Neurotech - the weblog of Luke Reeves

Apple opened their new store in Ginza today. I didn’t go since I don’t care that much, but there are some excellent pictures at Antipixel of the event. Apparently there was a 3+ hour queue to get in. Um, yeah. Via jeansnow.net.

It just hit me that I essentially live here now. I mean have a dentist and a doctor, an apartment, a subway pass, etc. I’m going home for Christmas but then immediately coming back. I’ll probably even get rid of my place back in Toronto.

I guess I should be scared, but I feel pretty good about the whole thing.

I ended up going to the dentist this morning with horrifying visions of Japanese dental care after the strange experiences I’ve had here with medicine.

He took a quick inspection of my wisdom tooth and then told me (using a cute dental terminology English and Japanese picturebook) that the bastard would have to come out immediately. I asked him how long it would take - about five minutes.

Damn, that be quick! So I went for it, and holy God almighty did it hurt. He used some mild local anesthetic on me, but it didn’t help as much as I had hoped. I have never felt pain like this in my life, and the grinding, breaking stress noises of the tooth as he pried it out almost made me vomit.

Now the cool part - endorphins. This was the first time in my life I’ve experienced this so-called endorphin rush due to pain, and let me tell you - damn. I was higher than a kite for like an hour. It was incredible - I had to go sit down for a while, collect myself, and just kinda sink into the buzz.

It’s about 8 hours later now, and I’m still bleeding a little bit from the yanked tooth. All in all though, it seems pretty good. No pain at all - totally the opposite of what I expected.

One nice touch though was the dentist putting a towel over my eyes, preventing me from being goddamned blinded by his high powered lamp. Every dental clinic should do this. Plus, it allows me to mask my pain.

Only cost about $120. Not bad at all (including wraparound X-Rays).

As I mentioned a while ago, my old laptop went and died on me and I bought a replacement: A Sony Vaio TR2/B. Let me tell you, this thing is beautiful. There were two equivalent models for sale, a TR2/P and TR2/B - the P having Windows XP Professional installed, and the former having the Home edition preinstalled. Japanese version of course. And that’s about where the trouble started.

I figured I’d save a few hundred dollars by getting the Home version, since it has the exact same system specs. The baseline for the system:

• 1GHZ Pentium M.
• 400 MHZ front side bus.
• 256 megabytes of RAM.
• 40 gigabyte hard disk.
• Two external USB ports (and strangely enough two internal ones).
• Built-in CD-RW/DVD-ROM Matshita UJDA755 drive, with 24 speed burning. It’ll read DVD-ROM, DVD-RAM, DVD-R, and DVD-RW as well.
• 802.11a/b/g wireless network card.
• Standard 10/100baseT ethernet card.
• Bluetooth.
• Memory stick slot.
• Firewire.
• Motion eye camera, built into the top of the monitor.
• A 16:9 aspect monitor running at 1280×768 pixels with some wacky XBRITE technology..
• Dual graphics chipsets, so you can extend your desktop onto an external monitor (as opposed to just cloning it). The chipset is an Intel 82852/82855 GM/GME.
• Semi-decent Intel 3D graphics accelerator.
• Single PCMCIA slot.
• Modem.

So needless to say, that wasn’t nearly enough RAM to run Windows XP. I found a shop near where I bought it in Akihabara that sold me a 512 megabyte stick of MicroDIMM RAM. Accessory shopped (eventually) and also grabbed the extended battery (approximately 9 hours!!) and a carrying case.

So Tani found me, at a duty-free shop, a boxed version (legit!) of Windows XP Professional. Which I paid for - ugh. Anyways, once I got the system and the OS I rushed home to play with the new toys.

I booted it once into the Japanese XP Home Edition, made sure it worked correctly, and then promptly formatted the entire drive to install XP Pro Service Pack 1. It installed quite well - keyword being installed. On first boot, pretty much nothing whatsoever in the system was detected - no network card, no modem, no firewire, no wireless, no correct keyboard, hell, even the monitor had the incorrect resolution.

Needless to say I was pissed, but no biggie. Just download the drivers! With what? My busted machine? And how to copy them over? Punched cards? Fuck.

Now let me explain this - in my mind, any name-brand system should be able to run Windows without the nine million bullshit programs that are installed by the factory. No Sony Network Capture application, no thousand fucking tray icons. I want none of that. It would make sense to me that any system you find can run with a clean install of Windows, plus additional drivers downloaded.

Maybe that was the case. So I started hunting for a driver CD in the box. There was none. OK, I’ll do a restore - no restore disc. What the fuck? No driver disc, no recovery disc, nadda. I’m tearing my hair out while staring at the sticker on the machine that says “Designed for Microsoft Windows XP”. Bullshit!

The next day (and I didn’t sleep well) I went to the Sony Center in Ginza. A nice lady that spoke English sorta well on the tech support floor sat me down and tried to help me. I explained to her I wiped the drive and installed XP Pro, and the shit don’t work. “Can you give me a driver CD?” I asked.

“Sure, one moment please.” A few minutes later she comes back with an external CD-ROM drive to sell me. I knew from then on that this transaction would not work in my favor.

Once she understood my problem, she explained to me that there are no CDs because you’re expected to burn your own recovery CDs when you get the computer. It would take 8. Holy shit, I thought. Great!

“Can you give me a recovery CD? Cause I fucked it up.”

“We can try to load from the recovery partition…” she says.

“Nah, that’s gone. I erased it. I paid for a 40 gig drive, not 40 minus 8 gigs for restoration.”

“Oh. Well, um. We don’t have recovery CDs, but you can order one through the mail.”

Logically here I’m the asshole. I know that of course. But seriously, is it even legal to not bundle a computer with at lease the OS? Come on! I paid for a copy of Windows XP Home Edition, and I don’t even have the media for it.

I left the Sony Center in a fit of rage, probably swearing at the poor girl. I was pretty pissed at Sony, and I knew I couldn’t just out and return this thing since we got a huge discount for paying in cash. Warranty yes, refunds no.

And what’s worse is that I wanted to use this machine so, so much. I had spent like six hours in the same Sony shop just fucking with it. It is much too cool just to throw out of my seventh floor apartment.

So eventually I got it working, and here’s how. One of my coworkers had a USB drive, a little keychain puppy that held like a hundred megs or such. Luckily, the drive used the standard USB mass storage scheme and required no extra drivers. I immediately went to Sony USA’s website and downloaded every single driver for the American TR2/AP - and… Success! It worked like a fucking charm.

Every driver installed perfectly with no bullshit utilities piggybacking on them, so now I have a nice clean Windows XP Professional system. The only thing not working is the little “Motion Eye” camera - which realistically I don’t give a damn about.

Now you’d think that they’d just burn the 20 megabytes of drivers on a CD for customers here - or hell, shove them on an MD stick! But no, they don’t. And they don’t even offer driver downloads on the Japanese website.

So that’s my story. The morale is nothing every works easily for me, especially when technology is concerned. Actually, I think the amount of difficulty involved in a task for me is directly proportional to the amount of money spent.

• Phil Wherry wrote up some excellent instructions about installing Windows XP Pro on the TR2B (that I unfortunately found after the fact).
• SiliconePopCulture’s Sony TR World forum has been an okay resource for the ordeal.
• Apparently Microsoft has a patch for “TV Tuner doesn’t respond, Q817589. It’s a piece of Service Pack 2, and fixes the camera.
• The Bluetooth hardware needs the patch for Q323183 from Microsoft as well as Q811228 to connect to shit - why Windows Update doesn’t grab these items, only God knows.

Last weekend was pretty awesome. I went to Kamakura with Chie to attend a large neighborhood party that her family invited us to. Her father is like a community leader or something so was kind of the M.C. of the event.

So of course I was all nervous about the family being there, and all the neighbors just added more acid to the ulcers. But it turned out to be really enjoyable - and extremely remeniscent of making maple syrup back home with my family.

The party was held in like a small park in the middle of Kamakura (which is considered a small town, even though an hour’s worth of city sprawl connect it to Tokyo). There were a bunch of fires burning away with smoke blowing into everything, and a bunch of weird wooden pots setup in the middle of the event. We were fed immediately upon arrival lots of tonjiru, a kind of hearty soup make from miso, pork and vegetables. Good stuff.

It turned out that the freaky wooden pots were actually for pounding rice cakes with massive wooden mallets. Of course, within five minutes of my arrival everyone was praying that the one foreigner in attendance would give it a try. And I did, and it was cool. I hammered away at that fucking rice like no tommorow, gouging a few big chunks from the lip of the pot. And each swing that I brought down was accompanied by a chant from the people watching - numbered somewhere in the twenties.

Once that was finished we actually ate the rice cakes, and they were good. Like I said though, it was eerily reminiscent of making maple syrup in Iron Bridge. Both events contained:

• Open fires cooking various good-smelling things.
• Lots and lots of family.
• Healthy quantities of alchohol.
• Swinging around large dangerous objects, usually with some of the aforementioned alchohol in your system.
• Family members feeding you until you’re ready to vomit.

Oh, and I almost forgot. There was a band of high school students playing the tycho drums for us all traditional style - it was so excellent.

After that Chie and took her parents car for a spin around the ocean’s side and checked out Hayama County and Zushi City.

Like I said, good times.

This weekend is a little depressing though - dental visit at 8:00 AM on a Saturday morning. That sucks. I didn’t even know dentists were at their offices so early - shouldn’t they be out golfing or something?

So Movable Type has a bad vulnerability that allows your system to act as an open relay. Just delete the “mt-send-entry.cgi” file from your installation if you’re using MT. (I’ve done this for blogs hosted here).

Oh wait, no it isn’t. A great article about how useless the new anti-SPAM law actually is, from Wordsoup via Kasia.

A while ago I was complaining that I was a stupid bastard for accidentally ordering two copies of The Golden Transcendence, by John C. Wright. So no big deal, I have two copies of the book. I read it and it was a superb conclusion to the Golden Age trilogy (and I plan on blogging a review eventually).

And then something really cool happened: John himself asked me how it turned out in a comment on the page in question (you can find it right under the two gay jokes). It’s stunning that Google can magically connect people, whether it’s their thoughts, experiences or just general bullshit.

So I told him blah blah, now I own two copies but that’s OK. He gave me some general bio information I asked about, as well as a link to an online short story of his called “The Last of All Suns“. Excellent.

What an interesting turn of events. My girlfriend just sunk a straight 8.8 hours into Final Fantasy X. And now, when “stopping”, she only paused the game. Awesome.

For example: After way too many years, I finally registered TextPad.