a-cubed.info

So much for lemons. I think there are very limited supplies getting through and we’re not finding them, mostly. Part of the problem is that whole milk just doesn’t work (it sends my skin nuts and Tomoko is very wary of high-fat things as she doesn’t want to gain too much weight just now – an easy thing to do at present and as I know from bitter experience, it’s much easier to put it on than take it off). Our local supermarket hasn’t had any at all available since we bought 1L a few days ago and the other store we went to today in Asakusa had a modest supply, but only of full fat. (more…)

Well, milk actually (bonus point if you know where the title of this post comes from). My local supermarket had a limited supply of milk today – rationed to one 1L carton per customer. The combini where I usually get my 2% semi-skimmed milk still has no supplies (the supermarket has 3.6% and 1.5% – I bought a 1.5%). However, it does look like the supply chains are getting back in order.

Tokyo Power (Tepco/Touden) have made their rolling blackout plans more fine-grained and split the five areas up into 25. Still no reports of these blackouts happening over the full area and time predicted, but as offices get back to closer to normal operation, and people drop out of compliant disaster mode and start using power more normally (it’s bound to happen, though we’re trying to keep our usage low as I’Um sure are quite  few others) they may become more apparent. Perhaps once they happen a few times people will return to being more rigorous, though perhaps also only if they’ve personally been affected, or maybe their close relatives. Human nature.

There were three large aftershocks today plus a number of minor ones, after relative quiet yesterday. RIC (Random is Clustered – Ah, I See) as Jack Cohen once repeated to me. (more…)

The supply shortages seem to be easing, with some things becoming available again. Bread is now generally available in bakeries, though in quite limited supply at supermarkets. Meat is more available again at supermarkets and fish never really went away. Fresh tofu is limited. Milk is non-existent. Yoghurt almost so. Even soy-milk is almost unavailable, though we did find some of that today. Fresh fruit and vegetables are almost at normal availablility. Most pre-packaged drinks are limited or no supply. (more…)

So, people have been asking how things are on a regular basis, so I thought I’d give an update on the situtation here. (more…)

This morning we suddenly heard a voice speaking Japanese in the hallway of our apartment. Thinking we’d left the door unlocked (advice after a large quake is to leave an exit propped open and though we closed it when we went to bed I worried we’d not locked it. But it turned out to be coming from a speaker grill in the ceiling of the hallway, that I’d never noticed before. Who looks up when you live in an apartment so there’s a floor above, not a roof space? It was the apartment resident’s association chief requesting one rep from each floor (apartment number 1 – we’re 2) to go to a meeting in the basement meeting room.

There was a Richter 7.9 earthquake 250 miles from the Eastern coast of Japan at 14:46 Japan time today. Tomoko and I are fine. Nothing significant wrong with the apartment.

Reading this article, I noticed the Google Ads box at the bottom of the page and while three of them seemed pretty well chosen for the article (a computer security company advertising anti-DDoS services et al; a fibre optic communications service provider; a telecoms business analysis firm) the fourth seemed really quite odd: a religious site “examining” Jesus “claims to be God”. Either Google barged on its parsing of the article, or that group is paying for completely random allocations of their web presence.

In Japanese shibaraku (しばらく) means “a short while”. $WIFE just spotted and re-tweeted a Japanese message defining (a-la Uxbridge English Dictionary) the word mubaraku (むばらく — the Japanese pronunciation of Mubarak’s name). It is defined as “about thirty years”.

Here’s a message I sent to my MP Rob Wilson today, via writetothem. I encourage everyone else whose MP voted in December to raise tuition fees, to send a similar message to their MP.

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I recently ordered the new Steven Brust Vlad Taltos novel “Iorich” from Amazon.co.jp. I’ve been waiting since January 2010 for it to come out in paperback. Always annoying that long delay before a paperback, especially when they suddenly start producing hardbacks of a once a year series. I don’t like having different types in a series, particularly a long one like this and since i’ve got the rest in standard sized paperback, I’m going to continue in that vein. So, Amazon in Japan finally indicated it was due in January 2011 and I ordered it. Then they kept pushing back when it would be sent and finally they pushed it back to January 2012! WTF? Checking on Amazon.com, it turns out that Tor have now produced a trade sized paperback (8.2inches tall) which unlike my Harry Dresden books is too big even to fit on the shelf that the others are on. So, we now have the hardback appearing in January 2010, the stupid size paperback in January 2011 and the mass market sized paperback not until January 2012. A wait of two years until the ordinary paperback comes out. The book publishing industry seems to be hell bent on following the music publishing industry into screwing itself up by pissing off its regular customers. They’re insisting on DRM for ebooks, they’re not making all the older even very popular material available in ebooks (Pratchett’s Discworld isn’t all available for example) and even when they do they’ve screwed up the permissions so there isn’t a worldwide appearence (sometimes if you want it in ebook form it’s out but the only way to get it is illegitimate), and their core product is being over-squeezed in its traditional market in a way that annoys regular purchasers. Way to  destroy your own industry, guys. I don’t have an ebook reader, but if I did I’d be tempted to download one of the versions available on bittorrent. Especially since the legitimate version seems to be Nook only (that’s right, restrict your market – great way to keep your customers).