Adam Schabtach's Blog
Sorry for the lack of a post yesterday. We were quite tired early in the evening and I didn’t find the energy to write anything or even post any photos. I’ll get caught up soon; in the mean time here’s a photo from yesterday:
That’s Noppon, one of the two mascots for the Tokyo Tower. The other one is his brother, whose name is also Noppon. You can tell them apart because Noppon wears blue overalls, and Noppon wears red overalls. They’re quite popular with the locals:
It’s about 5:45AM; the morning sun is streaming through the window. We’ve been awake since around 3:30. Tracie just went down to the lobby to mail postcards. Through the open window I can hear crows and a few voices from the street, 19 floors below. Tokyo always seems quieter than I’d expect for a city of its size and at this time of the morning it’s almost still.
I realized yesterday or so that part of the challenge of blogging during this visit is that there’s a great deal about being here that I’ve assimilated and hence don’t feel any need to describe, particularly if I’ve decribed it already in entries for previous years. It’s not that it isn’t still exciting and still somewhat magical to be here; it’s just that in the past it was easy to write about things like vending machines and high-tech toilets because, well, it was all so new. Now it’s familiar and I’m left with one of the usual challenges of writing, which is to try to say something interesting about the familiar.
Today we did a bunch of shopping in Tokyo Station and Asakusa. It ended up involving a lot of walking and carrying, and we’re both pretty tired. To make up for a lack of verbosity, here are some video clips I shot near the Sensoji Temple (currently under rennovation) in Asakusa, not far from our hotel. You can actually see the hotel near the end of the first clip that pans from left to right; it’s the conspicuously tall building in the background. Mostly I hope that this video will convey the density of the crowds. Bear in mind that all of these people are here mostly because it’s cherry-blossom season.
It’s 7:20PM local time. We are settling into our room at the Asakusa View hotel in Tokyo. We were escorted to our room by an unusually talkative bellhop who went on engagingly about the new Sky Tree tower which is half-built and visible from our room (pictures forthcoming; it’s dark now). He asked where we were from, and then asked whether Colorado was near Ohio, and hence whether we had many taifun. After a brief rest to recover some semblance of our senses after the journey, which takes around 24 hours, we went to Life, a grocery store next to the hotel and brought back dinner in the form of various kinds of take-out food.
Tomorrow we leave for our annual visit to Japan, land of (among other things) excellent temples, gardens, trains, vending machines, toilets, and huge statues of spiritual leaders. It is currently my intention to blog more frequently than I did last year, although I won’t make any promises as such since this is, after all, a vacation.
To answer the questions that seem to come up most frequently when we tell someone that we’re traveling to Japan:
I dug a bunch of old paperwork out of the back of my filing cabinet this morning to make room for the new paperwork generated while preparing my taxes. I found some amusing old receipts for computer purchases from the past. It seems that in April ’97 I paid $155 each for two 16MB RAM modules. Today the same vendor sells comparable memory for $159 for 4GB, i.e. 256 times as much capacity for the same price, ignoring inflation.
About a year later I bought an Apple PowerMac G3 with a 266MHz CPU for $2395. I think the receipt indicates that it had 32MB of RAM and a 6GB hard drive, as well as a Zip drive. Remember those? What a disaster. Everything that was bad about floppies, multiplied by 100, with the added bonus that when the drive failed, it destroyed the data that was currently in it and on any other disks you were foolish enough to insert on the assumption that it was the disk that had gone bad and not the drive itself. I found a slightly earlier receipt that said I was dumb enough to spend $389 for an external SCSI Zip drive. There’s another receipt for RAM that says I spent $49 for a 4MB video RAM module for the PowerMac.
That’s the stack of paperwork that I gathered/organized/plowed through/generated/will retain for filing my 2009 federal and state taxes. I think its sheer mass presents an excellent argument in favor of tax reform, although I freely recognize that my tax situation is well above average in complexity. In any case I’m quite happy that I’m finally done with it all.
Most of the snow that I mentioned a few days ago had melted by yesterday morning, but it started snowing again in the afternoon. A friend in Toronto remarked that they hadn’t had nearly enough snow recently so I made a quick video of snow falling:
That was yesterday afternoon. This is what things look like this morning:
The forecast calls for several more inches today. Once again, as luck would have it, we have to venture forth for an appointment, so now I have to go out and excavate the car.
You may not know Dave Gamble by name, but if you’re in the music-making biz you’ve probably seen his work bearing the brand names of various companies. He has struck out on his own under the name DMG Audio, and his first product, EQuality, is now available. It looks to be the be-all and end-all of software equalizers. (Heck, it may be the end-all of hardware EQs, for that matter.)
Given Dave’s expertise with EQ, I’m betting that this one is going to be a winner. He’s also a heckuva nice guy and has fielded technical questions from Audio Damage on more than one occasion.
It snowed here yesterday. Coincidentally we had to drive into town for routine appointments with the eye doctor, but fortunately the roads weren’t particularly bad. Today it’s sunny and quite pretty outside:
I took delivery of a new PC earlier in the week. In order to keep up with the marketing hype that is foisting stuff onto sheep-like consumers whether they need it or not exciting new advances in CPU and operating-system technologies, Audio Damage needs me to be running a 64-bit version of Windows 7. My main PC is a bit long in the tooth and pretty much at the end of its sensible upgrade path, so rather than putting Windows 7 on it I decided to start afresh with a new machine. In the past I’ve built my own PCs from hand-picked components. One can save a fair amount of money with this approach, at the expense of a fair amount of time. I’m feeling somewhat short on time these days so I decided to let someone else do the component-picking and building for me. (Also, computers are deductible business expenses; time isn’t.) There are already three Dell computers in the house that have been generally well-behaved (although the one I use as a file server has developed an odd tendency to put itself into hibernation for no apparent reason), so I configured a new Dell at their web store and said, “make it so!” metaphorically speaking.