Deanna ([personal profile] dr4b) wrote2009-02-17 02:04 am

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

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 [personal profile] 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...

[identity profile] skydiamonde.livejournal.com 2009-02-16 09:08 pm (UTC)(link)
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!

[identity profile] bhudson.livejournal.com 2009-02-16 09:52 pm (UTC)(link)
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.

[identity profile] skydiamonde.livejournal.com 2009-02-16 09:56 pm (UTC)(link)
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.

[identity profile] bhudson.livejournal.com 2009-02-16 10:01 pm (UTC)(link)
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.