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.

The first Singapore Post

Hello everyone again.

I am actually typing this on the plane coming back from Singapore. Not that I won't get a chance to post it until I get on the Internet again.

So first off why was I there?

I was in Singapore to present a paper on my research (APCOT2006.org). The presentation I guess didn't go as bad as I thought it did and I met a bunch of interesting people doing other types of research or dealing with some of the same topics as I deal with.

In some later posts I will post pictures from the trip.

For now i will leave you with a link for googleearth to go Singapore. If you are like me the first time that I realized that I was going to Singapore I could not place it on a map so this should help some what.

Googleearth (tested in v4 however it might work in v3)(This is a collection of links that I found. Depending on how I feel and ambitious I am I might set up my own site for storing kml file.)
maps.google.com

Here I will put some of my thoughts of Singapore. I always thought that Japan was known for its clean cities. Singapore puts Japan to shame. things were really clean there. The second thing to note that for me was odd the first day or to was that we were basically on the equator the sun did not come up as early as it does in Sendai in the summer. There are two official languages there, English and Chinese. Guess which one I used. It was really nice to be in a country again where I could speak English with people. Singapore also seems to be a very international city/country. This made it feel like I didn't stick out as much as I normally do in Japan.

As I will mention later the architecture there is probably all new but I liked it. To me the prices were not that bad compared to Japan even though it was listed in the top 20 of the most expensive places to live in the world. The food was good there even though I really don't know what is truly from Singapore. But again because people understand English I could always ask for not spicy. Also the variety of food was quite good also.

A few of the points that I didn't like about the city but there is really not much that can be done about some of them. One was the humidity. The second was related to the first and that is the amount of electricity that must be used for cooling. During the conference I was in a suit and tie every day and as long as I was in AC building life was good. When I went outside I began to pour sweat out. The third thing that I didn't like was pushy restaurant owners.

Otherwise I really liked the city and highly recommend it to people for a visit at the least. I don't think it would be all that bad for somone who was single or as a retirnment home either.

Google Earth - Home

So this week google earth 4 beta came out. Now how does this relate to Japan and the like. For one it has a Linux client so I can use it now and secondly they have improved the resolution around Sendai. So this means that I can now actually find my apartment.

So still why the blog post?

Well because I am paranoid that if I post my address (even though I probably have in some other way and just don't realize it) some maniac will come to my door. So if you want a link to see where I live send me an email or an IM (all contact info is on the right) and I will send it off to you.

So thanks google for putting out this nice product for free and a Linux client.

Google Earth - Home

A relatively small Japanese pagoda

cimg2071
Originally uploaded by ehud4242.

On a weekend trip I saw this pagoda. It just so happened there was enough space to setup a forced perspective shot.

Here is the original without me in the shot. I will put more photos up of this trip later.