London 1901, Johnny Depp is playwright James Barrie, and as a result acts less lively than usually and speaks in a difficult dialect. Barrie has just had a huge flop when he meets a young widow (Kate Winslet) and her four sons. He ends up spending a lot of time with them, much to the dismay of her mother and his wife (who subsequently leaves him), and gets enough inspiration to write Peter Pan.

6 points

Today we were able to enter our new apartment (or as they call it here: mansion) for the first time. The occasion was to check that the interiors have been installed to our satisfaction. I would say we are satisfied. You can expect more detailed reports (and probably even pictures) in the near future. Here's a teaser: talking bathtub.

Unlike for example Java or .NET, which have some big industrial players promoting them, Perl is mostly community-driven. This community is quite active, and also includes a number of very bright people, who at the same time are also very helpful and willing to share. One manifestation of this fortunate situation is the previously mentioned CPAN public code library, another one is the Perl Monks community web site. The Perl Monks are a great example of a community site that works. Everyone can ask questions, and usually within an hour receives high quality answers: Newbies are (unless they seem too lazy or rude) given patient explanations, the more tricky questions have good chances to be answered by true experts of the field. There is also an integrated chat room for even faster feedback. But the Monastery is not just a Q&A site (although it serves that function extremely well and is not even plastered with ads like many other sites), there are also sections for discussions about Perl, for poetry, for news, for publishing code snippets, book and module reviews, even for obfuscated code (a special tradition that makes fun of the fact that Perl does not force the programmer to code in a readily readable way). And then of course, there is the whole Monastery theme which adds a nice touch.

If you are planning to buy an elevator, make sure it is made in Japan.

• Japanese elevators are fast. Especially in buildings with more than thirty floors they are approaching speeds of theme park rides. Toshiba has just installed the fastest of them all (in Taipei). It ascends at 60 km/h, and has systems to adjust atmospheric pressure and vibrations.
• Japanese elevators can talk. At least some of them.
• Japanese elevators are clever. When they are overloaded, they sound alarms and refuse to move. When they go up and you want to go down, they do not stop at your floor. When they are close to their capacity, and no one wants to get off at your floor, they do not stop at your floor. When they do stop at your floor, they announce if they are currently on the way up or down and prevent you from pushing buttons for floors in opposite direction.
• You can cancel your floor selection by pressing the already lighted floor button repeatedly in rapid succession.
• There are also elevators for cars. Since parking space is limited in Tokyo, elevators are often used to pack cars on top of each other. Five cars piled up are not unusual.
• Sometimes the elevator itself is old and unimpressive, but comes with an operator. A uniformed girl that greets passengers with a bow, pushes the buttons, announces the floors and what they hold in store. Not a very attractive job, especially since elevators are often crowded and the operators face the wall all the time, but quite common in department stores.
• You are not supposed to use elevators during an earthquake, but a Japanese elevator probably knows how to handle them (this is pure conjecture on my part, do not take my word here).

Interestingly enough, the particular elevator that made me write this article is an American model (but installed as a world-first in Tokyo): A self-adjusting double-deck elevator, whose two cars can move away from each other to accommodate unevenly sized floors. When this happens, the elevator would stop for a moment and announce that the lower car is moving, which is just a very cool thing for an elevator to say.

Exactly one year ago, Yoshinoya had to stop selling their primary dish (gyodon beef bowls) as a result of the import ban on US beef. Unlike some of their competitors, who switched to Australian or Chinese beef, Yoshinoya maintained that only US beef is suitable to make gyudon and had to come up with a completely changed (and not really convincing) menu. To commemorate that day, Yoshinoya today used up the remaining stock of frozen American beef from last year in a one-day special campaign. People (and TV crews) were lining up in front of their restaurants, and they even imposed a four-bowls-per-person limit. While being able to get a gyudon lunch, it was already sold out when I came back for dinner.

In between visits to Yoshinoya, we attended another quasi-culinary highlight, the Sunny Health Microdiet Grand Prix at the Tokyo International Forum (which with its impressive architecture warrants a visit in itself), which was kind of a beauty pageant for people who turned their lives around by losing pounds (and there was also a chance to win a trip to Hawaii, which is why we went).

My colleagues play darts more than they play bowling and I went with them today. This was my first time at darts, and I started out with a good chunk of beginner's luck, especially in the third game:

First game (8 sets count-up):

  19   4   2  OUT  50   15  14  17
T-13   4   5    5   3    1   9   1
 D-2 D-5  18  OUT  17 D-20  17  14
==================================
  62  80 105  110 180  236 276 308

Second game (counting down from 301):

   2  14   1 OUT
   2   2 T-5  20
   5   5   6   5
========================
 292 271 249 224 

Third game (8 sets count-up):

  17 D-BULL  20 BULL   4 T-15 OUT   1
 T-7     19   1 T-17 T-3  D-8   3  19
   9   BULL   3 T-13  13   13  15 OUT
=====================================
  47    166 190  348 374  454 472 492

Unfortunately, it went seriously downhill from there, with dismal performance in the next two team games of cricket (in which you have to hit specific combinations, which requires more target control than I could muster).

Weblog Japan, the wiki I am running about life and travelling in Japan (and for which sadly I have not found any time recently, no one else is contributing either) has been hacked for the first time, by someone from Norway called WEQ who accessed the page about the Japanese Calendar yesterday afternoon (using Internet Explorer 6) after having found it looking for Japanese Calendar Pig on Norsk Google (where it ranks fourth, yeah!).

Now, hacking a wiki that allows anyone to anonymously edit its whole content is not a particulary impressive feat, and the damage was minimal and easily undone by reverting to the previous version, but having attracted the attention of hackers is an important step in the life of a web site, and I would like to thank WEQ for that.

Just don't do it again.

According to the Chinese Lunar Calendar, today is the first day of the Year of the Rooster.

Test Date December 5, 2004 (Sunday)

Level		2

Writing/Vocabulary		 48/100
Listening			 70/100
Reading/Grammar			 84/200

Total Score			202/400

FAILED

2005/02/04

Akimasa Fukuda			Kuzuo Ogoura
President			President
Japan Educational		The Japan Foundation
Exchanges and Services

Andrew Lloyd Webber teamed up with Joel Schumacher to bring his popular musical to the big screen. The result is not all that interesting, and at 143 minutes runtime more than a tad too long, but the actors do know how to sing and it has become difficult for me to stop humming the Phantom's score. Fans of the stage musical will probably like it more than I did.

5 points

In the absence of witty remarks about these two books by the undisputed master of the techno-thriller, I can just brief you on the contents (Prey is about a swarm of nano-robots that develops a hive mind and really gets under people's skins, and Timeline is about time travelling to the Dark Ages), and use the opportunity to point out that I have read Jurassic Park, as well as owned and worn a Jurassic Park T-shirt, well before the movie was released.

Today we (or rather Cissy) signed (or rather stamped, they could not be pressured into accepting signatures) a lot of documents about our new apartment. We still have not been able to see it yet, but the building is completed now and they are just putting finishing touches on the interiors. If everything proceeds on schedule (and they have a detailed schedule for everything, down to who can during the moving use which elevator when, which is probably necessary considering that a few hundred people will want to move in at the same time) we will be shown the apartment later this month. At that time, we have to check if they built it nicely and notify them about any shortcomings. Their schedule collides a little with our plan to move in as fast as possible, because we cannot move before receiving the key, and they will not give us the key before we sent them the money, and we cannot send them the money before the bank sends us the money, and the bank will not send us the money before they send all the documents to the bank, and they cannot be hurried about sending the documents.