Went home by taxi today and the driver was using a Mac Mini for his navigation system. He also had it connected to the Internet via a cell phone modem, apparently doing a lot of online shopping on Yahoo Auctions while waiting for customers. One would think that a usual car navigation system would be easier to use (for example by way of a touchscreen), but he said scrolling around with the Bluetooth mouse on his lap (a keyboard was sitting on the front passenger seat) was actually more convenient.

Either my name server is borked, or the domain diff.com is still available.

Update: Or not, there is a whois entry after all.

Ooedo-Onsen-Monogatari, located in the popular Daiba area, opened in 2003 as Tokyo's first and only onsen (hot springs) theme park. Inside the building, constructed in traditional Japanese style, there are baths fed by natural hot springs pumped from 1,400 meters underground, open-air baths perfect for enjoying fine weather or starry night skies, a foot bath set in a large Japanese-style garden, and plenty of other bathing facilities. There is also a re-creation of a traditional street from the days when Tokyo was called Edo to offer visitors an authentic onsen experience that is sure to be one of the highlights of their trip to Japan.

You can also make an appointment with the ever-popular Doctor Fish to nibble away at your hands and feet, or get buried in hot sand for fifteen minutes.

The chicken nuggets I just bought have a product code very similar to the number of the credit card that I used to pay for them. When choosing coin lockers and the like I always try to get magic numbers like 42 or 2307, and I derive great pleasure from convenience store purchases that exactly add up to the amount of change in my pocket (or the charge left on my Suica or Edy card). I would really like to buy something to match the credit card, or my phone number, or Pi. There must be a searchable database of product codes online somewhere, but would that be cheating ?

class Bird {
  { System.out.print("b1 "); }
  public Bird() { System.out.print("b2 "); }
} 

March is the end of the fiscal year and thus time for annual performance reviews. To beef up my sheet I took the SCJP exam today. Now this is an exam you want to prepare for, even if (or maybe especially if) you have to use Java on a daily basis. The test is a computerised multiple choice test, delivered at a Prometric Testing Center, same as with the Oracle exams. Prometric seems to be doing really well, they have hundreds of exams for dozens of subjects, lots of offices all over the place, the exams are not cheap, and there are always plenty of other people when I go. Being an automated test (you get your score immediately afterwards) makes it necessary for clear-cut right and wrong answers. But the wrong answers cannot be too obviously incorrect, otherwise the exam would be too easy. As a result, things are quite tricky, you have to really pay very close attention to (often terribly contrived and not at all real-life) details, and the exercise somewhat resembles a puzzle or quiz: It is kind of fun, in the same way Sudoku is fun. Just do not expect to survive on your school math skills alone.

class Raptor extends Bird {
  static { System.out.print("r1 "); }
  public Raptor() { System.out.print("r2 "); }
  { System.out.print("r3 "); }
  static { System.out.print("r4 "); }
}

In particular, you need to be prepared to watch out for things like

• incorrect indentation to confuse you (which is normally taken care of by the IDE's code formatter),
• funky interpunctuation that causes errors (which the compiler would catch for you),
• calls to core API methods that do not exist or with the wrong parameters (again: compiler),
• defining different variables in different scopes using the same name,
• calling massively overloaded methods where it is not all obvious how the combination of widening, auto-boxing, and varargs would affect the dispatch.

class Hawk extends Raptor {
  public static void main(String[] args){
    System.out.print("pre ");
    new Hawk();
    System.out.println("hawk ");
  }
}

You get 72 questions and three hours (which is plenty, I finished in about half that).

What is the result?

A) pre b1 b2 r3 r2 hawk
B) pre b2 b1 r2 r3 hawk
C) pre b2 b1 r2 r3 hawk r1 r4
D) r1 r4 pre b1 b2 r3 r2 hawk
E) r1 r4 pre b2 b1 r2 r3 hawk
F) pre r1 r4 b1 b2 r3 r2 hawk
G) pre r1 r4 b2 b1 r2 r3 hawk
H) The order of the output cannot be predicted.
I) Compilation fails.

A question for those who read the book: Is the silly execution scene in it, or was it added for the film? How Grenouille managed to bewitch the whole town with his perfect scent was just too unbelievable to fit in with the general mood of the story. It also reminded me of (and lost to) Chocolat. They should have just skipped that part, especially since there is a much more fitting end scene (his return to Paris) right after it. Other than that (and the boiled cat, of course, I hope that the American Humane Association, credited at the end of all Hollywood movies for making sure that no animals are harmed, also exerts some kind of influence over European productions), no complaints.

7 points

Ran into a large crowd of people outside of the closed doors of a restaurant inside of Shinkoiwa station yesterday. They were apparently reading a document that was posted there. Co-workers were quick to break the news today:

A noodle restaurant in Tokyo's JR Shinkoiwa Station said Tuesday that curry tainted by a dead mouse was served to customers in the morning.
Nippon Restaurant Enterprise Co. said 18 tainted meals were sold for about two hours after it opened at 6:30 a.m. The meals included curry "soba" (buckwheat noodles) and curry rice.
The company, affiliated with East Japan Railway Co., said an employee found a dead mouse about 8 cm long in a pot used to cook the curry shortly after 8:30 a.m.
Concerned customers can call JR East customer service toll free at (0120) 658078.

Kyodo News

PS: Maybe I should take Kitty there.

1. Shadows and Fog (7 points)
2. City Hall (6 points)
3. The Graduate (7 points)
4. Everything is Illuminated (8 points)
5. Analyze This (7 points)
6. All the President's Men (5 points)
7. The Freshman (6 points)
8. Analyze That (6 points)
9. Donnie Darko (9 points)
10. Grosse Pointe Blank (6 points)

When an automated voice on the Hanzomon subway line advises you to change to JR Sobu line at Mitsukoshi-mae, keep in mind that while Mitsukoshi-mae and Shin-Nihonbashi stations are be in fact connected by a network of tunnels, and even Wikipedia lists it as a transfer point, it is quite a trip and cannot be too much different from leaving the subway at a random location in Tokyo and walking to the next JR station from there. Stay on until Kinshicho and change there.

eneloop came out as the first cartridge goods, in order to embody clean energy society which is one of the programs of a new vision ThinkGAIA. This low self-electric discharge nickel hydrogen charge pond developed on the theme of there is nothing throwing away and not applying load to earth environment is first charge pond in the world which he buys and can be used immediately, and the energy residual ratio after neglect also maintains about 85% for one year. In order to express the merit of this user-friendliness, the main part of a battery and the graphic design of a package were taken as the minimal design which is not in an old charge pond (battery) and which is simple and has feeling of purity. Moreover, about 1000 repetition charge is possible for this battery, and it can stop to load the earth environment.

So I bought these rechargeable batteries, for which there has been a lot of advertising from a number of makers since last year. I do not know if there have been actual recent advances in technology that merit the buzz, or if it is just a new trend in marketing. The most interesting thing is that the charger came with plastic battery casings that can be used to turn a AA battery (or Type-3, as it is called here) into a physically much bigger C (Type-2) or D (Type-1) battery. I always thought batteries came in different sizes because they output different voltages. Maybe this is not the case, or it is just not an issue anymore with modern electric devices. Or maybe this is the reason why rechargeable batteries are said to not work so well / at all for some applications.

Sixty-one days into 2007, I finally managed to replace the last calendar on our walls, this being the Bic Camera Calendar in the bed room. The Bic Camera Calendar is one large sheet of paper (A0?) that covers the whole year on one page. It is issued for free at the end of the year for free by the Bic Camera chain of electronic stores. I first came in contact with it years back in the classroom of a Japanese language school. The Bic Camera Calendar is a wealth of useful information, boarding on being overloaded, but in a good way. This year's edition features

• a map of Japan
  • eleven insets for the various remote islands
  • lots of place names
  • roads and shipping lines
  • latitudes and longitudes, annotated with other world cities that are located there
  • compass (English and Japanese, with pronunciation guide for both, as with most names on the calendar)
• calendars for the twelve months
  • English and Japanese names for the week days
  • English and Traditional Japanese month names, with an explanation of where the traditional name came from
  • some arcane system of naming/counting days that I do not understand
  • important weather events according to the lunar calendar
  • colour photographs of flowers in bloom during that month
  • lunar phases
  • the 2006 edition also had December of the previous year, but that must have been pushed out by some newly included section
• an explanation of the annotations for fortune tellers in the calendar
• a chart for the animals of the Chinese calendar
• a chart for the Japanese Imperial calendar (goes back to 1925)
• subway and train maps for the metropolitan areas of Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Nagoya, Kyoto, Fukuoka, and Sapporo (pointing out where the Bic Camera stores are)
• a list of thirteen World Heritage cultural and natural locations (cross-referenced with the map)
• a list of telephone numbers and web sites (including QR codes for mobile phone access) for Bic Camera and Sofmap.

I whole-heartedly recommend the Bic Camera Calendar, and everyone should have one (or more).