Finalized the schedule for my baby bottle business trip. Booked and company paid for flight and hotel this morning. Here’s the info:
Aug 1: arrive in Japan
Aug 14: go back to the US
Hotel: Keio Plaza in Shinjuku, Tokyo (link)
Hoo-ah!
Nipple trip
July 5, 2006 at 12:29 PM
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Prep
July 2, 2006 at 8:16 PM
5 comments
Like I said in that last post, I’ll be heading to Tokyo at the beginning of August for about 2 weeks for Handi-Craft, to do research and stuff. All expenses paid, which is going to be absolutely great. Although I have to come back to the US between that and the AEON gig in Japan, I figure it will still be a helpful trip to getting things ready for my year contract with AEON, aside from being a ton of fun. Here’s the stuff I’m planning on doing while I’m there; let me know if you guys can think of anything else I can/should do…
- meet up with the JET kids at their orientation at the beginning of August.
(I might actually be staying in the same hotel) - sign up for my cell phone contract, get my phone
- Namja Town
- see Shin-san and some of the Kanda kids
- visit the AEON school I’m going to work at
- bum around the area, see what’s around
- hopefully convince my AEON predecessor to show me my future apartment
- leave a box or two of my stuff at AEON, so that I don’t have to ship boxes of clothes and belongings from the US
- buy some DS games, like the Kanji Dictionary and the Opera Browser
I can’t think of anything else at the moment. I’ll add them here as an edit if I do. Aside from getting a sneak peak at my AEON life in Ichihara, I think the second most important thing for me might be getting my phone. I’m a nerd, but seriously, it’s pretty much impossible to be in contact with anyone in Japan without a phone. I’ll be there for two weeks, so I might as well get a phone to e-mail people, and that way I’ll have one as soon as I deplane in September as well. I have a feeling the AEON orientation process doesn’t have a scheduled time to get phones, since everyone will likely get them in their placement cities. My only concern is that I won’t have my address yet, so I’ll have to check with AEON if I can just put the office address down for now. I won’t need my gaijin card or visa yet, since if you have a credit card you can start a phone contract no problem. I think I’m going to get a DoCoMo. Black Tornado served me well last summer, after all, and AU doesn’t give me a discount since I’m not a student anymore.
Super Karate Monkey Death Car
July 2, 2006 at 7:19 PM
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I’ve slacked off recently with my blogging, so here I go back with it. I’ve been in Bloomington for about two weeks, having spent the time before that back in St. Louis. I have the summer job/internship with Handi-Craft Company, translating websites and doing research for them. I’ll be going on a two-week business trip to Tokyo at the very beginning of August, which should be really interesting. You forget how bad your foreign language skills are when you haven’t actively used them in almost a year, and then get back into the practice of scavenging the internet for information on baby bottles, plastics, and retail distribution. The main enemy of course, for Japanese at least, is kanji, which to those of you who don’t know (you all actually do, I think), is like trying to decipher hieroglyphics only kanji are about a million times harder. My work vocabulary includes fun words that I can barely read or pronounce in English, let alone Japanese. Some examples include linguistic gems such as bisphenol-A, polycarbonide, polyethersulfone, and of course nipple.
Outside of working on researching baby bottle stuff, this past week seems like IUSTV is making a comeback, at least on my Outlook calendar. Had 5 IUSTV-related meetings or engagements from Monday through Thursday, which is light compared to what I used to do, but it’s still hard to believe I won’t be doing this for much longer. I think subconsciously I just like keeping myself busy (yes, I consider watching TV and surfing the web being busy), because I can’t think of too much time when I’ve had absolutely nothing to do. Even when I was getting bored at the beginning of summer, I went and picked up this baby bottle gig.
I’ll be back in St. Louis this coming week to meet with my boss at Handi-Craft, and also to take back hopefully another full car load of my stuff, which over the past year or two in Bloomington has inflated to the “ridiculous” level. I’m going to try to sell off stuff on eBay and OneStart, but otherwise who knows. I know I’m going to end up with several boxes of stuff at my parents house either way. I have 1 month left in Bloomington, will be in Tokyo for those 2 weeks, then will be in St. Louis for about 3 weeks until September 7th when I leave for Japan to work the AEON job. I definitely have a better feeling/plan for what I’m doing the next few months, which I wouldn’t say at all back in April or so. Once I get to Japan, I’ll have to start thinking of more schemes so that I can make it big being as lazy as possible. For now, I’m going to watch some more News Radio season 4, which I actually purchased real DVDs of. You know a show is good when I’ll actually pay money for it. I figure just like the other discs of this series, I’ll watch these enough to make it worth it.
Shall we Flickr?
June 21, 2006 at 12:47 AM
4 comments
So I’ve been looking at and playing with Flickr lately, and it seems to be a really awesome system for storing, looking at, commenting on, and sharing photos. I’m considering using it as the photo system for this site, in part because it will be easier, in part because then more people can see it, in part because then you’ll be able to comment on individual pictures, and primarily because the way I do it now, editing HTML code, is a huge pain in the butt.
I think I’ll be able to make my Pictures pages look pretty close to what I have now, with Flickr providing the strip of images on the column of thumbnails. I could even be nice and copy the descriptions into a second column so it will look almost identical to the current setup. The big difference will be, when you click on a thumbnail, instead of opening a window with the larger image, you will be taken to a Flickr page. What do you guys think of this (all 1 of you reading this)? Does anyone think I should keep doing it the way I do it, or should I go with the fad and use Flickr? I’ll probably do a Flickr-based pictures page sometime this week. You guys can tell me what you think then.
Oh ya, if you’re on Flickr, my user ID is SkullCorp. Add me as a friend if you have a Flickr account.
Kamen Riders on the Storm
June 18, 2006 at 10:35 PM
1 comment
After driving through what seemed like a typhoon, I am now back in Bloomington. Started off a pretty lazy day, ate lunch with the fam (Cecil Whitaker’s pizza), then packed up and got ready to hit the road. Would have left earlier but there was some show on G4 about the history of MegaMan, which was sweet so I stayed and watched. Left my house around 4PM central time, and things seemed to be smooth sailing from there. About an hour or so passed, or the time it took me to listen through most of Ludacris’ Red Light District, it started to drizzle. OK, I can deal with that. Then it started to rain. Then it started to pour. Oh, and add that to the effect of any car or semi in front of you spewing water towards your winshield at 80 mph, and visibility was now cut to almost naught. The greatest moment was when I was behind a slow-moving semi, who was exactly side by side with yet another semi, both of which were spraying water at me. My winshield wipers couldn’t keep up; this was no longer a fun drive on highway 70. It reminded me a lot of my brother Alex’s common complaint in high school, when you’d have 2 or more HUGE fat chicks slowly walking down the hallway, blocking not only any hope of passing them but all artificial light as well. As if the two non-passable semis in front of me weren’t enough, soon after yet another car gets up in my space, and starts tailing me. This one was a weird looking bronze car that had a handicap tag hanging from the rearview mirror. Great, just great. I’m flying down the wet highway with a pair of semis in front of me, and some jerk handicapper (yes, just because you’re handicapped doesn’t exempt you from being an ass) decides it would be a great idea to tail me. Great idea PAL.
As fun as the highway party was, I pulled off in a nice little town called Casey, Illinois before the cars ended up doing a roadway mosh. I ate a McDonald’s cheeseburger while I waited out the storm. The rain seemed to let up and the sun was starting to come out a bit, so back onto 70 I went. Drove for about a half hour until I realized that the storm must have been following my eastbound path, and I had driven back into it. Luckily it wasn’t as bad this time, so I made my way from Casey into Indiana and to the town of Cloverdale, where I turn off of highway 70. Nothing really interesting happened during that leg of the trip; no fat high school girl semis to block my way, and no handicappers to tail me. As I started driving down 231, the rain pretty much let up and I was home free. Nothing like speeding down a 1-lane highway in the peaking sun. By the time I got back to Bloomington (around 9PM eastern time) and unpacked the first load of stuff into my abandoned-smelling apartment, I opened the door to get more stuff. Somehow in the 15 or 20 seconds it took me to set down 1 box, re-open the door and look up, the huge storm had found my apartment and did it’s stuff. The Japanese term 雨男 seems oddly appropriate here.
TGS2006
June 16, 2006 at 11:18 PM
4 comments
Too lazy for a real post right now, but I wanted to put up here that for all of us who will be in Japan, the Tokyo Game Show is gonna be the weekend of September 23-24, with Friday the 22nd being “business day.” Of course I’m going to try and get media passes to get in early and/or for free. The location is Makuhari Messe, about a 10 or 15 minute walk from Kaihim Makuhari Station on the Keiyo Line. Normal admission is 1000 yen in advance online, or 1200 at the door. I went to this show back in 2004, and it’s def worth going to. Not as ridiculous as E3, but awesome either way. Last time I waited in line for an hour or two to watch a long chunk of Advent Children before it was released. I think this show, Wii and DS stuff is going to steal the show. Everyone play Wii if you get a chance, even if you have to wait in like for a few hours. As long as it’s less than 4 hours of a wait, you’re better off than the saps at E3 who waited in line.
