Pikatto

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One Hand Clapping wishes you a safe and happy holidays.

This was the train I took to Tenjin today. It even played Christmas songs when it arrived at the last stop.

I finished reading Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson, some time ago but just hadn’t gotten around to posting my thoughts. I really enjoyed the book, but on the whole not as much as I enjoyed Cryptonomicon. This may be because Quicksilver is just the first book of the Baroque Cycle, and as a consequence it was not as self contained as Cryptonomicon was. It was a little harder for me to really get into it, but I would still highly recommend it .

I wish I had had my phone or camera with me, because I just saw something that was absolutely hilarious. I was ouot on the balcony and saw a tow truck driving by. Nothing strange about that I hear you say, but wait.

The bed of the truck was filled with bicycles! That’s right bicycles were being towed! That really cracks me up, and it could only happen in Japan. I’m glad I don’t have a bike or a car so at least I don’t have to worry about that!

Nobuko and I decided that it would be nice if we could surf the net from the kotatsu during the winter. I didn’t really want to run cables all over the apartment, but had decided that we would have to because Apple’s Airport was just too expensive.

I was lucky though, and while buying some ethernet cable at Best Denki I stopped and looked at their 3rd party routers. I found a router and wireless PCI card by Buffalo for under 20,000Â¥. I quickly returned the cable and purchased the router and wi-fi card instead. I was really happy at my unexpected luck of finding a router and card within our budget. This happiness evaporated as soon as I began to set up the network. (Continued)