Dream last night: There was an extended documentary-like sequence in which I learnt many interesting facts about Tyrannosauruses by way of comparisons with modern animals. One in particular stood out:
“A Tyrannosaurus rex can comfortably ride on a giraffe. If only the giraffe could support the weight – but then that’s hardly a design flaw in the T. rex.”
Stupid bank. My Visa debit card expired today. I’d expected a new one to arrive in the mail, but no sign of it. So I phoned the bank…
Navigated a maze of numbered options, and when none of the options matched my problem I picked the closest thing. When I finally got a human, he told me I had reached the wrong department and transferred me…
I got a guy whose voice was horribly distorted so I had to ask him to repeat every second thing he said. (It turned out later when my wife was talking to him to lodge a complaint, that he was in the Philippines. His English was fine, but the international phone line was dreadful.)
I told him I hadn’t received a replacement Visa card. He asked me to have my six-digit personal banking ID number ready and he would switch to a system so I could key it in. “Six digit ID number? Do I have one of those? Let me check my big list of ID stuff…” I checked but couldn’t find any number like that associated with my bank account. The guy then said I had two options: go into a branch, or he would ask me a series of security questions. I figured if I fail the security questions I can go into a branch anyway, so said go ahead.
He asked my full name, Visa card number, card expiry date, my birthdate, my address, the year we opened the account, the branch the account was opened at, the approximate current balance in the account, and details of a recent transaction. I answered all of these questions, including the exact amount, date, ATM location, and reported balance on our last ATM withdrawal, which was just yesterday. The guy then said sorry, the system had locked me out of accessing my account.
I had kind of expected this, since I’ve had similar experiences dealing with this bank before, so I just said I’d go into a branch. <sigh>
So, I’ve noticed lots of people at my work drink coffee. Some drink tea, some cola. I’ve also noticed that a lot of people who drink these things (coffee particularly) make various offhand comments about how they really need a coffee to get going, or to be alert or productive.
So, some questions for people who regularly have coffee or other caffeine-containing drinks:
You may have figured out that I don’t take caffeine. I actually kind of wonder: Am I less productive at work than I would be otherwise because of this?
I’ve formed a band with some of my friends – none of us are particularly good at playing anything, but we’re keen and want to have fun. Discussing what songs we should learn to play, we discovered that there is very little overlap in our musical tastes (as mentioned before).
One guy is into progressive rock, and recommended an album to another guy who was interested. The second guy came back a few days later and said, “Wow, that album is great!” The first guy said, “Yes, I call it a masterpiece.” The second guy said, “Yes… I agree. It is a masterpiece.” Then there was some discussion over how does one recognise a “masterpiece”, and could someone who has no prior knowledge in the field recognise a work as a masterpiece? They came up with a hypothetical experiment: Give someone who knows nothing about progressive rock a copy of this album, and another prog rock album, and see if they can pick which one is the masterpiece.
And so a real experiment was born. I know virtually nothing about progressive rock, so I volunteered to be the lab rat. The guys discussed together and selected a second progressive rock album, which is generally acknowledged to be good, but not a masterpiece. They ripped the tracks off both albums, anonymised the files, and gave them to me. I was to listen to them, make notes, and declare which one I thought was the masterpiece.
Album 1, as it was called, had 12 tracks. Album 2 had 5 tracks. That was all I knew about them. I didn’t know the artists, the album names, or the track names. I played both albums through once, and then on a second listen I took notes. Here’s what I thought.
On Saturday I went out to a concert – the Sydney Symphony playing Carmina Burana – and so got home late. I wanted to get up early on Sunday to go photograph the sunrise (best time of year for it right now), but I was tired. So I decided not to set the alarm, but if I happened to wake up before 5:30, I’d get up and go out.
I slept solidly and when I woke up it was still dark. I turned to look at the clock… and it said 5:29.
So I got up and drove to Mona Vale, which is possibly my favourite beach and ocean baths for sunrises. It wasn’t a great sunrise, but I think it turned out to be worth it.
Oh my. How had I not heard of Monster of the Week before?!? A webcomic rendition of every episode of The X-Files? And it’s by Shaenon Garrity!! So you know (1) it’ll be good and (2) this isn’t a project that the writer will quit after a dozen strips.
Sign me up!
So last year my friends and I finally got together and had a group practice session for our nascent band. We’ve scheduled a second session in a couple of weeks’ time and we’re learning our parts for our second song (I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) by The Proclaimers).
So at lunch today we were discussing various related things, like what name we should call our band, and what other songs we should stick on our list of easy songs to learn while we’re starting out. And we started to realise that all of our musical tastes have very little overlap. There were three of us there (out of five) with iPhones/iPads chock full of music, and we could not find even one song that all three of us had on our devices.
One of us would call out something like “The Beatles!” and another would go, “Yes, of course!” and the third would go, “I don’t have any Beatles”. And then someone said “R.E.M.” and one would say “Yes!” and the third would say “no”. And so on. Billy Joel. Beethoven. U2. Blur. Muse. Enya. Mozart. Sinatra. Everything we tried, at most two of us had.
And then there were the other two guys in the room, one who is mainly into prog rock, which none of the rest of us are, and the other… well, he listed some of his favourite artists, which included Metallica, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Chopin, Scriabin, and some Polish composer I’ve never heard of. This guy took eclectic, cut the ends off, threw away the middle, and glued the two ends together. Seriously.
So in trying to come up with a list of more songs we could start learning, everything that someone suggested, most of the others had never heard of. We were amazed by the fact that we’ve all been friends for years, yet there seems to be virtually no overlap at all between any of our musical tastes. And we’re trying to form a band.
The good thing is that we bring a huge variety of enormously different music into this project, and we will all be expanding our musical knowledge.
Tonight my drum teacher started teaching me about dynamics. Accented notes, ghost notes, and so on. We spent some time on technique for the various different volume levels, practising to make sure there was an obvious differentiation in loudness when I played the different types of notes. He’s been running me through a program which he’s developing for his second book, and testing out the new material on me to make sure it’s not too advanced for someone at my level. He said this was the stuff he was most worried about, as it’s tricky to learn for the first time.
I did find it a bit tricky, but I think with a week to practise before my next lesson I might manage this material. The shown bars are a groove from James Brown’s Cold Sweat. This is the sort of level I’m at now. I can look at this music and have a good attempt at playing it. Not very well, but it’s not impossible and I can probably master it given a week of practice.
Wednesday 23 January, 2013
18:34
I just have time to jot a few notes before heading out to dinner with Matt, who used to work with me in Sydney, before he married a Japanese woman and they moved to Tokyo. It’ll be nice to catch up.
I had a bad sleep in the hotel room. Trouble getting to sleep, then I woke up about 04:00, since that was 06:00 at home, and couldn’t fall asleep again. Hopefully I’ll adjust better tonight.
A bit before 07:00 I got out of bed, got dressed, and went in search of breakfast. I’d found a food court in the hotel complex last night, and tried that first, but it didn’t open until 10:00. So I crossed the road to the station and tried the food parlour where I’d bought the mochi last night, but that was closed too. So I went into a 7-11 and grabbed a tray of sushi and a vegetable rice cake thing and brought them back up to my room to eat while I got ready for the day visiting the Canon Inc. offices in Shimomaruko.
I needed to be there at 09:40 to meet my contact, and people told me to allow plenty of time to find my way there. So I left a few minutes before 08:00 and walked over to Shinagawa station, where my first task was to find the platform for the Keihin-Tohoku line, southbound. This was actually very easy to find, and when I walked down the stairs a train pulled in and I hopped on. It was full of people, but not really crowded – there was plenty of space to stand. Three stops later I arrived at Kamata and made my way across to the Tokyu-Tamagawa line trains. I arrived just as one train was departing, but the next train was a mere four minutes later, so that didn’t take long at all. It was only another three stops to Shimomaruko. The stations along this line were smaller and more rustic, with shelters made of wood.
Shimomaruko itself felt very different from the neon bustle of Shinagawa. The buildings were older and smaller, and it felt almost like a Japanese village. The walk to Canon goes down a street lined with fruit stalls and little shops, and it is fairly picturesque. I’d arrived so quickly that I had a full hour to spare before my meeting, so I dawdled down side streets, seeking interesting photo opportunities, as I meandered along towards Canon. The walk wasn’t very long, so I got there with plenty of time left, and continued walking past the Canon campus to the Tama River, where the street went over a long bridge across the broad floodplain and the river in the central part of it. Parts of the floodplain were made into sports fields, and a jogging track lined with trees ran along the side of it.
Tuesday 22 January, 2013
12:34 Sydney time; 10:34 Tokyo time
I’m sitting comfortably in a seat on Japan Airlines flight 722 from Sydney to Tokyo. This is a short trip for work, to discuss the wrap-up of last year’s project and the plans for new one I’ll be leading a team for this year. I have two days of meetings in Canon’s main office in Shimomaruko, then a Friday morning to myself before flying home on Friday evening.
I woke up just before the alarm, set for 6 o’clock this morning. I had some muesli and yoghurt for a quick breakfast, brushed my teeth, tossed my toothbrush into my luggage, and rang a taxi to collect me for the trip to the airport. M. got up as I was leaving to wish me farewell. The taxi arrived shortly after I walked out to the street, and whisked me off to the airport.
Partway through the drive, I heard a strange clunking noise from my side of the taxi. The driver heard it too, and expressed surprise. I realised it was the belt buckle of my trenchcoat, which had got caught in the door when I closed it, and must now be flapping along the outside of the car. I elected not to open the door while the taxi was flying down the expressway to the airport, but a minute later the knocking became so persistent that I asked the driver if it would be okay to open the door and pull it inside. He agreed and I did so, making the remainder of the journey quieter.
I arrived at the airport, walked inside, and found the check-in counters for JAL. There were no queues, and I had no checked luggage, so it was very quick. I asked for an exit row seat if one was available, and the woman granted the request, saying the flight wasn’t full and I’d probably also have an empty seat next to me. I went immediately through customs and security to the departure lounge area to wait for boarding.
I sat down and tried the airport wi-fi, which took a few minutes to wangle, but managed to get connected. After reading the news and checking Facebook, I ran out of things I could do from my work laptop without all my passwords (I tried one but misremembered it). I had a long time to wait, and my breakfast was smaller than usual, so I bought a chicken caesar wrap from a cafe. It was incredibly mediocre, but satisfying enough. Then with nothing much else to do I browsed the couple of book shops and walked around a bit to exercise my legs. Eventually the clock ticked to 08:45, half an hour before departure, and I headed to the gate. Boarding had just started and there were fewer than 100 people left, so I got straight into the queue and headed on to the plane. My seat is an aisle seat in a row of three at the exit row just behind the wing of the Boeing 777-200. Another guy taller than me got the window seat, but there’s an empty seat between us.
The TV screen on the facing panel showed video from the nose of the plane as we taxied out to the runway, leaving the gate a good 5 minutes early. I could see the tarmac and the plane in front of us as we queued up waiting to take off. After quite a wait on the taxiway, we moved to the runway and I could see the video of the yellow lines speeding below us as we took off. The view changed to a downward facing camera showing the city slipping past beneath us as we turned slightly west of north and headed up into the sky.
The JAL flight attendants are all women, and they put on pink aprons with an antique hot air balloon motif over their uniforms as they started serving rice cracker snacks, drinks, and then a bit later on the first meal. It was a choice of beef curry, or chicken ravioli in a tomato sauce. I chose the ravioli. It came with a bewildering array of sides: a brown bread roll and butter; potato salad; another salad with crisp asparagus, red capsicum, and lettuce with a separate vinaigrette sachet; a serve of soba noodles garnished with shallots and something which I thought was ginger but had a spicier kick, with a small bottle of “noodle sauce” on the side; and a fruit salad. The ravioli was mediocre, but the rest was on the good side. Then there was chocolate ice cream for dessert! It was frozen like a rock and took some heavy spoonwork to chop up.
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