Today is the last day that I will be teaching in Sapporo school as normal. From next week, a new teacher arrives, and I will begin the handover process. I know next to nothing about the new teacher, so I have not been able to tell the parents anything. That kinda sucks, as they are asking questions. I have taken a lot of photo’s of my kids this week, and will take more next week. I have also been tagging the photo’s I have with their names. In other schools I worked at, I assumed I would remember their names, but I don’t, so this time I am making sure it is written in the EXIF of the photo’s.

I have so much to do before I leave Sapporo. Not just packing. I have people to see, places to visit. Then there are the parents who want to have a good bye party with me. I am not sure if I will be able to do it all…

That’s right, this is my last week of teaching on my own in Sapporo. Next week, the new teacher gets here. I know nothing about her, and I am not sure I care to. I have a lot of things to do between then and now though. I have finally started packing, and damn if I don’t have a lot of shit. The movers will take 4 days to get my stuff to my new house. I have no idea what I am supposed to do until they arrive. I will probably have to get a hotel in Fukuoka until my stuff arrives. It appears to be at least 10˚C hotter there than here. I am more than a little upset about that, but them’s the breaks.

I am finding it difficult, now that the move is so close. I love this town and more importantly, the friends I have made here. I do need the change of job though. I have been doing the same thing for 3 years now, in the same room. A little variety should do me some good.

Google maps now has street view for Sapporo! It’s cool.

It appears that the latest version of bt747 now works fine on my machine. It has been updated to 1.54.1 which seems to work out of the box. However, as before, i did have to edit the bt747_macosX.command to use cu.serial-0001 as the device to connect to my GPS Logger. There is also a new interface that is experimental in the package. It looks like it has potential. Unfortunately, the device path seems to be hard coded in the Java, so I can’t change it to the device that works for me. Oh well.

After much searching and hard work, I have put my name down on an apartment in Fukuoka. It is a brand new building that still smells of wet concrete. Not as spacious as the one that I am in now, but then I am moving to a bigger city, and things are more expensive there. It is not too far from work, only 15 min on the train, and a 10 min walk to the station. So a little closer than where I am now, but not much. I will mostly be riding my bike I think, as soon as I work out the route. I will be sure to post pics from my new 8th floor apartment once I move.

Full text of 2008 Nagasaki Peace Declaration - Mainichi Daily News: August 11, 2008
Full text of 2008 Nagasaki Peace Declaration

The following is the full text of the Peace Declaration issued by Nagasaki Mayor Tomihisa Taue at a memorial ceremony on Saturday, the 63rd anniversary of the atomic bombing of the city:

—–

We will not forget the atomic cloud that rose into the sky on that fateful day.

On August 9, 1945 at 11:02 a.m., a single atomic bomb dropped by a United States military aircraft exploded into an enormous fireball, engulfing the city of Nagasaki. Unimaginably intense heat rays, blast winds, and radiation; magnificent cathedral crumbling; charred bodies scattered amongst the ruins; people huddled in groups, their skin shredded by countless glass fragments, and the stench of death hung”

(Via MDN.)

Well, today I am giving the area training to my new area. Not only do I have to fly to the other end of the country to do so, I have to talk in front of a bunch of people I don’t know, of which at least 2 are going to cause trouble. Of course the best part is that I have to catch the first flight out of Sapporo at 7:30, so I had to get up at 5. I am at the airport now. I checked in at 6:55 for my 7:30 flight. Only, I am not on a 7:30 flight. After a week of trying to work out how to get to Fukuoka as fast as possible, and talking about changing planes in Tokyo it appears that the stupid pleb who made the final decision decided that a direct flight is fine. Even if it means that I arrive at the training session late. The training that I am giving. So instead of getting the first flight to Tokyo and changing planes to get to Fukuoka by 11:30 giving me maybe just enough time to change clothes and set up for a 1pm start, I am instead on the 11:05am flight direct to Fukuoka arriving at 13:35. I guess I won’t be talking about punctuality today. Worse still, I didn’t even get a ticket to refer to for my flight. I got an e-mail with the flight and then another email with the ticket reference number. Oh how the ticketless system is so convenient. Oh, just incase you missed my carefully avoided point, I have arrived at the airport at 6:50 for an 11:05 domestic flight. It seems that all the talk of changing in Tokyo lead me to the assumption that I would be doing that. I have over 4 hours of SFA to do…. Worst of all, there is no free WiFi….

Today is not a good day.

That’s right, after 7 years at the same company, I am still worthless. This is the message I received from Head Office today. I am moving from my beloved Sapporo to Fukuoka. A promotion and everything. The shit of it is, that I have lived in a 3 room apartment for more than 3 years. Now that I am moving, I of course requested that I keep the level of accommodation that I am accustom to. I have already checked the prices on apartments in Fukuoka. They are not more expensive than any other apartment that my company has provided for me. And FUCK them, they have in the past (twice) provided me with an apartment of the size I want(2DK). When I asked to have my current level of accommodation continued, I was told that “like everyone else you must have a 1 room place or find your own”. The thing that pisses me off about that? I haven’t lived in a 1 room place since I lived in Osaka(my first place). Every place after that has been 2 or 3 rooms, and each time the company has found and provided the place for me. Suddenly they won’t do it anymore? I am the 2nd longest foreign employee in my company. You would think, considering that they have found and provided me with 2 and 3 room places 3 times in the past (I have only moved 3 times at the request of the company), they would do it again. No. Fuck you is the message I got. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.

It’s not like I have opened dozens of schools for them. It’s not like I have trained their teachers. It’s not like I have sacrificed my personal life for the good of the company. Not like I have done hundreds of hours of unpaid overtime.

Oh wait….

Yesterday I took 32 students and parents cherry picking in Nikki at a place called さくらんぼ山(cherry mountain). The weather was great, if a little hot. and there were HEAPS of cherries. I had no idea that cherries grew so densley on the trees. To say the trees were heavily laden with fruit would only be a mild understatement. The best part was ofcourse that you were allowed to eat as many cherries as you could while you were in the orchard. Now I was somewhat hungover, but I ate an obscean amount of cherries on my empty stomach…. I did not feel good for a while afterwards. Everyone was allowed to take 100g of cherries home. Most of the kids couldn’t work out how much that was, so I stood next tot he scales and gave them cherries from my bucket to make sure they all had enough. The old ladies thought that made me nice, so they let me take 60g over the limit extra home. LOL.

As always, I took a lot of photo’s. I will not be showing you them though, except the one on the right.

Today I am very sore from all the running. While playing some of the games in the park, I had to carry some of the younger kids, because there was no way they could outrun some of the bigger kids. It was the only way to have fun.

It has started…. 4 weeks of alcoholics congregating in the central park drinking beer together. There is nothing quite like the beer garden festival (I have never been to october fest). It closed far too early though. My friends and I drank from 6pm till 9:30. A very short period, considering the day before we drank heavily for 10 hours. The beer garden starts at lunch, but we got there a little late. You can see some of the photo’s –> HERE <–

For the first time in 20 years or more I was attacked by a wild animal today. While riding my bike home, happily listening to my pod and meandering my way down the street a black devil viciously launched an assault. The first I knew of it was pain. No warnings, no “shot over the bows”, just an insidious sneak attack from above and behind. Arms flailing and trying to hold the bike straight I turned to see my winged assailant pulling up from a second failed bombing run. A CROW! It’s murderous eyes fixed on my defenceless scalp. I sped away, scalp throbbing in pain….

Since when do Crows attack?

Hit by lightning…
http://laughingsquid.com/lightening-strikes-woman-as-she-is-shooting-video/

So I downloaded the RPC1 firmware for my drive by Ben11 from the rpc1.org site, but couldn’t convince Leopard (10.5.4) to use it. Basically is said that the updater was not compatable with my system and I had to update it. Having the most up to date system possible (to consumers) I figured there was something wrong with the installer program and started to search for answers.
It turns out that the installer expects to see versions of OS X between 10.3.9 and 10.4.9 in the file /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist
So I changed these to version settings and ran the installer. Presto! It successfully flashed the ROM on my drive. Unfortunately the installer insists on a reboot. Which I did without changing the previous file back to it’s original settings. Because of this, after the reboot, Disk Utility wouldn’t work on my machine. So I changed the file back to the original settings and rebooted again. Now everything is fine!
I have an RPC1 Drive on my Powerbook PPC 12″! YAY!

I had this working before upgrading to 10.5.4. I have been using the open source GPS Log downloader BT747 to access my logs on my iBlue logger. Before the upgrade I simply followed the instructions on the website for OS X and everything was fine. However, either the USB driver i had to install has been upgraded or the OS does something differently now, either way, it wouldn’t work. I dug around in the sub system for a bit and found that the device used to reference the logger has had a name change. Now you should do the following. *mostly taken from the website at sourceforge.

I used the CP2101 USB serial driver for MacOS X from this site:
http://www.silabs.com/tgwWebApp/public/web_content/products/Microcontrollers/USB/en/mcu_vcp.htm

Before it works, you need to create a lock-file directory, and make it world-writable. Open a shell, and type:

sudo mkdir /var/lock
sudo chmod 777 /var/lock

I downloaded the BT747 distribution, and copied BT747_rxtx.jar to /Applications/gps, the RXTX lib and binaries for MacOS to /Applications/gps/rxtx, the superwaba stuff to /Applications/gps/webstart, and created a shell script to launch the program. My folder /Applications/gps now contains these files:

BT747_rxtx.jar
bt747.command
rxtx/librxtxSerial.jnilib
rxtx/README
rxtx/RXTXcomm.jar
webstart/comm.jar
webstart/RXTXcomm.jar
webstart/Waba_only.jar

The script “bt747.command” can be created using TextEdit, and looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
cd /Applications/gps
CLASSPATH=rxtx/RXTXcomm.jar:webstart/Waba_only.jar:BT747_rxtx.jar:.:$CLASSPATH
export CLASSPATH
java -Djava.library.path=rxtx/ -Dbt747_port=”/dev/cu.serial-0001″ waba.applet.Applet /w 400 /h 400 /scale 1 /bpp 8 BT747

Double-clicking on bt747.command from Finder now starts BT747, and everything seems to work just fine!

Oddly enough, on Saturday I saw almost no police. That struck me as odd, with all the excessive security and paranoia going on in Sapporo, perhaps they think the bad men take the weekends off.

Today I saw over 100 cops on the street. This time I did get stopped. I was not carded, I was asked to push my bike instead of riding it. I of course responded with the good old “huh? (I don’t understand you face)”. He was about to try again, but noticed some guy riding his bike coming the other way so he gave up. I was not upset by getting stopped this time however. As he was trying to indicate that he wanted me to push my bike for no apparent reason, I saw 2 women who had been told to do the same thing. While I don’t see any reason what so ever to have to push my bike between sets of lights, the fact that I was not singled out to do so because of my face helped me to get over it in a hurry.

It does concern me that there are cops stationed almost ever 50M along main roads. They still make me feel uneasy.

http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=frfl_qdi2Y8

This happened in my very own Sapporo. Imagine if it had been a foreigner driving the truck.