Nigorimasen! Blog

Later this morning, I’ll be heading to the airport to embark on a 26-hour journey to Düsseldorf, Germany, with layovers in Minneapolis and Detroit. Probably going to see a lot of interesting things during my month’s stay in Deutschland and take many pictures of architecture and scenery. This might also be the self-realization journey (like Takemoto’s bicycle trip except less physically demanding) I didn’t ask for as I travel outside the United States for the first time ever. Yep, haven’t even been to Canada yet.

I’m not going to be packing my laptop so I’ll have to use the computer labs at the university (free) or an Internet cafe (not free but gonna try it once!) to check my e-mail, upload pictures, and submit an occasional post. I still have to read a good amount of class material which I could probably make a dent in while I’m flying thousands of miles in the air.

I’m going to try to post at least once a day (except for the last week when I’ll be on a bus) to a specially dedicated blog I set up for this trip. The address is studyabroad.crumplednapkin.net (link is also in the sidebar under “My Other Sites”) and I hope I don’t forget to do it after the first couple days. I have to keep a hard-copy research journal that I have to turn in near the end so the entries I write in that notebook may overlap with what I write online and keep me on a schedule of sorts.

Today, Joey Chestnut defeated Takeru Kobayashi, 66-63, at the annual Nathan’s hot dog eating contest and brought the title back into the hands of the United States. America has finally earned back a matter of national pride this Fourth of July. Unfortunately, this event glorifies binge eating at a time when childhood obesity is of great concern. But aside from what it represents, it makes me happy that an American has won the title for the first time since 1999 (Steve Keiner - 20 1/4). I still don’t consider competitive eating to be a “sport”, though.

Vinyl FTW!

Okay, this is an off-topic, shameless self-promotion, so you’ve been warned! Later tonight at 11PM [2AM EDT/12PM GMT/2PM Singapore], I will be undergoing on-air training at my college radio station KDVS and will play about 15-20 minutes worth (5 songs) of music from their library. This is in preparation for my weekly spot for next quarter as a newbie DJ at the station.

My show will be titled “Angry Fruit Salad” and I’ll be playing rock, punk, folk, and indie music for 2 hours starting from 4AM [7AM EDT/12PM GMT/7PM Singapore] early Wednesday mornings. You don’t have to listen live, of course — shows get archived to the website minutes after they wrap up — but giving me some feedback on my first outing on March 28th would be greatly appreciated and would help me smooth over some first-time jitters of being on the radio and managing a live broadcast.

Feel free to post any requests and I will try to see if the station has it (probably not if the artist is mainstream). I will try to play at least 50% “currents” but that leaves me with room to put in stuff I found poking around the racks or something interesting from home. The rule for playing non-current music (that is, more than three months old and not in the “Currents” bin) on a weekly show is no more than twice from the same artist/band per quarter, which still allows me to play some of my personal favorites while forcing me to explore and find new music as I have been doing for the past couple months now. Wish me luck and I hope you tune in sometime!

P.S. I’m going to attempt recording another episode of Amateur Otaku Radio on Talkshoe at 1:15PM PDT tomorrow and talk about the upcoming spring season among other things. I’m not trying to compete with the Scattered Cels podcast but I feel the urge to make more episodes in a futile attempt to make money.

UPDATE (1:46 PM PDT): I got so frustrated trying to load the Talkshoe Java app and failing to log in properly that I decided, from now on, I’m going to just record AOR on my own and then upload it after the schedule TalkCast time passes. Sorry to anyone who tried to listen in this afternoon but I’ll try to compose the spring-related episode for the next couple days and have it up by Friday.

[adapted from PTO: The Sideblog]
I was originally going to keep this on my sideblog but after reading Mr. Gallagher’s comments on Megatokyo, I decided to copy what I wrote over here to reach a larger audience. I’m not trying to pressure people into voting a certain way but if you are an American citizen and happen to be registered, please vote today if you haven’t already. If you’re not sure whether you should bother at all, keep this in mind: you have no right to complain about the results if you didn’t participate in the process in the first place. Musing after the jump.
Read the rest of this entry »

My so-so meatball lunch at the IKEA restaurant

Over the past two days, I’ve been moving stuff into my new apartment and tonight will be my first night sleeping there. My roommate’s cool but I have a couple problems right now: there’s no Internet and one of the outside windows is broken. It seems that I’m not alone in the lack of connectivity department; I heard some guy down the hall (Mike, I think?) calling a friend about it. So right now I’m using my university library’s wi-fi connection to post this. I’m also going to file a repair request tomorrow to fix the window. Read the rest of this entry »

I just moved home for the summer from my dorm last afternoon and will be on a camping trip from this evening until Sunday morning. Then I have jury duty on Monday morning at 7:30am. I’ll finish up my planned Haruhi 11 post as well as a couple of other short ones when I come back Sunday night. Hopefully I’ll be dismissed the first day of jury duty but if I don’t…well, at least I get paid $15 a day for showing up.

I’m taping “Eureka Seven” as well as the Italy/USA and Croatia/Japan World Cup games. That’s 4 1/2 hours (about 3 1/2 with fast forward) for me to watch when I return. Although I suppose I could blog while watching the games… Anyway, here’s to hoping I don’t injure myself while shooting a shotgun, like I did last year. Sigh.