These days, I wonder if I’m graduating in Bioinformatics or in Petty Administrative Filing.

A tiny representative sample of the ten pages of instructions on how to file my thesis documents (bear in mind none of it has anything to do with the actual content of the thesis, this is all exclusively about how to format and present the documents, not what goes in it):

1. 60部については、表紙【様式D】をつけ、「論文内容の要旨」、「論文目録」、「履歴書」の順にセットし、左側2カ所をホッチキスで綴じてください。(2頁のものは見開きとなるように印刷) 2. 各3部については、種類別に揃え、ゼムクリップで止めてください。
(1) 2頁にわたるものは両面印刷とし、 「論文目録」、「履歴書」については、必ず捺印し てください。(綴じた60部は捺印不要)
(2) 種類毎に3部をゼムクリップで止め、クリアフォルダーに入れて提出してください。

Yes, three paperclips, not 2 or, gods forbid, 4. And for the love of Amaterasu, make sure that you use a clear folder for your stack of 60 copies of each document. We can and will fail you if you do not comply.

Faithful retranscription of my conversation yesterday late at night at my local combini:

Bored Teenage Combini Employee: Hello and how may I help you?

Dave: I’d like stamps. Do you sell stamps?

B.T.C.E.: We sure do.

Dave: Brilliant. In that case could I get for 90 yen worth of stamp?

B.T.C.E.: Unfortunately we do not have that.

Dave: But I thought you just said you sold stamps…?

B.T.C.E.: That we do!

Dave: Then how come you don’t have any?

B.T.C.E.: Oh, but we do have stamps.

Dave: Then why can’t I get my 90 yen stamp.

B.T.C.E.: We only carry ¥50, ¥80 and ¥10 stamps. Sorry.

Dave: facepalms.

Kotatsu: check.

Month-long supply of Thai curry: check.

Gallon-sized bottle of rum: check.

PhD Thesis submission draft: check.

Right, see you in Spring, people.

Yesterday was the first official outing of the Kyoto chapter of the Nomihiking Society of Japan. On that warm and sunny Autumn afternoon, a small group of us headed out to Arashiyama to enjoy the combined pleasures of pristine Nature sights and heavy inebriation.

If the success of a nomihike is to be gauged by the collective amount of hangover on the following day, ours was an unfettered triumph. We did well, even by other metrics, such as the exceedingly low casualty figures, with zero nomihikers falling off the surprisingly tricky trail. Yes, this was essentially the stuff local news drama is made of, minus the bit where drunken idiots crashed to their death on jagged river rocks, 10 metre below.

All hope is not lost for some gruesome nomihiking accident one day, since we shall resolutely repeat the adventure again in some very near future.

Last and final part in our Iya Trilogy

After a slow casual start over the weekend, we finally kicked into full-Iya tourism mode on Saturday night:

First, was a night at Ueda-san’s lovely B&B in a traditional farmhouse: 200 year-old chestnut-wood house, large washitsu with circling corridors, relaxing stone-lined ofuro and mellow family vibe. When I eventually buy my house in the Japanese countryside, this is probably what it will look like.

Even though some the charm of the above amenities was lost on my travelling buddies (particularly the awesome onsen-sized Japanese bath: a little “too exposed to the outside” for their modesty) and Ueda-san’s exclusive use of Japanese required a bit of translating back-and-forth with the group, everybody came together on the homemade, fresh-from-the-farm fruit, veggie and goat-milk yoghurt breakie… followed by a formal introduction to the goats themselves. As it turns out, milking a goat is not easy at all, but I can now add that to my short list of skills that might come handy, should civilisation crumble and send us all back to the bronze age.

Sunday was the day we had picked for finally touring Iya proper.

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If like me you deal with your typical Japanese administration office on a regular basis, you probably receive your fair share of documents, some of them occasionally packaged as a Zip archive…

If also like me, you are not using a Windows machine, but a Mac running OS X or some flavour of Linux, you routinely end up with files bearing such poetic names as “Åuäwà ò_ï∂ä÷åWèëófiíÒèoìÕ.pdf”, “äwà ê\êøìÕÅyÉfÅ[É^Åz.xls” etc. This is due to some incompatibility between the way each system stores Japanese characters¹ and the fact the Zip format was never conceived to handle such differences. Not a big problem if you have one file, bit tedious if the archive contains 300 of them.

In the spirit of sharing the fruit of my last productivity-sink effort to fix that problem, I present you with a small script that takes such a Zip archive as input and correctly extract all the files (with their properly encoded filenames):

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1. To be specific: Windows seems to be using good-old antiquated Japanese-only SJIS, whereas OS X and others prefer spiffy universal encodings like UTF-8. [↩]

A selection of random pics from last weekend’s Halloween party (guest photography credits: Aki, Cory & Yanmei).

Prize for creativity goes to Cory, who came as A Shower.

Prize for glamour icons was shared between Sona’s Audrey Hepburn and Anita’s Betty Boop.

On the witch vs. devil front, the battle was fierce: in the end, Tyana, Aki & Maja took Team Witch to victory by a slim margin against Jun & Yanmei’s Team Devil.

Rafa took a break from his busy Colombian import-export business to show his scarred face at the party (later enhanced by some strategically-placed white powder).

Roland and yours truly provided for some much-needed furry fuzziness and important life-lessons to the kids, courtesy of Sesame Hood’s favourites: Elmo and Cookie Monster.

Towering over the festivities and occasionally bringing chills down the spine of all guests present with his lugubrious laugh and transylvanian accent: Count Rei graced us with his presence (and gets extra points for being the only one ballsy enough to ride Japanese transports as is).

Continued from Pt. 1

After our bus dropped us at Tokushima station in the evening we spent the night at a henro-oriented guesthouse in Naruto (located very close to temple #1). The pouring rain and remote location put a serious damper on our initial ambitions to go explore the local izakaya life and we had to settle for the rather mediocre chain izakaya our taxi took us to. It was a reasonably early night. Good thing too, as our host gently kicked us out at 9:30am the next day (he apparently had to be somewhere and I guess he wanted to see us off before).

Waiting for the once-every-couple-hours train to Awa Ikeda gave us time to purchase and eat some basic breakfast on the side of the street… Prompting a local obāchan to come running to us, urgently asking for Sona’s help with her needles; twenty thread-through-needle-eye and much effusive thanks later, we were on our way toward the centre of Shikoku by train.

It took less than half-an-hour for the landscape to change from suburban Tokushima-shi concrete, into farm fields and small villages, into just mountains and the odd farm. By the time we arrived in Miyoshi-shi, the stations were little more than platforms in the middle of nowhere.

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Last weekend, Sona, Roland and yours truly decided to go do some exploring of that beautiful country we all live in. After some deliberations, we set our sights on Tokushima-ken in Shikoku, more specifically: Iya valley.

In addition to being a reasonably short and affordable bus ride away (2h30 from Kyoto to Tokushima city, another 2h to Iya proper), the region has a reputation as one of the last somewhat-preserved rural areas of Japan: lush nature aplenty, stunning mountain scenery and slightly less of the concrete horrors that litter every last corner of the Japanese countryside. The latter in particular was a big selling point, albeit taken with the healthy skepticism of someone who has seen his share of “scenic” Japanese countryside towns and “world-famous Unesco sites” consisting of a couple painfully preserved traditional houses surrounded by entire towns of nondescript gray buildings in all their aging 70s glory, along beaches littered with endless lines of tetrapods…

As it turns out, Iya valley might indeed offer some of the last shreds of unblemished rural landscape found in Japan (outside of 2-day hikes to remote mountainous parts of Gunma-ken or the like). In addition to largely unscathed landscapes, the constant mist and low-hanging clouds locked in by mountains on all sides contributed to give the whole area a distinct Lost Valley feel.

Don’t get me wrong: local government is clearly hard at work finding new and inventive ways to lay down concrete anywhere they can and utilitarian, cheap & ugly is the only zoning code local construction abides by. But on the scale of concrete addiction: if your average Japanese town is the worn-out crack whore who will blow you behind the city hall for a new four-lane expressway construction project, Iya would be the fresh-faced socialite who fashionably dabbles in cocaine but still has most of her youthful looks still on¹.

In short: it was awesome and a much needed break from suburban city life.

Since it has been a while since I posted any real travel notes (instead of just plopping a bunch of pictures), I thought I could make an effort this time. Behold:

The Wondrous Adventures of Sona, Roland & Dave in Beautiful Iya Valley!

It all started on Friday night, when our bus dropped us at Tokushima station.

to be continued…

1. In that overwrought simile, Tokyo is probably Keith Richards: pumped up full of chemicals, and oddly endearing for the sheer excess of it all. [↩]

On the 17th of October 1961, 50 years ago to the day, France-residing Algerians gathered in Paris for a non-violent demonstration in support of Algeria’s independence.

Between 20,000 and 30,000 men, women and children, dressed in their best Sunday clothes, many coming from the outer suburban slums where France crammed its growth-fueling immigrant workforce in the 60s, were marching peacefully toward the centre of the city, when municipal police forces charged into crowds, raiding isolated groups, firing on people and making good use of their wooden clubs, murdering dozens of unarmed Algerians: shot, beaten to death or thrown into the Seine river… Weeks later, swollen corpses of Algerian protesters were still being fished out of the river or found hung to trees in nearby forests.

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Around age 6, I made my first steps with a computer: drawing houses in MacPaint and typing elaborately formatted 30-line novellas in MacWrite. A couple years later, building my first programs using HyperCard (at the time I thought of it as “playing some sort of virtual lego game” rather than “writing object-oriented programs”).

Although I long ago decided that I did not want to make a career out of merely writing computer code, the skills I seamlessly acquired back then have since opened countless doors and helped me etch a living at times where options were scarce.

I would have most likely picked these skills anyway, had my dad not brought back a brand new Mac 512k to his practice, one day in 1986… But learning them the way I did unquestionably shaped my entire vision of the modern world: it taught me that technology does not have to look complicated to do complex things, that building things can be exciting and fun…

Apple Inc. is just a company, staffed with many great people at the moment, but still just a company: with no personality or sense of human emotions.

Steve Jobs, on the other hand, like him or not, shaped the world we live in. His ambition, his drive and the people he chose to carry his vision out, will keep resonating in the technologies your life is built around, for many more decades to come.

RIP.

Missing piece to Version 5.3 of Dave Disco Mobile has finally arrived. Just in time to keep me and my cold indoors. Yay.