Report from Greater Tokyo

So on Monday I worked an evening shift, Tuesday was a day shift. Today is an evening shift, tomorrow is another day shift, and no one has told me yet what Friday will bring. This is tiring me out.

I'm considering the idea of changing the back end for this blog into something that uses a wiki style interface. The advantage is that I'll be able to add stuff from any computer in the world, not just my home computer. The main disadvantage is that I'll need to do a lot of work on any freely available wiki before it is useful as a blog interface.

Of course, the other big problem is that this is unlikely to actually change the odds of me writing anything interesting here.

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One of my JTEs seems to have heard that it is kind of rude to ask "how old are you?" in English. So he has managed to teach the poor 1^st year dears the ludicrously convoluted and slightly archaic "May I ask how old you are?"

Whenever I hear my students ask "May I ask your age?" I am always tempted to reply "Certainly you may. Oh by the way, Vicar, would you like some more tea? Or perhaps a cake? I heard that Mr Kipling makes exceedingly good cakes".

After a week too many of hot and humid weather, my landlady has got a new air conditioner for my room. It's a Toshiba. At the same time, a new light shade arrived, which i didn't need quite so urgently.

I just installed a newer version of Wiki on my site. the old one has no real security measures, and was getting hit by spammers out to sell viagra. Hopefully the problem should be gone now.

So the other day I went down to Akihabara. For those who don't know, Akihabara is Tokyo's computer district. It is sometimes called 'Electric Town'. Just about anything electronic can be bought there if it can be bought anywhere. 'Why?' I hear you ask. Well, the keyboard that came supplied with my new computer had a flaw. Nothing too critical, it most worked, and i could work around it. The problem was the left arrow button didn't work. So I went and got it replaced.

And bought myself a nice new 512 meg keyring drive while I was there. It is Electric Town after all.

Akihabara, as well as being Electric Town, is also one of Tokyo's many Geek Centrals, this particular one catering to the anime crowd. And true to form, there were literally dozens of young women dressed up in an excessively revealing French Maid outfit. This was part of a promotion to sell a new DVD anime release called, I kid you not, That's My master. They were giving out what i think are free mouse mats.

This week's award goes to Googlebot/2.1. In the space of 24 hours earlier this week it managed a total of over 51,000 hits on my BBS forum. This is particularly strange, as the pages in question are empty, required for script functionality only, and the forum has not had a real post in months.

So I have a class of people from immigration that I have been teaching on and off this last week. Weird stuff that I have taught them that is probably not on any regular language / culture syllabus include:

• Vocabulary for different kinds of facial hair. How to tell the difference between sideburns, a goatee, and a soul patch. And which is cooler to have.
• The difference between block, cursive, and signature style writing, the importance of having a complicated signature, and a practical lesson on forging each others' signatures to demonstrate why block letters are unsuitable for a signature.
• How to lie believably using the classic card game 'Liar'.

A good time was had by all.