The Midnight Bark

I'm in Tokyo Japan, and I have been for almost a week. We're working here to update our local site and make sure the existing gear is all up to snuff. If it wasn't immediately obvious, I'm a systens engineer(a term I use loosely) and occasional datacenter engineer(again loosely) for a technology company based in the USA.

I was fortunate enough to make my way to Kyoto the earstwhile imperial capitol of Japan, the other day, which was a fantastic change from the overall feeling of Tokyo.

Tokyo is a really magnificent city, full of life and energy; but also remarkabley sterile in certain ways. The sheer number of people walking around in surgical masks for instance, is mind blowing. My co-worker calls them the Japanese burka. I'm not sure he's wrong really, I don't know enough of the culture or the language to tell.

I'm beginning to understand more Japanese as I go along, I admit, nothing profound; but the "Hello"'s, "Thank you"'s and "Excuse me"'s are becoming reflexive.

This society is amazingly polite, to the point that when we powered our gear this morning and tripped an alarm our contact at the datacenter came running upstairs with the building maintenance man to investigate, asking if we'd done anything that could have caused the spike. I replied in the affirmative and suggested that in the future we should notify them before powering so much on at once, he actually blushed with pleasure.

Dinner was simple, a bowl of ramen(which apparently looked like cat vomit) and some rice, followed by a carlsburg at Skaal(They say it's a bar, but it's more like a steakhouse), and an ethereal visit from my former pupsandstuffs who demanded scratchins.

I hope that I was an emissary of American good will last night.

As we made our way home from The Hard Rock Cafe in Roppongi, we ran in to a group of drunken Japanese, one REALLY trashed dentist and his assistent and one of his clients. Apparently I'm the friendly Giant Gaijan(foreigner) who you grab on to when you're hammered and faling over on the subway.  I was as pleasant as possible as I held her and her friend upright in the interveining time before we debarked at Ginza station.

As anyone who's crawled under raised floors or snagged him/herself on a rack/cable tie can tell you, I'm dreading the shower I'm about to take. Soap in open cuts tends to sting quite a bit, and lets be honest hand pain sucks. Oh well, hand pain then sleep.

Whee.

So I've had a beard forever. At least the last couple of years; and I've kinda gotten used to it. Unfortunately the last few weeks has made me tear out hunks of it and it's starting to look a bit scraggely.

Time to shave.

Our tools this evening will be the Edwin Jagger EJ89 loaded with a feather blade, Mamma bear soaps Lime oil shave stick, and a tweezerman brush.

Have you ever stopped to wonder how much of the world runs on diesel? From the small generators powering the basics of a home in a storm all the way up to the massive container ships carrying thousands of tons of cargo from ports around the world.  It's worth mentioning the beauty of the design, basically the laws of physics dictate that the air in a container will stay more or less the unchanged so long as the temperature and pressure within the container  remains the same.  However, if the gas is compressed, and the molecules are forced together the temperature will rise to a point that if you were to inject fuel into the mix it would explode outward.