Moonlight

The ends justify the means (?)

Climategate

Something beautiful is happening in the world right now, but it has nothing to do with climate change. For those of you that don’t know, there’s quite a fair bit of controversy right now concerning global warming and the Copenhagen climate change conference, because a lot of e-mails of well-known scientists were leaked out that show that the scientists were trying to cover up a rather nasty fact: global warming really doesn’t exist.

Regardless of whether this is true or not (it might be dis-disproven again in the future after all) it’s sparking all kinds of interesting conversation online. Specifically, people are very interested in why the mass media has not reported on ‘climategate’ yet, and they’re even speculating that Google is being pressured to remove search results related to climategate.

Rather than making this post an extensive commentary on the situation, I thought it was important to point out once more that the internet is all-powerful, and nothing can block the flow of information.

One final note though. Perhaps you’ve seen the movie (or read the comic) Watchmen, which has an ending that makes you think. I can’t help but compare that to the climategate situation. If the scientists are manipulating data in the favor of global warming, they are morally wrong to do so (?), but are they practically wrong as well? After all, thanks to their manipulated data mankind has developed a cleaner way of living, using less natural resources, and we are more aware than ever of what we are doing to the planet. Even if the data was rigged and the planet really doesn’t care what we do to it, you can’t argue that our way of living has become better (more aware? more smart?). I for one think it’s brilliant that the scientists covered this up, because it forces people to rethink their moral stance in life.

Is it ok to lie to people if it’s for a good cause? If so, where do we draw the line? This private little moral dillemma can suddenly become a global moral dilemma, which will become an important learning experience for us all.

The Youth Heim

Some observations about the youth heim, my venerable home in the country of wonder and flying chopsticks.

• Correct pronunciation: YOU OU OU SUH.  HI! MUH.
• Although no one has ever done it before, it has not been proven that building a swimming pool on the roof is not allowed.
• More than half of the rooms are dark in the evenings.
• At least two people in this building use deodorant that smells like dead rats. One of them is my neighbor.
• Besides the nasty smell of dead rat deodorant the distinct smell of something pot-like can sometimes be found at certain rooms in the second and/or third floor. Since it’s highly unlikely that people are actually smoking pot here in Japan (as the punishment is way too high) I suspect they have some kind of pot substitute that only smells like pot but nothing more than that. I wonder if the people living here notice this smell and then go out and find more pot substitute, thereby increasing the fake pot smell in this building quadratically.
• Washing machines are never occupied on weekdays. Saturday and Sunday afternoon are the worst  times to attempt to wash your clothes.
• For a total of five floors and about 25 rooms per floor, there is one dryer in the whole building that works.
• Said dryer is never busy, but always filled with clothes that are already dry. People leave their clothes in the dryer for hours and hours before picking them up. Especially on Saturdays and Sundays.
• I am not the only inhabitant who gets pissed off about this. Today I noticed three other people walking to the dryer and then back to their room, annoyed that it was already in use.
• A lot of the inhabitants of this building (more than three quarters I’d say) are single Japanese males.
• Single Japanese males living in the youth heim have no friends and no social life. This is demonstrated by the fact that they do their laundry in weekends and have time to check up on it several times an hour. (And let’s not discuss the social life of the person that’s observing aforementioned single Japanese males in the weekend…)
• The remainder are foreigners, mostly Indian, and some Americans. The gaijin ratio in this building is much higher than most other places. Might be related to half of the rooms being empty…
• Pets are not allowed, yet there are at least two couples in this building that have dogs. It’s those tiny dogs that Japanese people like to put into handbags, not the big ‘will-kill-you-by-sitting-on-you’ kind of dog. Single people either have no pets, or else they never take them out of their room.
• A peculiar person lives opposite of me on the fifth floor. He goes out late at night in his minicar and comes back with two or more girls, who he then takes to his room. This person is also the only person to leave a dinner plate outside of his room every night. As far as I know this building has no dinner service. This person is widely known as ‘The youth heim pimp’ by no-one else but me.
• Some weekends, usually on Sunday morning, a salesmen may knock on people’s door, trying to sell newspapers, rooms or other things. This annoys me greatly.
• My annoying smoking neighbor is still here. He usually comes home late at night, and then proceeds to move his furniture around loudly for several hours. Or at least that’s what it sounds like. I counter-annoy him by showering after 1AM.
• Several other apartment buildings are in clear sight from the roof of the Youth Heim. One might speculate that a 70-300mm lens would provide an adequate peek into the rooms of aforementioned buildings, but that would of course be mere speculation. One certainly could imagine that a 1600mm mirror lens would provide a very clear view indeed. Then again, one might imagine that the poor quality and the small aperture of the mirror lens would make the lens quite useless for such a venture. Pure speculation, of course. No one would be crazy enough to actually take photos of those people and sell them online on a successful porn site. Surely not.
• During storms a great many sounds rattle the youth heim, most notably they are balcony doors that don’t shut properly and kitchen fans that clapper due to the wind pressure and due to being of very piss-poor quality.
• The siren of an ambulance can be heard every Saturday night and every Sunday night. The ambulance often stops at an apartment just south of the youth heim. Either people there are dying one by one or there’s just one guy who clings to life like a piece of gum to a table.
• Many older people working in my company used to live in the youth heim. Rumor has it their ghosts still wander the corridors.
• One such employee lived ~4 rooms away from me. This person always wore a suit and a face mask. He never spoke. In his room he had two closets. One of them contained ten suits, all exactly the same. The other closet contained the chopped up remnants of all the interns he killed with his butcher knife. ^{[citation needed]}
• Last fact: nobody in this building knows each other. Nobody will talk to each other or strike up a conversation. Ever.

*Some of the information is this post is based on mere speculation and should not be taken seriously. Yes, Japanese police-investigator-san, this means you.

Nightscape

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It’s dere!

Solid State Disk arrived ^_^

It’s actually 2.5 inch and I have no ‘professional’ way to mount it in my case. I considered duct-taping it to the side but it seems to fit snugly on top of the other harddisk.

I’m experimenting with Windows 7 x64 a bit. So far it’s been hell trying to install all the software I used, but that would have been the same if I was using XP. So far I’m liking Win7, even though it completely looks like Vista to me.

One nasty thing that caught me off guard was when I tried to write this blogpost and suddenly my internet connection speed dropped down to about 900 bytes per second. Apparently this is a known issue and it can be fixed by disabling some obscure network components deep in the bowels of the OS. Did that, works fine now.

I am EXTREMELY pleased with the startup speed of applications. It’s practically instant. Especially Photoshop loves the SSD. Other than that I don’t have much to report yet. I’ll still need several days to reinstall all drivers and applications…

 

Yummy!

20+ different kinds of raw fish. Oishii!