Seven Months

1. It was seven months ago today when I first arrived in Hiroshima; I remember stepping out of Hiroshima Station to a display of flashing neon and rumbling streetcars, feeling a long and unknown road stretch out into the distance. Weariness from travel and absorbing so many new things had me feeling a little romantic I suppose, but I felt as though I had finally crossed the threshold into the world my imagination had conjured months before my arrival. For the second time in my life I was living in a place that was truly foreign and completely outside my realm of experience. How many experience that even once?

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Dipping into the past

1. Progress is a strange thing. I am quite fond of progress, believing that there are very few things that were truly better in the past than it is now. So I find it strange that I am currently typing this in the DOS version of Microsoft Word 5.5, running in a full screen DOS window, which I’ve adopted as my primary writing program on my PC laptop.

2. On my Mac I have WriteRoom, which is a great full screen text editor. On the PC I was using DarkRoom, a program offing almost the same functionality of WriteRoom. But it was not a perfect match of WriteRoom, and the few differences were jarring.

3. My first complaint with DarkRoom was how long it took to load. It almost as long as a full fledged word processor, yet it offered the functionality of Notepad. It’s nothing more than a text window, yet it required a mammoth .Net Framework download. It’s supposed to be a modern text editor, yet it had that nagging feeling of yesteryear; pressing backspace did not delete a whole block of selected text, you need to press delete.

4. Enter the DOS alternative.

5. DOS offered the sort of isolation and sparseness I was looking for when writing. All I needed was a readable font and zero distractions, and this version of Word delivers in spades — I reckon this is the best version of Word I have ever used. It’s just blue background and white text for me, having hidden everything from scroll bars to menus. I daresay I prefer this even to the Mac — the default DOS font is actually quite a pleasant thing to stare at for a while.

6. It’s not the perfect solution though. For one thing the now stock standard ctrl+c and ctrl+v keys for copying and pasting were not standard back when this version of Word came out, which takes some getting used to. And obviously Word for DOS and WinXP do not share the same clipboard, so you can’t copy and paste a link or a quote from a website, you have to edit the text in another editor. But for me the lack of visual clutter is such a boon that I am more than happy to use another editor in Windows to format and add links to my text. This is a case where it’s what you don’t get that counts — the clutter, the distractions, and the stress.

The Big Flop and the Big Durian

1. I have been rather lax the last couple of months, and I have no excuse besides laziness. So, a quick update on life matters.

2. Firstly, my long awaited trip to Kansai this month ran wildly off course and unfortunately had to be aborted mid-trip. It was disappointing, but Kansai is only a two hour train trip away, and I’ve been told November is the best time to go; as the country slips into Autumn it dresses itself in a brilliant red, a breathtaking sight. Not sure the finances will cope but a November weekend in Kyoto is a possibility.

3. Secondly, I won’t be coming back to Sydney this NYE after all. Plane tickets were just to expensive to justify the short time back home, so now I and a fellow teacher here will be going to Indonesia instead — climbing Anak Krakatoa, visiting Yogyakarta and the nearby Merapi volcano and getting under the influence for Christmas and New Years in the Big Durian. Molten rocks, millenia old Javanese temples and cheap cheap beer, oh my!

4. I’m working right now to expand my photography portfolio, and am planning on launching a web store in the near future to sell my prints. I think I’ve got some nice images now, and the cost of entry is so low there’s no reason not to try. More on that as it comes.

5. Not much else to report I’m afraid — weekend antics notwithstanding (and I ain’t talkin’ about that). All is well in the night.

Gallagher’s mouth vs Socceroos

1. From SMH:

Oasis frontman Noel Gallagher has let rip at the Socceroos, saying Australians should stick to sports they’re better at.

“Stick to the Aussie Rules and the tennis and the cricket and the rugby, you are good at that,” he told AAP from the United Kingdom.

“Football is the game of the intelligentsia and you are shit at it.

2. Harsh words indeed. But he saved the corker for Tim Cahill:

“I don’t know, there is something about him. I would love to kick him right in the bollocks.”

3. Now, who do you think is the smart money — a world class athlete or a drug-fucked spastic that can’t keep his mouth shut?

Sake Festival, Saijo

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1. Sake Matsuri, held at Saijo every October bills itself as “the biggest Citizen’s festival in Higashi (East) Hiroshima”, which I’m sure it is. But let’s just get right to the point — it’s just an excuse to get absolutely, totally, unequivocally blind drunk.

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How we got to Fuji

1. This is how we organised our trip to Mt Fuji, based on the research I did in organising this trip. It is by no means a complete guide, but we managed to get there and back just fine. Your Mileage May Vary.

2. The motivation for writing this is in part because there is very little information in English about climbing Mt Fuji if you live in the country. Most of the information about getting to Fuji and back is for tourists — who will most likely pass through Tokyo — and thus most advice is for people who are coming from Tokyo. We were coming from Hiroshima, we had time constraints (just one weekend) and we wanted to do it on the cheap. Keep in mind that travelling in Japan is an expensive proposition at the best of time, and with our time constraints it meant we often took the fastest way, not the cheapest. Again, this is just our experience, so do your own research.

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The Half Life 2 Ass Kicking Device