w00kie’s ramblings

More cool Dental Health info from my Japanese health insurance society. Coming back from Golden Week vacation, I find the following letter on my desk at work:

Information for Dental Checkup and Treatment:

Announcing the “Let’s leave 20 teeth at age 80″ campaign

Aren’t your decayed teeth or pyorrhea getting worse while you are unaware ofr them? Health Insurance society has been sending application forms of dental checkup to the insured persons in numeric order of Insurance Card.

This time your insurance card number is in range of an applicable object: you are entitled to a complete dental checkup including teeth, gum and supporting bone X-rays at 10% of the medical care cost.

This is actually a pretty good deal, apart from the goofy tag-name for the campaign, and I’ve signed up for a long overdue checkup on the cheap.

I’m not sure if they have Cribs on MTV Japan, but this guy would have a spot on the show for sure.

From left to right: a Maserati Quattroporte, a Lamborghini Gallardo and an unknown Ferrari… More pics here and here.

I’ve upgraded my blog to Wordpress 2.5 last weekend. The new design of the admin backend is great and seeing things evolve like that really motivates me to pour more time into my blog and add some nice little functionalities that I’ve been thinking about lately.

But it happens that I came upon an error when trying out the new image uploader and I’m sure many people will get it too:

PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function ctype_digit() in wp-includes/link-template.php on line 182

What happens is that my flavor of PHP5 is not compiled with the ctype flag. This seems to be the default on Gentoo, so if you run it be sure to add the ctype use flag to your portage config. But if you can’t recompile PHP, you can just open up the file wp-includes/link-template.php and replace the line 182 as follows:

Replace ctype_digit with is_numeric

That should do the trick until the version 2.5.1 that should patch things up according to what I see in the bug tracker (pending issue on link-template.php and a similar issue in another file already merged in 2.5).

Mac OS X 10.5 is driving me crazy! I’m trying to open an FTP access to my machine for sharing some files with a friend. Obviously I turn to the newly renovated file sharing tab, activate it and open FTP sharing. A new feature of Leopard is a new “Sharing Only” user profile that lets you create users for file sharing that will not be able to login to your machine. So I create one of those and give him access to my share folder.

Now that should be the end of it, 15 seconds to share a folder cleanly and securely with someone else. But no…

Thanks to some crazy security freak somewhere in Cupertino, if you try to FTP to my machine with this Sharing Only user, it won’t share, just give you a stupid error that “this user may not use FTP”. It makes absolutely no sense.

3rd year in Japan and each year I was on a busines trip somewhere for early April: the time of the 花見 parties. This time I was home and got to drink myself silly on a tarp under the cherry blossoms.

On the border of the 目黒川, I got to take some nice photos with the president of the 写真倶楽部.

Today, while reading Candyland, Remka’s blog about graphic design in Tokyo (careful, it’s in French), I was introduced to the absolute best stop-motion video I’ve ever seen. It will melt your face with awesomeness:

Check out their website for more of the same and even a making-of.

2 weeks ago I went to Hiroshima for the weekend with my girlfriend. We had dinner (and innumerable drinks) with a friend of hers on Saturday night in the 本通 area at what must be the restaurant with the most perfect レバー焼き鳥 I’ve ever tasted.

Anyways, I received as omiyage the following which made me laugh a lot:

It’s a set of senbei rice-crackers inscribed with examples of 広島弁, the local Hiroshima dialect. Whenever we’re in Hiroshima, my girlfriend reverts to her roots and drops the Tokyo accent she acquired, especially when she’s with her high-school friends. I’m usually totally lost…

Just a random conversation during one of my team’s daily meetings at work:

Colleague: We have a problem with the *censored* server.
Boss: Where is that server located?
Colleague: It’s in the Intellectual Property room, on the 2nd floor of the Reliability building.
Me: Yeah, you know that place? It’s right next to the office of Lost Causes.

We always have lots of fun during our daily meetings.

Shamelessly stolen from Japan Probe, but it’s too mind-blowing not to spread the word about it.

Last Saturday in the early afternoon, we had a huge dust storm all over the 関東 area. It started out as a very nice day, sunny 15°C, I went for grocery shopping in just a light sweater. Then around 2PM, the sky suddenly became dark, great gusts of wind started whistling around the corners of our building, we could see the road signs and city lights shaking in the street and parked bicycles being blown away. The sky became dark yellowish / light brown as the huge dust cloud passed over us. Then it was over in 15 minutes.

I couldn’t take a good photo as my girlfriend wouldn’t let me open the windows or open the door to go outside (we just cleaned up the apartment, so letting all this dust come in was definitely not a good idea), so I got this photo of the event from surround’s photostream on Flickr.

Apparently, these dust storms happen often in the Kanto plain at the turn of spring. This huge plain all around Tokyo is heavily farmed and parched fields, from the very dry winters we have here, go up in dust with the strong winds marking the coming of spring.