Report from Greater Tokyo

• Epicentre distance from me: 22.2 km
• Magnitude: 6.1
• Time: Saturday, July 23rd, 2005 at 4:34:58 PM local time

Two months ago I sent an email to Google to complain about their web search engine robots. They had hit my site several thousand, well, over 44,000 times to be exact, in a single day, on the 1^st of June. This effectively constituted a denial of service attack. All of these hits were focused on my discussion forum.

Over the 3 days 19^th-21^st July, I received over 70,000 hits from them, again focused on those same web pages.

Google, you are a bunch of idiots. You have forced me to take down part of my site to prevent you from causing my web hosting fees to rise. The forum is still there, still grossly underused, but the WAP section has been taken down. No longer can it be reached from a mobile phone.

So this morning I got a phone call from one of the Japanese teachers at yesterdays school. It seems someone has slapped a password on to the school computer, and now no one can access it at all.

I love how they automatically phoned me to see if I had done it.

Also in the news, as I had plenty of time on Thursday afternoon at school, I decided to pop in to the basketball club and demonstrate my amazing new talent for spinning basketballs on my thumb. As soon as the girls' basketball club saw me, they immediately burst into song...

"Malta, we love Malta, there's nothing that we'd alter..."

This is actually quite impressive when you consider that they had only heard that song once, exactly three weeks earlier. I am obviously making an impression on these kids.

I just downloaded Google earth. It allows you to see satellite maps of the World in surprisingly high resolution, and search them too.

For the first time, I have actually been able to place on a map the town where I was born. It is, apparently, close to Hannover. This probably doesn't sound like a big deal to most people, but when you've never known exactly where you were born (except as words on paper), it is quite an amazing thing to know.

I have often said that my life is inherently ridiculous. This week is a case in point.

Thanks to my crazy work and travel schedule last week, I was really hoping to have a nice quiet weekend, with nothing more strenuous than eating and sleeping. As if.

So on Friday night I got an email from my landlady asking me if I'd like to work on Sunday for half a day and get paid ten thousand yen (about fifty quid). Upon sensing the words 'easy money', I naturally fired off a reply accepting. This was of course without properly reading the message.

Turns out the work in question would be early morning, and further, the work itself would be in Yokohama, which would mean a ridiculously early start to the day, utterly ruining my plans for a quiet weekend. So I replied again, this time in the negative. There was of course the fact that the work would involve dressing up 'transvestile', and dancing on stage. This didn't really appeal to me that greatly.

So once she got my formal rejection, she said no problem, and she started looking for someone else. My 'punishment' was to look after her cats today, which is no punishment at all. One of my housemates accepted the dancing job, but then for the rest of the day proved uncontactable. This naturally prompted her to try to get me to do it again. She said that if she didn't hear from the other guy, then I would have to do it. That didn't appeal to me at all by this stage. So I was up until late desperately trying to call him and get him to contact my landlady. The mission was finally accomplished at half past midnight. Bang went any hopes of an early night.

And hopes of a late morning were dashed by a carnival. On my very street, no less. I suppose I should have been aware of this carnival in advance. After all, there are lots of dangly things hanging from the street furniture, saying such weird things as 'Happy Pedestrian Heaven', promoting the 'Yakuoji Tanabata Festival' in big letters. The date however, is promoted in indiscernibly small letters.

So far, we've the local childrens' unicycle club, Brazilian Samba, a band of musicians wearing penguin hats, and hordes of street vendors trying to sell everything from beer, live goldfish, dead squids, fried noodles, and even weirder things. All loud enough to wake the dead.

All I wanted was a quiet weekend with lots of sleep.