It is for mornings like this that I own a coffee brewer with a delay brew timer.

Today is a Safety Day. Two or three times per year, Fort Rucker shuts down entirely for one of these, no matter what they were otherwise doing. People on the flight line just lose that training day, and make up the hours later. WOCS candidates and AIT kids get the day off from training. They even bring the SERE people out of the field and give them access to showers and the same crappy lunch pizza that everyone else can get. The Army rents out the civic center of one of the nearby towns so that the thousands of us can all sit in the same place and watch the briefings. The briefings are the same every time: Drunken Driving Will Kill You. Motorcycles Will Kill You (And Owning One Means You Don’t Love Your Family). Think Carefully When Starting Fires In Your House. Don’t Be Stupid On Vacation.

For the rest of this week, I’ll be in the simulators. Everyone, including the trainers, prefers real flight hours to simulator hours. Still, simulators are valuable for the most dangerous parts of training: the first few days encountering the aircraft, the first few days in instruments, combat maneuvering flight at terrain flight altitude, sling loads. It is the last of these that I’ll be doing now.

Sling loads are unique in that they really aren’t dangerous to us. We used to train them in the aircraft. In some of the training LZs, you can still find the practice loads, which are nothing more than big blocks of concrete each with a U of rebar looped into it. Nobody can verify the story, but everyone agrees on it: one day, one of the training devices failed in flight. The rebar just slipped out of the concrete block, which then holed someone’s house. Now we train sling loads in the simulator.

I should head out now. When briefing us about the safety day, our class leader gave us the mandatory accountability time, and told us to bring a book: there are no scheduled activities until more than an hour after we have to show up. We all also know that this accountability time is according to the Army schedule: if we have not already checked in with our section leader ten minutes before accountability, everyone will consider us late. It is for this reason that I am leaving at 0600 for a day whose activities start two hours later.

Japanese sounded like fun at the time, even though I had no real hope of success: all previous efforts to learn a non-English human language had failed miserably. Why’d it sound like fun? In college, I watched a ton of anime, enough that I was starting to pick up certain words and phrases simply through repetition. It was really nothing deeper than that.

What I wasn’t expecting was to really like the language. It’s tremendously elegant. With the exception of kanji, which I still object to from a language-design standpoint, it’s a flexible, compact, powerful language that any computer scientist would be proud to have designed. It’s astonishing to me that it managed to evolve naturally. In any case, that class was fun enough that I got an A in it, a first for me in a foreign-language class.

My parents noticed all this as it was happening. They had been looking for a graduation present for me, and my success with Japanese inspired them: they would pay for a plane ticket to and from Japan, with the duration of my stay determined entirely by my own ability to pay. When they first brought this up to see if it was something I’d like, they suggested that I could find a job there and stay indefinitely.

To imagine my reaction, think exclamation points. Think cold, calculating ecstasy. Here was a golden opportunity being dropped into my lap, and I was not going to waste it. The process from there was simple, with each step proceeding logically from the previous. Determine that they don’t want just-graduated gaijin programmers in Japan, but they do want ESL teachers. Locate a monthly email newsletter with current opportunities in the ESL field in Japan. Draw up a resume, and send it to everyone in the newsletter who looked interesting. Make sure my passport is current. Conduct some phone interviews, get the seal of approval from a company. Wait while they scout their locations for an opening for me.

In the end, I got a phone call coming out of a final exam two weeks before graduation. There would be a position open for me in a month in a small town in Saitama. Was I interested? I walked down the path behind the CS building in the shade of the hill the campus is built on, talking on my cell phone with the company representative, and a giant grin grew on my face.

That thing just stuck there for ages.

One CraigsList guy, though, had an entirely different response. I called him at about 4:30 pm, and he said “Great! How soon can you be here? Mapquest it. It takes 43 minutes? If you can be here in 40 minutes or less you get a bonus.”

As it turned out, it actually took about 50 minutes to get to his house, so I didn’t get the bonus. He greeted me, said it’d be about 15 minutes before we could leave, then vanished.

One hour later, he showed up out of thin air and said he just needed to print out the directions, then vanished again. In the meantime, I was alone in a well furnished house which seemed to be of a different level of formality than his attire, with a number of pictures of people who looked nothing like him.

After another 40 minutes, as I was thinking of just leaving and writing the whole thing off, he suddenly showed up and told me that it was time to head out. It was now 1900. He backed the giant truck out of his driveway, then asked me if I’d ever driven such a thing before. I said that I hadn’t, but that I’d be willing to try. He told me that was good, and that I should get in the driver’s seat and drive to Worcester.

About ten minutes down the road, I noticed that the fuel gauge was hovering near the Empty mark. He told me that it was fine and that it would get us to where we were going. About an hour later on 495 South, the engine stopped producing power, eventually sputtering to a stop. I headed for the first offramp (37B–Fort Devens), but the offramp was uphill, and I ended up having to park (without power steering) on the edge of the offramp. We then hitchhiked the few miles to the nearest gas station and back, then spent about an hour getting the truck going again. Apparently big diesel engines need to be primed with a special primer button located under the hood after they have been run entirely dry of gas before they will go again.

Keep in mind that everything in this post is true. My sketch quota was eventually so far exceeded that by now I’m just not reacting to it at all.

It was now 2130 or so and we still had a ways to go before we made the first delivery. At this point, I was having some doubts as to what was really going on–he had told me that we were delivering mattresses, but I really had no idea what was in the back of that truck. It was kind of a relief, when we finally got to the first person’s house, to discover that the back of the truck contained about 10 mattresses and box springs, two chairs, two ottomans, two hand trucks, and about as much empty space as my bedroom. We offloaded a mattress, box spring, and frame to the customer, and everything seemed pretty much normal. Aside from the total lack of packaging on any of the components, it pretty much resembled a delivery from when I was a UPS guy.

The second delivery was in Worcester, about ten minutes’ walk from ‘s house where I’ve been spending my weekends. We brought the mattress and box spring into the apartment, at which point my employer told me that we were to head off.
“What about the frame?”
“The real question is, do I care if they get the frame?”
“…”
“If they go yelling out the window ‘Chris, what about the frame?’, we’ll deliver it to them. Otherwise, let’s get moving. We’ve got a long night ahead of us.”

With an extra bedframe surplus, we set out to the third delivery point. Here, he not only took particular care to ensure the customer got the best matching mattress, box spring, and frame, but he also bargained with them to try to sell one of the chair/ottoman sets. In the end, he sold the bed set and one of the ottomans for a grand total of $220. Comparing this price to others after the fact, my employer’s price seems suspiciously cheap.

At this point, he had me drive him to Irish Times, where he had three beers and I had a Red Bull for the caffeine. We left at around 0130. It was at this point that he informed me that we absolutely had to return the truck to Penske tonight, as if it wasn’t there by tomorrow they might report it as stolen. This would necessitate some logistical planning, as there were still a number of mattresses and chairs in the back that he didn’t want to just abandon. In the meantime, he had an idea of someone to sell the chairs to, so he had me drive there.

After successfully offloading the chairs (“A special 2/1 chair/ottoman deal! Don’t fight over who gets to put their feet up!”), he had me drive to a Penske dealership which displayed many characteristics I associate with businesses which have closed down for the night. Arriving at around 0230, we were met by a guy in a pickup truck with a motorcycle trailer, into which we loaded the remaining supplies. We then left the big truck there unlocked with the keys in the ignition and a notable lack of “I am returning the truck I rented from you” type paperwork.

I had to argue fairly strongly against the notion of me riding in the trailer on the way back to the employer’s house, but I did eventually prevail. The ride there was almost entirely uneventful, just long; we arrived shortly after 0400. We then unloaded the motorcycle trailer into one half of a two-car garage which was serving duty as an ersatz mattress/box spring warehouse, and probably contained about 40 of them in addition to the ones we unloaded. I was then paid my $110 ($11 / hour, discounting half an hour at the bar; this rate was negotiated when I first met the employer), and left for home.

There were additional points of sketch that I didn’t mention the first time around because they wouldn’t fit properly into the story. Stored carefully between adjacent mattresses in the truck were a pair of paintings and several framed mirrors, all about 3×4′ in dimension. The employer was extremely reluctant to fill the tank of the Penske truck, and we left it at its depot with little more than fumes in the tank. The pickup truck dude put up about half an hour of negotiation on the cell phone before the employer acquired his services; in the end, the employer paid him $100 in exchange for the use of his truck and trailer, his help loading and unloading, and a joint.

So. On the one hand, the work was easy and profitable. On the other hand, the best case scenario if I were to continue it is that my sense of sketch would be permanently uncalibrated due to supersaturation; the worst case is that I would end up with titles like “Accomplice” and “Felon”, which would pretty much end any hopes of flying for the army right then and there. I am pretty sure that last night I didn’t actually do anything wrong. This does not change the fact that working for the wrong people may in itself have harmful effects.

The employer told me that he had plenty more work for me, and that I should just call him as soon as I want to work again. The more I think about it, the less of a good idea it sounds to ever contact him again. This means that I am looking for a job that I can start immediately and end abruptly. Anyone have any ideas?

Until that point, my only experience with Apple’s operating systems were on ancient System 7 machines, which I despised. I’d be hard-pressed at this point to name specific flaws with those systems, but I’m pretty sure my loathing wasn’t baseless. It was a pleasant surprise, therefore, to discover that the OSX experience was generally a positive one.

My overall impression of the current Mac OS is this: there are certain use cases which the designers expect of the owner of the machine, and for those cases there are well-polished applications which generally behave quite pleasantly. I was particularly impressed with the ease with which I could use it to keep my cell phone’s calendar and contacts synchronized with the contacts on the computer and my Google calendar–it took about 15 minutes of research and setup, and thereafter exactly three button clicks to update things. If you want to write a document, watch a movie, browse the internet, burn a CD, or any of a large number of other common tasks, the computer comes with a convenient application for the purpose.

On the other hand, once you stray from the expected use cases, the ease of use plummets dramatically. The only way I could figure out to export my Safari bookmarks was to download a third-party program purpose-built for that task. I tried feeding internet to the computer through the bluetooth link to my cell phone; it took about four hours of research to discover a cryptic magic incantation to type into a special terminal that would launch if I ran a particular program; this incantation had to be typed manually each time because there was no obvious way to automate it.

There were a few quirks that I didn’t really like. The alt-tab analogue seemed broken to me because it switched between programs instead of individual windows, which didn’t help me at all when I had four IM windows going at once. That was just a symptom of a more general trend: in Windows, someone who knows what they’re doing can generally get along without a mouse, even though things get much more cumbersome. Attempting the same on OSX, so far as I could tell, would be futile. I really disliked the tendancy to fly icon bars over, under, and around the working space in their own miniwindows; I like to keep my icons in one place relative to the workspace of a window, where they won’t overlap or be hidden by anything.

Other differences were noticeable, but easily adapted to. I still think that it is strange for a program to stay in memory after its last window has been closed, but I bet there are people who appreciate the near-instantaneous “load time” it gives their applications after the first time. Individual windows tend to take more screen space than I’m used to percentagewise, but that drawback is neatly counterbalanced by “Exposé”, which flies all your windows into individual panes which you can choose from. Putting the menu bar at the top of the screen didn’t bother me because there was almost never a need to use a menu.

Overall, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend an Apple to someone with little or no previous computer experience, as it’ll do just about anything they’re likely to want to do with less trouble than they’d encounter on a comparable Windows machine. The only real exception to this general rule is that someone interested in computer games would be much better served to just get a Windows machine.

On the other hand, I also know that I would not be happy using OSX full time. I actually am interested in computer games, which is really the deciding factor. Beyond that, though, I have a decent understanding of how Windows works–I’ve been using it for over 10 years, and I know what to expect and how to do things the quick and easy way. It may be that the stuff I dislike in OSX can be configured around or have non-obvious analogues, but I wouldn’t look forward to going through the learning process again. Also, I have a FreeBSD box for “serious” purposes; while it’s possible to do most of the same stuff in OSX, I see no reason not to go for the free OS which runs on much cheaper hardware. I’d expect the same would apply to other power users.

OSX in one sentence: it is bright, shiny, rounded, easy to use for limited purposes–exactly like the toys given to four year olds.

First impression from the plane: there are a ton of parking lots in America. First impression from the ground: I’m going to really miss living in a country where obesity is more or less unheard of.

I only got around to assembling my computer today, not because of any shortage of parts, but because my whole family is almost unbelievably wired, and it’s easy enough to find a spare computer when I need one.

You may recall me assembling my computer some months ago: a high-end gaming rig which I hoped would last some years. I assembled it myself, not just to reduce costs, but because that way I could have complete control over which parts got integrated into the machine. I thus ended up with a tower case which sported, among other features, screwless drive bays. Instead of screwing in your hard drives, there’s a fairly clever mechanism which fastens them with small metal tabs which are inserted or removed by sliding a locking control.

Unfortunately for me, these metal tabs are not as secure as the more traditional screws. Somehow during transit the computer apparantly received some sort of very severe shock, as both drives somehow managed to come entirely loose and spend the remainder of the trip rampaging around the bottom of the case. The affected components are the drives themselves, the video card, and about half the motherboard. All told, about a thousand dollars of equipment may or may not have been destroyed–I haven’t yet had the guts to replace the cables (which were quite definitely broken) and see what works.

On the plus side, I still have my backup computer–I’m likely to try to set that one up tomorrow. On the minus side, I’m not happy about the lifespan of my machines–one way or the other, all the expensive custom computers I build for myself die within months.

I’m in the market for a cell phone. If you particularly like your carrier, and it has some sort of nationwide plan, I am all ears.

My movements for the next week are as follows:
Sunday: drive to Cape Cod to pick up my parents who will have bicycled its entire length as part of the Pan Mass Challenge.
Wednesday: go to Worcester in the hopes of finding someone interested in seeing me. Even better, find someone to take me in for the next few days while I meet people.
Saturday: fly to Seattle.

Over the course of the next month, I expect to skydive, test for the Army, fly several thousand miles, drive several hundred miles, and eat out more often than in. I am going to attempt to spend less than $1500 on everything during the month, but I can afford to blow that budget out of the water if necessary (read: if something really interesting and or cool shows up). This is my best chance at vacation for some time, and I intend to spend it memorably. If you want to join me, just let me know.

After 12 hours of sleep, I woke up, made myself human again, and decided that as there wasn’t anything to do in the guest house save watching TV, I would head to Tokyo. One of the other teachers staying in the guest house was willing to guide me there, and on the way give me a brief lecture about how the train system works. Once we got to the city, he left me to my own devices. I chose a direction, and started walking.

The first place I got to was the Imperial Palace. The way you can tell that it’s imperial is that it’s several acres of land, more than half of which is private residence, in the city with probably the highest real-estate prices in the world. My first view of it turned out to be in the ‘fountain garden’, an area with a number of beautiful and varied fountains. From there, I walked the circumference of the moat for 3 km before finding one of two gates which allow you into the ‘eastern gardens’. These are large areas of parkland, with occasional fountains, sitting areas, parks, and so forth. Overall, I’d say that it’s all very impressive, and quite pretty, but some parts just seemed strange. There was a section, for example, of wide path with trees planted to shade the way, and stone benches encircling the trunks of the trees, such that people could sit and relax in the shade. However, every second stone bench was roped off. I have no idea why.

After touring the palace gardens for a few hours, I decided to go to Tokyo Tower. This is a duplicate of the Eiffel Tower built in 1958, apparantly to spite the Parisians. It is identical in just about every way, except that where the Eiffel Tower is 320m high, the Tokyo Tower is 333. Apparantly, thanks to improved metallurgy, this one is also 3000 tons lighter than the original. I went to the second observation deck, 250 m high. On a clear day, you’re supposed to be able to see all the way to Mt. Fuji; today was not clear. I did, however, see the giant Ferris wheel, which I had previously seen only in anime. I intend to visit it at some point, but I don’t think it will be today. The same applies to Akihabara, the electronics district. After some wandering in search of a subway station, I happened across an internet cafe, which is where I am now.

Coming to Japan feels oddly familiar. On the one hand, it’s a strange and alien environment where many things are just different. On the other hand, I’ve watched a ton of anime, and many of the things which would otherwise be bizarre are much less so.

One thing I hadn’t been expecting, however, is the amazing amount of Engrish (that being English words and phrases misused in strange and often amusing ways). I had the impression that it was something you might see once or twice per week; instead, I’ve seen more examples in the two days I’ve been here so far than are worth counting.

I feel like I’ve had a lot more experiences that I intended to recount, but I can’t think of any. One thing I should have brought, had I thought of it, was a small notebook and pen, to keep track of the strange and wonderful things as I see them. Another would have been a digital camera. I thought I would just use the camera in my cell phone, but it has the dual problems of low resolution and a battery life measured in hours instead of pictures. Its battery died last night, to my disappointment, and I’ve missed any number of fascinating photographs so far.

My time allotment here draws short, so I have to wrap this post up. In closing, I’d like to list the items included in the “American Style” breakfast listed in the menu here at the internet cafe:
Toast
Salad
Boiled Egg
Corn Soup

It’s just like home here.

The other interesting thing is that I lost all symptoms of the flu that’s been going around… and gained one that nobody else has. See, instead of coughing, or having a runny nose, my body shunted all the virii into my vocal apparatus, with the result that my voice is gone into a horrible squeak that sometimes drops into its normal register for a second or two. It’s like when you’re going through puberty and your voice sometimes breaks, except it’s happening all the time, and ‘breaks’ into the way it should be.

Two less interesting things that happened recently are that a cadet dropped from my ROTC detachment, and I got her duties as Web Coordinator. This is ok, as I had that position a year and a half ago. Still, it is funny to see that neither of the two people running the cadet web site after me didn’t bother to take my name off the headers of each page, or add their own. Also, I acquired a block of Lucite. I plan to find a Dremel tool, inscribe something cool into it, and put LEDs in the side so that the inscription appears to be hovering in it. I’ll do pictures when I’m done.