if you can!
I hear it’s doing well at the box office too, perhaps on it’s way to becoming a record breaker!

Click more to see one I made of a panorama from our holidays in the summertime!

Now recently Softbank have had a deal on the iPhone, the basic plan, so called flat rate data, plus iPhone 3G actually works out at the same price as a regular phone, maybe even a little cheaper.  However Emily didn’t really want an iPhone, she would rather have a phone that was more like the one she already had…  So I thought I could take the chance I had missed before and get me a nice shiny iPhone.

The iPhone has many advantages to life in Japan, first up it has a nice English interface, not the afterthought most Japanese phones have.  This is particularly good in regards to input, Japanese phones usually don’t have the predictive text and even the regular input method takes way too many button presses to use English.  But then they aren’t designed for english users.  The iPhone can switch easily from Japanese to English and a multitude of other languages if the fancy takes.  Not to mention the apps, the music etc etc etc

But the rub with the iPhone in Japan comes with data.  In other places it is a completely flat rate deal, but Softbank’s “flat rate” data service isn’t really flat rate.  But rather it is cheap if you don’t use it, but if you do it rises, and then hits a ceiling after a little while.  But the ceiling isn’t overly low, it’s not outrageously expensive either, but its a good bit higher than I would pay for the same service in the UK, and it would take a big chunk out of the savings we were hoping to make by getting Emily a Softbank phone.  Now this is ok, I can be careful etc and try to use Wifi as much as possible, I have it at home and at school after all.  But this is harder on an iPhone than you might think.  And it might also mean me taking a step down in terms of convenience…  Let me explain…

I have a lovely 1st generation 32Gb iPod Touch that the lovely folk at GCD Tech gave me when I left working with them to come to Japan.  And I would carry both it and my mobile all the time when I was out and about.  It is/was my Japanese dictionary, notepad, calendar, iPod (duh) and more.  It syncs automatically with my Gmail, contacts and Google calendar.  I could spend a trip on the train writing short emails or catching up with things I hadn’t read yet…

Now all of this is iPhone territory right?  It can do all of this, and more!  And it will do it over wifi just like the iPod!  But the issue is that it doesn’t [i]just[/i] do it over wifi…  It does it over 3G as well.  If I have everything automatically updating on the iPod, it could only do it with wifi, so while I was at home or school it would update away, go on the road and it would sit there, not updating.  But the iPhone won’t do that, inder wifi it’s fine, but go on the road it it will use 3G to do it’s updating.  Fine if it’s a prepaid limit, but with Softbank costs rise… 
So lets try and keep it low.  Contacts is easy now as I can sync with Google contacts through iTunes.  But email and calendar won’t sync without Outlook, and I don’t have Outlook, I use thunderbird…  So I have to sync the calendar and mail over the air, but trying to control it and keep it to wifi.  So I can go into settings and set them to manual sync.  That should do it right?  Manual sync on the iPhone doesn’t mean you push a sync button.  Rather it means when you open the calendar or email, it will then sync to keep it up to date.  That sounds ok, but it means if I am out and about and need to check to see if I am free on Friday evening or Monday afternoon or something, the calendar will sync via 3G as soon as I open it up to look.
Email is even a step more irritating.  If I set up Gmail as an email account on the phone set to manual, and the Softbank email account as well.  Now if someone sends an email to my Softbank account, I get a bleep and it says “You’ve got a mail” (it says this even if there are a lot of them) and I can open it up and see what the mail says.  But when I open the mail app to see the email, it downloads whatever Gmail is waiting for me on the server along with it, the opening of the app being the trigger for a “manual” sync.
I have also lost the ability to write emails on the train to be sent when I get home, I have to download any emails that are waiting in order to have the opportunity to reply to old ones or even write a new one from scratch…  And I have to remember to open the mail app when under wifi to make sure they get sent and new ones downloaded…

So I feel like getting an iPhone has downgraded my flexibility, unless someone knows a way to get it to sync some things only over wifi and still let me make phone calls and get mobile mail…  It seems either I take the convenience hit, or I take the financial hit….  Any thoughts?  Another option is to carry both iPod and iPhone….  And another is to give Emily the iPhone and go back to my keitai/iPod combo, she won’t really use the internet, sync or anything, but I do like the ease of English!

On Sunday the 22nd of November 2009, Emiri and I got officially engaged.

Now I thought we were engaged before, but that’s only part of the story here in Japan.  Japan has a lot of traditions that stem from the Buddhism and Shinto religions, from Confucianism and just from having a culture and people of it’s own.  Marriage, as you’d expect, has a whole bunch of these traditions, one of them is 結納 (ゆいのう ‘yuino’, for more info) which is basically an exchange of gifts between the bride and grooms’ families.  This exchange of gifts formally marked the engagement of the couple and there are a few other things around it that I won’t go into, largely because I am not at all sure that my understanding is correct!

The church in Japan quickly recognised that if Christians are to get married they should have something to go in place of these various ceremonies and traditions, as they are based in buddhism and shintoism.  Otherwise, families and onlookers may feel something is not right and the engagement and marriage aren’t valid.  So in place of this engagement process the church created a 婚約式 (konyakushiki – engagement ceremony, or betrothal ceremony).  While the original Japanese traditions have pretty much died off, the engagement ceremony in the church is still done.  This is what Emiri and I did last Sunday!  We did it at Itayanagi Chapel in Aomori, where I spent 3 months of my short term year, and Emiri attended for 6 years and actually lived in for a few!

We went down by Ferry last Monday, spent the week half on holiday (although Emiri had a lot of homework) and half preparing for the ceremony.  We got to go to the Thanksgiving celebration on Saturday (Surprised I could fit in my suit on Sunday) and on the way home the following Monday stopped in Hakodate to see Nari-Nari and Hana-chan, who used to live in Aomori, but now live and work in Hakodate.

Overall the ceremony was great.  I had kind of expected it to be a kind of formal proposal of marriage, or agreement to get married or something like that, like a formal pandering to culture…  But really it was more significant.  It really was about us gathering with friends and relatives to aknowledge before them and before God, His work in bringing us together, and then promising to seek to honour Him as we prepare to get married.  In that regard it really was a strong affirmation of the purposes of the marriage we intend to, and are preparing to enter into, particularly in a modern culture that doesn’t hold marriage in the regard that it used to be held.

Some detail about the ceremony itself…

The ceremony was held in the afternoon at 2pm.  The normal morning service went on, then everyone had lunch at church (normal at many Japanese churches) and we rearranged and decorated the room a little, greetted all the guests who weren’t at the service and began the ceremony.  Martin Ghent, the pastor and OMF missionary, lead the service, we sang a song called God’s Family (神の家族, chosen by Emiri).  We then made promises before the congregation, each other and God.  As I understand from Martin’s explaination (I didn’t fully follow the promises as he read the Japanese, but thankfully he explained beforehand!), we aknowledged God’s leading in bringing us together and promised to remain pure and faithful to God’s Word as we move towards marriage.  This was particularly relevant as for many in Japan marriage is just a formality to undergo to have legitimised children and obtain the relevant benefits and legal recognition etc.  We also exchanged gifts as symbols of the promises we made, I gave Emiri a bilingual Bible and she gave me a Japanese one.

Martin spoke about love based on 1 John 4:7-12 (although, becasuse of a slide break, we only actually read vv7-9), talking about the roles of the different kinds of love mentioned in the New Testament and how they fit into engagement and then into marriage.

After the ceremony the church was rearranged and the tea and cake came out!  The youth group “surprised” us with a song we most definately didn’t know anything about whatsoever…  Emiri used to help lead the youth group and so has a close link with them.  They sang the song “God bless you” which some of us a JLC had sung for the Pain family when they graduated, but they also added a special last verse for us!  the food was good and the chat was nice, it was great to see people who had moved away from the church since I was there in 2006, and also to see others who I hadn’t seen in a while, like the Elliots and Angela!

The testimony slideshow

Emiri and I also gave a sort of testimony about where we were from and how we met, then how I went back to the UK and came back to Japan and Emiri talked about how she ended up at HBI, all the while showing photos of along the way, including as kids…  Afterwards Peter shared on behalf of OMF, Nozomi on behalf of Itayanagi church and Emiri’s dad too.  Then there were some thanks and a lot of eating things!

A few months ago I got a printer, so that I could print my own documents without having to go all the way to the Hokkaido Centre or somewhere to print. Back at home in NI we’ve had a whole range of printers, mostly from Epson and HP, but lately we got a Canon multifunction and have had no problems with it at all. So I went for a Canon this time around and got a multifunction so I can scan and copy and so on as well…

A month ago then I got a CISS for it (Continuous Ink Supply System) from Rihac systems in Australia (also in UK). It cost a bit, but it’s bunged full of ink, something like a bazillion cartridges (maybe 60…) worth of ink or something ridiculous, so the overall price is a bargain! Also when the time comes to refill I don’t have to pay for more cartridges, just for the ink. But, as I still had ink left over in the cartridges I had before, I didn’t fit it right on it’s arrival. Rather this Wednesday night saw me run out of ink in my black cartridge and so I thought I would go for it!

Taking care to lay out some paper and get a box of tissues to address any spillages or unexpected events, I opened the box and got the gear out. There was a tank full of ink, a bunch of tubes and bits and pieces, a syringe and a couple of frightening needles! I had to prime the system as it had been flown and couldn’t be sent primed, presumably it would burst open in a mid-air inking frenzy and turn everyones baggage cyan, magenta and yellow… I managed to prime the system with minimal spillage and only peripheral blackening to my hands and clothes, an older, dark coloured jumper chosen for the occasion. I then managed to put the thing into the printer without spilling anything and follwed the instructions to thread the tubing through the printer, add little blocks to stop the lid crimping it and measuring out the right lengths so it could move back and forth easily… Then I put the cartridges in, reprimed a couple of bits that had collected more air in the pipes in the process, and turned it on.

Now at this point it is worth saying that Canon only wants people to buy Canon ink for it’s printers. Printers aren’t expensive these days, every one wants you to buy their printer, and the reason is so they can sell you ink. printer ink and cartridges are extortionate to say the least, which is a big part of getting one of these ink systems. It used to be that cartridges would be made a certain shape or with certain patented parts, so that only that company could make them, but that started to lose it’s control and so now, to ensure you get only the “correct” ink, they put a little chip on the cartridge. This little chip’s job, of course, is not to stop you using other cartridges, nono, it is to keep an eye on how much ink is in the cartridge so the printer can tell you when to buy more. But as an aside it just so happens that if a cartridge doesn’t have the right chip, it won’t work with the printer. And that chip is made by Canon. So to put in this ink system, the fakey cartridges on the end of the tubes have to have these chips, and Rihac provide instructions for removing chips from real cartridges and sticking them onto theirs so that they appear to be real cartridges (then we disable the ink level monitor). But they also offer, for a small fee, some chips pre-fitted to the cartridges. Now sometimes I like to fiddle with these things, but the last thing I wanted was to buy this whole thing then mess it up trying to put these tiny chips on. So I got the prefitted ones.

So yes, I had put everything into the printer and turned it on and the printer told me it couldn’t recognise the cartridges. This was a bit of a disappointment to say the least. I emailed Rihac and, as it was past my bedtime, I went to bed.
Rihac replied on Thursday morning and suggested I call their customer support line in Australia. I decided against that, I figured they would probably just tell me the chips have some kind of problem, or maybe Australian chips don’t work in Japanese printers so the ink markets can be independant or something annoying like that. So I decided to take matters into my own hands and, following the instructions I mentioned before, I set about taking the authentic chips from the canon cartridges and replacing the supplied chips with them. Now it is worth pointing out that before I did this, I closed up the valves on the ink tank so that it wouldn’t get air in the tubes again and I wouldn’t have to re-prime it after moving around. I finished up changing the chips and put it all back in and the printer recognised the cartridges! Success! But wait, it still didn’t seem to be happy. It was moving things and whirring for much longer than normal and eventually it displayed an uninformative error message saying “Turn me off and on again!” on it’s little screen and stopped working. So I did. Still nothing! At this point I noticed air had got into the tubes… so I removed the stoppers I had put back in and used the syringe to push the ink through to the cartridge like the last time to re-prime the system… But I forgot I had closed the valve on the back of the tank… When I took the syringe out the pressure I had built sent a spurt of black ink splattering up the lovely, nice, clean, white, rented apartment wall! Tissue upon tissue went to mopping up the ink, trying to soak as much out of the white wall paper as possible. But it was immediately apparent that no amount of tissuing was going to clean up this mess. And the time had passed, I had Japanese classes to go to and a prayer meeting that evening! Fortunately I had recently used some bleach based bathroom cleaner that had amused me by turning the blue rag I was cleaning with white as I cleaned. So, that evening, a careful application soon removed the inky mess, and gave the room that “just been swimming” smell!

I had left my printer in a non-printing state, it was just giving me error messages when I left it to go to class. But when I returned in the evening and turned it on, it sat there ready to print as though there had never been a problem. I still don’t know what happened to change the situation, but after a few test pages the ink was flowing freely and it has been printing brilliantly.

So now each page works out even cheaper than the ￥10 I would have to spend at the Hokkaido Centre for copying, so I can print and copy at home, in colour, and save money! I also feel I should name my printer as it has displayed a level of intelligence and emotional trickery that normal appliances don’t seem to hold… Squirty McGoo*

I am not sure if I would recommend the system or not, I’ve only been using it a few days! But certainly anyone who isn’t adventurous, would panic when faced with possibly indelible ink on their walls, or doesn’t like having their emotions and sanity toyed with by an inanimate piece of imaging technology probably shouldn’t get it…

*unless someone can come up with a better one? My only criteria is it needs to be fun and also be recognisable as a printer when put in the sentence “I’ll just run a off a copy on old Squirty McGoo”

The first is called SkyDrive Explorer and is a Windows Explorer extension that allows access to SkyDrive (Microsofts free online storage provider) directly from Explorer. SkyDrive is extremely useful if you ever need to share files that are too large to email or can’t be sure if the recipients email providor is up to the task of a larger attachment. You can upload the file and share it with Windows Live! users privately, or open it up so no password is required for people without Windows Live! accounts. I recently used it to pass two audio recordings to our language advisor at OMFs Japanese Language Centre as they might have been too large to email.
I have used SkyDrive for a while for this kind of thing, it has bags of storage space (25GB for free!) and it’s drag and drop upload has often allowed large uploads. It also (recently) allows the download of an entire folder as a zip file, which is handy for downloading too.
SkyDrive Explorer is in development and currently is a beta, so whether there will be a charge for it in the future I don’t know. Depending on how it’s features develop, it could also make SkyDrive a viable target for online backup of essential docs and files…

The next one is Offisync, a plugin for Microsoft Office (2003 and 2007 only I am afraid).  This appears as a toolbar in compatible applications (Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc) and allows direct interaction with Google Docs.  Now Microsoft have their own service for sharing docs and so on (Office Live Workspace), but it doesn’t have online applications (yet…although apparently coming…) and I am not sure if it is as widely used as Google Docs.  But this ability to directly open and save Google Docs via Office on my desktop is great, it might mean I begin to use Google Docs more.  The only drawback is that it doesn’t facilitate allowing others to see the document without signing in.  It allows for collaboration, but others must have a Google Docs account in order to sign in and view, to open it up for public viewing means going to Google Docs itself and sharing it out.  Office Live Workspace is actually a little better in this regard.  Perhaps when Office goes online it might be a real competitor to Google here.

Both potentially very useful little apps, both still in beta and free for now.  I will be using them and if they are rubbish you’ll find out soon!

My most recent discovery is that my water heater is running on kerosene (or paraffin for the old timers!) and not gas as I had previously thought.  I found this out as I received a docket telling my how much kerosene I had used over some summer months and was surprised to find I had used any at all (the only other kerosene burning appliance in my apartment is my stove, and summer was warm enough to not need it).  So some poking around later I finally found a sticker on the hard to get at side of my water heater saying that it used kerosene (灯油 – touyu in Japanese).  That is probably a good thing as kerosene seems to be cheaper than gas.  Another reason for me going through these dockets was I was talking with a friend about how much gas I used and I didn’t really know.  In the end the numbers I told him were off as I was mistaking my gas and water bills!

Anyways, the other side of this story is I turned on my stove for the first time yesterday!  I got home to find my apartment at a chilly 14 degrees, so warmed it up a little.  Today the sun is back out and beaming throught the window, so it has taken a backseat again, but it’s yet another sign that winter is on the way!  Colder weather, more rain and everyone is talking about the snow coming.  My shovels will need to be be fished out from the back of my little shed and the work will begin again!  Not that I am complaining, well not much, it also means another chance to go snowboarding, it means all the dirt and grime will be covered over for a few months and the city will seem pure and white…  and it means Christmas and New Year’s are coming….  So roll on the winter and do your worst with the snow.  Actually if you want to hold back with the snow that is fine too!