Entries this day: Lazy Pissy joe_surfer miyuki

Lazy

1:17pm JST Thursday 1 July 2004

Today has been a bit of a lazy day. I have hit some roadblocks for doing stuff with paypal; I have transferred money from my US account to my paypal account and it's taken days and days it seems. Just like a watched pot (of (non) gold (backed currency)).

Oh, and I fucked up; I forgot about a payment I told my credit card to get from my bank account, and now my IRS payment will bounce. Oops. But I'm not too scared of the lumbering bohemoth; I'll pay their little fine and pay the amount once the money gets to my paypal account and I'll bounce some back to my bank account.

The reason I moved money from my account *to* paypal, is that paypal now offers a 1.0% interest on balances. My bank account, while *free*, doesn't offer me any interest. Paypal gives me interest on balances as low as one dollar.

But *that's* not all! Paypal *also* (apparently; I've not confirmed this yet) can smurf money out of my Japanese bank account! This is not *so* amazing, but it is WAY cheaper than the way I had been sending money back to the US. 500 yen instead of 3000 yen! Wow wow wow!!

So, if you want to be cool, and you still haven't gotten a paypal account, get one now.

If you want a business account, where you can accept credit card payments online with low transaction fees (2.2%-2.9% + $0.30 USD) click here and I'll get a bonus for the referral.

Pissy

4:17pm JST Thursday 1 July 2004

Grrr.

Tokyo is a disgusting place to live. People don't care about the environment; they try to give me plastic bags to hold one item; and someone stole my bicycle.

No, not again, but today I went to the bicycle pounds to look for it. I went to two different pounds, and yes, I could have gone before, but I trusted the cop saying they would call me if they found it, so I didn't go, plus it just seemed like such a hassle and more specifically so fucking unfair that I should have to *walk* to look for my bicycle. I would walk to go *get* my bicycle, but knowing that it probably wasn't there made it just seem fruitless. Well, I went today and for some reason the dude at each place took like forever to understand the concept that even though my bike was stolen on 31 March doesn't mean that's when it possibly arrived in their bike pound. The thief could have ridden it around for a while and then dumped it. He could still fucking be riding it; he could have dumped it in a river, the fucking punk. Anyway, all I wanted was to look through the lot to see if my bike was there and they each let me do that and in each case I didn't find my bicycle and in each case they were like, "told you so," and I was like, "yes you sure did; you sure told me." and when I tried to ask if they had a phone number the dude was like, "bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb" five hundred miles per hour talking and I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about? Do you have a fucking phone number or not? And I was mad and I said in Japanese, "you speak Japanese very well" and he's like, "I'm Japanese." "Yes you are. And I have no idea what you are saying. Thank you, good bye."

I mean I would say three words and he would jump to some conclusion that he knew what the fuck I was trying to say. NO You have no idea what I'm trying to say, and I sure as fuck have no idea what you are spewing back at me. Fuckin' have some compassion or some common sense that says if I speak the language at 1 low-level-vocabulary word per second, I can't understand your fucking' high end speed demon chatter.

And, and *AND* I asked each of the bike pounds what happens to the bikes after three months. "They are crushed."

Ever heard of an *auction*? Some of the bikes were fucking money. Yeah yeah the grandma bikes feel free to crush, but the mountain bikes are worth something! Fuck!

joe surfer

7:21pm JST Thursday 1 July 2004

Richard's friend Joe from Hawaii just got a cellphone yesterday. I got his number (actually he asked for mine first; I shoulda thought that with a new phone he would likely want to collect numbers asap) and he told me his upcoming plans which include setting up home base in Kamakura for the local surfing options available there. He invited me to come down there and hit the waves with him. Calder's wish may come true soon. I think I'll try surfing.

Ah - I just realized something about google's adwords. It seems likely that the first time they see a new page that has goodle adwords adspace on it, that they crawl the page for content and decide what keywords to key on and therefore what ads to serve. On a particular day (particular URL), if I post a small entry first and then post subsequent entries, they won't likely crawl the page again immediately, so the initial small entry that may not have been worthy of any ads will make the page end up with no ads even if the subsequent content would trigger ads.

miyuki

10:24pm JST Thursday 1 July 2004

Just met Sumidasan and Tomoko and Tomoko's friend Miyuki who wants to climb Fuji with us (us = Sumida and me). Tonight she was really shy and barely willing to speak to me, much less speak English to me, though they report she was tested into Nova at 7A. In Japanese I was like, "why don't you speak English?" and I meant it in a cheerifying way, but I didn't realize until later that she hasn't started attending classes yet, so she has not really started speaking English, so I tried to take it back while we were on the train together from Shinagawa to Shibuya.

During the train ride (no longer under the pressure of her far more English-confident friends), she spoke a bit of English, but still we primarily used Japanese to communicate. Found out that this will also be her first time to climb Fuji, that she lives in Shinjuku and she's going to hang out with her family tonight.

Tomoko had introduced her as Hemichan (maybe), but her real name is Miyuki, so she (, after some consideration,) asked me to call her Miyuki.