Nine years later...

Please stand by.

Bloggers block

As you may have noticed, there's been a long stretch, here and over at SPO, without posts and I've finally figured out what it is that's causing the block:  my commute.

All of my musing is occurring while on the road, and by the time I'm some place where I can log in, it's gone.

It's pretty annoying, too, as I've got to do this for work, and even that's getting sparse.

Time enough....

You know what the most frustrating part of turning 40 is for me?  Not having enough time to do the things I want to, and not being sure why I don't.  I've got lots of time, but I just can't fit things together, which is doubly annoying because I'm a great time-manager when it comes to work.  I just can't work my leisure time like that because, well, it becomes work.

Here's a list of things I want to do, in no particular order:

• Read more
• Watch more movies
• Get out more
• Set up a server
• Learn Linux like the back of my hand
• Get my 'official' website up and ready
• Learn PHP 'my way' so I can use it
• Read more (yes, I know...)
• Take a nice long walk every night after work
• See my friends more often (which would start with actually seeing them)
• Get back into photography
• Re-learn how to play bass
• Re-learn how to draw, thanks to my arthritis changing the way my hands work
• Write more
• Re-learn Java
• Learn Ruby on Rails
• Learn Python
• Cook
• Build a new hardcore PC

Yes, I know the answer is "prioritize", but really, how do you prioritize that?

Okay, yes, getting out for walks/exercising¹ should be number one.  Thank you, gentle-reader.

After that, though?  No clue. See, I could build the PC, use it as a Linux box, and run a virtual server from it, but that presents even more issues.

Gah.

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¹ I'm reminded of an old TV show called Shadow Chasers, I believe, and a character who was an Aerobic Exorcist. Not sure why I thought of this.

On revenge, a tsunami, and the distance between here and there

Over the recent long weekend, I discovered the Japanese revenge flick Hard Revenge, Milly¹, which is set (from what I can tell) in a semi-post-apocalyptic Yokohama. In the prologue for the movie the audience is told that Tokyo has been consumed by desert, while Yokohama remains green, which presents a problem.

For those of you not familiar with the Greater Tokyo Area, I'll point out that the distance between Yokohama and Metropolitan Tokyo is shorter than the distance between Hamilton and Toronto, or between Seattle and Tacoma, and is about the same distance as Queens is from Staten Island. 

So, in other words, the desertification of Tokyo would have a serious effect on the Yokohama area.

From this, I'm reminded of the tsunami of 2011, where the epicenter of the original quake was closer to Tokyo than Ottawa is to Toronto, and the entirety of Honshu, the main island of the Japanese archipelago, is roughly the distance between Windsor and Quebec City. Honshu is also the home of the majority of Japan's population, which is roughly 128 million people, with a population density of about 377 people per km² . For comparison, Canada's population is roughly 34.5 million, with about 3.4 people per km², giving us around 1% of the population density of Japan. 

These thoughts got me wondering what the definition of space is in Japan, and how the average Japanese (as a nation, not ethnicity) person perceives distance when everything is so (comparatively) close, including your neighbour.

The movie, assuming that there is a somewhat down-to-earth representation of Japanese perception involved (which, admittedly, might be a stretch considering that it's a low-budget exploitation flick), seems to illustrate a disconnect involving the perception of distance and how that maps (literally) to the rest of the world. In makes me wonder if centuries of isolation, and decades of urban sprawl, have defined a different perception of how big the world is, and how much space there is out there between places.

I imagine that a country the size of Canada, with the distance between places, and the focus on 'space' is quite alien to someone who's never left the archipelago.  The reverse of this is how the average Canadian would react to the ability to travel from coast to coast on a train in a couple of hours.

Myself, I've got a thing about personal space, and I suspect that I would not do well with the population density in Japan, at least on Honshu.  I think I'd probably even have troubles on Hokkaido, the northern-most island, with its lower density and, well, earthquakes.

So, I think I need to fire off an email to my friend in Tokyo about this, as it's got me wondering.

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¹ The comma is not a typo.

Please stand by

Hi,

Consider this a placeholder until I start actual content.

-Jason