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Kerry Me to the Whitehouse

Logged Monday, 25th October 2004 - Daily - Perma-Link - Comments (1)

I've been back in London for a week now, and yet I'm still stuck on EST. I can't seem to get my body back onto GMT. Combine ongoing jet lag with a dose of the flu and I've not been happy. Now all that travel is out of the way, with over 60 hours of the past six weeks spent cramped up in economy class, I can finally get back to normal London things.

For starters I kicked off the next stage of Japanese classes, a beginner's continuation class. This class isn't the nice and easy Introductory Japanese like the first course, it's almost entirely in Japanese (as it should be) and you are required to converse with the teacher in Japanese, who will usually attempt to explain the meaning of the word you don't understand in Japanese rather than English. And it includes reading and writing, not just speaking. Makes for a great learning experience, but it's also a lot of work. Definitely more study required between classes as some of the students have a lot more practice due to being half-Japanese or having Japanese partners/spouses/parents etc.

One observation on the US elections, while in New York last week I was hoping to be bombarded with political ads and people on the streets pushing their respective parties, all the normal stuff you see going on a few weeks before an election. I thought if it was happening anywhere, it'd be Manhattan, unfortunately (or fortunately perhaps) I saw nothing, not one single political ad. Turns out that New York City is such a safe Liberal seat that neither side seems to bother advertising there. Every person I spoke to was pro-Kerry, and was sure he would get in. My tip is still Bush, too many change fearers. Oh wait, I did see some political advertising, a woman walked past me in Central Park with a T-Shirt reading "Kerry Me to the Whitehouse".

The big news of the week in NY was not the election, it was the Boston Red Sox vs. New York Yankees. I was seriously considering trying to get tickets to the first game, but they were going for USD$250 or more. As explained by a New Yorker there's a long rivalry going back between the two baseball teams, and every time they play Bostonites hope this will be the time the "curse" is broken and the Red Sox finally beat the Yankees. It would have been great to watch, I'll do it next time for sure. Loved this headline: "Red Sox Arrive For Annual Beating".

In my spare time particularly last weekend I did a lot of walking around SoHo, East Village and West Village. Checked out lots of shops and did the now mandatory cake stop to Magnolia Bakery on Bleeker Street. I love this area of Manhattan, and it'd certainly be a great area to live.

Geek project wise, I've finally got my new Shuttle XPC AMD system working, it's a beast with an Athlon 64 3500+ socket 939 CPU, 1GB TwinX XMS 128 bit Dual Channel DDR400, 200GB SATA, 802.11g, Bluetooth, FireWire, NEC DVD-RW Dual Layer, Infared Remote Control, etc. The small form factor SN95G5 certainly looks nice. The cause of all my problems was the dodgy Corsair memory that didn't like being run at its advertised settings of 2-2-2-5, so I had to wind it back to 2.5-3-3-6 to get it going, not happy considering I spent the extra to buy the lowest latency memory. Networking wise, I had originally planned to go all wireless along with a Celeron box I've got hooked up in the cupboard acting as a file and printer server for the flat, but after trying to stream video over 802.11b and then reading reviews about likely only incremental performance of 802.11g, I've opted for good old Ethernet for linking everything up, except for my laptop which will stay wireless. I managed to squeeze Cat 5 down the edges of the carpet between the skirting boards so it looks wireless anyway. At some stage I'm going to go the whole hog and upgrade to a gigabit switch as all my machines have gigabit capable NICs.

Anyway.. as soon as I get a chunk of spare time I'll upload all my Japan photos and write up that trip report.. yep one of these months.