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November 16, 2014

A trip to Nikko with the family

Sleeping cat at Toshogu temple — The carved sleeping cat up there is famous for some reason.

Evans family at Kegon falls — The four of us at Kegon falls

PB091847 — It is a bit messy, but we enjoyed the stay at a traditional Onsen. I do find sleeping on the tatami mat with the thin futon a bit tough, but for one night, no problem!

My dad came to Japan on his way to China for a three day layover. He's headed to China to give a talk at a conference (and based on my recent experience I had some advice for him!) We thought it might be fun to go on a trip, so we did an overnight trip up to Nikko. We piled all four of us into our tiny Mini Cooper (reinforcing the idea that we will need a bigger car if we want to do things like this more often with more people) and took off. Nikko was a nice two and half hour drive from Tokyo.

We made our first stop at Nikko Toushougu Shrine, where we walked up many, many stairs (still, no comparison to the Great Wall of China!) to see the grave of Ieyasu Tokugawa. It was a very impressive temple complex. We walked all over the place, and went to a nice yudofu restaurant for a late lunch. It was all tofu, so dad was able to get along just fine. Actually, now I'm not so sure that what we saw was the grave of Ieyasu Tokugawa. Based on the wiki article, it sounds like there are many shines in which he is enshrined (hah!) So perhaps there is some amount of his ash there, since cremation is very common in Japan. Actually, based on what my father-in-law was saying, burial is now illegal, so cremation sounds like the only reasonable option to me.

After lunch, we piled back into the car and headed up to Kegon falls. It was an amazing waterfall! Lots of water falling from the crater lake of a volcano that formed about 1000 years back or so. I think. Lisa said that it was well known for suicides. I think there are many places in Japan that might be well known for suicides, like the train tracks.

We had reserved an overnight stay at a hot springs resort on the Chuzenji lake. On the drive up, we took a famous road called the Irohazaka road. After the drive and settling in at the hotel we took a dip in the super-sulfurous baths. They were a bit too hot for Alan, but it was quite nice, and dad seemed to enjoy it as well. Afterwards we had a nice dinner, provided in the package (all the Onsen are like this, and include breakfast as well.) The only problem was that it was in the traditional Japanese style, and involved a lot of sitting on the floor. That is a bit tough for dad and I, but we managed. They even provided an all-vegetarian option for him, which was really nice. We all bedded down in a large room in four futons, with a super satisfying sleep given all the walking that we did.

I chatted with the staff to make sure that we could have western seating for the breakfast, which we got. So the next morning was a nice breakfast (assuming, of course, that you don't mind fish and rice for breakfast) before a leisurely check-out. On the drive back to Tokyo we stopped for some gifts (you usually buy some kind of local food / snack for people at home and work when you go somewhere, so we had to load up on those.) The drive was also pretty nice, and we didn't hit much traffic (surprisingly!) The next day Dad flew out to China - but it was great while he was here. Alan is still talking about Grandpa Gary. We'll see everyone again in July 2015 when we go to America (and probably a big road trip there too!)

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November 15, 2014

A Business Trip to China

The CCTV building in Beijing. Can you see the air? You normally shouldn't be able to see air.

I really liked the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square.

The Chinese Army have some hoops set up in the Forbidden City.

The Great Wall of China in Badaling — Up to the Great Wall at Badaling! I highly recommend taking the cable cars, because you are in for a long stair climb otherwise.

I went to China for work a while back. I spent four days at the China office working with our local team there, and then spent the next week in a training session in Beijing. Many of the participants in the training session were from Japan, which was kind of funny. Still, Beijing is only a short flight away from Tokyo (about four hours - almost nothing compared to flying to America!) so it wasn't all that bad. I was excited to go to China, since I had never been there before. I had to jump through some hoops to get a Visa, but it wasn't difficult at all.

What did I think of China? I had a really tough time there. The Kanji looks similar enough to Japanese kanji that I feel like I should understand it, but I don't. At all. The simplified characters make me feel a bit uncomfortable, and they often had characters in n-gram sequences that I just don't understand. I don't know any Chinese at all, and I couldn't communicate one bit. English wasn't super useful either; it was useful at one hotel, but not so much the other. Taxi drivers didn't understand English at all. Before I went to Japan I printed out a little sheet with the possible places that I might want to go (two hotels, work, and the airport) and used that. If it wasn't for that I wouldn't have been able to go anywhere. I actually took the bus to work mostly, and the second week of training was all located at the hotel, so I didn't do much traveling at all there. We did go out as a group a few times to dinner, and we had to take taxis then. That was a real experience. It probably took about 40 minutes to get three taxis. They each took different routes and got caught up in crazy traffic. When we tried to get taxis going back, they wouldn't always stop to pick us up. Or, once we told them where we wanted to go, the driver didn't want to go there, and wouldn't take us. I was amazed. Something like that would never happen in Tokyo.

The air was unbelievable in Beijing. The first week I was there, I didn't see the sky at all. It looked gray and overcast every day. The air was kind of dusty, and I had to constantly clean my glasses. I started to get a persistent cough. I can understand why people would not like the air quality there. On the second week it cleared up a bit, and I was amazed at how many skyscrapers Beijing seemed to have. I thought that if it was a videogame, I would have said that they have terrible pop-in and too much fog turned on. It was really amazing to me. I know that Los Angeles used to have a problem with Smog when we lived there in the early 80s, but they managed to clear it up. I don't know if Beijing is going to be able to make as much improvement because they already have cars with good emissions standards (I assume) and I believe a lot of their pollution comes from factories, which drive a large percentage of their GDP, which makes it difficult to try to cut back on emissions there without having an impact on global competitiveness.

Over the weekend that I was there, one of my friends from work was kind enough to show me around Beijing. We took one day and went to the Forbidden City and Tianeman Square. They were both amazing. The Forbidden City was huge. Unbelievably so. It had some really amazing architecture. You could spend hours walking around there and not see everything. Days probably. One thing I wanted to do was find the Starbucks in the Forbidden City. I never found it. It turns out that it was shut down a few years back by the Chinese government because of concerns about the image. I can understand that. I still really wanted to go to a Starbucks in the Forbidden City. They have some tea shops now, but it just isn't the same.

I really liked Tianamen Square too, but probably for the wrong reasons. The big picture of Mao, all the people, the China Dream, all that stuff is great. But I just kept seeing Chun-Li's stage. No bicycles though, just a bunch of cars. Too bad. Now that I am back and have done some internet searching though, it turns out that Chun-Li's stage never had a picture of the Forbidden City and Mao in the background. I thought I remembered a picture of Chun-Li in front of that exact backdrop, but I was wrong!

Security to get into Tianamen Square was really tight. We had to wait maybe an hour and a half to go through security. There was a person who once immolated himself in the square in protest of something, and the government really doesn't like that. So now they check for people bringing in fuel or something like that.

On Sunday we went to the Great Wall. I don't know if can say much about the Great Wall that hasn't been said anywhere else; it is an amazing wall. We walked up and down it. We actually took a cable car up the wall. I highly recommend that. If you don't take a cable car, you will have to walk up more steps than you can easily imagine. We actually had to walk down those same steps because the cable car shut down at some point for maintenance (and does so daily - watch the schedules!) but going down was bad enough. I am very glad we didn't have to climb up all those steps. I can't imagine trying to breach that wall without steps (or cable cars) and instead arrows coming down at you. Unbelievable.

All that said, the wall didn't work. I was on the wrong side!

Based on my experience at the Great Wall, I think if America builds a huge wall between Mexico and America all that will happen is that we get massive crowds of people taking buses out to the wall to climb around on it. I don't know if that would address the problem that people have with the US-Mexico border. It might be good for tourism though.

The drive back was slow - we hit traffic in Beijing and the two hour drive out turned into a four hour drive back. Crazy.

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September 2, 2014

The Magician Trilogy

Lev Grossman's "The Magician's Land" was recently released. I really enjoyed the first two books in the trilogy, The Magicians, and The Magician King. I was looking forward to the conclusion of the trilogy quite a bit, and in preparation I re-read the entire series. It is rare for me to go back and re-read books, and this was my first re-read of the Magicians books. I feel like I understood what was happening a lot better and came away with a better holistic understanding of the story. The re-read helps a lot; the books are rife with references to previous characters and events. There are lots of references all over the place actually, to pop and nerd culture. I had to look up a lot of words as well - I really appreciate the dictionary feature of the kindle, which was one added bonus over the paper version that I read the first time.

Actually, last summer I read a short story in this universe from the "Unfettered" anthology. That was really a lot of fun to read at the time - it really brought back the impact of the series and was a nice short story to tide me over for the release. I was a bit disappointed because it turns out that the short story from Unfettered was in fact a good portion of one of the chapters from The Magician's Land. I wonder if the short story (starring Plum, a character from The Magician's Land) in the "Dangerous Women" anthology is also a part of the book. I'm interested in picking up that anthology, but the price is a bit high now; I'll wait for the mass market paperback edition to force down the Kindle pricing a bit before picking that up.

So, a quick post on some books. If you haven't read the Magicians, and are looking for a smart take on Hogwarts style stuff for adults, check it out. The characters are (intentionally I believe) fairly unlikeable and it takes some work to get through, but it is a really fun series. I really look forward to more in that universe, and might check out Lev Grossman's other work as well.

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May 7, 2014

Updating my desktop

The main thing I use my desktop computer for is streaming NBA games via NBA International League Pass. My desktop machine is pretty old, it dates back to at least December 2007 and probably a bit before that, running an Intel Quad Core Q6600 from that time. It has been having a bit of trouble streaming the NBA games. It is running with a Radeon HD2400 Pro passively cooled graphics card, I think. Anyway, I decided that I wanted to update the system. So I decided to go for an AMD build this time, thinking that it would be a bit cheaper, and I've never had an AMD system.

It turned out, as these things always do, to be more complicated than I anticipated. First off, I decided on the processor that I wanted. Might as well get the latest and greatest, so I chose a very new "Kaveri" processor with a nice integrated graphics stack. The particular one I ordered is an A10-7850K. People say that it isn't really a great update over the previous generation, but it still should be many times better than the Q6600 I am currently running. It will also require a lot less electricity. I should also be able to get better graphics performance without a card than I have with a dedicated graphics card. All this is nice because I want the machine to run cool and silently, since I have left it on continuously since 2007.

Since I'm going from Intel to AMD, I will need to buy a new motherboard. The current one is so old that even an Intel upgrade would need a new motherboard, so no big deal there. I've had good luck with Gigabyte, so I chose another one of those that is said to work well with the A10-7850K. That also means I need new memory. So I lined all those things up.

When it got here, and once I was able to find some time after putting Alan to sleep, I pulled the old motherboard and got the new one in there. I installed all the parts and… Nothing happened. Huh.

I checked around on the web, and the processor that I have is so new that you need to update the firmware on the motherboard. Which requires an older processor that does run with it. Well, there are lots of processors that will work with that motherboard, so I got a cheap one (the A6-6400K, which still should be better than the Q6600, maybe) and a few other things. A blu-ray drive to replace the DVD drive that now won't work (no ATAPI interface on the motherboard, or whatever old interface it is using) and a bunch of other things I needed: molex to sata power converter cables, and some molex to motherboard fan conversion cables to see if I could get the two large case fans to be controlled by the motherboard.

When that got here, and I found some more time, I took out the old CPU (shoot, now I need some thermal paste for when I put that back in, so I ordered some of that too) and put in the new one.

Still nothing.

Huh.

Then I checked a few things, online, and on the motherboard, and wouldn't you know it, I didn't plug in the CPU power connection. So maybe it would have worked with the original A10-7850K (it has been a few months and they might be shipping newer BIOS versions with the motherboard.) I haven't been able to check that because the motherboard posts so fast that I haven't been able to drop it into the bios screen.

Anyway, on first boot with the A6-6400K windows did come up (complained about having a problem, and that it could not fix it, and then rebooted fine) and started to install lots of drivers. I couldn't even get networking going. That was on the Radeon HD2400 Pro graphics card. I shut down after a bunch of drivers were installed and switched to the integrated graphics. That booted up too, and now I have an internet connection. To update the BIOS I need to run a few things, but until the new thermal paste comes, I'll see how well things work on the A6-6400K.

For fun, I installed Steam, and Dark Souls: Prepare to Die edition works on this setup. It probably doesn't have a rock solid framerate, but at 1280x960 (or something like that) it works well enough. Sadly, for some reason my keyboard doesn't bring up the in-game menu so I don't have a good way to quit the game (maybe because I'm using a small apple keyboard, I don't know.)

So now I've spent two days with this machine with the A6-6400K and it is just above and beyond what I had before. Probably because I was able to beat the Asylum Demon though.

Just before swapping in the A10-7850K I re-ran PC Mark7 (1949) and 3D Mark11 (it never actually got a score to me.) Also, I tried Dark Souls in 1920x1200.

Once I got around to swapping in the A10-7850K (and re-installing the drivers to pick up the proper video driver) the PC Mark7 score was 2165 (better, but who knows what that means?) and 3D Mark11 says it was P2030. Concretely, it had 2x the FPS in some of the tests that I noticed, and Dark Souls runs nice and smooth in 1920x1200, so I guess I'll just keep playing it that way.

Seems pretty good overall!

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April 5, 2014

Family Trip to Ishigaki

Last weekend, the family went for a trip to Ishigaki, Okinawa. I had never been to Okinawa at all before, and was pretty excited for the trip. Our friend Mibe was getting married, so we flew out Saturday, the wedding was Sunday, and then we stayed through Wednesday.

Ishigaki is about as far South East from Tokyo that you can get and still be in Japan. It is super close to Taiwan. Maybe the embedded Google Map to the left shows that, but I was surprised at how far away it is - a three hour flight from Tokyo!

Alan was super excited to fly on the plane. He had a great time. The ANA flight attendant gave him a cute little airplane toy, which he played with the whole time we were there (and which now I can't find.) Unfortunately, we checked out stroller on as baggage, and it came out broken. Lisa talked with them, and they said they would fix it.

We rented a car and headed out to the hotel. I think you could drive around the entire island in about four hours, and mostly it takes that long because the majority of the island has a 40 km/hr speed limit. We were staying at a nice hotel where the wedding would take place, right on the ocean. They didn't really have a nice beach, but we could walk down to the water, going over a little seawall and down to some rocky shores.

We had some great food - Ishigaki is well known for Beef - and had a lot of Orion beer.

The wedding was outdoors, and beautiful. I'm sure if you know the couple you can find some pictures somewhere. Alan was a trooper and didn't make much of a fuss during the wedding, which was pretty quick as far as those things go. I got sunburned, since I of course forgot to put on sunscreen. As always.

The standouts from this trip include a Glass Boat ride, which Alan really loved. He loved all the boats really - including a ferry we took. On the glass boat ride Alan would point to a fish, and then pretend to eat it, along with the accompanying eating sound.

We had two really nice dinners, one early on at Hitoshi which specializes in Maguro. It was great. We also had a nice Yakiniku dinner, but I can't remember the name of the place.

Another memorable moment was when we took a ferry to Taketomi Island and went on an ox-cart ride. The island is tiny. It was lots of fun though.

We did safely make it back to Tokyo, exhausted. We survived a five day vacation with a two year old, and it was great! I would still like to check out Naha, Okinawa, and see how it compared to Hawaii. I don't know when we will get a chance to do that though.

Blog · Japan · Travel • 0 Comments

January 25, 2014

Ugly Japanese fonts in Emacs on OSX

At some point, when I started to use Japanese in Emacs on my Mac (currently emacs verison 24.3.1) Japanese text turned childlike. It is annoying.

I tracked down the problem: if I do something like M-x list-fontsets and the M-x describe-fontset with a likely candidate, I see something like:

...
　 .. 〿 (#x3000 .. #x303F)
    -*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-gb2312.1980-0
        [-apple-Wawati_SC-medium-normal-normal-*-22-*-*-*-p-0-iso10646-1]
    -*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-jisx0208*-*
...
㈀ .. 龯 (#x3200 .. #x9FAF)
    -*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-gb2312.1980-0
        [-apple-Wawati_SC-medium-normal-normal-*-22-*-*-*-p-0-iso10646-1]
    -*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-jisx0208*-*
...

You can also do something similar by placing the cursor on an ugly font, and do a M-x describe-char and it will show the font that displays the character. In general, the fonts that are used to actually display something is set by the fontset, since not every font can cover every possible character that can be in a buffer.

What is this Wawati? Open up Font Book on the Mac, and take a look. It is some ugly Chinese children's font or something.

Why does that get added as the default font to display characters in the ranges x3000 - x303F and x3200 - x9FAF? That is a lot of characters.

Based on unicode-fonts.el it sounds like the default font you get for an unknown symbol that is non-ascii is pretty random. So this unicode-fonts.el package tries to set some default mappings based on unicode character ranges. I installed some of the recommended fonts from there. I also had to install font-utils. And also ucs-utils. And also list-utils.

Once all of those were installed, Japanese fonts now look a lot better.

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