旅行の帰り

昨日、兄貴のとこから帰宅した。でも、最悪。　トランスミッションが飛んじゃって、ペンシルベニア州から牽引してもらう必要があった。　
先日、トリプルAを紹介したが、今回発見したのはターンパイクを利用するとトリプルAを利用することが出来ないそうだ。　PAターンパイクは独自のシステムで＊１１（オハイオ州なら *990 だと思う）を携帯で電話するとターンパイクが牽引車など呼んでくれるわけです。　一応、トリプルAに入会して「プラス」になっているので１００マイル牽引無料だが、ターンパイクの業者さんがこれを認めるなので家の近くのガレージに運んでもらったんだ。

これから調べるが、多分ワランティーが切れているので修理全額を払う必要があると思う。最悪。きっと＄３０００ぐらいかかると思うのだ。　このお金がどこから歳出出来るか悩む。

ということで今朝はワランティーの有効期限を調べるのだ。

Turkey Day

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.  Yes, it's a day late but that's okay.  I was busy eatin', and pulling my hammy.  Aaargh, age sucks.

But the eats were excellent!

Update: Check out the pics below. I'm still trying to get some more so we have the whole slew of pictures.

トリプルAに入ってよかった

一週間前ぐらいにトリプルA（AAA=American　Automobile　Association)に入会しました。　我が家の愛車２台とも中古車であり、いつ壊れるのが不安です。　僕は結構出張があるのでいないときにありさやエリーが何かあった時にトリプルAに電話するだけでバッテリチャージとか無料で牽引してもらえると思って入会したわけです。

ケンとジョージが予定がある場合に、向かいに行ったり、送ってあげたりしてもらう代わりにエリーは割と自由に車を使わせています。　昨夜はそうでした。ケン君が友達と映画を見に行く予定だったのでエリーが車で送ってあげていて、その後出かける予定でした。　そうしたら、映画館の駐車場で車を止めていたら、再度エンジンがかからなくなったことになりました。　エリーはバッテリーの問題かと思って、友達に電話してチャージしてまらったのですが、やはりエンジンがスタートしませんでした。

そうすると、仕方がなく僕を電話しました。　すぐにとまったところで行って状況確認しました。　そして、AAAを電話しました。 会員番号や住所を教えて、４５分以内に牽引車が来て、ガレージまで牽引してもらいました。　今はガレージからの連絡を待っていますが、昨夜はAAAを電話できると知っていたのでだいぶ安心しました。

トリプルAに入ってよかった

Case University Intiative: Gigabit to the Home

Hattip to George Nemeth.  Case announces a project to provide 1000mb/sec internet service to the community surrounding it.

The details are over at Lev Gonick's blog. They'll start with 100 households but hope to grow to 25,000.

Note, this is just the announcment of the initiative not announcement of service.  It appears that they have some review hurdles to overcome.

Regardless, this is a great initiative!  Kudos to Case.

Google Apps Account as Google Account

Wow. I discovered this morning that I can use my google app private domain account as a google account. Perhaps I am slow, but what I had been doing is associating my gmail google account with my google app account. However, today I received a google wave invite to my private domain. In the process of muddling around I discovered the ability to create a google account using the google app domain. So for example, now that my rbh at neohawk.org account is also a google account, I have a google profile, picasa account, etc. Until today, I need to use my gmail account to login, but now I can use my neohawk.org account. See below:

You can see my profile below:

This is huge. One of may largest complaints with google has been the two different logins I needed. One for my google apps, one for google accounts. Now that they are the same, I'm a happy camper. I did have to remove my neohawk.org account from my gmail google account to make this work.

Did I just not know this or is this new?

Be Afraid

Hat tip to Cleveland Scene.

I've always wondered how an something like the Roman Empire could fall. Now I know.

Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid

Blog It Forward

Like this idea. I don't think I'll be in town for it, but if you have time this a great thought to help a complete stranger.

http://www.chefswidow.com/2009/11/23/2827/

Blog it forward.

Candy and Carmel Apples

Turns out Arisa has never had candy or carmel apples. So we decided to give them a go. Pictures taken with my blackberry, hence they're not very good.

We haven't eaten them yet, but I'll update this post when we do.

Browns Lose A Thriller

The Cleveland Browns found a way to lose, 38-37, after being up 24-3 in the first quarter.  But what a game.  It was a lot of fun to watch, the first one since what, 2007? It's fun when to comparable teams play each other.  I was originally worried that it was going to be a sleeper but after the ups and downs of a football game and 75 points later that worry was unfounded.

I have to be honest, I cheered and was laughing with delight when Detroit Lions scored with zero seconds left.  And I'll tell you why.  It's not because I'm not a Browns fan, it's because I am a Browns fan.  There are multiple reasons I was cheering.  Probably the first and foremost being, as I said many moons ago, I want Mangini, and by extension Daboll, fired.  Yeah, yeah, I know.  All you football gurus out there say no, give him time.  Nevertheless, I called it back in September and I'm staying with the call to fire Mangini.

I am also aware that Randy Lerner has said he won't fire Mangini.  I understand that.  I also understand he intends to hire a "credible" football voice.  What I want to happen is that the first thing that person does is to fire Mangini. 

The game was lost due to coaching.  First off, they went conservative way too early and stayed conservative even when it became apparent that Detroit was going to keep on coming.  Run, Run, Pass, Punt.  That's Mangini's "process".  Granted, they opened up the offense much, much more this week than in any previous week, but where in the world does it come into a coach of this team to go conservative?  Idiocy.

And to add an exclamation point, we fake a field goal and get a first down just so we can....kick a field goal.  Baffling. 

Idiocy and Baffling.

After the interception to stop a Detroit drive with 3 minutes left one would think you'd want to get a first down.  Why does this coaching staff continue to turn to Jamal Lewis.  He's lucky if he gets 4 yard, mostly 2, sometimes 3 yards.  And yet when it was critical to run the clock out we go to him.  Result was a punt, setting up Detroit's stunning come from behind victory.  Where was Jennings?  In really his first game he was averaged 3.6 yards per carry (Jamal averaged 3.1), with which you get a first down (3.6 x 3 = ???).

Another reason: Poteat was in the game on the final play.  Why?  What has he done to show he should see any time inside the white lines?  Inexplicable pass interference with zero seconds on the clock, giving the Lions one last opportunity from what, the 5 yard line.  At a minimum, player selection is questionable. 

Then we see Mangini arguing the timeout call.  I questioned it too.  I thought teams only got three timeouts per half, and subsequently thought the Lions had inadvertently gotten an extra time out.  I was straightened out by some guy on twitter and confirmed on that oh so infallible wikipedia:  After the 2 minute warning a team gets one injury timeout with no penalty, but 10 seconds run off the clock.  All subsequent injury timeouts incur the 10 second run off the clock and a 5 yard penalty.  So I didn't know this.  My Bad.

But the Head Coach of the Cleveland Browns also didn't know it and argued quite vociferously with the referee.  Meaning he didn't know the 2 minute injury timeout rule.

Idiocy, Baffling, Ignorant

To add insult to injury, he then calls timeout allowing the Lions to re-insert Stafford, the rookie quarterback that had already burned our defense for 4 touchdowns.  The result?  The Cleveland Browns allowed Stafford to become the first rookie quarterback in the history of the NFL to throw for 5 touchdowns in a game.

Idiocy, Baffling, Ignorant, Stupid

And overall, where did the defense go?  The Lions first play from the line of scrimmage went 64 yards or some such.  How can that happen?  It appears the Browns D was completely unprepared for the Lions.  Where was all the progress we thought we were seeing?

Idiocy, Baffling, Ignorant, Stupid, and Inconsistent.

Overall, just poor, poor coaching.  Why on earth would you leave this team in Mangini's hands.  So my hope is that whomever Lerner hires  that individual sees that we lost to arguably the worst team in football over the last two years.  And the quickly fires Magini, since these last couple of months have been wasted when we could have really been rebuilding and preparing for the future.

Granted some of the blame needs to fall squarely on the shoulders of the Browns players.  You can't drop passes that hit you on the hands.  You just can't.  You can't cause pass interference  with no time on the clock left.  But overall, this loss falls more on the coaches than the players in my mind.  I got the sense the better coached team won.

It was  fun game to watch though.    It really was.  What I realized at that point is that at this point I'm more interested in a fun, competitive game, win or loss for the Browns, with a great game ending comeback game than anything else this football season.  And that's a sad state of affairs. 

New URL

You may or may not have noticed but this blog is now available at a new url: http://robataka.neohawk.org.  Please note that if you are seeing this post, you are at the new url.
If your not seeing this post, well there's really nothing to say since you're not reading this.  In other words, the dns is still updating.

This is part of getting ready to move everything off of my current server to something else.  The neohawk.org blog will come here, though it is still currently live.
So if you following along with an RSS reader, you'll need to update it.  I'll post again when I take the other one down.

Bonenkai

I realized this year that I hadn't been to a bonenkai in ages. Of course here in the U.S. December is a month filled with "Holiday" parties. Well in Japan they're called bonenkai. Literally "forget the year gathering". Either way, it generally involves drinking, conversation, and general fun with friends, colleagues and clients.

So I'm happy to report that JANO is supporting a spontaneous "Bonenkai". It'll be on Saturday, December 19th from 6PM to 9PM.  And what good bonenkai wouldn't have Karaoke?
So the 1st Annual Bonenkai will be held at Karaoke Station

Please RSVP by 12/10/2009

Below is the map to Karaoke Station:

View Larger Map

I must say that I'm looking forward to it.

Pet Peeves

One of my favorite sites was pet peeves, but unfortunately I lost the link to it.  It was just a list of pet peeves submitted by various people, that you could vote on.

I really enjoyed reading some of them.  Well recently, my sister posted on her blog, and at the end of it she asked the question

P.S. Oh and...is it really that hard to turn on one's turn signal when changing lanes? :)

This reminded me driving pet peeves of mine that I wanted to post on that site.  

1. People who tailgate me
2. People who force me to tailgate them

Arrrggghhh

Test: Motherhood as Ministry: a 40 Day Revelation: Vision

Elly and Ken Inducted into National Honor Society

Today, Arisa, Grandma Barbara, and I attended the Mayfield High School's National Honor Society Induction Ceremony. Both Elly and Ken were inducted. The pictures aren't great, but here they are.

One of Ken's friends asked me how Ken got in. I answered truthfullly....we had to pay.

checking out seed funding in NEO

Cavs - Warriors...

I'm missing the Cavs - Warriors game, but from the box score it looks like neither team understands what the word "defense" means.

Highlights from NBA.com

In Process

I have migrated all my posts from www.neohawk.org/blog to blogger.  Still a few more things to do before I make the change.
Yes, I have decided to go with Google, bad validation and all.  It's just to easy to post to it compared to byteflow.  Yes, I could figure out how to enhance Byteflow, but I don't really want to spend the time doing that.  So I've made the switch.

The real question left for me is how to handle static pages.  Unfortunately, the GAE application I used for JANO isn't really being developed any further so I don't really want to do that.  I'll need to look around. 

What I need to finish is

1. The stylesheet and customization of this layout
2. domain switch
• this will become robataka.neohawk.org
• i'll set one up for arisa if she ever decides to blog

Probably missing a few things, but it's still early in the morning

damn, shouldn't have had that coffee at 6

this sis started a blog! http://ping.fm/6QGuE

robataka sent you a video: "tokyo bicycle parking tower"

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robataka has shared a video with you on YouTube: This technology was just hitting Tokyo when we left Japan. When I was in Tokyo, bicycles were always a problem around the train stations. This technology solves that problem in spectacular fashion at least behind the scenes tokyo bicycle parking tower 東京都江戸川区葛西駅前にできた自転車地下駐輪場です。収容台数は9,400台、総工費は70億円です。 It can accommodate 9400 bicycles here.
© 2009 YouTube, LLC 901 Cherry Ave, San Bruno, CA 94066

Japanese American Fair

This last Saturday, Arisa and I headed out to St. Ignaitus High School to attend the JACL's 40th Japanese American Holiday Fair. I had a errand to run at Micro Center and so we were running a little bit late. We got there probably about 2PM.

By the time we got there, it was packed. I'd say close to a hundred folks or so were there. The Mame Taiko Drummers were already in action. At the entrance to what I assume is the cafeteria, there were booths with a silent auction, origami, and other things like soap sales.

It was our first "Japanese-American" event, as opposed to JANO, but I'm glad we went.

Ubuntu Upgrade

Yesterday and today, I 've spent a lot of time installing Ubuntu 9.10.

First off, my son George's PC died. Well, I probably could have struggled to fix it, replacing the hard drive but that would have been a lot of effort. So we headed over to Micro Center and got a refurbished PC for $250. This refurbished PC is now the most powerful one in the house; 320G hdd, 3Gb RAM, dual core amd64, Nvidia, blah, blah, blah. No other PC in the house comes close to it.

It came with windows on it but uninstalled, or not set up. So powering it on and getting windows set up took about an hour I would guess. Maybe a litt le less. Of course, the Neohawk household doesn't use windows, so I downloaded Ubuntu. Not Kubuntu this time. Popped in the cd and installed Ubuntu. All I can say is wow. It was dead easy and took an hour, but like windows probably less. In both cases, I wasn't really paying attention to how long it took and was pleasantly surprised how quick it was.

I had only two real issues. The first issue was I wanted to place the /home directory on a separate partition, and also wanted to resize the windows partition. With the GUI I couldn't tell how to do that and didn't want to screw anything up so I just installed it. The second issue was getting the wireless configuration to work. This probably had less to do with Ubuntu itself than the fact that I was using Ubuntu's wireless interface for the first time and the fact that the wireless signal is weak in my son's room.

Other than that though, the Ubuntu install was flawless and easy.

Interestingly enough, my son took a look at it and said, "Where's KDE?" . So I did a "sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop". Now this took quite a while. Mosty because of the weak wireless signal it took forever to download the necessary files. Once that was done, though, it went off with out a hitch. My son is ecstatic now that he can get back to creating his game maps.

Laptop Leap

So based on that really pleasant experience, I decided to take the plunge with my laptop. I have yet successfully "upgrade" with Kubuntu, but thought I'd give it a chance. #FAIL. Yet again, the upgrade did not work. Then again I did not try very hard either. Once I hit problems, I just decided to do a clean install. Luckily for me, my laptop already has the windows partition size the way I want it, and my /home directory is on a separate partition. So all I had to do was install Ubuntu 9.10 to the right partition and away we went. I got up late this morning, about 7:45. It's only 9:30 and I've been done with the upgrade for about an hour.

Similar to my son, I'm a KDE person, so I ran 'apt-get install kubuntu-desktop' as well in that time frame. It is also how I know that it was the wireless connection in my son's room that was slow. My laptop is hardwired and the download of Kubuntu files was relatively fast.

I read somewhere that somebody recommended to the Ubuntu/Kubuntu folks to make the /home directory a separate partition the default setting. +1. I wholeheartedly concur with this. My experience is that the upgrades never go well, and that a clean install is always smooth. (note, that's my experience). The only painful part if the /home directory is not separate is backing it up, moving it somewhere, and returning it when the install is done.

Other than that though, I was really impressed with the ease of the install. Particularly on my son's pc which went really fast. Nice hardware helps I guess. ;-)

40th Annual Japanese American Holiday Fair

40^th Annual Japanese American HOLIDAY FAIR

Saturday, November 7, 2009 at St. Ignatius High School from 1pm to 5pm

FOOD, ARTS AND CRAFTS BOOTHS AND ENTERTAINMENT PROGRAM

1:30-2:10 2:15-2:45

JACL Sho Jo Ji Billy "The Kid"

Japanese Dancers Matsumoto Juggler

3:00-3:45 4:00-4:30

JACL Mame Daiko Mentor Karate

Taiko Drumming Institute Martial Arts

Also see the Japanese Holiday Fair 2009 PDF

Cleveland Browns - Not Much More to Say

I was going to write a long post about the Browns and the fact that Randy Lerner actually watched a game and was disgusted as the rest of us have been for the 7 weeks prior to that. I had some sage advice for him. I'm glad I waited because I ran across a blog post, Coming Out Of The Closet by Gary Benz, that expressed the same idea but much more articulately. It's a must read.

His basic point and my unwritten one is the same - the only way for the Browns organization to turn itself around is for Mr. Lerner to take ownership of it. I don't mean property law ownership, but deep down emotional, spirtual, intellectual ownership of the team and the organization. I don't know where I read it but it was basically that what he thought he was doing with Manigini was cleaning out the organization and hoping to bring in a new philosophy.