if ($drunk == true) { never_do_this_again(); }

So I was cleaning out the kitchen a bit today and I noticed the bottle of sake on the counter. It still had a fair bit in it. I said to myself, "You know, self, you might as well get this experiment over with." The taste of alcohol is repugnant. It makes me want to throw up, but I decided to finish the bottle off in one fell swig. I got out my cup, filled it up with the rest of the sake , stuck it in the microwave and downed the whole thing in one go.

I vow here and now to never drink again.

I feel like I am sick. Kinda woozy and I want to take a nap. I don't think I am actually drunk because I have full mental and physical capabilities (I tested that by picking up a jo and doing some stuff). But I have a growing headache and I feel like if I let it my balance would make an attempt to desert me. My stomach is screaming at me and releasing vast quantities of gas.

If this is the result of drinking, I can't see the appeal.

attempt++

I've kept at this drinking sake thing. Every couple of days I try some more. It's getting a little easier. I don't feel like my stomach is fighting itself when I subject it to sake. Now I just have to get over this attitude that alcohol is stupid.

if ($alcohol->inStomach()) {throw new Exception($vomit);}

It seems I am incapable of consuming alcohol. I decided that since I am going to Japan, I should learn to drink sake. I don't want to be in the situation of being offered some sake while over there and having to turn it down. Drinking is like a national sport for the Japanese. If I was offered some sake I would be loathe to have to say, "Sorry, I don't drink". I am not thinking I want to get drunk (the thought of losing control scares the shit out of me) I just don't want to be rude.

To this end I went and bought a bottle of sake at the local liquor store. The plan was to drink a bit each night until I got used to the taste and effects. When I got home I poured out a small amount (not even a mouthful) into a Japanese tea cup I have and set about trying to drink it.

It was only by an effort of will that I managed to get the stuff in my mouth. My body seems to have a mind of it's own with this regard. It does not want me to drink. I had to force myself to do so. The stuff tastes vile, as harsh and nasty tasting as every other alcohol I have ever had. After I had swallowed the first pour, I started feeling like my stomach was angry at me. It was tossing and turning and I started burping a lot. It took about an hour for the effects of the first cup to go away.

When I was feeling a little better I poured some more into the cup. About the same amount as last time. I fought myself to get it up to my mouth. I got it to my lips and had to put the cup down. I waited a minute and tried again. Once again, as I was getting to the point of being able to drink, my body forced me to put the cup down. I managed to actually drink it on the third attempt. History is a good teacher, even recent history. My stomach started doing acrobatics and the belching started again.

After another hour, the feelings settled down so I poured a third small dose into the cup. This time I managed to get it in and swallowed on the first attempt. My stomach threatened to crawl up my throat and kick my brain in the cerebellum for doing this to it. The burping took on a new urgency, and then suddenly stopped. I could feel the need to burp building and building. It was getting desperate but I couldn't seem to open my throat to let it out. The pressure built and built and my throat remained closed. Finally after what seemed like an hour but was only 45 minutes, I burped. It was a good feeling.

By then my stomach had stopped practicing for it's attempt to join a trapeze act so I poured a fourth cup. This one I couldn't bring myself to drink at all. I sat on the couch staring at the cup, listening to John Stewart making wise cracks about some new political scandal. The cup stared back at me wondering why I was refusing to drink it.

After half an hour of this staring match I got up and poured the cup down the sink. I now have a mostly full bottle of sake that I am not sure I can bring myself to drink. Maybe I will try again this weekend.

sudo reboot

It's been a long time since I posted to this blog. After I dropped out of the trip I lost the reason to keep this blog updated. But there has been a change. I am going again. I have decided to go back to Japan to try to take advantage of the hanami season. It's a bit of a crap shoot as the hanami season doesn't start on a set date. It is dictated by the weather. I've looked at the historical trends and it seems to me that the end of March would be the best time to catch the hanami in Tokyo. It will probably be similar to the last trip. Tokyo and Osaka. I'm getting all excited again. Woot.

I have no clue about what I want to do while I am there. I will do some reading to see what there is to do on the cheap.

$destination = "Chicago";

This is going to be my first post on this blog not related to Japan in some way.

I have been asked to go to Chicago next week for 1 day. One of our clients needs someone to fix a bug on their intranet and they can't give external access to it. Therefore they are going to fly me down there to go to their location and fix the problem.

I'm excited and nervous at the same time. I have never done a business trip before so I don't know how this all works. Plus I am scared of going to the States. I keep hearing horror stories about US customs.

I will have to find someone to look after my cats.

if ($events == NULL) {do_nothing();}

I got chastized by my friend Linda for not posting lately. There hasn't been any movement on anything.

I guess I will talk about Sunday.

On Sunday, Bernard wanted to go for brunch with me. He spent the whole time trying to convince me to change my mind. He was convinced that if I didn't go I would regret it. I told him that I was not going. Period. I couldn't deal with a trip at that time. I will go next year. I think I will enjoy myself a lot more then.

I fully intend to hit on as many women as I can while I am there. ;-)

if (!$have_degree) {haveProblems();}

I heard back from the company in Japan. They liked my experience but wanted to know if I had ever used Oracle. I never had but could learn without much trouble. The big problem though, they wanted to know if my diploma is equivalent to a Bachelor's degree.

I knew this would come back to haunt me.

My diploma is functionally equivalent to a Bachelor's (as far as I am concerned) but not in some other people's minds. There is a stigma attached to it. Many people feel that it is not as good as a degree for some odd reason. They think I didn't work to earn it. It was bloody hard to get that diploma. The CS course at Algonquin was very difficult. There was a lot of work involved.

I was lucky because I understand computers very well and was able to grasp the concepts and zip through the work without trying too hard. I could zip through my assignments quickly so I never got bogged down. Others were not so fortunate. They had to slog through it all.

It has made it a little hard to find jobs in the past and it may prevent me from getting a work visa for Japan.

return false;

The trip has basically imploded. I have backed out. Only Bernard and Remi are still going, but they are not going to travel together. They are going to look after their own hotels and travel arrangements. I have no clue what is happening now. I will probably plan out my own private trip some time in the near future.

That sucks.

I discovered on my last trip that exploring a different country is a lot more fun when there is someone else to explore it with. Being alone means I have no one to talk to, and no one to hang out with.

Poo.

$members = $members-1;

Charles has just pulled out from the trip. The group seems to be self-destructing. With the tension between Bernard and Remi and now Charles dropping out and Remi just this moment sent an email saying he might pull out too. This is looking worse and worse every day. It's looking like this is the end. It seems very bleak right now. I guess the next day or so will determine what is happening.

I don't want to go to Japan alone again. I like having someone to hang around with, but with the way this group is going... I might have to.

function leaveMessage(phone_number) { return call; }

I was getting anxious about not hearing back from the company in Japan. My friend Andie called me this evening and convinced me to call them. I didn't want to because I am too shy to do that sort of thing. In the end though I knew I should. So I swallowed my fear and made the call.

I have never had luck with international calls.

My first attempt provided me with just a funny beeping sound so I hung up and tried again. This time I got a voice telling me that the call couldn't go through and to hang up and try again. Third try I mis-dialed, managed to hang up before the call went anywhere. Forth time I managed to connect, but their phone system told me that I was blocking caller ID so I should call back with caller ID enabled. I hung up to turn it on, but I realized that it was probably just because it was an international call. I never block caller ID. So I called back to wait for the answering machine. I left a message asking to be called back.

One big hurdle out of the way.

I went and lay on my bed and read a C++ programming book. I am too geeky for my own good sometimes. After about 10 minutes of waiting the phone rang. I ran to the computer room and took a few deep breaths. I was nervous. My heart was threatening to go on strike if I didn't stop getting it all worked up like this. I answered the phone in as calm a voice as I could manage.

The gentleman on the other end explained to me that this week is a holiday in Japan so he hasn't gotten around to evaluating the submissions yet. I apologized profusely for bothering him and felt like a twit. I should have known that it was a holiday in Japan right now.

Anyway, I feel a lot better now. I know I will have to wait at least a week or two before I hear anything again. I can wait now that I know it wasn't just an email going missing.

My heart can relax for a little while.

bash> sudo nice -20 group_interaction

There is a lot of tension in the group right now. Things are not smelling of roses. On Friday, at the meetup Bernard made some jokes about Remi's weight and Remi didn't like that at all. Remi sent an email to Bernard about it, and Bernard replied and back and forth and the two of them are annoyed at each other right now. If this doesn't get settled soon and all the egos get assuaged then things are going to grow and grow. By the time the trip comes around we are all going to be at each other's throats. Then two weeks in close proximity with these people? Eek!

I am working hard at not annoying anyone but I know I do occasionally. It's human nature. "Hell is other people" and all that. I hope I don't feel like strangling anyone by the end of all this.

try { Application(); } catch ( Exception $noReply ) { tryAgain(); }

There has been no response from the company in Japan. I sent my resume to them last Thursday, and on Friday received an email asking me to send an email to a different person in the company to set up a time for a phone interview. I sent that email off right away.

And I waited. And waited.

Two Japanese business days later, I still hadn't gotten a response so I sent off a email asking for confirmation.

And I waited. And waited.

Two more Japanese business days and I have not gotten a response. I've checked in my spam filters, they have not had any false positives. Nothing. Not a peep from these guys. I am getting disappointed. I was so looking forward to this opportunity.

I will try one more email asking for confirmation then give up.

It's a pity. This job was such a good fit for me.

On a totally unrelated note: Reiko, my former language exchange partner, emailed me saying a friend of hers has come to Ottawa to study English and needs a language partner. She asked if I would be willing to do be that partner. I said sure. Reiko said she would pass on my email address to this girl. This should be fun.

if ($credit > $cost) { buyTicket(); }

I got the limit on my credit card upped a bit. Before it was set to just a little bit below the cost of the plane ticket. I can now afford to buy the ticket on my own card. If I couldn't have gotten the limit bumped up then I would have had to get either Bernard or Charles to buy the ticket and paythem back in cash. I wasn't relishing that thought.

Charles also emailed earlier today saying that he has booked the Tokyo hotel. That leaves us with booking the hotels for the second week. We have selected the ones we are planning on staying at, we just have to make reservations.

Many hotels in Japan still accept only cash and require payment up front. When we check into the hotel on the first night we will need 19,800 yen each in out pockets. That seems like a lot but it is for nearly a whole week. At the moment the conversion rate is close to 100JPY = $1CDN. That equates to having nearly $200 in cash at touchdown in Japan. I will talk to Charles to see if he thinks it best to get that money here in Canada or to get it at a bank machine in Japan.

I am getting more and more excited and nervous about this trip. There is still so much up in the air.

I was looking for Japanese goth bars, but most of them are not going to be operating at times that are good for this trip. Maybe the one in Osaka will be do-able. I will examine further.

/* The meeting */

We had out latest trip planning meeting last night. It's starting to feel like we are going over the same stuff over and over again. Bernard is the sort of person who needs to plan everything to extreme detail and Charles and I are of the opinion that "we are on vacation, why plan anything?" We are going to let him have the Hakone trip planned to the minute because that is his pet project. He wants to take "The Romance Car" from Tokyo to Hakone. It was so named because the seats don't have arm rests between them, perfect for couples to snuggle. Anyway, the romance car leaves early in the morning from Shinjuku station. So to catch it we will have to wake up early, and rush across Tokyo. Bernard has calculated exactly when we have to wake up and when we have to get from point A to point B to point C. We are letting him have this day because it will make the rest of the trip easier.

Last night though Bernard started to get it through his head that we are all adults and we can go off and do our own things without a tour guide. I don't know how happy he is about that, I think he wants this to be like those prepackaged tours when a tour guide will take you to places of interest so you can take a few pictures. Speaking of pictures that seems to be all he is interested in. The way he talks, he is just interested in taking pictures of the sights not in actually being there. Ah well, to each his own.

The meeting was a potluck dinner so Remi decided to bring drinks but he forgot that I don't drink and Charles was driving so that left him and Bernard to drink all the alcohol. He got really drunk. At one point he found out that he would have to go into a change room and be naked around other guys before going into an onsen. He got nervous. He has never been in a change room before. We tried to assure him that no one was going to be staring at his penis but he was still upset. You could see the fear in his eyes. Or maybe it was the alcohol.

Speaking of onsen, Bernard wants me to sneak my camera into the onsen. Cameras are forbidden there because of all the naked people but he seems to think that he will forget the experience if he doesn't have a photograph of it.

We have basically hashed out all the over riding plans for the Tokyo leg of the trip. We have to book the hotel and figure out what to do with the bulk of our luggage during the Hakone trip. We will probably be able to leave it at the hotel in Tokyo, as many hotels in Japan offer services like that.

We couldn't finalize our plans for Osaka because Olsen was not there but we are very close to getting that done.

Not much else to report.

$im = @imagecreatetruecolor(50, 100)

I promised pictures showing how much I have changed in appearance since I was last in Japan. Enjoy.

4 Years ago, near Shinjuku, almost getting hit by a bus:


A few months ago, on Laurier Ave, at Timothy's Coffee:

location++;

There have been some events in my life recently that my close friends know all about (I'm sure they all wanted me to shut up about it). I wont go into details here but the end result was that I decided that I was going to attempt to get a job in Japan.

Ever since I was a small child I have had a love of Japan and the thought of moving there has always appealed to me.

unfortunately, I have this inertia thing I mentioned in my last post. I always would find excuses not to make the leap. These excuses caused me to miss out on a perfect chance. I could have taken a working holiday and gone there to live and work for a year. I am now too old to do that (the cut off is 30 years old). I don't have a university degree so I can't get a job teaching English to kids. Now, to get a working visa I have to somehow manage to convince a Japanese company to sponsor me sight unseen.

To this end I updated my resume (thank you Andie, I couldn't have done that with out you) and started searching out jobs in Japan. Deep down I know that the chances of me actually getting a job there is pretty slim but I will still try. As long as I keep trying I will not feel like I broke a promise to myself.

On Wednesday I spotted an ad on www.daijob.com. It was for a company called Denphone K.K.. It's a company located in Tokyo; Roppongi to be precise. They make PBX systems based on open protocols. They are looking for a PHP/UNIX programmer. When I saw the ad I rushed to write a cover letter and emailed it off to Andie to get her approval. Andie is really good at that sort of thing. Waited all night for a reply from Andie. Couldn't relax. Kept running to the computer ever ten minutes to see if she had replied yet.

At 9:30 I decided to give her a call to see if she could give my cover letter the once over. She answered her phone and instantly launched into a pity me story. Her basement was flooded and her computer's hard drive was FUBAR. She lost a bunch of physical and digital stuff on the same day in totally unrelated incidents.

And to top it off, her shower was broken. She was having a bad day to the n^th degree.

I am a good listener but I am not very good at comforting people. I never know what to say. When someone gives me a sob story, I usually just listen and say "uh-huh".

After she had gotten all her frustration out I got around to asking her to go over my cover letter. Only problem was that with her computer out of commission she couldn't check her email. I ended up reading the letter to her. Between the two of us we got it polished up and ready to go.

Thursday morning, I emailed off my resume with the cover letter. I didn't expect to hear back from them. Why bother to sponsor someone from Canada when you could just hire someone who already has a visa?

When I woke up this morning I saw a email waiting for me asking me for a phone interview. If I wasn't still rubbing sleep out of my eyes I would have done a happy dance. My first attempt and I manage to get an interview. Awesome. One thing about my resume: it gets noticed. Bernard (one of the trip members) thinks it is no good but he is in the minority. Everyone else seems to love it. It stands out. I was once told by an employer that it is the single best looking resume that he has ever seen.

I have to wait for them to get back to me on a actual time for the interview. There is a thirteen hour time difference between Ottawa and Tokyo. Co-ordinating this might be difficult.

I really hope this pans out.

Hello, world

I've started this blog for the simple purpose of keeping a journal of my preparations and eventual trip to Japan. Nothing fancy. Nothing earth shattering. Probably no one will ever see this. Doesn't matter. I'll keep plugging away at it until I get bored and stop updating it. That tends to happen a lot. I don't often have a long attention span for things. Martial arts is probably the only thing I've been able to stick to.

Anyways, onto details about the trip.

Several months ago, one of my friends, Charles, had a job which would send him to Tokyo once a year or so. He had decided that at the end of the trip this year he would extend his trip out by two weeks and have a vacation there. While discussing it with his friends the proposition came up that a group of us would join him for that two week vacation. Charles has since left that job and the business trip portion of the trip was canceled but the vacation part is still a go.

The general plan was to spend a week in Tokyo and a week in Osaka (and nearby cities). We would firm up our plans over the coming months.

At first there was a lot of speculation about who would go on the trip, but that eventually settled down to just a group of five people: Charles, Bernard, Olson, Remi and myself. There was still a bit of a question about that though. Remi wasn't sure he would be able to make it and Olson didn't know if he could join us for the whole two weeks. Eventually Remi settled his issues and Olson decided to only join us for the second week.

The group has been having meetings almost every other week planning out the trip. First we planned out what were going to be doing on each day. In general we are free to follow the plan or abandon it as we see fit. It is up to each person to choose what they want to do on any given day but we have a general plan.

After we hashed out the plan we started choosing hotels. Bernard and Charles went searching the internet looking for hotels. One of the members (no names) in the group has a problem with the communal washrooms that are normal for Japanese hotels so every place we are looking at must have private washrooms. It jacks up the price by a few dollars a night but that's OK.

Around this time I finally got around to renewing my passport. During my last trip to Japan I looked very different than I do now. I will dig out a picture of myself from then and post it with a comparison picture from now so everyone can see. My old passport, while technically still valid, had a picture that looked nothing like me so I had to get a new one. I have a lot of inertia (that whole object at rest stuff that Newton was talking about) to doing things. Getting the forms and the pictures was just too much effort on most days and the days when I had the energy I always forgot. Eventually though, I managed to get myself in gear and got the forms submitted. I got my friend from my dojo Mazda to be my guarantor and some other friends from the dojo, Nicole and Kevin, to be my references. The woman at the passport office said the passport would be mailed to me in two weeks, but it arrived in my mailbox after one week. I guess there wasn't a lot of people asking for passports that week.

That brings me up to today. We have another trip planning meeting this weekend at Bernard's place.

I know this was a rambling, badly written piece of crap that was probably pretty boring to read but I needed to bring everyone up to speed. As events warrant I will add extra posts.

Andrew.