Busy is a pale euphemism to describe the current chaotic state of my life right now.

If I tell you I am currently a full-time music producer and arranger, full-time VoIP server architect and full-time applied mathematics student, you might get an idea of what I mean. And there is no mistake in the previous sentence: the word full-time is purposely used three times because I am very much supposed to be doing each of these occupation full-time. Which is kind of a problem given that Earth rotation period seems to be stalling around 24 hours these days. Factor in my current involvement with WordPress development as well as my attempts to keep an appearance of social life by making regular expeditions with friends to nasty local watering holes where we proceed to get absolutely plastered on cheap sake… and you have a mathematical impossibility the likes of which even Gödel would give up on.

Since there are only so many hours of sleep you can remove from your daily schedule before permanent psychosis sets in (I mean, real psychosis, not the milder form of borderline psychopathic behaviour I usually retreat to on a good day), and since I also decided that food could not safely be removed from my daily essential needs, I had to cut down on other activities. As a result, my news readings has long fallen from many hours of intense paper scrutinizing, down to a 30 second scan of my RSS feed list and a few occasional glances at online news articles, every other week… As for TV: I have barely ever watched it in my life and the only TV set of the house is currently stored in my roommate’s room where neither of us ever turn it on, so it isn’t much of an issue.

So we can safely say that I know close to nothing about the big (and small) events of the world these days, except for the rough outline (Bush has not yet declared martial law in the US, Ishihara still hates foreigners and Tokyo maintains a precise average daily temperature of: “very hot”)…

Hell, for all I know, the War of the Worlds has already begun and I am talking (writing, really, but anyway) for a bunch of unmanned computers sitting atop the ashes of what used to be the proud western civilization, while Godzilla is busy fighting evil alien spaceships off the coast of Japan.

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Went for a drink in Golden Gai…
“Being the adventure of a young man whose principal interest is…”

Yesterday, Jus and I ended up stopping for drinks at Sports Café for a little while. She kinda wanted to check out the All Blacks game and we were also to meet a few friends there.

The night was an interesting one to be in a sports bar, since, along with the important rugby game, Judo finals were on in Athens. Judo being one of Japan’s stronger discipline in the olympics, one half of the place was packed with Japanese fans (many of them still wearing yukatas and jimbeis from their evening watching fireworks) cheering for the Japanese competitors, while the other half was occupied by mostly-gaijin rugby fans rooting for the All Blacks (the place was definitely big enough to fit everybody happily).

Since both girls’ Tani Ryoko and guys’ Nomura Tadahiro brought this year’s first crop of gold medals to Japan, the mood was definitely upbeat. And while I usually loathe most sports on TV, Judo can be really entertaining to watch: especially if you compare a mere 5 minutes of intense fighting and people flying all over the place to, say, three full hours of painfully boring commercial-laden graceless ball-pushing by slices of 10 seconds.

Watching Judo here made me realize something really interesting that had completely slipped my mind up to that point: when I first arrived to Japan, I actually spoke much more Japanese than I thought.

My level of Japanese back then was a resounding zero. nada. nil. If you were to exclude the three weeks of rushed crash course readings and the few notions Yutaka had been kind enough to try and impart on me, I had absolutely no knowledge of Japanese whatsoever until I set a foot in Narita for the first time in my life in October 2002. At least that’s what I thought. But yesterday, I realized that, without knowing it, or more exactly, without remembering it, I had known a whole bunch of Japanese ever since childhood.

See, as a kid, I could not be bothered much with sports… particularly the kind that required you to build some form of “team spirit” and where smashing your opponent’s head in the concrete was not considered the principal objective… if said sport involved the use of a ball, then I downright hated it. Don’t ask me why, I just couldn’t stand soccer, basketball, handball, to say nothing of hell-spawn cricket.

My parents, instead of spotting an obvious display of what would later bloom into my current fully asocial psychotic personality, decided I just needed to have some kind of regular physical activity that didn’t involve being nice to my fellow schoolmates and gave me to choose between judo or ballet dancing…

Well, we all know how parents are: just pick one thing and they’ll give you the other. bastards.

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We all know about the contagious power of yawns…

One only needs to start yawning in the middle of a crowd to get everybody else yawning in return. This can actually be quite fun if you suddenly decide to fuck with people’s head and discreetly yawn at people during some large meeting (I know, it sounds really stupid - it is - but try it one day, you’ll be amazed how quickly you’ll get the whole room yawning).

In Japan, though, there’s a much more interesting variation on that theme: Cell Phone fidgeting.

Anybody who’s lived in Tokyo will have no doubt told you about the principal characteristic of the average Japanese commuter: an uncanny ability to instantaneously fall asleep as soon as they hit a train seat, doubled with an instinctive knowledge of when to wake up, the very second their train hits their stop home.

Most of the time, though, they are not really sleeping: merely building that legendary Japanese force shield of indifference around them. Western people tend to do the same, but they need a book or a cd-player to help them fake complete absorption in their own world… Japanese do not… they just seat, half-close their eyes and doing so, ostensibly tell everyone they do not care what happens in the car until their destination. Guy next to them wanking on his tentacle porn manga, leecherous salaryman gawking at them from across the car, passenger falling asleep and drooling on their shoulder: nothing will wake up the Japanese commuter.

Except for one thing…

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Today is Tokyo’s big Fireworks.
Which is why every other girl is wearing a yukata (not nearly as many guys wearing jimbeis).
If half a million people crowded on an island (Odaiba) the size of a football field is not your thing though, u better wait for next week’s fireworks somewhere else

Just installed the awesome language picker plugin for WordPress.

At long last, Dr Dave’s Logs is joining the truly multilingual blogging crowds !

Do not expect real full-on translations for any of my posts. I have neither the time nor the slightest motivation to post redundant content. However, I will probably post from time to time a full entry or an extended discussion in the language relevant to certain items of a particular country/culture, without fear of boring my beloved ignorant American English-speaking-only readership.

Japanese is a special case though: half for my own practice, half to spare my poor Japanese friends the pain and suffering of reading my already convoluted English through Babelfish, I’ll try as much as possible to post a small sum-up of every entries somewhat relevant to my life in Japan and/or my friends here. If you are a student of the Japanese language trying to improve your practice, I strongly sugest you stay the hell away from these, as they certainly won’t do you any good. I do not assume any responsibility for the permanent damage to your practice you might incur by exposing yourself to my crappy grammar and overall appalling level of written Japanese.

If you are really bored with yourself and have a better master of the language than me (basically: if you speak any Japanese), feel free to mock my errors and even possibly point them out to me. I yearn to learn.

Note: if you are reading this blog through RSS, you won’t be able to see alternate language content or links. You need to use the website version. I’ll work on fixing this later.

In my ongoing quest to bring flawless multi-language (multi-encoding to be more accurate) support to WordPress, I just had a blindingly simple, yet highly efficient, idea for an improvement.

If your blog is accustomed to receiving trackbacks or comments containing non-standard characters (accents, kanjis etc.), then you have probably noticed that a fair share end up getting mangled in the process. WP is not really at fault here, since this is caused by some browsers’ failure to respect the encoding set in a page when sending form content (e.g. submitting a comment). No need to tell you which poor excuse for a browser so shamelessly ignore proper web standards. This is of little comfort anyway, since in the end, all that matters is that WordPress is getting toh-mah-toh when it is expecting toh-may-toh, and pretty much ends up displaying poh-tah-to to everybody else.

The fix, as I was saying is ridiculously easy. And to the best of my knowledge it won’t break anything in your current WP install. Worst that could happen is that it won’t fix your problem, but it won’t break your blog.

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At least one person has found a way to kill time on the subway home…

Just uploaded the mix I recorded yesterday…

In a hurry, so no annoying banter witty commentary this time.

We shall just say that if you liked Mix #1, you will probably like this one too.

Keywords: jazz, chicago house, swing, Saint Germain, Daft Punk, Roulé Boulé, Hakan Libdo, Norman Cook, Moodyman, C&C, Glenn Miller, shiny disco balls, everybody fucking dance NOW…