International dialing

Figuring out exactly how to dial a phone number in one country while in another country (particularly if neither one of them is a country with which you have much telephonic experience) can be a huge pain in the ass.

Just a few minutes ago, while making sure I was telling someone in Japan the correct way to reach my apartment line, I stumbled across this very handy website. It lets you specify a dialing and target location and very conveniently breaks down the entire dialing sequence into whatever international, national, or local dialing prefixes apply.

Windows uptime

I was just wondering how long it had been since I reset my computer (which I tend to do rarely if I can possibly avoid it) and remembered that at some point I had a simple command line utility that would tell you exactly that. After a quick search I found Uptime.exe over on the ancient Windows NT 4.0 server page.

\\MUTANTFROG has been up for: 8 day(s), 11 hour(s), 57 minute(s), 6 second(s)

“Time is precious, but truth is more precious than time”

That’s what my fortune cookie once told me. And despite being a flavorless and generally unneccessary part of my Chinese food experience, it’s right. So keep it real folks.

I turn 24 this year, and if the Chinese zodiac is any guide, when your age is a multiple of 12, you’re supposed to have an unlucky year.

So far, 2006 has been pretty good, actually. I started the year in Japan, seeing my precious Mrs. Adamu for the first time in three months (She currently lives in Thailand doing world things).

Hm, that’s all I’ve got for now. Expect some pictures of Japan among other personal posts I’ve got lined up including a trip to New York I took a few months ago to eat ramen that ended up being really crappy.

WordPress 2.0

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.0. It’s still using the same theme (for now) so nothing should look any different on the user end, but the administrator’s interface is radically different, and pretty nifty. I haven’t explored it enough to actually say what practicaly changes there have been, but it should be fun to mess around and see what it can do. If anyone finds any bugs or oddities caused by the upgrade, make sure to email me.

Mahjong

I was playing mahjong last night with some people and decided to look up the proper and complete rules on the internet. There are of course many, many variants of the game in different countries/regions, only some of which seem to be easily findable online in English. I did manage to find a good set of Japanese style rules here, and an explanation of the Taiwanese style points system here.

Supply and demand in isolated Burma

I wouldn’t be surprised if most people reading this Washington Post article didn’t make it to the end. After all, we’re so used to getting a constant stream of news on the wretched conditions of people living in some third world nation that a certain level of fatigue sets in, and economic sanctions against Burma doesn’t have the same zing as the Yellow menace of rising China, the endless Middle Eastern wars, or the delicious scandals unfolding in Washington. But for those who did make it to the end of the article, or those watching this page, there is a paragraph at the end that I would say is quite literally jaw-dropping.

The import of automobiles, for instance, is so tightly restricted by these well-connected businessmen that Burmese say a 15-year-old Japanese sedan might sell for more than 20 times its value elsewhere and the supply of mobile phones is so limited that they can cost more than $2,000.

Bombs vs. ports

Just a few days away from returning to Japan. While visiting a war museum in Charleston yesterday, I spotted these names painted on a WWII-era dive bomber:

Obviously, it’s a list of islands that the plane bombed. But I can’t help but think… if you put it in Book Antiqua with some nice photos, it could just as easily come from a cruise line brochure. Stick Honolulu on top and Yokohama on the bottom and you’ve got a nice little Hawaii-Japan trip.

(More profound blog posts coming soon, I promise. Still a little fried from cramming for my tax exam…)