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About meArchives for April, 2004
New address
We’re surrounded by boxes. My desk is nice and empty and soon it will be time to start breaking down the partitions between our desks and such . . . Since my massive (ha!) readership here might want this information, and also so I know where to find it should I need it later, here’s the new contact info for the company:
Japan Echo Inc.
2F, Nippon Press Center Building
2-2-1 Uchisaiwai-cho
Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 100-0011
JAPAN
Tel: +81-3-3519-3514
Fax: +81-3-3519-3519
My mail address is the same as before: durfee@japanecho.co.jp.
Free stuff
Looks like I’ll be taking home a 17″ monitor from the office. It’s a CRT, and I don’t know for sure how I will get it back home (taxi-train-taxi, most likely), but it’s much nicer than the 15″ hunk of junk I am using now.
That one is on its last legs. It likes to make the visible screen narrower and narrower, showing me acres of back on either side of the screen, just before it goes POP and disappears into a singularity, thus showing me the end of the universe. So it’s a nice piece of equipment in that it helps me ponder the eventual fate of all creation but I can’t say it does much for my productivity in the meantime.
There is a 17″ LCD monitor with my name on it at the office. Looks good, and I was actually hoping to use both of these monitors at once, but I poked around online and found that the video card in the machine I’m using here isn’t powerful enough to drive two screens at once. And while I would have been willing to spend a couple thousand yen on a DVI-to-VGA adapter to get more screen real estate, I don’t think I will be springing for a ¥20,000+ video card to do that. Heck, I already did that at home.
Free stuff . . . I have some of it to give away, come to think of it. There’s an old PowerComputing Mac clone that needs a home. It comes with a 2GB hard drive, 192MB of RAM, and OS 8, or 8.5, or 9–I have the CDs for all of those. If anyone out there reads this and wants a rather underpowered toy to play with please let me know!
Other freebies: a PowerBook 150 (old, old, old, with a trackball and a black and white screen); a dishwasher (a gift from a coworker that doesn’t fit in our kitchen); some skis and boots (28.5cm blue and yellow Salomon boots, 208cm red Elan GS skis with Tyrolia bindings). I want this stuff out of my room so I can put this big monitor in there.
Any takers? Helloooooo helloooooooo . . .
Monday Bleargh
New look for this page: I went shopping over at the MT templates page and picked out this “Rusty” style. I might play with color combinations later on, when I have time . . .
But there isn’t too much time for that. The office shelves are getting empty now, and we’re left with just about a month’s worth of newspapers and the dictionaries on our own desks. I have a pile of my own personal books I’ve been meaning to take home, and today I have a backpack to do just that. They look so heavy, though . . . Should I just stick them in a box and ship them to my desk at the new office? Hmm.
I’m not too sure if I’m busy or not. There are some assignments on my desk that have been here for a while but none of them are of the particularly urgent sort. I have to read through this presentation that a police official made at some sort of gathering in Berkeley and decide what it needs (beyond heavy editing to make it real English) to whip it into shape for publication in Japan Echo. So far I’ve come up with things like “an introduction” and “a point.” But perhaps it doesn’t really need one of those after all.
Speaking of our pubs, we just got copies of the very last issue of Japan Review. It’s too bad this one is coming to an end; the JIIA was a good client, most of the time, in terms of letting us do our “professional English output” thing without trying to muck about with our translation and editing choices, and the material itself was often interesting.
Not much to say, really. I need to read this article and I need to clean up my desk and I need to stop posting on this weblog, even though I have at long last brought it back to life and made it sit up and roll over and all those neat tricks. More later.
Is this thing on?
All right, I think I finally figured out the paths on the server . . . If this entry doesn’t show up I am going to shriek like a person who doesn’t understand how to install things on a remote Linux server. Which I, uh, am.
I’ve been busy with work. And other work at home. And teaching work. There’s a new page up right over here for my Simul students. A new design for a new term . . . let me know if you like it.
I have to get to work on the Enchante site redesign too. It’ll be a similar shape to that class info page–one big column of stuff centered on the page–but nice and subdued, filled with pictures and colors that are guaranteed to make you want to go to Yotsuya and eat.
Made it back
I use a hosting company called Racknine. This firm recently moved all their customers to new servers (faster, with more memory) and a different flavor of Linux. It messed things up here for a while, but I am finally back into this blog software and able to post again . . .
There are some pictures up from a recent trip to a Korean joint in Yurakucho with a gang from the Science Museum. The beer was cold and the food spicy and full of garlic. I loved it; my wife wasn’t so happy with the scents I brought home, though. Oops.
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