Fearing the Air...

Looking back at previous years, you compare things.... and contemplate whether things were better or worse than the present time.  Comparing 2019 with 1990, on one hand you have 1990 which was a time you went about your life thinking about work, friends, the weekend, etc., and other than land line telephone calls and paper-based mail (the hand-delivery kind), you communicated with the people you were actually with and didn't contemplate the end of civilization or whether you could go out without filtering the air you breathed.

In 2019, the world seemed to be coming apart in many ways - global heating, wars, a whole host of non-sustainable human activities/behavior leading to an existential threat to life in the future.  And now in 2020, the very air is to be feared.  Nearly everyone covers their face when going out.  .............  Thought I was going to write up a storm about this, but that's basically it.  I'm feeling very nostalgic about 1990 as a time when people went about their lives without wearing face masks and when you were with someone, they didn't have primary focus on their micro-computer(s) and were actually with you.

On the other hand - I certainly do like having computers and electronic communication.  What would be nice?  Getting past this virus threat/upheaval, and while still having the convenience of modern technology, a world where people turned off their electronic devices while with others and left primary focus on the people they were actually with.

Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
youtube.com/lylehsaxon
lylehsaxon.blogspot.jp/
lookback1997.blogspot.jp/
tokyoht.blogspot.jp/

七国への旅 - 令和二年三月

The new morning ritual now after a night's sleep is to go on-line and see how much worse everything is.  I don't recall any time in my life where reality seemed so much like a disaster movie where the people on the screen confront an ever worse reality - leading to...?

Aside from the abstract feeling of reading about bad news from afar, and seeing/feeling the people around you getting nervous about events, the first in-my-face shock came on February 27th at Tokyo Station when I went to the platform for the Chuo Line and it was nearly empty!  Then when I got on the train, it was nearly empty as well - until it filled up down the line.  Thinking about it now, I suppose the businesses in the Marunouchi area (next to Tokyo Station) were told to work from home?

Gradually, the concept that it's bad to be near people has set in and I've stopped (for now...) going to art exhibitions in Ginza and stopped walking through places with a lot of people (if I don't need to be there that is).  What with telecommunications, it's not so bad to hole up at home, but after a while you want to get out and get some fresh air....

And so I decided to take a mini-vacation to a suburb of Tokyo I'd never been to before.  As I exited the station, I felt a little excited and started thinking about it:  "On the face of it, I've just gone across town to a nondescript suburb, but what is so different really from jetting to another country for a vacation?  In both cases, I'm in an area for the first time, seeing things I've never seen before.  This is a valid vacation!"  Granted, I could use the same language I use at home, half of the chain store names I already knew, and I would be going - not to a hotel - but home that evening, but on the adventurous vacation side, I hadn't seen the names of half of the chain stores, and as I walked up a hill I'd never walked up before, I thought "I wonder what's up the road here...?"

I don't know...  As I attempt to explain it in words, it looks kind of mundane on the screen... but in the moment it was actually quite nice.  After not having gone anywhere new for so long, the change really did feel as though I were on a journey into an unknown land... which I was.  The part that looks mundane is that it was just another part of the city I already live in and was just a day trip.  I know... but trust me, it felt like an adventure!

As I walked up the hill, I thought, "As long as this goes up, it's going somewhere interesting... if it levels off or starts going down, I'll turn around and go back."  Writing/remembering that, I realize an important element of it becoming a pleasant adventure was that I had low expectations for it.  I didn't really expect to find anything very interesting, but whatever was up the hill was guaranteed to be at least a little bit interesting, since I was approaching it from a fairly long period of boredom.   Contrast is the key element here.  If there is contrast, then it's interesting.

Midway up the hill I looked across the street and saw an area between condominium... not high rises, but medium rises?  From about nine to fifteen stories high?  What do you call those?  Anyway, they're one of the forms vertical gated communities take.  The area looked visually interesting, so I thought it would be a good place to record a pair of JV/EV videos.  So I crossed the street and started a JV video... and realized it was a boring one and there wasn't so much to say, so I just left the camera running and said the same boring content in English, then another comment in Japanese and then English again.  Ideally, those should be separate, but lumping them together in a JEV video gets it out-of-the-way more quickly.

From there I continued up the hill... and at an intersection, I looked down the road going to the right.  Something about what I was looking at seemed interesting....  Recalling the moment now, I'm not really sure exactly why it seemed interesting, but the scene beckoned and I obeyed the allure.  As I walked along, I was pleasantly surprised to see that I was approaching the edge of a valley, with a view through space to the other side of the valley.

Again, contrast.  If you do a comparative analysis of valleys on planet earth, surely there are many more dramatic and beautiful ones.  But for me, after spending months on narrow streets, in crowded trains, inside buildings, etc., that open space - with some flowering trees (cherry? plum?) in the middle of a cluster of green trees (on the other side of the valley) was a beautiful sight.  Arriving at the end of the road, I then descended a series of stairs (with the camera rolling) and discovered Opera Tunnel... which I just had to give a try.  (The experience and the video were in tandem, so that's an authentic view.)

The echo was... dare I say spectacular?  ("Spectacular" here refers to the quality of the echo, not the quality of my bad singing.)  As a child, I liked the fun of making noise in tunnels, continuing on to honking my car horn in them (when there was no other traffic) and throughout my life, I generally haven't been able to resist trying out the echo in tunnels.  But... I am usually disappointed!  There's always some kind of echo in a tunnel, but generally not enough to be much fun.  Opera Tunnel though, now that's what a tunnel echo should be!  Perhaps the oval shape of the tunnel works better than a round tunnel?

After that, I climbed back up the stairs and walked along a beautifully straight road on the edge of the valley.  Why "beautifully straight"?  Back to contrast - when living in cities that had nearly all straight roads, I would have considered it the very definition of boring, but now I live in an area with no straight roads at all.  There are some roads that are straight for short stretches, but even those roads tend to be curving slightly or straight for only very short stretches.  So, looking down a perfectly straight road, it was an exciting thing to walk down - for the contrast of it.

And... that's about it actually.  As I walked back down the hill towards the station I was beginning to feel tired and then the prospect of being home again that evening was a pleasant thought.

Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
youtube.com/lylehsaxon
lylehsaxon.blogspot.jp/
lookback1997.blogspot.jp/
tokyoht.blogspot.jp/

The Fragility of Supply...

   It was when I saw a news article stating that industry people were saying "There's no need to panic-buy toilet paper - there's a good supply of it..." that I thought "Uh-oh..." and a few days later I went around to three stores in my area, two of which have a large area where they stock a small mountain of a dizzying variety of toilet paper.  Before walking into the first big store where there had always been that mountain of toilet paper, I thought "It'll probably be half gone..." so it was a bit of a shock to walk in and see the shelves were completely bare.  And not just toilet paper - there were no tissue paper packs or paper towels either.

   So, I went to two other stores to have a look... and it was the same story.  Completely empty shelves.  One of the large stores had a sign at the empty shelves where the toilet paper used to be saying "Two packs per customer".  Okay... I guess that didn't help too much.  For that kind of thing, I suppose a family of four would have each family member go to a cash register on their own?  In any case, what I have is what I have and any new stock is unavailable to buy.  I have some, so I'm okay for now, but I wonder when it'll be available again.  What I'll probably run out of first are tissue packs... I have pollen allergies and fairly active sinuses....
   Anyway, after I had checked out the situation with paper products, I went grocery shopping, which was uneventful except for noticing that rice was nearly sold out.  I bought one of the last remaining bags.  I walked around the store observing the other shoppers in their face masks.... and then noticed a woman not wearing one.  Seconds after spotting her, she let loose with a very congested-sounding cough... into her fist (to best spread the germs around).  I speed walked in another direction (but still ran into her again a few minutes later).  I thought "Well, that's great.  Probably the only person in the store who really should be wearing a mask is the one who isn't...."
   Anyway, the whole thing reminds me of the fragility of supplies.  Never in my life have I experienced going into a store and there being no toilet paper for sale.  It was always there... and then, with people considering the possibility of having to stay holed up at home for some period of time, hording starts, and "Poof!" supply vanishes.

Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
youtube.com/lylehsaxon
lylehsaxon.blogspot.jp/
lookback1997.blogspot.jp/  20200304  (水)

Mechanical Mice Work Best

   Back when I began using computers, there were only one type of cursor-positioning mice in general use, the type with a small but heavy rubber surfaced ball that rotated two shafts mechanically and indicated motion that way.  They worked fine, although they needed to be cleaned periodically for proper use.  Since most people I observed around me never cleaned theirs, the performance would get spotty and they blamed the design and enthusiastically embraced optical mice when when came out, since they could be absolutely filthy dirty and they would still work fine (provided nothing was blocking them optically.
   But wait - there was another problem with the mechanical type - since they needed a certain amount of friction to work properly (to mechanically turn the rubber ball), they didn't work very well on slippery surfaces.  The blazingly simple answer to that was to use them on a sheet of paper, but while I used a sheet of A3 or whatever non-glossy paper was handy and got great performance that way, I don't recall anyone around me noticing what was happening and doing a little work procedure kaizen for themselves.
   Fast forward to the era where all externally-connected computer pointing devices are optical and I've found (to my intense irritation) that one optical device after another starts out working great, but develops a kind of glitch where if you're trying to move it precisely (like when cropping a photograph) it will jump or stick a little.  I don't know if the sensor for the light beam is wearing out or what, but it's really irritating when editing pictures....
   Fast forward again to yours truly walking down a street in Akihabara about a month ago.  I noticed a box of old PS/2 connector mechanical mice - new ones no less (old stock) and so I bought a couple (as my desktop machine has both USB and PS/2 sockets) and while I wasn't really expecting it to be great, I'm finding that it's much much more precise in movement (on a sheet of copy paper, as of old) than the optical ones I have.  The amount of motion required for moving the pointer is quite a bit more, but after going into the settings on my computer and dialing the speed up, it works absolutely great.  No jumping or stalling  - yet.  Hopefully it will just keep working this way and I won't need to go back to optical mice which have - time after time after time - started produced spotty performance after using them for a few months.
   Granted, I've only been using this new (old stock) mechanical mouse for a few weeks, but I remember how it was before - if the performance started to get weird, just clearing out dust buildup on the metal shafts (that come in contact with the rubber ball) would restore performance.

Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
youtube.com/lylehsaxon
lylehsaxon.blogspot.jp/
lookback1997.blogspot.jp/