MetaAnomie

Really, I’m not. Well, maybe I kind of am. Having a hard time just finding the time to take a shit these days. I finished reading “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking and now pretty much all my current reading material is work related. And pretty much all my of my day is work related. And I feel pretty horrible because I have gone from spending a crazy amount of time with the kids to not being able to spend much at all — and I’m thinking I really need to at least clear my weekends out so I can give them 100% then. It’s really a bit lonely getting to be with them as little as I am.

With that said though, work is going good — I’m learning and it’s certainly exciting. Now I just got to figure out when the hell I’m going to finish my taxes.

I just started playing BioShock 2:

Really cool. I’ve only played a few minuets of it so far but it definitely gets points for originality. And creepiness.

It seems I have now developed quite a list of games I have started playing but haven’t found the time to finish, including:

Modern Warfare 2:

And Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. Oh, and Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.

I haven’t also technically finished Super Mario Galaxy (even though I have won it), but damn that game is hard — I don’t think I’ll ever have the patience to collect all the different stars.

I also really want to dig into the two expansion packs for Half-Life 2 among other things but I figure I have more than enough on my plate at the moment. Who knows — maybe one of these days. That’s the hard part about getting old I guess. There is always something more pressing to cover and even forcefully making bits and pieces of time to play here and there, it still never really amounts to much.

As is life.

Here is a hint: it starts with a “J” and ends with a I-have-to-put-on-a-suit-and-go-to-work-on-monday.

Just got my tax book in the mail (*sigh*).

It’s going to be rather fun this year, both with losing my job and trying to figure out how my Japanese unemployment benefits and pension payout counts against the current tax treaties in place between the two countries. I’m hoping to god I don’t end up getting double taxed because I really can’t afford it right now. By the way, I’m reminded every year how utterly ridiculous the U.S. tax system is. It’s like going to a restaurant and them making you calculate the bill.

Except you don’t get any food.

It’s been a very busy year for me so far. I had about a million interviews last month, finished reading “The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao” by Junot Diaz (it was fantastic), and I’m seven chapters into “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking (and my brain is about to explode). I also finally started watching “Flash Forward” and I’m rather hooked. It’s almost completely different from the novel (except for the main theme), but that’s kind of a good thing (because you know how well movie versions of books usually go). I’ve also been doing an ass load of studying — programming and math stuff, among other unspoken things.

Anyhow, I have about a million other things I could probably write about but rather than going on till infinity, I’ll just end with a picture of Ren sleeping with his face pressed up against an elephant’s butt:

Chicken Parmigiana:

Chicken Fettuccine Alfredo:

I made the chicken mild cajun and it came out tasting pretty decent.

Random Stir-fry (aka throwing shit together):

I had the rather odd idea to mix balsamic vinegar (because balsamic vinegar makes my world spin) with habanero sauce but abandoned the idea after tasting it because I knew the princess couldn’t eat it. She didn’t eat anything but the meat anyway, but you know, that’s besides the point. Anyhow, I was surprised at how good it was — I really want to play more with it. I bet it would rock on roast beef.

The wifey’s grandmother passed away last week and we went out to Gifu for the wake/funeral. She was a whopping 98 years old believe it or not. Odd to think that I have known her for over ten years now.

Anyway, I have been to quite a few of the Buddhist memorial services for her grandpa (they have these on intervals of seven days from when a person passes away till the 49th day, and then some more at different intervals stretching as far as 60-70 years on — the latter I really don’t understand so well), but it was the first time I have ever taken part in a tsuya (wake) and ososhiki (funeral).

Over here, it’s common to keep the body in the house (surrounded by dry ice) until the day of the tsuya. The immediate family gathered there, and the men helped to carry her down the staircase into the hearse. From there, we went to a funeral home to move her into a casket, other people gathered, and a monk was brought in to do the okyou (Buddhist sutra — chanting if you will). After everyone left, the closest siblings (as well as the wifey, princess, Ren, and myself) stayed the night at the funeral home and kept the incense burning. Note that you’re technically supposed to stay awake all night (which explains the characters of the word tsuya - “through the night”) but you can imagine how well that works with a two year-old.

The next day, people gathered again for the funeral service, the monk came again and did the okyou, people put flowers and manju (a sort of traditional Japanese snack that the wifey’s grandma loved) into the casket, it was closed, and the family took a bus to the crematorium. From there everyone went back to the funeral home, had lunch together, and returned yet again to the crematorium afterwards.

The crematorium room was medium size, plain, with one small platform in the center (the building apparently contained multiple rooms like this). The body was laid on the platform, dropped down below, and was then lifted back up again by the time everyone had come back, leaving just the ashes and bones. Relatives lined up two at a time, picked up a bone from the platform together with pairs of chopsticks, and then placed the bone in a small bag/box that will later be split in half: one part going to the family grave and one part going to the main temple in Kyoto at a later date.

By the way, if you have ever wondered why passing food from one person’s chopsticks to another is taboo, I figure you can guess why by now. If you didn’t know, well, now you do.

By the way, I finally have a skype account now. Shoot me an email if you want to chat.

P.s. I’ll probably be drunk.

Got my new RAID case in:

It works like a typical internal HD install, but without the cables which was rather nice:

Two 2 TB drives now installed:

Yay, an empty SATA port!

Now to install the SATA interface:

And now to partition the…

What the fuck!?

Let’s back up here for a second…

I ordered this PC a couple of years ago with two of the biggest HDs available at the time. Being that I was running out of space, I decided I HAD to get some more storage space. Note that I had been using the OS as it had been installed without alteration.

Why, oh why, did they only partition under half of my drive space on both of my discs? I had a full 170 GB available on both that I wasn’t putting to use!

Second bit of fun, I quickly learned that the SATA ports on the motherboard apparently don’t support port multipliers, leaving me only able to access one of two of the discs in my case. Luckily however, I had purchased another SATA interface (PCI card) thinking that I wouldn’t have any extra available, and I was able to install and use that one instead.

Nothing is ever as straight-forward as it should be eh?

I had been rather looking forward to 2010 being that 2009 has been so fucking horrible but unfortunately, so far it has been just a one-two punch to the nutsack. Out of two active interview processes I lost both — in the same day. My unemployment was terminated and I’m currently paying for formula with retirement money. So of course like all 30 year-old men with no future I waited till my family went to sleep to be really, sincerely depressed, but Ren decided that shit wasn’t happening and instead preferred to scream his head off for a couple of hours. And throw up on my shirt a couple times for good measure. And so I got stupid frustrated and laid him down and he screamed, and picked him up and he screamed, but slightly less, so I alternated between standing up and holding him with slightly not-so-aggravating screams to laying him down with wake-up-the neighbor screams.

And then he went to sleep and I went to the bathroom to cry for a bit.

Only after 30 years of socialization that men aren’t supposed to cry, I appear to be physically incapable of doing it anymore. And that pisses me off more than anything — cause god damnit some times it’s necessary.

When no one else is looking of course.

So my shitty mode continued on to today and I was putting the princess in the shower halfheartedly, once again with my head in my hands. And she kept calling my name, over and over and over again. And I said “what?!” really frustrated.

And she bent over naked with her head between her legs and said “I can see my own butt!”

Man, I have just been so busy since I got back to Japan — and the kids’ sleep schedule has been all over the place which has made things all the more interesting. I had one interview a couple days after I arrived and did a bit of an online shopping spree the other day. I have totally exhausted the hard disks in my computer and am in desperate need of some more storage, so I put in an order for an external eSATA chassis, interface card, and two 2TB drives. Hopefully that will be enough to hold me out for general data storage and backups for a little while.

I also put in a order for a LinkTheater (and another external HD to connect it to). Having kids means you pretty much get to watch zero TV, and I have been wanting a digital storage device of sorts to save programs so I can watch them at later times (and to save shows for the kids). This one caught my eye because one, its hard drive is external, meaning you can increase the size or swap them around eliminating worries about space limitations, and two, I had been wanting a way to connect my PC to my TV to watch programs and whatnot, and using the LinkTheater LAN connection I should be able to do that as well. Anyhow, we will see how well it works once I get it in.

I watched Avatar with my brother and dad when I was back in the states and rather liked it. The visuals were just downright stunning. Unfortunately I was only able to see the 2D version, but I have heard nothing but good things about the 3D one as well. I would love to see it.

Anyways, the story was entertaining enough but not fantastic perhaps. It was mainly a combination of elements and ideas that you have most likely seen before in one form or another. That’s not to shit on it though — as I said, it does at least keep you engaged. And the bad guy is badass.

As for books, I picked up a copy of Maddox’s “The Alphabet of Manliness.” It was pretty much in the writing style that he uses on his blog, and the content was on that level as well. If you like his blog, you would like it — it’s pretty damn funny in parts.

I also picked up a copy of “Flash Forward” by Robert J. Sawyer. My brother was telling me about the series on ABC (which I haven’t seen yet), and noticing the book it was based on in the bookstore, I grabbed a copy for the flight home. It is probably one of the better books I have read in the past year or so; the story is really original and catchy. If you haven’t heard of it yet, essentially the plot centers around the entire world blacking out at the same time for a little over two minuets, and everyone getting a brief glimpse of their own future — and of course all the different human and scientific repercussions of that event. As for the story, I really have no major complaints. On the other hand, the writing wasn’t anything to write home about. Not distracting per se, but not fantastic either. Either way, it was definitely a good read.