Fire/Earthquake Drill in Japan

cimg2779, originally uploaded by ehud4242.

Just your normal everyday earthquake drill in Japan.

My New York City Trip

At the end of October I had a conference in New York City. The conference was the 2007 IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium. It was a good conference and I got to meet a bunch of people from different fields.

I did not have very much time for walking around NYC but I did get a few pictures on the day that I arrived. My initial plan had been to walk to the USS Intrepid from my hotel on 53rd and 6th. Little did I know that the Intrepid was not in the dock and would not return for over a year. After learning that the Intrepid was not in port the hard way, I walked to Rockefeller center where they already had the ice in place for people to skate .




I walked around a bit more but there is not much more worth posting. I walked around Central Park at dusk and that was really neat and eerie place to be at dusk.

The last comment from NYC was that because I for a change was the only native English in my group I was in charge of leading around my group of Japanese colleagues. They seemed to expect I would know where to go to find a good lunch. We never got sick and we never spent more than $25 on a meal, so I guess I didn't do too bad.

After the trip I went up to Argyle for a little less than a week to work on installing smoothwall and freenas on different machines. While I was there I took this picture.



I guess cats and dogs can live together.

Guess What I did Today

Graduated, originally uploaded by ehud4242.

Finished

My third broken bicycle

Well it has been way to long since I have put a post up. Not much to say just a little thing called life and a PhD have been keeping me busy.

The good news is that yes I have finished my PhD work. The only thing left is to print out a bunch of copies of the thesis and get it bound. In another month or so I will be officially finished.

The primary reason for this post today, other than to say that yes I am still alive, I to talk about my bicycle. In a previous post I mentioned that I had bought a used bicycle from a friend who was leaving Japan. The bicycle was a nice big Trek bicycle that fit me. I was happy to have it because it made it easier and more enjoyable to go out for rides. See the previous post.

Over the past week or two I could here a new "creek" in the bicycle but I was not sure where it was from. On Wednesday I was on it again and the entire bicycle felt wobbly but the "creek" was gone. Looking over the bike and frame I found this where the center tube meets the down tube and the cranks for the pedals.


To say the least that is very bad and unsafe to ride on. I am going to see if I can get the frame replaced by Trek.

The other funny part about this story is that this is the third bike that I have "killed" while in Japan. The first was my eight year old mountain bike whose frame broke a few months after arriving in Japan.


The second was standard Japan bike that I showed in the previous post. That bike I was definitely too big for and probably too heavy for. That one died due to the spokes on one of the tires breaking and it was not worth fixing after only 21 months of riding.

My last bike only lasted one year. The next bike I get will be lucky to last 6 months.

Anyways here is a couple of pictures that I took while bicycling to the sea.

A little explanation of me

I don't know if many of you go to xkcd but it is well to quote its author, "A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language" (Randall Munroe). Anyways I found his last comic especially amusing. I think it will help people understand me a little bit better.




The original link

An article about my parents next buisness venture

Today the local newspaper in my hometown published an article about my parents next business venture, a cheese making business.

The Post Star Article

I was not thrilled with the fact that the Post Star could not spell our last name correctly and a couple of other points but in the end, no publicity is bad publicity (or at least I hope).

I should also say I am sorry that I have not posted much of anything lately, I have been very busy with my research and thesis. I will not make any promises for future posts but you never know if and when I will get the writing bug again.

Thats all for now

Glass ware at a DIY shop

Just an interesting picture showing a bunch of glass ware that you can by at large hardware store (like a Lowes or Home Depot). For most people you are like so what but to me as a scientist/researcher/mad scientist this is really cool.

I will try to keep posting stuff.

Installing a Washing Machine

So as part of getting a new apartment I purchased a used washing machine so that I don't need to worry about going to a coin operated laundry. So you might think that I had to do some fun plumbing similar to what is shown on the left.

Far from it. The plumbing for adding a washing machines to an apartment is surprisingly easy. In my case it was just two water connections.

As can be seen below.


The water supply.

The waste water.



So as you can see from the pictures water supply comes directly from the tap on the sink with an adapter on the end of the tap for the hose to attach to.

For the waste water, I take out the gray waste water tube for the sink and insert the white tube for the washing machine. Beneath the bottom of the cabinet for the sink there is a pipe that comes out of the floor which I assume goes to the septic system. So obviously I can't use the sink while I am doing laundry.

What is interesting for this entire installation all I needed was a Philips head (called a plus driver in Japan) driver and a knife.

I just wanted to post this so people can get a little contrast for typical plumbing that they are use to.

Please feel free to comment.

Hanami (Cherry Blossoms)

First off I should say this that hanami are in bloom in April and May. So this post is a bit late. To compound things the text was written on my flight back from Singapore. It has been waiting for me to put together the photos that I wanted so I finally decided to sit down and do it. Think of this as an incentive to come out to Japan and see the hanami next year.

I know this is very similar to one blog post that I have already done but there are always so many good photos (If they are not any good, don't tell me :) ) that it is hard to resist putting them up. So here are a few of my favorite shots from this year. I also went to the botanical garden close to my apartment this year and caught those flowers in bloom.

New apartment

Well I don't have much of an excuse for not posting much lately its just that I have been kind of busy.

From the title you can see that I have a new apartment now. So, I have been doing the moving type stuff lately.

The apartment that I moved to is probably a little bit more of a normal Japanese apartment, if not in style at least in size and layout. It is just your basic bachelor pad. It has its own kitchenette and bathroom. The other nice feature is that there is a loft above the kitchenette/bathroom. I have put my bed up there to free up space in the main room. Trust me there is still not a lot of space in the apartment.

There are several nice features of moving out of my old apartment. One is that I will not forget to bring ingredients to the kitchen when I am cooking. My old apartment had been in a pseudo dormitory, so that meant that it had a separate shared kitchen for each floor but I had my own refrigerator in my room. This meant that when I went to make scrambled eggs I would bring most of the ingredients from my room to the kitchen. This would include,

• Eggs
• 10 yen for the range
• Milk
• Bread
• Cheese
• Onion
• Margin
• Orange Juice

After scrambling the eggs I would but them on toasted bread with the cheese. The OJ was for drinking with the sandwich. Almost every week I would forget one of those ingredients (I don't care to admit to the number of times it was the eggs). So with the kitchen and fridge right there I don't need to worry about forgetting any of the ingredients (Well except maybe going to the store to pick something up).

A couple of nice things are, I am closer to the lab. This move will cut 5 to 10 minutes off my trip in every morning. Also any friends or family can now come and stay at my place if they come to Japan. At the dormitory they did not want people staying overnight.

However, the quality of the view out my window has gone down significantly. At the dormitory I had,
or .

However at the new place this is the view.


If you can't tell that is a brick wall. The change of going from the third floor to the first floor is pretty significant.

I will try to do a better job of keeping this updated.
Andrew

A new/used bicycle

Last week I bought a new/used bicycle from another American friend who was returning to America. This has been very nice for several reasons.

• Before I only had a Japanese bicycle that was too small (see picture below)
• The Japanese bicycle was broken
• It is probably a good thing for me to get off my butt and get some more exercise.

We will see if this will spur at least more photo taking because I will take the bike out on more trips.

Funeral over the weekend

I know I don't post as much as a I should but that is life.

Over the weekend I went to a funeral. I am not going to go into details because I don't think it is appropriate. Rather I am going to give you a link to a wikipedia article (link). Look at the sections listed for wake, funeral and cremation. I took part in all three with to a varying extent. If you have specific questions or comments please email me.

Andrew

The touring day of Singapore.

So the group of us spent a day touring around some of the more famous spots around Singapore. I was sad that we could only spend one day but such is life.

The first up on that tour day was a trip to an island that had formerly been a gun emplacement for the British when Singapore was a colony. On this island there was a bunch of the standard tourist traps but there was also a bunch of good scenery.



This is the merlion, what I call the mascot of Singapore.

Then we went down to the beach and out onto a smaller island which according to the sign is the furthest southern point on the Asian continent. Which also makes it the furthest south that I have traveled (Surpassing Shreveport Louisiana).





While walking along the beach we found a coconut that had fallen from the tree. Some how I got the idea to break it open, whether it was someone else who suggested it or not I can't remember. So here is some of the pictures of me doing that and the results.




It would have probably been better to use a sharp machete but all I had was the corner of a concrete block embedded in the ground.

After this we took a gondola ride back to Singapore and then up to a mountain. Here are various shots of the harbor from inside the gondola. Mind you some of these pictures were taken through the plexi-glass of the gondola so the quality might not be that good.





For the last part of the trip we went to a botanical garden that had a dedicate orchid garden. So I used up a bunch of pictures on that. Here are some of the highlights.












Finally that night we went to little India for dinner. Here is a picture of dinner. mmmmm... mutton.



As always there many more pictures on flickr. For starters looks under Singapore.

The last service at the old church building

Last week we had the last service at the old church. We will be building a new church. Below is a picture of the original church.


And here is a picture of the congregation after the service.



As the new building goes up I hope to put together more posts.

Merlion & the CBD

Merlion & the CBD
Originally uploaded by voux.

This is the merlion that I showed in the previous post. This showes what I hoped to see when I took my pictures.

The First Set of Pictures from Singapore

In this post I will include some of the pictures that I took during the conference. Sadly I did not have a lot of time during the conference to take pictures or walk around much. These are just some snap shots that I took as I was walking to and from the conference. Notice the architecture there. It was all I think very new but what I liked is that typically designers tried to not make all the buildings either simple rectangles.







This next set is some shots that I took while walking around at night after the last day of the conference. Some of the shots are not great but that is the only chance I had t get some of that stuff.









One of the sad things about the timing of this trip was that the tiger thing with water coming out of its mouth was being cleaned so we couldn't see it. Here are a couple of pictures I got of it but they are not all that great.