Sajjad's May Blog

One of his pieces hanging in our lounge:

I'll get to see more once I manage to visit him.

Posted at 01:25am Comments(2) | ¶

Strange how things turn out. I was watching "Highlander - The Series" a few weeks ago and thought how cool it would be to own a sword and learn to use it. My brother bought this from a local fair.

Its not very sharp and quite light, just right for practice. One thing that does bother me is the hilt which is made out of plastic, but they probably have other options available. You can get order-made ones too so I'm thinking of getting a Katana or even a clone of Andurien.

Posted at 05:48am Comments | ¶

Attempted to eat my first boiled egg here yesterday, but gave up halfway through. Firstly it was only slightly larger than some people's brains. Secondly, the yolk was white.

And finally, it tasted like it had just come out of a nuclear test site. It was either laid by a dwarf albino chicken or they've figured out how to create eggs from depleted uranium. This delicacy is only available in my area so I hope to eat real eggs tomorrow.

Posted at 17:09pm Comments | ¶

Posted at 16:07pm Comments | ¶

Tomorrow, I'll be leaving for Lahore, the historic city about 300km south of here (no not on that small bike) where my brother is studying. I hope he isn't reading since its meant to be a surprise. I heard the city generally has better connectivity than the capital. We'll see.

Lahore is bound to be a few degrees hotter and quite a bit more humid due to the huge river next to it (a tributary of Indus). I still miss snow.

Posted at 23:11pm Comments(2) | ¶

The temperature is about 39 degrees Celsius in Islamabad and apart from a few drops this morning, there is no sign of rain or cloud. I heard it can and will easily go above 40 during May. This is the same city that cools down to below zero during winter.

The good thing is that the weather is very dry which makes it bearable, though I'm having trouble believing you can ever drink enough water here. Even 15-20 glasses (yes I'm counting) of water a day is not enough. The bright sunny skies make for great riding, but force you to make frequent watering stops and I already have quite a tan, first one in 5 years I think. The heat isn't that bad overall, but I really miss snow.

Posted at 22:54pm Comments | ¶

Today, I took our trusty bike out for a ride for the first time. It has been about 5 years since I rode one and the dry, sunny weather made the ride even better. The bike is quite underpowered at 50cc, but very economical. I heard that on average you only need to fill the tank once in 2 weeks. Cool.

Posted at 00:37am Comments | ¶

I just met an old friend today who is now working for a software company here. Babar had some encouraging news about the state of connectivity and the software industry in general. Right now, the only internet access I have is through these dialup cards which you scratch to find out the login ID and password. They seem quite reliable, except that you may get disconnected once in 2 hours or so or when the card expires.

But there are better solutions, though much more expensive than Japan. A 64kbps dedicated DSL line costs around Rs.6,000-7,000 (~13,000 yen) while something like 1Mbps is at least 4 times that. I'll have to check if these include a static global IP.

Posted at 00:36am Comments | ¶

We were given masks and gloves on the flight before the 1 hour transit in Beijing. I put both on, but decided the gloves were too much of a hassle and off they came soon after take-off with a few dozen Chinese travellers onboard. The mask came off sometime before we reached Islamabad and right after I read Frankl's quote of Nietzsche "Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich starker" (That which does not kill me, makes me stronger). Just then, the Chinese guy sitting across the aisle from me coughed.

Posted at 02:24am Comments(7) | ¶

No breakfast today until around 11am after I reached Narita airport. Not that I felt like eating after the way the Japanese immigration treated me and others leaving Japan. I was so relieved to finally get on the plane and get my phone back, though it was pretty much useless then due to the restriction on their use onboard the aircraft.

PIA(Pakistan International Airline)'s service seems to have gotten much better. The crew was really nice and friendly and the food was pretty good, though the sound system still needs a lot of work.

Posted at 02:22am Comments | ¶

Thank you Stuart for bringing me .the Matrix and Philosophy. and .Dive into Python.. The former is just what I need at a time like this, but I.ll complete .Man.s Search for Meaning. that Tim got me first. Dan and Mika, great to see you again. Michaela, Saadia and David, I don.t know what to say except that I can.t thank you enough for arranging and bringing me my stuff. Rey, Steve and Kimpara-san, sorry I couldn.t receive all the goodies you got for me, but it.s the thought that counts.

Posted at 02:19am Comments | ¶

Quite a few people came to meet me today including my Brazilian wife who I had never seen or heard of before. What are the odds of two "Ahm[ea]d Sajjad"s, of Pakistani origin, being here at the same time? Many thanks to Annarita, Noriko, Michaela, David and Fujie for visiting me. You don't know how much that meant to me. I'm sorry if I might have seemed unappreciative. Its not easy to express joy when you are in such a difficult position.

Wish I had internet access in here. It can get quite boring just watching the matri.err..urm.Japanese TV and practicing martial arts. I'll probably get some books tomorrow so at least my last few days in Japan will pass more smoothly. Right now, I'll just continue with my "Pen Blogging".

Posted at 02:17am Comments | ¶

I.m in a relatively large tatami room with two Chinese guys and a younger and talkative Morgan Freeman from Nigeria (Freeman, Fishburne, what.s the difference?). I know Kung Fu. Urm, just a little bit.

Posted at 02:14am Comments | ¶

They came in the morning. Though they didn't have dark glasses the beefy "agents" looked intimidating enough in their awful suits. They plunked down a really thick file with my name on it and had a little talk about my visa. It seems that I.ve been living in a dream world. My consultant was wrong when he said I was ok till next month.Then I set about hurriedly gathering my important belongings.

At their brand new office in Shinagawa, I was asked to sign a document stating something along the lines of: .I had misunderstood my visa status and wished to leave Japan as soon as possible of my own will.. I off course refused to sign it without consulting my lawyer or someone else first. Fortunately I was allowed my @^%$!#@8 phone call (quite a few calls in fact) and they were patient enough to wait until he got there.

The consultant arrived after about 3 hours to tell me I should sign the document and that arguing my case was pointless. I don.t really trust him anymore since he was part of the problem in the first place, but not having any other choice, I signed. My keitai was taken away from me. Now that hurt.

Posted at 02:07am Comments(25) | ¶

I think I have become insensitive to minor tremors, but I felt these ones. The first was one of the biggest since I've been here, but the weird thing was that it started raining the moment the earthquake stopped.

This wasn't the "big one" that is supposed to hit Tokyo sometime soon, but I wish that that was it. Reminds me, I should run through my earthquake survival plan again.

Posted at 01:27am Comments | ¶

It's been about a week since my building got this. Now we have a few dozen extra channels to watch at any time of the day. There are only a few worth watching, but thats better than the normal Japanese TV.

There are a couple of good movie channels, though most of the movies are repeated for a while. The others include the Discovery channel, National Geographic and CNN. Sadly, BBC is missing from the package we have.

Posted at 00:06am Comments | ¶

From David (yesterday's birthday boy):

And AkuAku:

I should change my error pages too. Have got some interesting ideas.

Posted at 20:11pm Comments(2) | ¶

After a whole week of dry, sunny weather, it has started raining. Its also quite humid and stuffy right now. Hope the weekend is better.

Posted at 14:26pm Comments | ¶

Read this entry on Ian's blog about how bad the walks are in Japan. On this topic, I have lots to complain about so here it goes.

One of the first things that really frustrated me here was how slow people walk. Around that time, there was even a "Rant and Rave" in Metropolis magazine ("Tokyo Classified" back then) about how the pace defies all laws of physics. For a bustling city like Tokyo, you would expect its citizens to be more active and in a hurry to get to their destination. Instead, you see salarymen, students and other professinals competing for the slowest walk. If only there was a minimum speed limit for pedestrians.

The lag is even more apparent now that I spend most of my commuting time on wheels. I ride on the road whenever I can, but sometimes am forced onto the sidewalk where the trouble starts. Part of the problem is how unaware of their surroundings the crawlers are. Approachers are the worst since they just refuse to look more than an inch ahead or as Dan would put it, are too busy receiving visual signals on their embedded v-chips. This morning, I almost managed to ram two people coming side by side in a very narrow part of the sidewalk, but slipped through somehow. Maybe next time.

Others, you just ride behind until they notice your ringing and gear clicking and jump out of the way in a panic. On the bright side, at least now I've learnt to ride through the Shibuya crowds at more than 30km/h and slow down to less than 1km/h and even stand still for a few seconds when I have to.

Posted at 16:18pm Comments(3) | ¶

Until recently, the only RSS aggregator that I could run on Linux was Java-based RssView. Last week, I found a few more, of which Straw looked the best. Partly because it is written in my favorite language (Python) and mostly because of its nice features.

It has some installation quirks which is why it took so long to install, but now I have an RSS reader that can handle HTML and looks much better (to see how I managed to install it, check my tech) page.

Definitely worth a try, but if you happen to find any more good ones, let me know.

Posted at 01:28am Comments(1) | ¶

Last Monday, I finally got around to reading the current issue of Linux Journal (thank you Stuart) which convinced me to give the development kernel a try. Compiled and installed version 2.5.68 on my home machine (still Redhat 7.2) which went smoother than I had imagined. It feels blazingly faster than the 2.4.20 kernel I normally use and folding@HOME runs much better. Once stable, the 2.5 series will become 2.6 or 3.0 depending on Linus's decision.

Networking changes seem to have eliminated the problems I was having with the fiber connection. That is a bit strange, since the troubles were on the ISPs side and other users were still facing them. Either all of them were solved yesterday or I was just lucky. If none of those, then this really is a superior OS. And I haven't even touched the new audio features yet which are supposedly a major improvement.

There are still a few big problems though such as X crashing (NVidia driver related) and USB keyboard not working. Modules couldn't be loaded at first because of an older modutils package, the update of which requires glibc 2.3. The installed version was 2.2 so that is a major change to the system. After some thought and a few searches on Google, I decided to go ahead and risk the update using RedHat's Rawhide repository which seems to have turned out ok.

I hope to solve the rest of the problems soon and will post an update later. In the meantime, I'm content to run folding@HOME on the console and GUI apps through VNC and reboot to the 2.4 kernel for anything requiring GLX.

You can get the kernel source here: http://www.kernel.org/

Posted at 16:01pm Comments | ¶

This is just hilarious:

"Former Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf is attempting to surrender to US forces ...., but .... the Americans have refused to arrest Mr Sahhaf"

He is starting to remind me of the foul tempered bus driver from Southpark, Mrs.Crabtree, who becomes a star because of her "act".

Posted at 12:00pm Comments | ¶

Today (Tuesday 29th) was the first official holiday of the Japanese "Golden Week". This is almost the only time of the year in Japan (well at least Tokyo) when the weather is neither cold and rainy, nor hot and humid, i.e. very nice. There are usually 3 holidays in the week, but this year, the 2nd holiday will fall on a Saturday.

Since I live quite close to Yoyogi park, I went there with some friends, instead of trying to fix my shiny new kernel (more on that later).

We stayed there until evening playing football ("soccer" for some of you) and various other games. It was a nice mix of foreigners and Italian speaking Japanese so got to practice a little bit of both languages.

Posted at 00:43am Comments | ¶

Things you always wanted to know about the characters of Lord of the Rings, but were afraid to ask:

Reminds me of the Secret Diary of Adrian Mole. Just read Legolas's diary. Thank you for the link Stuart.

Posted at 14:36pm Comments | ¶

Be sure to put on your headphones (or turn on your speakers) first:

Someone commented that it is the voice of Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, the Iraqi information minister, but to me it sounds more like a villain from a bad Indian movie.

Posted at 21:37pm Comments | ¶

Posted on Slashdot last weekend. The article is by the author of Taking The Red Pill: Science, Philosophy, and Religion in The Matrix and is quite informative:

He addresses issues such as "Can humans really be an energy source? How does the Matrix know what fried chicken taste like? Why do the rebels have to enter and exit the Matrix via a telephone system (that doesn't actually exist)?"

Posted at 14:15pm Comments(2) | ¶