Not that I'm sure, but...

I am one with the wind!

Hallelujah! With the help of this completely awesome walkthrough, I have fixed my iPod! I have music again! Thank you, CrunchGear!

According to the article, a lot of people's more dire iPod problems have to do age effecting the way the iPod casing grips the hard-drive, the upshot being that when the hard-drive isn't held as tightly in as it needs to be and wobbles minutely as it spins, then everything stops working. But this isn't death for your iPod: all you need to do to fix it is open your iPod up and wedge something in there so that when you close it again, the casing grips the hard-drive more securely. And presto! It spins like it wants to spin, perfectly orbiting its axis and at an insanely high speed, and giving you music. Huzzah! I tried this once with paper that was too thin and stiff to be a good material insulator, and had to re-do it with a slightly spongier strip of thinnish cardboard (torn from some box that something came in), but now it's holding true. I even took it jogging the other night, with no drama. Fucking. Awesome. Thank you CrunchGear!

Who is a black belt in Aikido? JOSHU!!!

Warrior Woman

My girlfriend, Sachiko. It's our six month anniversary in just two weeks. Crazy, right?! I'm going to get her some of those russian dolls that fold into each other, which aparently she had as a child and wishes she could have gotten at this Works of the Hermitage exhibit we went to recently at the prefectural museum here (or to be more accurate, to the Works of the Hermitage exhibit which I recently went to without her...it's a long story and involves a dog, but anyway she's nuts for these dolls and hopefully is secretly hoping that that's what I'm going to get her). So that'll be nice. There is one small hitch in the anniversary plans, which is this: On November 26th, Josh will be here in Matsuyama, in good old Ehime on good old Shikoku, but where will Sachiko be? Sachiko will be in Fukuoka, over on Kyushu, care of our friend Kouji and his generously including her in his company's Mandatory Company Travel event (a staple of the Japanese business model), even though Sachiko isn't a part of his company...not that I don't want her to go or anything (hey, a trip to Fukuoka, right?); it's just that Kouji is one of our more overtly infideletous and vaguely predatory friends of ours, and he's had a thing for Sachiko since small times and I don't entirely trust his motives or anyone else's as far as laying-groundwork-for-when-Josh-is-out-of-the-picture or the feeling that I get when folks are doing that. That happens in about six months, by the way. It's nuts with a capital N! Nuts! Anyway, where will Josh be when Sachiko's in Fukuoka? Right where I always am. Why did Kouji not call or mention this to me at all? Am feeling a bit obtuse about the whole thing? Or jealous? This is not the right choice of words. Well, jealous of the time that I don't get with her, sure, and miffed and more than slightly smug, sure and sure again, but it is what it is. And I've got more time to get my hands on those dolls.

Plates

You know how they say that eating too late at night isn't good for you? Well, here I am at ten minutes to two-in-the-morning and I find myself still with a lot on my plate. This mostly has to do with me trying to record a radio show for a city I don't live in anymore on a computer which isn't mine and doesn't work using a program which eludes me at the last, last possible minute to get it all done. Currently a program called Audacity is telling me that it's a few minutes from finishing the encoding on a chunk of my radio show, the Kessel Run for its broadcast early tomorrow morning on FM Bari Bari, and this is good, but when it's finished then I'll still have to record and encode another chunk or two before the program's finished and then figure out how to upload them all onto the internets somehow and to let my sponsors at the station know how to download them and play over the real live airwaves tomorrow. I somehow thought that continuing the radio show in Imabari even after I'd moved to Matsuyama would be, if not easy, then at least not the total pain in the ass that it has been so far. I also thought I'd have a working computer to use to this end (and others) but this has been another (and possibly the most fraught)(besides the job) part of the re-settling in. No working computer. Hence: no blogging, no Flickr uploads (we also have No Camera to help account for that one) and no YouTube/Podcast/Music, all of which were project goals in moving to the big city and gaining some free time to use creatively. But maybe tonight will prove to be the great first step. For tonight, we make radio!!!

It's my first time trying to record the show on the computer instead of in the real live studio, and if the learning curve seems a bit steeper, so too do the possibilities. I'd been planning to give this a try for quite some time, and when I finally got my computer back to operational status two few weeks ago I'd been getting psyched to try this, but just two nights ago I found myself suddenly hamstringed once more by the great beast Windows. And I finally thought I'd fixed it all, too. By Sunday night I'm either able to fix it once and for all or I'll order a new Macbook and be done with it. I will buy a computer sooner than I wanted to and acquiesce to trading in my technological troubles for fiscal ones. A new computer will set me back a bit more than I'd like to be spending all at one time right now, especially with expenses being what they are in the big city--rent is up, dojo fees are up, pay is way, way down...but my food costs are down, going out costs are way, way down, and commuting costs are down; although with gas prices on the rise, I'm paying half of Sachiko's fuel cost when she comes to see me in Matsuyama to be nice, so it's not like I'm totally done commuting--but having a new computer will, I think, let me be creative and fun in all the ways I want to be right now, so maybe it's worth it. Anyway, back to the radio show, already in progress...