Blizzardboy | A Kiwi in Japan

I changed the skin on the blog again – this time to Chris Pearson’s excellent Copyblogger theme. Hope you all don’t mind all the changes, but I wasn’t 100% satisfied with the last skin. One of these days I must get around to making my own. I have a pretty good idea of what I want, but I will have to brush up my php skills to make it do what I want.

Anyway, with wordpress 2.2 (which is what is powering this site) I discovered that switching back to old skins is a really bad idea – I could still see the front end but the whole of the admin backend was completely inaccessible and I just got a “Cheatin’ huh?” error which I think is the sense of humour of the wordpress creators coming through. I do like error messages like that, much more friendly than “Error 808.”

How to fix that error? It is quite easy – in my case because I had changed wordpress skins and couldn’t get into the admin section to change it back, all I had to do was ftp into the webserver and delete the offending skin. I made a backup before I did that of course. Wordpress defaults back to, you guessed it, the default theme, and we were up and hobbling along like a drunk Japanese grandma with a walker in no time splat!

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In Tokyo last week, exploring the Sony Building in Ginza, and we chuffingly stumbled across a copy of Wining and Dining in Tokyo.

Published by the people who put out J-Select, Wining and Dining in Tokyo: The No. 1 Guide to Tokyo’s Finest Eating and Entertainment Spots is a really useful book targeted at Tokyo’s expatriate population. Featuring 100 restaurants listed by location, this is an easy-to-use guide to the best and brightest of Tokyo cuisine. Wining and Dining in Tokyo includes a wide range of types of restaurants from Mediterranean and Egyptian, Mexican and Nepalese through to more standard Japanese fare such as sushi and shabu-shabu.

Wining and Dining in Tokyo is available from most major bookstores in Tokyo for 980 yen. They also have a search engine where you can search for restaurants in Tokyo by location, type and budget.

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If you have ever wondered how to cut a watermelon so you don’t have to spend most of the time fighting to find all the pips, then, the answer is simple: cut the melon along the dark stripes. This will ensure that the pips are on the outer faces of the slice.

I saw this on tv. Not sure if it works for the square watermelon pictured though.

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I have been rather busy recently, and I am sorry for not posting for a while. One thing that I have been doing is trying to get my drivers license. Getting a drivers license in Japan is quite a simple process if one has held a drivers license from a recognised country (such as New Zealand or Australia). In that case, all one needs to do is to get the paperwork translated into Japanese, pass a simple test and then a short driving test on a test course. There is a useful page – Japanese Driver’s License and Driving Test Tips with more information on this if this is your situation.

However, having been away from New Zealand for coming on 8 years, I no longer hold a valid New Zealand drivers license, so the process is a bit more complicated. Much like in New Zealand, one has to go to the Driving Center, pass an eye test, then a written test to get ones learners license. Well at least in New Zealand one would get ones learners license at that point – in Japan one also has to pass a driving test before receiving ones learners license.

The written test for both learners and full licenses is available in English in only 11 of Japan’s 47 prefectures – including Akita, but not, unfortunately Ibaragi (although they have plans to introduce an English version in January or February of 2008). So rather than brave the vagaries of the test in Japanese (my Japanese is good, but I fear not that good), I changed my address to Tokyo (thanks E). One has to be domiciled in the prefecture one takes the test (anachronistic Federal system?) – so by doing that I was able to take the test in English.

The written test for the learners license has 50 questions and one has to get more than 45 to pass. Most of the questions are reasonably straight forward and require only common sense. It is a good idea to pick up the road code published by the Japanese Automobile Federation – get a Japanese friend help you obtain a copy (about 1200 yen).

I have my second try at the driving component next Thursday. The last time I drove was back in New Zealand in 2001 – for about 2 hours, and before that a scooter in Thailand in 1999 (that poor bike!), so I was quite rusty when I got behind the wheel the first time. I failed the test on the level crossing – didn’t quite get the hill start together. I wish I had known then what I found out after that test – one can hire a car at accredited driving schools, and with the holder of a full license in the passenger seat, practice to ones hearts content. This cost us 3500 yen for an hour and was invaluable.

Fingers crossed for my driving test take two next Thursday!

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If you come from one of the cricket playing nations of the world – which makes cricket the worlds second most popular sport after football, or soccer, or whatever you call it, then you will know that the Cricket World Cup is being held in the wonderful West Indies.

Of course with Japan still living in the shadow of their defeat during World War II to the nuclear power of the Americans, baseball is very much the mainstream sport in these isles, so it is a tricky proposition to catch any of what is a very minority sport under the haze of American hegemony. One option of course is to vacate oneself to the delightful isles of the West Indies, although for the rest of us mere mortals the best option remains the internet.

Luckily there is another option – p2ptv. With the SopCast system installed, you will be able to watch not just the World Cup, but a wealth of other programming besides. And it is all free.

SopCast, according to their about us file is:

Sopcast Team built on Dec, 2004 and focus on the research and application on P2P streaming technology. The first website http://www.sopcast.org is very famous in China and many other countries, is linked and introduced by many aboard website especially in Europe . The sop protocols, developed by SopCast Team, has some specifications like security, high efficiency, extendable and make it easy to support huge users to view the online channels in a standalone server.

The question does arise over who gets what from this. I am sure that if this was based in a country of limited freedom, in the intellectual sense, then this would be closed down as fast as one could say “attack Egypt”, “attack Sweden” or “attack Oman” or whatever the current flavour of the month was. The advertisers certainly do benefit from this service. They get eyeballs on logos, brand recognition – everything they could dream for. The channels themselves dont get anything, unless they work it into their marketing plans (their ability to do so remains to be tested – getting ads for Indian insurance companies is wonderful, but I don’t really need their services living here in Japan).

If you want an interesting viewing platform download sopcast. If you thought this post was crap, then you probably want to stick to fox (and I am not going to do you the convenience of linking to them).

Enjoy the fours, sixes, and drunk kiwis in ridiculous costumes.

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Despite being introduced late in the nineteenth century by the British in Yokohama, cricket has never been a big thing in Japan. Baseball has always been more popular – probably as a result of the lower cerebral threshold required to play and watch the game.

I know the Japan Cricket Association (日本語）has been doing an excellent job to develop the game throughout Japan, but I didn’t realise it had spread as far as my little neck of the woods. So I was quite happy to discover that Tsukuba has a cricket team. There is a quite a large international population in the area so it isn’t that surprising.

They have a website up – you can check out the Tsukuba Cricket page here. A quick look at the wicket and it suggests plenty of bounce and movement off the seam early on, with prodigious spin by days four and five – depending on the amount of tape on the tennis ball.

Who knows – if any kiwis out there make double figures in a couple of games they should be a shoe-in for a prestigious place in the much vaunted Black Caps top order.

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It has been about a year and a half since I bought this powerbook and made the change to using a mac. From a design point of view Apple have done a wonderful job and overall I think OS X is an excellent operating system. Coming from a linux background I am used to using open source software and tools, and that is probably the biggest limitation to using Apple computers.

One of the main tools that is missing is a free ftp client. I grew up using gFTP, which is about as solid as a piece of 2 by 4. The most popular FTP clients for OS X are Fetch (off topic, but in Japanese that means fetish), and Transmit – both have 15 day trial policies, after that you have to pay to use them.

I did a bit of a search around last year for an open source ftp client and couldn’t find much of a solution. The answer came when I updated firefox. Now I know a lot of Mac users are reticent to use anything other than safari, but if you install a firefox plugin called FireFTP then you have an FTP client.

FireFTP doesn’t support some things like sFTP or SSH or unicode character filenames. But I haven’t had any problems with using it. When it installs it takes you to a page asking for donations for orphans in the Balkans which is a nice idea – you don’t have to pay, but you can if you appreciate the hard work the developer put into creating the software.

If you need a copy of firefox you can download one here,

and the FireFTP client can be downloaded from the FireFTP site.

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Found this neat little tool that allows you to look up words from the definition.

So I put in small furry mouse catcher as a kind of test. And look at the results – pretty cool eh!

A search for “New Zealand flower arrangement” came up with Mike Moore which was amusing. A more normal search for “Japanese flower arrangement” gave us ikebana – the correct result.

The reverse dictionary site is at onlook.com. Perfect if you just can’t remember “that” word. And we all know how often that happens.

Good too if you are learning English and want to increase your word power.

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