a-cubed.info

So for only the second time since late August I managed to swim today. Travel, colds, Colitis and diarrhea have interfered with all my efforts to get back to swimming since Worldcon except for one day (I came down ill the following day and haven’t been up to it until today). Having been out of it for so long I took it easy and only did 30 lengths, with a break after each ten. Excluding the breaks I was just over 18 minutes for the 30 lengths, though, which is a pretty good time considering I’m still not feeling like I’m 100% and that it’s been close on four months since I last swam. I wasn’t exhausted afterwards, either, which is good. It means I didn’t overdo it.

I think I’m not going to try to get back to every day from this point, but I would like to make it three times a week for the long haul.

Despite their own advertising claims and hype, Apple did not invent the personal media player, the smartphone or the tablet computer. However, their second or third generation mass-market devices in these areas have clearly captured the market at a crucial time becoming the single largest provider of such devices and relgating their competitors to mostly fighting amongst themselves for second place. While Android devices outsell iPhones by more than 3:1 no single manufacturer was able to beat Apple for sales until Samsung pulled out of the Android pack in 2012. By this time, however, the name of the game was iSomething. Ask a teenager what type of mobile they have and they’ll often say an iPhone, even if it’s Android device. Similarly iPod and iPad have become the standard term for media players and tablets. With the release of the iPad mini, even mid-sized tablets no longer seem distinct from the fruity products.

This all seems good for the Cupertino mothership, with brand recognition supporting their product with much higher product margins than anyone else (Samsung sells more but makes less), while their tied-in software and content distribution system also buoys up their profits more than in the more open Android marketplaces.

But this is a double-edged sword as at least two companies have learned before: Kleenex and Hoover. They became so ubiquitous and their products so associated with the product class that they effectively lost much of their trademark protection due to genericisation. Google made a strong effort to prevent this, although both the OED and Miriam-Websters include the verb “to google” as a synonym for searching the Web, particularly but not solely with the Google search engine.

I am hearing a lot of usage of iPhone, iPod and iPad to refer to smartphones, media players and tablets, particularly at places like airports where we’re told to take our iPads out of bags and iPods/iPhones out of pockets for security screening, and on planes where we’re told to switch off our iPods/iPhones and iPads for take-off and landing, and only use our iPhones in airplane mode while in-flight.

While it may seem a boon to their current business model to be the poster-child of the current generation, becoming too generic can lose your edge in law and undermine your position in the market as the brand people will pay more for (which seems to be and remain the core of Apple’s approach [pun intended]).

So, for once I’m moved to do a non-book review blog.

The week before last I cut my finger. About a 1cm long shallow slash just below the last joint of my right index finger. So, this kind of things happens all the time, and why am I blogging it? Well, because I gut it on some cheese. Wow, that was some sharp cheese!

I made soup last night with some kabocha (Japanes squash variety with inside flesh pretty much like a pumpkin but with a green skin) and with some satoimo (also called taro, under which name you might have seen it outside Japan in restaurants, particularly in slices for tempura). This is a relatively common dish for me these days. The recipe is based on a leek and potato base (which can be used for all sorts of other flavourings like asparagus). I just substitute some kabocha and satoimo for the  potato. The particular satoimo I had in is one with a purple flesh as well as purple skin (most of the ones available in Japan are purple-skinned but have pale yellow flesh). Combined with the orange kabocha flesh this usually makes for a yellow/orange soup. However, the purple flesh meant that, like mixing all the colours of plasticine together, the result was pretty much brown. A slight purple-tinged brown in this case, but definitely brown. Very tasty, though.

I’m now mostly back to my normal diet now. At least I’m able to eat high residue foods like Weetabix and brown bread again. I’m still being quite careful with spices, working my way back up to chili, via increaing amounts of pepper and ginger in things. I’m still avoiding Indian (I had an Indian the evening before my colitis attack and while I’m fairly sure it wasn’t the direct cause, I am pretty sure the spices did not help) and Thai so far, and only using tiny amounts of (fake)wasabi in soba dipping sauce and sashimi soy dipping sauce.

I had one of those odd coincidences last night. I bumped my little side table with my leg as I sat down and spilled some coffee. A very small amount got onto the TV remote controller, though I was fairly sure it was only on the surface and didnt get inside at all. We were watching an episode of Once Upon a Time at that point, so I didn ‘t need the TV controller, only the media player controller, until after the episode. It didn’t work. So, figuring it was a coincidence I swapped out the batteries for a pair in my laptop bag, as they were the closest to hand. Still no joy. I left it until this morning to see if it was moisture inside, but still no joy. Before trying to replace the unit, I tried with a fresh set of batteries from the cupboard and it worked. The batteries in my latop bag must have been there too long or were used ones I’d put in there while travelling at some point and not taken out. Ho hum, at least I didn’t find this out after buying a replacement controller.

Japanese has a lot of homophones. This is at least partly due to their importing of Chinese characters and their pronunciation. Japanese has a much more limited set of phonemes than Chinese and so symbols which have different sounds in Chinese get imported into the same sound in Japanese. These collisions or near collisions make Japanese a great language for puns, as are Chinese and English for both related and different reasons. My flashcard system Anki is set to give me 15 new cards a day from (currently) the JLPT 1 set of vocabulary, which some kind other user have entered (I alter them to my needs and preferences as they come up). Today, the word 幹部 pronounced “kanbu” meaning executive, senior manager or officer came up. I often double-check words for extra meanings (and particularly for use as adjectives – many Japanese nouns can be used as adjectives with the particle な or the adjectival phrase 的な added). The electronic dictionary I use does lookup by phonetic entry (using roman letters though it has a kana entry option as well, though most Japanese people seem to use the roman letters, too). The first entry for “kanbu” is not the word I was looking for, but the homophone 患部 meaning “diseased part”. Great fun for puns, methinks.

Apologies if the Japanese characters don’t get transferred to LJ properly.

I hit another personal best in the pool today. Not bad for a guy with a hole in his leg. I did 50 lengths of a 25m pool using two lanes in 25 minutes and 45 seconds. My previous best was 26 minutes 38 seconds in a single lane. I’m pretty sure that changing lanes slows me down a tad (over 50 lengths even half a second per length adds 25 seconds) so I’m interested what I can manage when I’m next in one lane. This is also a best at the Ryogoku pool. The previous best was in the Kinshicho pool. In the Ryogoku pool they usually have two lanes set up for serious swimming, each one being fo an inner (quick) and outer (slow) half-lane. When there’s a class (they do young kids swimming classes, adult/elder exercise and swimming classes) or a school swimming club in, they restrict it to one lan. Kinshicho alwyas have at least two lanes allocated to serious swimming, sometimes up to four. In general these are all back and forth half lanes, though sometimes one side of the pool is set for one pair marked for “outer overtaking” (the Ryogoku concept is better for that one, I think). When I first started using the Kinshicho pool when it opened I always seemed to be slowed in there. I’m not sure if it was the extra walk and stairs (at the station and in the gym building) though I suspect it’s that the water/air temperature in that pool was a touch higher. They seem to have dropped the air and water temperature in there and that seems to help with my swimming speed. Or maybe I was just levelling up anyway and it’s coincidence that I seem to be faster at Kinshicho than even in one lane at Ryogoku. If it’s two lanes tomorrow at Ryogoku, then it will be one lane in Kinshicho on Tuesday anyway. I’ve had a dream of getting down to 25 minutes for fifty lengths, but wasn’t sure i could do it. It’s down to technique as much as anything at this point. I noticed that I had a “hitch” in my crawl style just after my hand enters the water and worked yesterday and today to kep a smoother action. It seem to have worked. I do alternate lengths crawl and breaststroke to work out different muscles.

Yesterday I took $DAUGHTER to Kinshicho Park. She reall enjoys the fountain (with sideshows) and the playground in there. It’s all new, rebuilt in the last two years. On the pedestrian way in nearest the train station there are 15 inch high removable bollards. I know exactly how high they are because there’s a hole in the skin on my shin 15 inches up where I walked into one of them. It’s hard to see down there them when carrying a toddler on your front and you’re paying attention to elders with walking frames, kids and adults on bikes and other parents with pushchairs.

Ouch.

Fascinating article in the Atlantic magazine showing pictures from the only official photographer in the Manhattan Project’s secret city.

It’s somewhat ironic that Japan’s National Institute of Informatics requires paper submission of job applications. So, ten page application form, three copies of three papers (ranging from eight to 23 pages), covering letter and trwo references hand-submitted (their offices are five minutes walk from my current workplace, so I figured it was better to drop it of in person than run any risk with the post. I’m told they get 150 applicants per year for the one or two posts they appoint, so this is a long shot.

So, here I am again in the lounge at Narita airport. I spend far too much of my life in places like this and in this lounge particularly. Still, at least I’ve got access to the lounge. The thing I find about having to fly economy but having status is that access to the business lounge does reduce the stress of travel. It’s not the free drinks and snacks (my diet goes out of the window when I fly anyway so the snacks aren’t good for me) but the more comfortable chairs are nice. What’s nicest though is that they’re much quieter than waiting in the general concourse. Plus they usually have free WiFi. The one here wants my name and email address, but doesn’t check it so they get a fake one.

I was up about ten minutes before my alarm this morning so made an earlier train. The first Skyliner of the day, actually. That is only about fifteen minutes before the second one. I found out why when I got to Narita and had to wait in a queue for Security. Not unusual, but this queue was for the security check to open at all (it opened at 07:30 and I was in the queue at 07:25). I must remember that for future early flights. Not much point getting here before 07:20 at the earliest.

Security and immigration (sic – it’s really emigration but they still call it immigration) were as easy as they ever are in these days of security theatre and then I headed here to the lounge. There were only a couple of people here ahead of me and they were already ensconced in their seats with coffees or whatever. Just as I had dropped my bags by a seat with power nearby and was heading towards the coffee machines, one of them starting spurting water onto the floor from two nozzles in a steady stream. I was nowhere near. There were no staff in sight so I popped out to the reception desk to let them know about this. Unfortunately the English of the woman on the desk wasn’t good enough to understand, nor was my Japanese good enough at this time of the morning, so I just had to tell her there was a serious problem and to please come and see.

They got it sorted out without too much trouble. I’m just glad I wasn’t standing in front of the machine when it started spurting out.

Next stop, Frankfurt, then Tuebingen via Stuttgart on the train.

There’s a typhoon comng through Tokyo just now. It’s 23:30 and the wind is really picking up. It’s going to be tough to get to sleep with this noise which is a shame because I wanted to get an earlier night than before. Oh well, coming through overnight means les disruption to things like trains. I just hope it sticks to timetable and is really gone by tomorrow morning. I have an early flight out to Germany on Thursday and if there’s significant disruption to schedules on Wednesday there may be knock-on effects on Thursday. I got delayed by 16 hours (luckily at home nt at the airport) last year due to a typhoon and have twice been caught on Shinkansen trains (each time for about 5 hours) by them.

The people I fel sorriest for are those in the Tohoku area still in temporary accomodations from last year’s earthquake. Yes, there are still significant numbers in that kind of situation. While not as bad as last year’s season when a couple made direct landfall in Tohoku (this one mad landfall just south of Nagoya so will have spent the worst of its Fury on Shizuoka, Tokyo and Chiba before hitting Tohoku) it must still be adding more misery on top of a hard life up there.