IiYama Hanami Festival

A bunch of us gaijins went out today and went to a rap concert / Japanese festival. You can see the pictures on Picasa, and I added some of the HDR images here. Some of them did not turn out well at all because I did not keep the camera steady enough while taking the 3 shots that I later merge into the HDR image. 

Note: the A-something crappy brand CF card is slow!! I can notice it when taking pictures as high speed and when copying to the PC. It’s not a problem when I’m not shooting HDR, and fortunately I’m not usually an action photographer. Still, I switched to a faster one per default, so I’ll use crappy brand for backup purposes. 

Note2: custom profiles on the 50D are love! I’ve finally taken the time to set up C1 as HDR snapshot setting (highest speed, raw+jpeg, bracketing +2/-1) and C2 as flash-photograhy mode (shuttertime 1/250s, f/8.0). Awesome!

Canon: please hurry up with the video-capable firmware for the 50D! If you don’t hurry up some hacker will make it for you!

Illogical

Atsugi –> Seaside (12.94km) : 41 mins. Average: 11.8km/h. Max: 42km/h

Seaside –> Atsugi (13.50km): 40 mins. Average: 10.41 km/h. Max: 33km/h

Hm. So it seems the averages are wrong because they include a lot of 0km/hs at the beginning and end. Meh.

Overzealousness

I was writing a nice piece of software at work today. Very clearly defined, very straight-forward to code, and as a result very fun to work on. Too bad these kind of programs are a rarity.. Anyhow, I was planning to finish up the program around 17:00 so I could do the finishing touches and the deployment before going home. But I had to put in one more feature, which took me almost an hour… And of course that’s the feature that kills everything. I underestimated the deployment time and I should have expected that there might be bugs inside the ‘killer feature’ that would only show up during deployment. It’s no fun to fix a piece of software on Friday at 18:45! Moral of the story: don’t introduce too many features in your program if you’re planning to stick to a tight deployment schedule!

And on a completely unrelated note: if somebody could please tell me why the damn glassfish plugin for eclipse fails to deploy because of a locked jar file, I would reward him or her with over nine thousand lollipops. Thank you very much.

Gotta catch em all!

• Hepatitis Armor: +1 Defense
• 6 Malaria potions: 20HP each

What’s the worst that could happen?

Thank you, family and friends, for pointing out to me all the possible things that could go wrong during my trip to South Africa. I present to you here a list of all the horrible things suggested so far:

• Getting drugs planted in my luggage at the airport and spending years in jail or getting the death sentence
• Plane crash on the way to Africa
• Plane crash from Zimbabwe to South Africa
• Get my luggage stolen or lose it in the airport of hotel
• Get robbed
• Get shot
• Get shot in a slightly different way
• Get shot, but in a more horrific manner
• Get shot, again
• Die from malaria
• Almost die from malaria
• Don’t get any disease and get annoyed because I paid so much money for the vaccinations
• Die from malaria again
• Be bit by a spider in the tent. Either become spiderman or die
• Same scenario, but snake
• Same scenario, but lion
• Same tent, but getting trampled by an elephant
• Get rabies. Die because I was too cheap to get the rabies vaccination
• Get rabies and feel miserable despite having the vaccination
• Various other kinds of diseases are available too!
• Have sex with a hot girl and get aids
• Have sex with an ugly girl and get aids
• Have sex with a guy and get aids -__-
• Get stung by a mosquito and get aids (do you see now how much that would suck?!)

Ok, I’d better stop here. I’m going to Africa! What’s the worst that could happen? Well, it can’t be much worse than anything listed here, so whatever happens, I will be prepared

A tale of two drunks

Saturday night in Tokyo. Drunk people everywhere. The train that took us back to Atsugi after a nice day of hanging out was no different. The local train was not that crowded, and most benches were partly filled with people. Except one. A drunk guy was lying down, occupying about 4 or 5 seats, leasurely sleeping with his face down. Shortly after we spotted him the leisurely sleeping part turned into leasurely puking, and then he leisurely fell on the floor. You got to have respect for the Japanese, though. No matter how far gone they are, they always manage to wake up and get out of the train at the right station. Admittedly, this guy had some problems, but he still managed it. When the doors opened he kind of eel-slid his way out of the train, managing somehow to miss the small gap between train and platform, and then continued his sleep right in front of the train door. Fortunately a woman dragged him further onto the platform because otherwise he might have been hit by the train on its way out. Two stops later the cleanup people entered the train and cleaned up the puke from the seat and the floor in less than a minute, then exited the train before it left the platform. This kind of thing must happen all the time..

Then, after returning to Atsugi, I cycled back home. It was just before a blind corner that I was passed by a car, and immediately after that the car stopped in the corner. After taking the corner myself I found out why: an old man was lying on the floor with his bicycle. The car guy got out and we tried together to help the man get back to his feet, but he didn’t seem in much of a hurry. His head was bleeding slightly and the groceries that he bought were scattered all over the road, yet the old man himself didn’t seem to think much of it. He said in Japanese: ‘just let me lie here for a while, I don’t think I can get up yet. And if I go home like this my wife will scold me anyway’. The car guy told me he could handle it, so I moved on at that point. Let’s hope that he was wise enough to continue his journey on foot..