Lotusblog

Is it really 4 months since my last entry? How can this be so?

So much has happened.

But it would take forever to write it here.

So let me just say that I am in London now, will be back in Osaka next weekend. You know my email address. You know my number.

Contact me.

Zefrank talked last week about “busting your cycle”. It’s worth watching, so just click here and sit back. So in the meantime, I decided to bust a cycle of my own.

I rode my bike!

I didn’t fall off!

I didn’t have a crash!

Actually, it was fantastic. I haven’t ridden since my last crash, mainly because my wrist still hurts, but I just had to ride. The autumn weather is just beautiful- too beautiful to miss. So I did a home-Honmachi-Umeda-home run and boy do I feel achey now.
Haven’t felt this good for ages.

BBC’s online news is one place I go to almost everyday to check the day’s headlines, and see what’s going on. It’s clean, the RSS feeds work with my news reader, there’s no advertising and the quality of the writing is pretty good.

At least, that’s how it used to be.

I just read this article and I am in shock. How could such poor writing be featured by the BBC?

The world is a large and mysterious place.

My tomato plants, growing on my balcony, are certainly full of vigour but from three plants, in four months I only managed to get one tomato.
They seem to be more focussed on growing skywards rather than producing fruit.
Is there something I should be doing? Any skilled tomato gardeners out there?
You know where to reach me.

After living in Japan for a number of years, and after having had a number of employers, I found myself with a lot of bank accounts. It was silly. I only ever use two of them on a day to day basis, four of them were lying abandoned. Potential security risks. Fodder for identity hijackers.

So I decided to do something about it. That is close them.

The Japanese banking system (well, the retail banking system) gets a pretty bad rap, especially from overseas. But to be fair, I really don’t know why. While they admittedly pay negligible interest, they don’t charge you money to give them your money. (Western banks; take note!) You don’t have to go to extreme lengths to open an account either (again, US/European banks… take note!) And once you’ve opened it, it’s there for ever. R opened an account in 1992 (?) and it’s still there. 500 yen patiently waiting. What’s more, J-Banks offer smart ATMs that really are automatic tellers. They do everything. Once you’ve opened your account (which involves talking to a pesky human) you can be safe in the knowledge that you’ll never need to talk to one again. Everything is automated.

And if you do decide that you need the human touch, the banks are there. Admittedly, they’re only open 6 hours a day, but nonetheless, they are there for you. And there’s none of the humiliation and frustration of banking in the UK or Australia. You tell the nice lady at the door what you want, she’ll give you a number and you sit down on a comfy couch with a selection of magazines and a TV (no comment). And you relax. Then they call you. You do what you had to do. You don’t shout through a bulletproof glass partition. You have a nice civilized conversation with a charming, young lady (no, they really are all charming young ladies) face to face. And then you go home.

Despite all this, I decided to slim down and close three of my accounts.

And now I feel like I have just lost 10 kg, everything is so much lighter!

In doing all this banking though, I discovered one thing. The banking industry is starting to wake up and modernise. A much more “bespoke” banking experience is being offered by some of the banks. And even a couple of young upstart banks have become so well established that they now eclipse the older dinosaur banks in terms of assets, and blow them away in terms of services. I actually opened an account with one of these younger banks. Their services and conditions seemed to good to be true.

Which, now that I think about it, is a bit of a worry!

I guess I am a bit of a rambler. In a random way. Spent last week in Bangkok, Osaka and then Aomori. Have been back in Osaka for five days. Here are some random pictures of my journeys.

In what has become a pretty tired routine, I just got back to Osaka from London. I am here for one week before heading off again.

For the first time, I actually came back without any photographs at all!
Not even one!
And I didn’t have any accidents either!
Not even one!

And for the first time I can’t think of anything remotely interesting to write about. So in that case, I’ll get back to work.

I am in Tokyo at the moment (again) and staying a dive in Shinjuku. With the most amazing hotel service I have ever experienced. Anyway, thought I would upload some of the pictures that were in my ‘phone, the trusty Nokia 6630.

As a communications device, this ‘phone is pretty good. Not remarkable, not bad, just OK. But as a camera, this ‘phone rocks. It rocks because of its limitations. Because of what it can’t do. Take a look at these pictures. All taken at night. At the Louis Vuitton Tokyo 2006 party. No flash. No editing with software. Just straight from the ‘phone’s memory to you.
I think some of them are pretty cool.

It was with enormous relief that I read this post on BoingBoing which showed that I am not the only person in the world who loathes professional sport. Especially the ones with jackasses running after balls.

The post itself, however, was not specifically about the tediousness of (watching) professional sport. No, rather the post was about a hilarious “pre-emptive cease-and-desist letter”.

Absolutely hilarious to think that some lackey in the Baker & McKenzie LLP office thought that BoingBoing might actually want to stream videos of games, and therefore would have to give them a stern warning to watch their step.

On my “Top Ten List of Wastes of Bandwidth”, webcasts of soccer matches are certainly up there. Slightly ahead of YouTube, and just under spam.

Probably not quite as wasteful as blogging, though.

Over the last couple of months I have been the unlucky recipient of a lot of spam. I was fortunate in that up until very recently I seldom received any at all. But my number is up.
Speaking of numbers, there was an interesting article on Boing Boing talking about mysterious spam blog comments that consisted of a strange comment and then a 5 digit number. (You can read about it here )

Today, I broke the number one rule and actually opened one of the spam messages and was intrigued to find that this is what it said:

Discretion is the better part of valour Give Neither Counsel Nor Salt till You Are Asked For It Many are called but few are chosen A heart at peace gives life to the body, but envy rots the bones. The bigger the better.
The pot calls the kettle black. Barking dogs seldom bite

After a storm comes a calm. You can’t teach a new mouse old clicks. Better bend than break Wise men think alike. Any fool can criticise, condemn and complain and most fools do
Where there’s a will, there’s a relative. Football is a game of two halves The country is in ruins, and there are still mountains and rivers – japanese proverb It is easier to get forgiveness than permission. A bad penny always turns up.

What does it mean?