A good friend's sister in law will be performing with a handful of members of the Hungary National Philharmonic in Tokyo on July 5th. Tickets are available for 3,000 yen if you buy now or 3,500 at the door.

Gotta love the kung fu bear.

One of the first things you notice in Japan after arriving is that the Japanese take recycling very seriously. It is against the law to mix burnables and non-burnables. It is against the law to mix certain types of non-burnables (bottles/cans) with other types of non-burnables (plastic drink bottles/styrofoam). Each day a different trash truck comes by and picks up that day's trash. Monday is Plastic/Styrofoam. Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday are Burnables. Wednesday is Cans/Bottles/Car

One thing that I really miss from the old ICQ days is the ability to give custom 'My Status' to different people. MSN Messenger gives me the ability to appear online, offline, or whatever, but it applies to everyone who is on my list. What I'd like is the ability to set Online for some contacts and Away for others and Offline for others still without hampering their ability to send messages. This is a huge shortcoming of MSN Messenger.

Normally the train is packed to the ceiling with salarymen dressed in black suits with white shirts and ill-advised ties reading X-rated comic books on their way to another day of boring, life-sucking work where the only escape from the drudgery is through daydreams about fucking the new 19 year old part-time office girl with the short Burberry skirt and long auburn pony tail in the emergency stairwell at lunchtime.

Japan has a reputation for being a country of the utmost politeness and courtesy. It's a lie.

I know there are /. subscribers around, I can see their stars. So why aren't there any comments on stories that come out of the 'holding pattern'?

Do subscribers only get to read the stories but not get to post?

Apparently I have a script that hits the Slashdot servers every 43 seconds. Thus spake Robert Rozeboom (samzenpus@slashdot.org).

You'll forgive me if I don't believe that you manually loaded a page on
slashdot every 43 secs over a 24 hour period.

43 seconds per page request == 1.4 page requests per minute

1.4 * 60 == 83.7 page requests per hour

83.7 * 24 == 2009 page requests per day.

If anyone remembers this article posted by Cliff they will remember that it spent about half an hour with comments disabled after being posted. Brilliant, you know. An Ask Slashdot without the ability to post answers. It's like a Zen koan without any of the mysterious insight.

The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!

Thanks, but no thanks.

When I was in highschool I used to hang out with a cool bunch of guys. We'd go pick up girls after football games, we'd go to parties to pick up girls, and sometimes we barbecued and invited girls over. It was a good time to be young. We also had a handshake. It wasn't something that we agreed on or anything, it just kind of came into being. Nothing complicated, it barely consisted of anything more than randomly slapping in the general direction of the other's hand. But it was our 'in'

I'm famous!

A girl on the train reminded me of my annual physical results. The results said that I am grossly overweight. I am an average 5'9" in height but weigh in at a whopping 78kg (172lbs). The doctors warned me I'd have to lose weight or I couldn't continue working. My ideal weight? 64kg (141lbs) according to the Japanese health charts. That's the upper end of the ideal weight zone, btw.

It'll be my first.

Out of college this was my first job. It's coming up on 6 years. 4 of those years were pretty good. The last couple have been hellish, what with the layoffs and the transfer to this dysfunctional Japanese division. But hey, at least as the only remaining QA engineer I get to call myself the QA department manager. That's got to count for something on the old resume.

I definitely thought those options would have made me rich by now...

Well, for us in Japan.

It's at a banquet hall a couple blocks away from the office. I'm betting it will last just long enough to change the passcodes on the door making our keycards worthless.