Entering the Wireless Free Zone

It has recently become painfully apparent to me that wireless technology needs to improve quickly.

The main purpose of wireless in the UK is to  enable many devices to connect to the internet, without the need for extremely long cables.  This is fine in the UK, where the current fastest internet tops out at a notional 50mb/s.  Korea doesn't have wireless.  Wireless routers are sold in the shops, but nowhere near as heavily.  I don't know the reason for this, but I would imagine it has something to do with the 100mb/s internet connection I'm using at the moment.

In the big cities they can get gigabit internet.  Wireless technology is about a decade away from a sustained throughput of this magnitude.  Supposing I obtained the latest N router, and a wireless card of the same ilk, I could reasonably expect a burst throughput of 100mb/s.  That would be sustained for all of a nanosecond, before the connection settled down into what could be reasonably expected.  This equates to a fraction of that, so all that extra speed would go to waste.  If you connect a second computer, then the overheads of constantly accepting, verifying and error checking both streams would take a percentage of the throughput away again.  Forget about media streaming, at least of any high-def content.

So I'm stuck with wires all over my room.  My complaint isn't aesthetic, I could care less what my room looks like.  Besides, the wires are primarily hidden underneath the piles of clothes.  It's the ever present trip hazard that concerns me.  I've fallen over dozens of times, even though I've routes the cables to the very extremities of the room.  This problem would be solved should I get a bone-fide router, instead of a 1980's styled single output modem, as I could tape the myriad wires to the floor and be done with it.  As it stands, I'm too tight to procure a router.

Thinking about it, I could play on my PS3 and talk on MSN at the same time if I did that...  Maybe I should invest in a dodgy old second hand junker.

In reply to the anonymous poster on an earlier thread, apparently you can't escape reality.  Or maybe I haven't tried hard enough yet.

Technology is Being Really Rather Silly at the Moment.

Ok so here's a little heads up. Blogger is being stupid, so I've been unable to post for a while now; and my camera had a fit and lost absolutely tons of photos and videos from my trip around the aquarium, which is a real shame because before the aquarium I saw an amazing family of wadaiko drummers, they were unbelievably good, but I only have a couple of the videos of them. I lost the rest.

Ueno Park, The Second Outing!

So this is the chronicle of Ueno, day two.  On this day I went with Pascal and Naree again; it was the last such time that we went out together, I think.  To be honest I should have written this earlier, because I've forgotten a lot of things that happened!

We essentially had a nose around the park ala my first day in Ueno, (yesterday in chronological blog order).  It's always more fun to go around with good people though, so it was another good day.

Onto the pictures!


Or at least there would be pictures here, but the internet in this hostel is so bad that I can't upload any!  D'oh!

Ok so I hear the cries of, 'what the bloody hell is going on here then?!?!'  I don't know.  Prior to this she contorted  herself into the small blue bag behind her, and re-appeared with a couple of velcro eyes on her, that she proceeded to move around her body, inevitably ending up on her ass.  She then did a merry jig with this.

Everyone was so awed by her performance that all that could be heard was the occasional cough.

Still, a large number of people were gathered so maybe it's the Japanese way of showing appreciation, rapt attention with no sound might be the ultimate applause here...

Ok so this guy actually had demonstrable skill, unlike the prior 'entertainer.'  He plays the kind of music that you might here in a Chinese restaurant, the soft melody that's so relaxing.

It really is amazing how quickly he can move his hands around, and how deftly he moves around the board.

Ok so this is a random train that appeared before us in the park.

It turns out that the park has a mini railway around the edges for children and, bizarrely, couples.  Lots of couples.  Weird.

Anyway, not wanting to do anything by halves, they've stuck a big old steam loco out front.  The determination to stick out here is quite impressive.

This is another shot of the same train, this time vertically.  I don't know why I included two, I just felt like it I guess.

Ok so now for the serious portion of my blog.

There are lots of homeless here.  I don't know, statistically speaking, whether there are more here than in London, but one thing is certain; they're more visible.

We were walking around the park and noticed that there were fewer people heading over here, so we came and checked it out.

All the people in line are queing for food, donated by a christian charity.  Charity doesn't exist in Japan; this event is extremely rare.  The mindset of the Japanese isn't one that allows for donation normally, if someone is homeless it must be through a fault of their own.  This attitude is changing however, and it's surprising to see a christian organisation actually doing something helpful, rather than just trying to hold the world back, or abusing children.

Having said that the Japanese are, frankly, harsh, they do other things extremely well.

All their trains and train stations have lifts for disabled people, and all their doors have special notches that wheelchair ramps can connect to, so when a wheelchair user gets onto the train, a conductor (quickly and efficiently) slots a ramp onto the train, and he can quickly get on and off.  The whole process takes less than thirty seconds.

It seems to me that they frown upon those who have had opportunity and failed, but cater, discreetly, for those who were born with disabilities.  I don't know enough about their tax systems and social welfare systems to see how far this goes, but to have every bus be low floor, and every train be accessible for everyone without the need to modify anything, (i.e. these considerations were built into the fabric of the system) would seem to make them quite conscientious of everyone.

It's also worth noting that unlike England, where homeless people are harassed every hour of every day, told to move on and not stop anywhere, the police do nothing of the sort here.  They don't move people or arrest them for loitering, they just let them be.

This does create areas where native Japanese don't go, because they think it's dirty or unsafe, but coming from London, I'd trust these people with my children, they're that harmless.

The difference in these areas is almost complete, between England and Japan.

The English would rather not see the homeless, despite knowing they're all about the place; out of sight out of mind.

The Japanese would rather leave them be and not go to those areas.

The English give out charitable donations, to ease their guilt over being in a better position than the homeless; thereby helping those with less than them.

The Japanese don't have that same guilt.

The people wearing the blue shirts belong to the christian church giving out the food.

They also had a band playing, which was the initial draw for me, music of any kind is worth investigating and has led me to many interesting encounters!

I don't know how much food they had, or if it was enough to feed everyone, but there were thousands of people to be fed, and the queue, as you can see from the photos above, went beyond the depth of field of my camera.  It was massive.

I wonder what the average Japanese would think of this scene?  Or what the average English person would think of this happening in hyde park or trafalgar square?  Because Ueno is essentially comparable to those places in terms of tourist importance.

Ok so back to the lighthearted stuff.

If you've seen my videos section, (on the right hand side, it says youtube!) you will have seen TIM (the incredible machine) here!

It's amazing.  To see the amazing thing in action watch the video.  The movement makes this much more incredible to watch in full flow.

This giant pizza oven is some kind of shrine to some kind of god.  The pizza deity he shall now be known as.











More to come soon!

Ok, let's do this thang!

Check out my youtube videos for this guys crazy one man band contraption thing.  He made all the equipment himself, and custo designed it to fit into the bags on his bike.  He essentially travels around (thanks to his sponsor, seen on his bike and shirt etc) raising money for charity.  He goes all around the world, and he listed the countries he's been to; most of which I can't now remember.

He was the only performer who made an attempt to communicate with the big scary foreigners in English, which makes him a favourite of ours!

So we crashed on a bench looking over this lake, (the park is massive, so we needed a rest).  We just ended up sitting here, making fun of the people in the boats, (really big fat men sitting next to small women made the boats lean and end up going round in circles) and generally chatting.  We did this for two hours somehow...



Before

So this bird went around fishing the waters, having an amazing success rate.  It was walking around being terrorised by the carp in the lake, as well as us for a long time before getting bored and flying off, straight into one of the boats.

Click on the image to see the little tiny fish it caught, and I managed to catch it catching!  There was a lot of catching apparently.

This is one of the most time consuming photographs I've ever taken.  It took about 20 attempts, using a huge number of different settings.

I don't know if I even like it :/

Anyway, for those who are interested:
Night time settings, 1 second exposure, resting on a fence around the lake!

So when it got dark we headed to this crazy loud noise, that turned out to be a free concert!  Amazing!

Unfortunately we only arrived for the last few acts, but these guys to the left here were definitely my favourites.

They have a man playing an electric ghost instrument on the left there, that's just awesome.  Check out my youtube videos for the video of their performance.

This is a better photo, and is another case of being extremely annoyed by the process of trying to take it.  So much effort went into this...

We liked this band for two reasons.  Firstly, and most importantly, the guy in the pink A: had the stones to wear a pink shell suit and B: He did a rock out thing at the end of their first song, where he stood  at the front of the stage pretending he was metallica or something.  Awesome.

Secondly and least importantly, the guy in  white had a pretty good voice.

It's a dark picture, but they're still posing like the cool dudes they are.  The guy in black was the bass guitarist, and seems to be fulfilling the bass guitarist stereotypes here.

And has become customary in my posts, we end today with a comedy picture.

Suntory is a beverage/snacks company here in Japan, and they make everything from beer to packed lunches.

Their best product however, is this; BOSS coffee.  It has an old 50's style american dad with a pipe, and the face they put to this?  The sidekick to will smith in 'men in black.'  Tommy Lee Jones himself.  Wearing the men in black suit and everything...  Epic.

A Trip to Harujuku and Shibuya

So yesterday me and a couple of guys I met in the hostel went to Harujuku to see the crazy dressed up people, and to see what the part of Tokyo you see on the T.V is actually like.  It was a little too hot for all the costume people yesterday, so there weren't that many out and about; but the dedicated few who were present provided quite a show.

After one of the party members left to head to Osaka (I think) we decided to go to Shibuya, where he hit some arcades and I laughed as he got whooped repeatedly.

After another hundred mile day we got home, and after agreeing to meet up for dinner I fell asleep and woke up at 8 this morning.  Oops.

Onto the photos!

Welcome to jam packed Tokyo.  This bit is the cool section, evidenced by the macdonalds signs everywhere, and the western shops on every corner.   For the record, it was in the high twenty degrees with a whopping humidity, bear that in mind when you see some of the costumes...

These dodgy maid outfits are everywhere.  I thought they were just myth, but they actually exist.

Is this a well recognised chain?

Ok that red suit is head to toe... Hot much?  Those glasses are also awesome and so is the hat.  He even moves as if he were a robot.  I have no idea what he's selling, if he's selling anything at all.  I do want his glasses though.

Same guy again, he's worth three pictures I think.

Again, I don't know what she's selling, all I know is that it's worth 980円.  This picture has a spiderman just offscreen.  He was livid that we were taking pictures of this girl, and we presumed that was because he fancied her, and was trying to chat her up.  He was awfully friendly with her, for simply being colleagues...

We saw this guy a few times around the place, but were never able to get a good shot.  He is some kind of tron/power rangers mix, and the bicycle he walks around with kind of makes me lean towards tron more.

This guy/girl was standing in the exact spot for more than three hours, we walked past him twice!  A lot of effort went into this one, ten out of ten!

These girls went the extra mile, even putting blue contact lenses in.  Tons of effort also went into these costumes, 10/10!

Same guys again, slightly closer to show the detail that's gone into these madhat costumes.

The golden flowers mean this is some kind of imperial owned site I think.

Shinto priests.  A wedding procession went past while we were ambling around the site.  It felt kind of weird to take pictures of the procession as tourists, not knowing the couple and generally being an unwanted nuisance.  From a selfish perspective however, I'll never get  an opportunity to see that again so I took as many discreet photos as I could.

More covert photographs.

This is the procession.  Everyone doled up in their finery.

A closer look at the formalities.  I was going to use the word 'festivities,' but somehow it doesn't seem apt for this particular photo.

They had the whole thing filmed, and all the cameramen wore green armbands.  To make sure everyone knew who was holding the camera?

The woman in the green/gold/beige was running around in and out of train organising everyone and everything.

I noticed that I hadn't managed to get a photo of someone wearing the traditional dress, so I pretended to be american, and asked this woman if I could take a photo.  The exasperation was evident in her demeanour, but it was a minor victory for non american English speakers everywhere.

As you can probably see by now, these ornately constructed roof and edge parts of their shrines hold a particular fascination for me, look at how detailed and ornate they are!

Another covert photo op.

I don't know whether these guys are asian or what, but they are insane looking.

These are the guys I went around with.  Whereas Europeans try to look normal in photos, and Asians do the two finger peace thing, americans try to look like they're about to shoot you.

As they would say, 'go figure.'

Also, never follow a texan, their sense of direction is awful.

Elvis is not dead.  He has been cloned, and taught to 'bodypop,' and now performs in duplicate, in the park at harujuku.  I bet you didn't see that one coming!

Showing off is showing off in any country.

I've no idea how you spell didgerydoo.  But his has a mic and is attached to an amp...

This dog park, is in the middle of the normal park and has several zones.  The little dogs go here, and the big dogs go elsewhere.  This is quite possibly the most pointless thing ever.  For one, how do you get the dogs here without taking them through the normal park?

There were a lot of people chatting away though, so maybe it's more of a way to meet people than to do some actual dog based exercise.

The weight categories made no sense either, 3kg - 12kg?  That's mike tyson versus me.  That's plainly not fair.

One of their old olympic facilities.

This is the picture of Tokyo you see in the news, on tele generally and in the films.   This is the view from street level.

This is the same view from a few storeys up.  This is a non-crowded, average, any time of  day scenario for crossing this street.

 

There is a person inside that, waving his or her arms up and down in a slightly worried kind of way...

For all your voltage testing needs.  They had about five stalls in a row, owned by different people all trying to peddle the exact same models of these.  Strange.  And kind of utilitarian for a country that doesn't have the D.I.Y concept.

It's a real shame this photo came out badly, because these guys were good.







That's all for yesterdays trips.