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.

I didn't ride the train at the normal time today so I got a glimpse of what it's like when the train isn't so busy. The type of clientele is decidedly different between the 7:00-8:00am rush hour and the 9:00-10:00am late morning lull time. After the business men are off and running at their jobs, the mentally handicapped make the rounds. I've had brief encounters with a few and can't say with all honesty that I feel totally comfortable around them.

On the Sobu line there is a group of three young retarded men. I believe that at least two of them are brothers with the older one who is of a much milder temperament looking after the younger who is much more brash and rude. The third one accompanies them on occasion but does not seem to be related to the other two. They travel as a group up and down the entire length of the train looking for abandoned magazines and comic books. The older brother collects them in a bag while the younger one keeps the raunchiest of them for himself. I was approached a few months back by the group of three and immediately engaged in conversation about my nationality, language ability, and whether I liked Ichiro Suzuki more than Hideki Matsui. The conversation only lasted one stop from Asakusabashi until Akihabara, but I enjoyed it especially as the older brother really tried his hardest to speak English with me.

Other mentally handicapped people on the train are not so friendly or are harrassed by school kids. The barking man, who I guess suffers from a type of Tourette's Syndrome, is tortured by a group of junior high school students who mock him by barking at him incessantly. The preener stands near the door looking at his reflection in the glass and adjusts his pants, his jacket, his hair without pause. And today I met the sideways crowder who forces herself in front of the people standing, forcing them to make way for her as she navigates the most crowded spaces of the train.

I would still rather deal with the late riders than fight with the rush hour crowd.

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

In my experience of living in Japan for a little over a year I have noticed that Japanese people are much ruder to others than Americans are to others by an order of a magnitude. Most of the time this rudeness is seen in the stomping on old ladies when stepping off the train, pedestrians making no effort to move aside or make room for oncoming pedestrians, a total disregard for regulations concerning smoking, and other things that are simply bad behavior and show a lack of respect for others.

Other things I've noticed are smaller and have more to do with a lack of common courtesy than anything else. One of these is sneezing or coughing in public.

Today on the train I was able to sit for most of the trip. A guy sat in the open seat next to me a little later and then another guy stood in front of us. So far so good, I can read my book and worry about the project I'm working on in peace. But out of the blue the guy in front of us coughed.

I don't think it's a cultural thing to cover your mouth when you sneeze or cough. I've seen people from all over the world do it. However in Japan it's not uncommon to see people coughing or sneezing over and over onto the people around them. Today's cougher, a late 20's rock and roller (I guess, he may have had a real job, who knows?), didn't bother to cover his mouth at all. As a result, the guy sitting next to me in his windbreaker got a big glob of mucus on his sleeve. How very fucking nice.

During another trip to Kamakura SARS guy was standing next to the door. It sounded like he was going to cough up a lung. Every time the doors closed he would start coughing and everyone would look and slowly edge away so as not to catch the phlegm and spittle bouncing off the train doors. Then instead of getting off and getting a drink at any of the many stations along the route, he rode all the way to Kamakura hacking and spitting and generally being a nuisance. A mouth non-covering nuisance. Kamakura is an hour and a half away from where I live. He was on the train when I boarded so his incosideration must have lasted for a good 2 hours. When he finally got off, the window had a nice hazy film of his lung goo.

Cover your mouth when you sneeze or cough. No one wants to catch your germs, much less your phlegm. I'm truly surprised at how wrong the 'polite Japanese' stereotype actually is.

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 you read the original email you'll remember when he said: This IP is banned for crawling us 2000 times in a day.

So I did a little math...

2000 page hits per day == 83.3 page hits per hour

83.3 page hits per hour == 1.39 page hits per minute

1.39 page hits per minute == 43.2 seconds per page hit.

It's amazing how these numbers match up so nicely. It's almost like Robert went out of his way to calculate how many page requests I was performing.

I'm sure the ban_insightful_user.pl script calculated it all for him so he didn't have to do anything but cut and paste that number, but it's nice to believe (however fleetingly) that I'm important enough to go and make numbers up for.

[Response to MonTemplar]
Me too. I'm waiting to be shown the server logs. I was online for 2 hours that day. If it is true that I loaded /. 2000 times, I would have had to perform a page view every 3 and a half seconds.

I have to assume that they are pulling that 2000 hits number out of thin air.
[/Response]

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.

So I refreshed a couple times waiting for the comments to be enabled. In the meantime I also posted a little bit. Apparently the hits added up.

>From: Robert Rozeboom
>To: Obvious Guy
>Subject: Re: 219.176.70.115
>Date: Thu, 1 May 2003 10:10:37 -0400 (EDT)
>MIME-Version: 1.0
>Received: from kilowog.blockstackers.com ([216.144.199.194]) by mc4-f31.law16.hotmail.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(5.0.2195.5600); Thu, 1 May 2003 07:10:38 -0700
>Received: from samzenpus (helo=localhost)by kilowog.blockstackers.com with local-esmtp (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian))id 19BElh-0006Zi-00for ; Thu, 01 May 2003 10:10:37 -0400
>X-Message-Info: JGTYoYF78jEHjJx36Oi8+Q1OJDRSDidP
>X-X-Sender:
>In-Reply-To:
>Message-ID:
>Sender: Robert Rozeboom
>Return-Path: samzenpus@kilowog.blockstackers.com
>X-OriginalArrivalTime: 01 May 2003 14:10:38.0368 (UTC) FILETIME=[70FA2A00:01C30FEB]
>
>This IP is banned for crawling us 2000 times in a day. It was banned on
>the 30th. So you either are running something or you share this IP with
>someone who is.
>
>On Thu, 1 May 2003, Obvious Guy wrote:
>
> > No scripts running here.
> >
> > Please unban.
> >
> > Thanks
> >

Still banned. Still not running scripts.

2000 times, huh? I'd hate to see what kinds of hits a script could rack up if normal usage leads to that many hits.

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' code.

After going to college, that kind of went away. I moved thousands of miles away from my highschool friends and gradually fell out of touch. More to the point, I fell out of practice of shaking hands that way. These days I don't even shake hands anymore, such is life in Japan.

The Handshake Trio rode with my from Ochanomizu to Shinjuku today. Not really 'with' me, but close enough that I could notice that they had their own special handshake. The three were in their early twenties, and they obviously just entered the job market judging by their fresh suits. Possibly bank employees or something similar.

At Shinjuku two of them split off from the third, but as they got off they gave each other their 'in' handshake. Normal Grip->Arm Wrestle Grip->Wonder Twins Power Activate. It was quaint.

It was quaint up until the girl in the group messed up halfway through her shake and the guy reset the shake to the beginning. The second time through they went much slower. At that point quait turned into inane.

By the time you graduate from college aren't you also graduated from that kind of behavior at least in public? From what I understand certain fraternities have the same type of thing, but thankfully I've never seen such a weird public display of comaraderie.

Now I'd like to invite you all over to Tokyo for burgers and beer. Don't forget to bring the chicks.

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.

The last time I weighed under 150lbs was back in high school. A sack of skin and bones at 150, my neck looked like an ostrich's and there wasn't a speck of muscle or fat to be found anywhere. I can't say I was unhealthy, but I sure didn't have any significant strength nor could I keep up in stamina-requiring exercises. Except for the geek part, I was your typical pencil-necked geek (thanks Classy Freddy Blassie!).

The girl on the train has obviously taken her doctor's advice because she must have weighed in under 100lbs though she was only an inch or two shorter than me. Skinny as a rail and all angles, there wasn't a pleasant curve on her body. She didn't look unhealthy like some anorexics, it was pretty plain that she had just never gained any weight, ever.

She was standing near the door, holding a handstrap. When the train came to a stop everyone lurched forward except for her. I guess not having any mass also means you are immune to inertia.

I am no doctor. I don't know the first thing about nutrition nor do I know anything about ideal body weights. But my gut (the big fat one that's weighing me down) tells me that these Japanese doctors have got a huge blindspot if they really think that the weights they are prescribing are healthy. There's of course something to be said about being overweight, but they have simply gone overboard.

So a big fuck you to the Japanese doctors telling their patients that it's necessary to become a skeleton in order to be healthy. And give that stick a cheeseburger.

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.

I was reading Lingqi's journal regarding the NHK daily mini-drama and got a little laugh out of it. The title of the show is Manten ('man' means 'packed' or 'full' and 'ten' is 'heaven' or 'sky') it's translated meaning is something close to 'starfilled skies'. It is a really bad miniseries, IMO.

It's the story of a girl who didn't go to college and ended up being a meteorologist with a grand desire to go into space. I guess it was meant to inspire kids to reach for their dreams or something. However, during her training a real-life problem occurred. The Columbia blew up. Well that threw a huge monkey wrench into the show because here's this girl trying her damndest to get onto the next Shuttle launch and we're all supposed to pretend like reality didn't happen.

The mini-drama that played before Manten was Sakura and it was much better, if not a little corny with all the Japanese people pretending to be Hawaiians.

On the camera front, I've finally splurged and bought the Nikon FM3a. So far I'm really happy with it, having shot about 5 rolls of film at a bontanical garden I visited last weekend. The pics turned out great and I'm tempted to go buy some Extachrome or Velvia film, but I think I can hold off on that until I get a little surer with the camera.

I don't know. Why doesn't the FAQ to which that question is linked to have an entry regarding it?

But think of all the researchers who weren't just jacking off in the corner.

Going to the protest of love...