Christeph: On the Lam

Today we drove from Los Angeles to Davis, California, a six-hour drive along mostly open highway. This gave me a lot of time to think while the car zoomed along on cruise control — and many opportunities to curse the dumb design of cruise control interfaces on just about every car out there.

Who designed the “standard” cruise control interface? It’s a horrible overcomplicated mishmash of awkward abbreviations and mysteriously organized functions. I can’t decide if it was put together by an over-precise engineering team or a feature-obsessed middle manager.

Consider:

• Why is the on/off switch separate from the others?¹ Setting the speed requires two button presses when it should only take one.
• What on earth is the practical difference between “off” and “cancel”?²
• Do we really need two extra buttons to make the car go faster or slower? Cars, after all, are already graced with eminently effective and much-used speed controls. Having “accel” and “coast” buttons is like adding a joystick down on the floor so that you can steer using the feet that are left sadly idle by the operation of the cruise control.

Imagine what the cruise control UI would look like as implemented by Apple. It would be like the iPhone without the fancy screen: one button labeled ON. You hit the button, the car keeps going the current speed. Hit it again and it turns off. I can’t believe nobody has done this yet.

Cancel rant. Rant off.

—
¹As a computer guy, I can kind of see the logic in having a separate on/off control. After all, the system is managed by a computer that needs to know whether it should be listening for commands at any given moment. Maybe, back in the dark ages of computers when cruise control was first implemented, the system may have had significant startup time, requiring a few seconds of warning to get everything in order for the “set” command. But that’s certainly not necessary today — the whole car is essentially managed by computers nowadays.

²I understand the technical difference, but it’s a stupid thing to bother the user with.

Dad’s always asking me how my Japanese language skills are coming along, and I never know how to answer this question. (3.2? C+? 78%?) While my Japanese ability has progressed a great deal in the last 3 years, those of you who understand Japanese and have heard me speak know that I have a long way to go before I achieve fluency. However, should the rest of you be mildly curious about my ability to communicate, here are some small victories from the past week:

*Successfully explaining the rules of Sharks and Minnows to a group of elementary school kids, each of whom has the attention span of a small kitten surrounded by fluff and balls of string.

*Figuring out who that random guy at the pool was. I had one of those awkward moments where I was greeted warmly by some dude I swear I’d never met before. After a brief conspiratorial conference with the poolside manager, I was able to divine that he was in fact my old salsa teacher (who’s also, incidentally, the nation-wide champion of Japan. And a hair dresser.) In my defense, I haven’t been to class for about a year, and he was wearing a swim cap.

*Conversing with a saleschick. Mildly curious about the GAP that materialized recently in Akita, I cautiously entered this new store but was skeptical about trying anything on. As I explained to the overly-eager sales staff, I’d been through this masochistic pas-de-deux with Japan-based GAPs before in Tokyo. Theoretically, the GAP is supposed to carry western sizes that don’t exist in the boondocks of Akita, but instead I found to my dismay clothing that had been tailored to fit the Japanese frame, and thus, not my own. After hearing my tale of woe and betrayal, I was assured that THIS store (GAP*USA!) was different, because everything is directly imported from America, and as such I was encouraged to approach shopping with renewed optimism and vigor.

I don’t know if any of that’s going to be on the JLPT, but it’s nice to know that I can increasingly say what I want to say on the spur of the mo’.

The Australian highway patrol doesn’t have it, apparently, despite cruising the roads in cars that would look right at home in NASCAR. Two days of driving in Australia was enough to impress upon us what a serious matter road safety is in this country. One need only drive for minutes before being bombarded with a plethora of signs and oddly catchy yet morbid slogans (”Crashes kill Christmas!”) all designed to instill in the driver a healthy respect for the posted speed limit. The highway began to take on a Big Brother-esque feel, as signs scolding “How fast are you going now?“, appeared with astonishing frequency. Adding to my paranoia, speed cameras hovered ominously by the side of the road. We passed not a few drinking and driving checkpoints, where random cars were pulled over to test drivers’ blood alcohol content.

Not all of the preventative measures involved government monitoring and scare tactics. You can regulate yourself, too! If you’re feeling less than alert, the Australian highway is dotted with Stop. Revive. Survive. pits, where you can score some free coffee from a cheery volunteer before being sent on your way.

You would think with all of these mechanisms in place that we would have been super-vigilant, dutiful drivers, and thus immune to interstate mishaps. That would be true if we weren’t so very unfamiliar with the geography. If we hadn’t been gawking at all the crazy Fauna crossing nets suspended high over the road, or marveling at a highway which accomodated both bicyclers and U-turns. The one thing we didn’t notice was how fast we were supposed to be going. Imagine our dismay when we realized that what we had thought was a 100kph zone was actually only 80kph… a fact driven home as we whizzed by and subsequently caught the attention of a patrol officer. We watched in our rear-view mirror with horrified silence as he made a U-turn (in one of those handy bays), turned on his siren, and summarily pulled us over.

Assuming the gentleman who pulled us over was representative of officers nationwide, I will say this for the Aussie police: they are exceedingly pleasant. After a quick chat, he popped back to his patrol car with a “won’t keep you long, folks”. When he returned a moment later, he handed over our hotel address (we had only been able to produce the name when asked). What service! Unfortunately, he also handed over a ticket: 150 AUD for 14 kph (8.5 mph) over the speed limit.

Crashes may kill Christmas. But tickets tick off tourists.

Several people have noticed that it’s been some time since we last wrote. Well, I’m here to end that drought. But I’m not going to write about a fascinating cultural experience or deep personal realization. I’m going to write about my own particular brand of font-tinged geekiness.

That being said, this is going to sound like a non sequitur.

As you may or may not know, a few weeks ago Japan’s Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda resigned, out of the blue, with no hint he was thinking of doing so. (This is becoming something of a tradition, as the previous Prime Minister Shinzo Abe did the same thing almost exactly a year before.) Fukuda has been, I think, a good prime minister. He’s a moderate politician and has toned down the nationalist rhetoric of his predecessors, and is exactly the kind of “boring guy” you would expect to be a Japanese Prime Minister.

Fukuda’s popularity was in the dumps for his entire term, just like most of the the world’s leaders at the moment, and in part this was because his mild-mannered ways didn’t provide a lot of juice for the media to latch onto for their nightly newscasts. When he held a news conference to announce his resignation, a reporter apparently dropped the last straw by asking Fukuda if he had really put his whole effort into his job. (This is something that is definitely not kosher to ask a Japanese person — “Do your best!” is essentially the national creed.) Fukuda responded with a delightfully snippy comment: “Unlike you, I’m able to see myself objectively.”

That comment basically ended up being the sign-off for Fukuda’s entire career, and it was pure gold for the news media. But the phrase that really inspired the Internet community was the “unlike you” bit, which in Japanese grammar comes at the end as a finishing punch-line flourish. The actual phrase is “あなたとは違うんです” which literally translates as, “I am different than you.”

This, naturally, brings us to ASCII art.

(ASCII stands for “American Standard Code for Information Interchange” and is one of the earliest definitions of a computer character set, covering the English alphabet, numbers, and basic punctuation characters. “ASCII art” is an ancient term referring to a graphical image composed on a computer using only textual characters.)

Japanese nerds are second to none, and an anonymous someone immediately hit the Internets with an anime-themed ASCII-art take on Fukuda’s parting press-conference shot, complete with guns blazing.

Click on the image above to go to Flickr, where you can see my annotations noting where Japanese characters have been used to great effect in the final image. As you may imagine, the characters 彡 and ミ are indispensable in representing politicians’ hairlines.

My favorite part of this Japanese “ASCII” art (and this is where I get really nerdy) is that it’s not really ASCII at all.  ASCII is an extremely narrow standard, covering only the English alphabet.  It’s not even useful for Western European languages since it doesn’t have any accented characters for French, Spanish, German, etc. So this Japanese “ASCII art” is really “Unicode art” (although I guess technically it’s Shift_JIS art).

This whole situtation was brought to my attention by a Japan Times article talking about this T-shirt that was brought to market within days of Fukuda’s resignation, and is still selling off the shelves. I am now the proud owner of one of these shirts (after waiting a week and a half for it to come back into stock). And that means you have the Japan Times to thank for waking up to a blog entry about two of the most entertaining subjects imaginable: Japanese politics and computer character sets.

I literally just returned from my two-week trip to Boston and Buffalo, and moments after sitting down at the computer… another earthquake! The epicenter was in the same prefecture, Iwate, as the previous big one about a month ago. Poor Iwate.

This one was a little scary because this time, Stephanie wasn’t here in Akita. She and our friend Andy took a road trip to Aomori, and were located much closer to the epicenter than Noshiro. (They are in the armpit of the large axe-shaped peninsula at the top of the island.) Not to worry though; Steph called and assured me everything is all right.

I should also mention that there was a big one in the same region, but a ways off shore, just last week! That makes three in just over a month, all about the same 7-ish magnitude. Definitely some major correction going on in the earth’s crust around eastern Tohoku.

Earthquake Early Warnings, originally uploaded by miyagawa.

This (not my photo; thanks, Flickr!) is what appeared on the TV screen several seconds before the earthquake arrived in Noshiro this morning. Note that the blue overlay is not part of the newscast, but pops up over whatever show is currently on. This particular warning is from an aftershock about half an hour after the main quake, so at this point everybody was already watching the news.

Seismic sensors are placed all over the country, and immediately upon the occurrence of the first shock, the epicenter is calculated and warnings go up on TV stations immediately. Since the shock waves take time to spread from the epicenter through the ground, the warning will hit the TV before the quake arrives in most places. Impressive stuff.

I have a fascination this one question, and lately I’ve been asking everyone within earshot: What was your first job? Sometimes this leads to cryptic two-word answers for which you must invent your own back-story (take for example “cookie factory”). Other times you get more information than you were bargaining for (”I mowed lawns so I could buy my first set of bagpipes”).

(more…)

Oh, and did I mention that I just, much to my surprise, passed my Level 3 Japanese Proficiency Test?

Woohoo!

Last spring, we travelled to the nearest Big City, Sendai, for a Beck concert. During that trip we skipped over to the famous sightseeing destination Matsushima. While there, Steph snapped this moving shot of a Shinto procession carrying a shrine down the street:

Imagine our surprise when a few weeks ago, out of the blue, a gentleman named Maarten Reith from the Netherlands contacted us through our Flickr account. The Dutch city of Arnhem is playing host to an international sculpture exhibition called Sonsbeek 2008 in June, and the opening ceremonies for this exhibition will involve the sculptures being hand-carried throughout the city to their final destination in a public park. Sonsbeek’s procession was inspired by religious ceremonies such as this Shinto custom, and Mr. Reith was writing a newspaper article about the exhibition.

Now, not two weeks later, the article is published and Steph is famous! The photo is almost a full page and spans the center spread of De Gelderlander newspaper of January 24, 2008. Contratulations to Stephanie!

Thanks to my boss for forwarding me this New York Times article, incredibly focused on Noshiro and Akita!

In Japan, Rural Economies Wane as Cities Thrive
By MARTIN FACKLER

NOSHIRO, Japan — The only outward sign of conflict here is the red flags of protest, but this small logging city on Japan’s remote northern coast is seething.

A proliferation of national chain stores outside town has already forced the closing of about half of the city’s once teeming central shopping district. Now, many in this normally restrained rural community see the megamall being built nearby, by a company based near Tokyo, as the final nail in the coffin of their economy. read more

It doesn’t make Noshiro sound very nice, but the depiction of empty lots and shuttered stores is sadly true. We’ve learned to ignore these things and just accept that this is what a medium-size town looks like in Japan; all the similar-sized towns we have visited are in the same state. On the other hand, restaurants and nighttime hangouts seem immune to these problems, and Noshiro is blessed with many wonderful, warm and bustling eateries (and people!) that are probably the #1 thing we love about the town.

We have heard rumors of this new Supercenter that Aeon wants to build east of town. But generally, people don’t talk to us about these kinds of things, probably because of the language barrier. While it would be nice to have a huge mall nearby (we currently have to drive an hour to get certain groceries), I agree with the townspeople quoted in this article that it would probably be the last nail in the coffin for the downtown business district. There’s already a big department store right in the middle of town (JUSCO, you can see it in the picture above) which is probably responsible for shutting down most of the small stores on that street. Putting a bigger one outside of town might even kill that downtown JUSCO, which would be doubly terrible, leaving the main central shopping street almost completely useless.

Thanks again to John for forwarding that article to me. Amazing to see our very own “shopping street” (our name for it; the real name is ??, Yanagimachi, “willow town”) on the pages of the NYT.