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Mike,

Today I made a great discovery – the observatory has guest bikes for anyone to take out. So tomorrow (Sunday) I’m going to ride to the history museum in Nobeyama, and see the sights of the nearby tourist towns. I walked about 5 or 6 km today, mostly on bike trails, and watched the winds whip up soil from the plowed fields nearby. The locals ought to leave the stubble like most American farmers seem to since the great Dust Bowl of the 30’s. But here we are in a deep valley hemmed in by mountains – unlike the Great Plains – so the soil probably just gets blown from farm to farm instead of into the Atlantic.

There were also quite a few dust devils over the farms. I haven’t seen any of those before except in western deserts. I didn’t get a picture of one today, because I was on a quest for camera batteries, but now, thanks to the Nobeyama Co-op store (Domo arigato gosiemas) my camera is re-empowered. Maybe tomorrow I can get a dust-devil photo without being swept up in one like Dorothy.

Shamaru/rakkity

Mike,

Here are two pictures of where my fingers are doing their pecking these days. The first is my workspace, where you can see my laptop sitting next to a keyboard and the corner of a monitor “pcheliog2” (which is currently crunching away on a project). Look closely at the laptop screen and you might recognize someone drinking an Old Fashioned.
The 2nd picture shows the bane of my existence, the Japanese keyboard–it’s about half katakana and half english. The upper line of keys has different locations for “&”,”‘”, etc. In fact almost all of the symbol keys are mispositioned for american fingers. And the space key is shorter to accomodate more katakana keys. What a mess! No touch typing on this baby, for sure. When I set up my password, which ends in &&, for this computer network, I didn’t realize I’d need to log in on another workstation to copy files over, and that that workstation has an american keyboard. My password didn’t work on it because the & is over the 7 (where it’s ‘sposed to be). The only cure was to change passwords, and let the new one propagate through the network.
If you think the Japanese keyboard is an accident waiting to happen, you should see the Japanese Mozilla browser. It’s an accident in progress. I’ll try to send a picture of that one later.

Shamaru (alias rakkity)

Mike,

I’m losing track of what I’ve sent you and what I haven’t. So here are all the URLs of Japan stuff:

The dorm room I’m living in.
Shots of the observatory and mountains.
I’ve learned how to say Schmahl in Japanese.

In the last few days I’ve written a lot of emails to P,B,&K which I should collect together. Since I have internet access in my room I can do that anytime.

How’s the hand? Why not a story on the blog? Or is it too embarrassing?

Ed (rakkity)