Dave Brown

Two days ago, I wiped out on my motorbike and apart from a slightly twisted ankle (which is already much better), I figured I hadn’t hurt anything much.

Today, I feel like I took my 40km-each-way commute to work by rowboat. My arms are killing me.

I was toddling along on Yamate-Dori tonight next to the cars, just sort of making my way along slowly, when suddenly a guy on another bike pulled out right in front of me.

Emergency stop time! Unfortunately it was raining a bit, and the road was slippery. Fortunately I managed to stop before I hit the guy.

Sideways.

Horizontally.

The guy was mortified, naturally, and very apologetic, and helped me right my bike again (which was good, because I couldn’t really do so myself since my leg was pinned underneath it). The trunk had popped open, spilling its contents all over the road, so there was a hasty pickup job to replace it all.

I twisted my ankle a bit, and my bike suffered amazingly-minor damage as well—a tiny scratch on the front mudguard and the mirror. I drove the rest of the way home pretty shaken, though.

I really do wish people would look for other bikes coming properly before trying to duck out in front of them though. All it would’ve taken would have been for him to stand up for a moment and peer over the cars to make sure nobody else was on their way.

It’s funny, when things are going okay for me, I don’t have anything to write about. No complaints about how things could be better, no wry observations, nothing like that.

I find myself, as Facebook calls it, “in a relationship”. Which is as good a description for what’s happening in my life as any. She’s very nice, with some entertainingly-spiky bits to keep me on my toes. Also, inconveniently, she lives very far away, but not as very far away as I’ve experienced in the past. On the other hand, she’s quite easily the most comfortable person to talk to I’ve ever encountered since my sister. Often it feels like we share the same mind. So we’ve already scheduled two vacations together just to see what it’s like.

Today was raining, so I decided to take the train to work instead of riding. Unfortunately the entire population of the greater Tokyo area made exactly the same decision, so the trains were crowded. This, and various other things conspired to ensure that I was in a vile mood.

After I transferred to the Yamanote line, I resolved that I wasn’t going to let the day troll me any further, and resolved that I was going to cheer myself up or die trying.

Then a very pretty girl got onto the train and positioned herself right in front of me. After a few stops (when the train had gotten sufficiently uncrowded that people could move around in it), I got up and offered her my seat. Brightened my day up immediately.

For her part, she gave me a very cute smile, and then took out her phone and started writing a text message to her friend. It started, “This weird foreigner just stood up and gave me his seat….”

I spent the rest of the train ride smirking to myself.

The halfwitted webmaster at Simon and Schuster wrote a site that doesn’t account for the browser I’m using (Opera) and told me I need to upgrade it to Safari 2 or better, Firefox 2 or better, or Internet Explorer 7 or better.

I would like to upgrade Simon and Schuster’s webmaster to Brain Switched On Or Better.

Fortunately they also included a link that I could send them email at, so I sent them an email:

To whom it concerns,

I tried to visit your web site, in hopes of maybe buying a book or two. Money, coming from me, and going to you. A normal commercial transaction, you know what I mean?

Instead your webmaster chased me off by telling me that I was using the wrong web browser. I use Opera, which is perfectly compatible with whatever Safari 2 or greater, Firefox 2 or greater, or Internet Explorer 7 or greater can handle.

Perhaps in future you could consider simply offering the web page I requested and hoping that the browser I’m using can deal with it (and making it my problem if it can’t) rather than telling me, a potential customer (with money that could have been yours, but now won’t be) to go away.

Some dude was part of a family business. The family business recently fell upon hard times, on account of how everyone has recently fallen upon hard times.

So he braced himself, and asked the Internet for help.

The Internet delivered.

Yeah, I ordered some soap from these folks myself. It’s such beautiful soap (SOAP, fer crying out loud!) and well, lately I’ve had a bit of cash to spare. I can afford to blow some of it on awesome soap.

And I’m taking an inordinate pleasure in being a part of a ridiculous Internet phenomenon that actually helps a guy (and his mom, and sister) out.

My Internet access at home:

How well do I stack up?

My local yakitori has a TV on in the corner, and it’s tuned to a cable all-music channel, which generally works very well to provide both ambient music and a fireplace-mode TV set.

This video, caught my attention. See if you can tell why I was impressed at its special effects.

(The song itself is, well, average at best. But hey, cool video.)

A good friend of mine died today. She was only 34 years old.

We had our altercations. Once, I made her so mad at me that she demolished part of her house. Oddly enough, this ultimately made us much better friends in the end.

Her husband found her in the bathtub today. She’d died—either of a massive stroke or a heart attack. I hope it was a stroke. Less painful that way. One moment you’re there, the next moment you’re not.

And to her husband? I wish him the strength to carry on. I am doing pretty badly at the loss of my friend, so I can’t imagine how he’s feeling now. I just want to give him a hug, and let him know that I care about him.

In a situation like this, everyone seems to retreat into trite, stupid cliches. I hate it, but I have no choice. My friend has lost his wife, his life partner, the light of his life, the best person he’s ever known.

My friend Amy died.

Okay, that hurts. It hurts a lot. I was shedding tears just over that.

My friend Amy—my friend Bill’s wife—died.

That was where it really hurt. Not only did I lose a friend, but my good friend lost his life partner. I lost a friend and that hurts enough. My friend, who I care about, lost his best friend ever.

I can’t properly put that into words. Maybe it’s not even possible to put that into words.

Clichéd though it is, rest in peace Amy Haskew. I loved you. Many many others did too. Bill Bradford loved you especially. While others loved you as well, the love that Bill had for you was special. So while I weep, I feel especially for my friend Bill.

[crossposted hither and yon—I’m annoyed]

This was the happy news I received from my managers a couple of weeks back! Hooray!

Naturally, as might be expected, I’ve been doing the majority of my job between the hours of 10pm and 3am, after having been roused from a sound slumber by my phone ringing.

Fsckers.

I got a GPS navigation thingy for my bike so that I don’t get lost:

Note also the considerably lower-tech navigation aid I have installed.

Just…don’t look too closely at how I mounted it.

Today, I decided that I would take an alternative route home, because the standard route has become kind of boring.

Instead of going up Yamate-Dori and then entering the expressway at Nakano-Chojabashi, which more-or-less ensures a straight-line route home; or avoiding the expressway and taking the local roads home, which ensures a highly stop-and-start journey home; I hopped onto the expressway at the entrance which was nearest to work.

That entrance means that I end up taking this labyrinthine route through the heart of Tokyo before eventually hitting the road that I go home on. I figured it would be pretty good for spending some extra time on the highway, the Tokyo roads being as ludicrously congested as they are.

Well, I got home a mere five minutes later than I usually get home. But on the upside, I got to drive through some awesome scenery. Expressways going right between buildings, lovely vistas of skyscrapers going off into the distance. It felt like I was playing a video game.

I was really tired when I got home as a result of all of that merging and splitting and merging and blasting through jams and merging and whatnot, but it turns out that taking the scenic route home is very therapeutic.

I think that the route I took to work was nicer, though. Instead of my normal all-Tokyo-expressway route, I went on the Tohoku expressway into Tokyo. The Tohoku is, like most national expressways, designed to be as pleasant as an expressway can be. Lots of plants on the side of the road, for example.

Even when I got onto the Tokyo expressway system, I wound up going across a mighty bridge with a beautiful view of the city around me. It made a very pleasant change from my normal commute. I think I shall endeavor to do that route more often.

The other day I was feeling in the mood for some relaxing dancy kind of music. I remembered playing Lumines, and the very last song in its time challenge mode: Lights by Eri Nobuchika

That was exactly the sort of music I was in the mood for—a sort of cross between Robert Miles and Massive Attack, with a vocalist with a beautiful warm, rich voice. So I popped onto the trust iTunes Store, and lo and behold, in the New Releases section was Eri Nobuchika’s latest, Hands.

That made the decision pretty easy for me, and I bought it right there. This whole iTunes thing is, I’m guessing, going to be pretty dangerous for my bank account. Apple really got it right—it’s much easier to buy music on iTunes than to pirate it. What I hadn’t noticed was that it wasn’t released on Sony Records—it was released on an independent label, Daiki Sound.

I also didn’t immediately register that in the “if you like this, you might also like” section, it recommended UA and Norah Jones. I was to be reminded of this when I listened to the album, though.

Instead of the techno-electronica that I was expecting to hear, Hands is full of organic, acoustic sounds—acoustic guitars, pianos, real drums, hardly any electronics at all. There isn’t anything dancelike until the complex breakbeat rhythm in the fourth song, “calling you”. The most danceable song in the lot is “Steps”, and it’s danceable by virtue of its Latinate rhumbaness rather than because it’s something you’d hear in a club.

But I have to admit, her voice suits a jazzy style much more than it does electronic. I felt initially a bit annoyed that the music was so dramatically different from what I’d been expected, but then I got over it and realized that I like the album nonetheless. Her casual, warm voice goes extremely well with the more organic sound. I get the feeling that the new sound reflects her taking more control of her music, and I approve of that.

The new sound works out well for her. I really like this little album, all thirty-five-and-a-half minutes of it. I think that others would like it too, and I hope it’s successful for her.

You can tell:

05:21 < dagbrown> Ack, slept in.

One of those days, yup.

And I am endlessly indebted to a member of my Facebook friends list for discovering this for me.

My new favorite piece of music is Marc-André Hamelin’s Circus Galop.

It was originally written for two player pianos, not one. Note that it was written for player pianos—which means that mere human limitations become abruptly irrelevant. The video I linked to, though, boils the two-piano-player score down to a single player piano. Making it that much more insane.

But it’s made me think of music in a new way—you can do so much more with your music once you throw the pesky human out.

(As a counterpoint, to demonstrate why a human is a good thing to have in your music, here is the best performance of the latter two movements of the Moonlight Symphony I’ve ever seen)

I found a curious memo shoved into my doorframe today from the folks that I sublet my apartment from.

It was printed in a friendly blue color, in a sort of Japanese equivalent of MS Comic Sans.

It started out with how the company had been in business for a number of years and were quite proud of this fact. Skipping ahead a few paragraphs, though, I found the meat of the memo.

If it’s not too much trouble for the honored guests of this company, could they try to make sure their rent payments for the next month are made before the 25th of the previous month.

The 25th of the month is traditional payday in Japan. I wonder if they’re having trouble making payroll these days.

It’s not too much trouble for me, since I get paid on the 5th: paying the rent a week earlier will just mean I have a bit more reserves left before I have to dip into my savings account (I was a good boy this month and didn’t have to do so). But it’s still interesting.

Lane splitting is when a smaller vehicle fit itself between two bigger vehicles, essentially using the gap between the lanes as another lane.

I saw a lovely example of lane splitting yesterday on Yamate-Dori, a major artery in Tokyo, and famous for its congestion.

In the left lane, there was a bus that’d stopped to pick up passengers. And in the right lane, there was a taxi taking a fare to wherever the fare wanted to go.

And lane splitting between them…was another taxi.

Taxi drivers are crazy.

I’ve given this album at least the requisite three listenings to be able to give it a fair review now. So I think I can mention it now.

The thing that jumps out about it is that it’s a very-clearly transitional album. Vienna Teng is looking to explore new kinds of music, but she’s still anxious about preserving her previous style of music. Which is reasonable—she has made some beautiful music in the past, and there’s no reason to abandon that. So she’s obviously torn between abandoning her previous musical style and exploring new styles.

It is, of course, possible to embrace new styles of music without abandoning the previous styles of music. Radiohead, for example, seems to have realized that they don’t have to completely discard their previous musical style in order to explore new music. But while they were exploring new music, they completely left their old style behind—I’m assuming they did this because the new styles had enough appeal on their own that it was worth dropping their old styles.

Vienna Teng, though, is reluctant to leave her old musical style behind while exploring new styles. This isn’t a bad thing. Inland Territory is a very good album. But, while it’s very good, it is still an album that is between her “classic” style and a new style of music that she’s attempting to forge. One of the things that makes this album enjoyable to listen to for me is the conflict between her old music, as seen in her previous three albums, and the new music that she’s attempting to create.

I get the impression that when she switched to a new record company, Zoe Records gave her a better budget than she’d had before. She obviously spent part of the budget on more musicians, but I get the impression that she also spent a good part of the budget on piano lessons—her piano playing is much more interesting than it’s been on her previous records. I applaud this use of her budget—she was a good piano player before, but she’s noticeably better on this album.

I think it’s a very courageous move on her new record label’s part to let her put out an obviously-transitional album as her first release. On the other hand, they might well see it as a stamping of their brand on her sound. Either way, it’s an album that makes me look forward to what she comes up with in the future.

I wonder how well this would go down at the University of Waterloo.

I wonder how entertaining the reaction would be if james_nicoll were to link to it.

Today I encountered someone who is more-or-less the definition of a squid.

He was riding a pretty sweet-looking Triumph bike. It had a lovely engine note. His upper body was protected from accidents by a thin sweater, all the better to keep out some of the cold. His lower body was protected by a very hardy-looking pair of cargo shorts. His feet were guarded from whatever mishaps might have befallen them by a really hardy-looking pair of Crocs, and his head was doubly-protected, both by a baseball cap to protect his eyes from the glare of the sun, and a minimal brainpan just in case someone dropped a small pebble on his head. The brainpan was carefully not strapped on, so that if he did get sent flying from his bike, at least his helmet would be thrown clear so he could use it again.