I swear I've been to Akihabara more times in the last two weeks than in the entire last year.

[dr4b]

I am listening to the greatest college marching band album ever. Okay, not really, but it's scary how many of the songs I know on it. It's the Tokyo Big 6 University League Baseball marching band music, all 6 universities' worth, and it's fantastic. I can't wait to go actually watch some college ball again this year! (Okay... I really just want to see Ohishi-kun and Suzuki-kun pitch. But still.)

Today I went to Akihabara again. This time it was for a few reasons:
1) I needed to print out resumes to bring to interviews over the next two days. Yes, interviews. More on that in a minute.
2) I was buying some videogames for oren.
3) I was going to get lunch/dinner.
4) I wanted to check out the Akihabara Book-Off.

Well, I did accomplish all of that. Went to Kinko's and printed out some resumes, which in itself wasn't too hard. I tried to see if I could print out the meishi that Westbay designed for me for japanesebaseball.com, but explaining what I was trying to do was apparently too difficult. Oh well.

Went to Yodobashi, found two out of the three games Oren wanted. Also managed to finally get my two Yodobashi cards combined to one! Yay! Now I just need to figure out a way to never forget any point cards ever again.

I went up to the 8th floor to get food... and I was going to go to the kaitensushi place there until I saw the waitresses outside "welcoming" people and remembered that they were really obnoxiously condescending and "helpful" to me last time. And since it was only 5:30pm or so, it was fairly empty, thus I was likely to get the same treatment. No dice. Went to a ramen place instead called Chabuya, and had some pretty damn tasty miso ramen.

Then I found the Book-Off. It's HUGE! 6 floors! Sheesh! I might go back sometime and actually look at books, but for the time being I was just poking around the cheap CDs, which is how I found the aforementioned college marching band CD (it wasn't that cheap, but). Wooo. Then I also found Oren's third game in the used games section, so, I really did finish all my missions for the day.

Stopped by Yokado when I got in, grabbed a tray of makizushi and some inari from the deli section. It's neat having a sushi dinner for 600 yen, which I was going to say is $6, except I just looked at the conversion rates today and DEAR GOD THE DOLLAR HAS TANKED so it's more like $7. Sheesh. Still, the good thing about buying supermarket sushi is that I can throw it in the fridge and then eat it two hours later.

Came home, did laundry. Meant to be productive, but... at least my problem tonight isn't Puzzle Pirates, since I haven't been playing. Instead, I've been spending the last like, 3-4 hours fighting with iTunes and my iPod. I keep most of my music files on a separate flash drive, so apparently unless I have that flash drive mounted to the computer with the same drive letter, things get really wonky. BUT I think it's finally all settled. The other issue is of course with the way iTunes handles Japanese song titles and artist titles... There's got to be a better way to rename all of this stuff, but I haven't figured it out yet. Yar.

Anyway! I have an interview tomorrow morning (so in 9 hours, eek, gotta wake up in like 6 or 7) and then TWO interviews on Wednesday! I called one of the places that hadn't gotten back to me, today, and they basically said it'd be no problem for Wednesday... and then another place emailed me back about interviewing Wednesday too. Go figure. It'll be fun. Go me? Then I fly to Seattle on Thursday...

Comments

[oren.livejournal.com]

I went to the opening day of that Akihabara Book Off on my last day in Japan last time I went. It is a great store. :)

I like the small middle east stand in Akihabara for lunches at least. Good pita sandwiches.

[bhudson.livejournal.com]

DEAR GOD THE DOLLAR HAS TANKED

The US dollar tanked when the US economy tanked. Then the rest of the world tanked even more, so the US dollar more than made up its losses. Japan is the exception, but that may be changing.

[jccw.livejournal.com]

the US dollar more than made up its losses. Japan is the exception, but that may be changing.

Um, there are at least two exceptions: the exchange rate was around 1 pound sterling : $2 a year ago, hit around $1.35 in the last month or so, and hasn't come anywhere close to recovering. (Probably because of some combination sterling being overvalued initially, close economic ties, and the fact that UK banks are almost as hosed as US ones...)

OK, irrelevant to Deanna, but painful to me.

[bhudson.livejournal.com]

How is the pound getting weaker against the dollar an exception to the entire world (except Japan) getting weaker against the dollar?

The Canadian dollar tanked against the US when I had Canadian money. The US dollar tanked against the Canadian when I had US money. Now I have US debt, and the Canadian dollar has plummeted.

[jccw.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I misunderstood what you wrote, and I think I threw in a sign error somewhere for good measure.

[bhudson.livejournal.com]

Throw in a reciprocal to make it all better?

[skydiamonde.livejournal.com]

Good luck on interviews!

The only way I use point cards in the US are if they use my phone number as the card number and let me recite my phone number instead of physically handing them a card. I hate carrying them around and I always forget them. As for the grocery stores that only do discounts with a membership, for those I give my parents' number (which is the same from when I was growing up so it's easy to remember) since I know my mom signed up for them and I don't care about redeeming the few things you can get from that and let her redeem them all and just get extra points from me while I get the weekly discounts.

I have the same iTunes problem! I find it quite annoying. I tried keeping my playlists on my drive with my music and then on my work laptop and home laptop symlink/shortcut them both to the drive's playlist but that didn't work at all. =( (plus my work laptop is a pc and my home one is a mac). I wish I could find a better solution. Another annoyance I have with it is I also keep other data on that portable drive that I'd love my Time Machine to back-up, but it won't back-up external drives. But I suppose that's a whole nother gripe. Silly Apple not being friendlier to external drives!

[bhudson.livejournal.com]

itunes is smart enough to deal with .m4u files I'm pretty sure (by which I mean, somehow it figured out my ancient mp3 collection from linux, and the only way it could have worked is via the m4u files it came with), so it "should" be a simple matter of perl to write up m4us for the broken files and reimport them.

[skydiamonde.livejournal.com]

Well, I am constantly changing my playlist and adding new music onto my drive. I want to be able to carry my drive home and play it off my home laptop, then carry it back to work and play it off my work laptop, on a almost daily basis. A simple one-time conversation was easy to do (and I've done it), but to have to convert it every time I switch laptops is more than I want to deal with.

[bhudson.livejournal.com]

The issue I was responding to is "100% of the track names are messed up", which only needs fixed once, but is still really annoying when you have to go through the little form track by track. That I can fix. Your problem, I can't fix. "Sorry."

I haven't really joined the whole itunes generation yet. My phone has eight glorious gigabytes, of which nearly eight gigabytes are free.

[dr4b]

I haven't seen places here that do point cards by phone number for some reason. Or if they do, they've never let me do it. I got my second Yodobashi card because I had forgotten the actual card and they wouldn't/couldn't put the points on another way.

Some places it's totally worth doing the point saving-up here... Yodobashi in particular because you get 10% back in points. Like, I bought 12000 yen worth of videogames for Oren, which puts 1200 points on my card, which can pretty much instantly be used as 1200 yen towards a purchase there. The other place I used to be really good about it was the bakery in Akabane Station... it's not a very instant or good rebate, but collect 30 stickers for your card (and I'd get 1 or 2 every time I came in) and you get a free lunch. I dunno.

The other thing is that if you DON'T have a point card at a lot of places they insist on making you one! So it's better to just have one.

I think for iTunes I just need to remember to put that drive on my computer... but I just realized I already booted up today with something else linked to drive F. Oops.

[geekers.livejournal.com]

I watch exchange rates (via xe.org) like a hawk; mostly USD vs CAD, AUS, JPY, BRL, EUR, and GBP. Many currencies have tanked, but are currently recovering. Overall there have been some interesting things happening. With regards to the JPY, in short, it was 83ish to the USD last Nov. IIRC (my sensei was going home to Japan to visit parents, and exchange was horrible for her!). It is, as you've noticed 91-92ish lately. I'm pleased, as I've been anxiously waiting for the yen to weaken/dollar strengthen. Most of the change between the JPY and USD was due to a strong yen. This hurt Japan exports especially hard due to the global recession. /babble

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Good luck on the interviews!