sunday

1. Drink more water/fluids
2. Buy what I need, not what I want (unless it’s on super sale)
3. Do real work at work
4. Whine less
5. Spend more time on my hobbies

Japan was fun, way better than Egypt at least. I felt like I experienced two extremes, one country being wholly impoverished and dirty, the other being wealthy and impeccably clean. I prefer the latter. I liked the fact that all the hotel rooms provided shampoo, conditioner, toothbrush, toothpaste, and razors, and hair brushes…I could have left my entire toiletry kit at home. The western toilets have heated seats (pretty sweet, if you’re a girl) and some of them even have a water sound when you sit down because Japanese are very shy even when they go to the bathroom. We lucked out and didn’t have rain until the very last day and it wasn’t very crowded at any of the temples (apparently it’s shoulder-to-shoulder in the spring time during cherry blossom season, and the humidity is worse than summer in D.C.). Sushi starts to get old after eating it for breakfast, lunch and dinner and I was craving a burger and fries by the third day. I did finally gorge myself on a big mac in Osaka on the eighth day. I picked up the essential words for survival, including Wakarimasen, which means “I don’t understand.” I don’t know how many people spoke to me in Japanese (do I look Japanese?), but I always gave them the same response, “Nani? Wakarimasen.” To fully experience the Japanese way, I wouldn’t recommend joining a guided tour; however, if you can’t read kanji and/or don’t read/speak Japanese, join a guided tour. Japanese are infamous for their terrible English, more like their complete inability to learn English, and it was clear that you needed to speak either Madarin or Japanese to survive. They even dubbed CNN in Japanese (really annoying). You can get around the cities reading the English signs, but if you plan on eating out locally, bring a picture book to point. There are also a million shrines and temples, sort of like going to Europe and seeing all the churches. The beds are rather short and ridiculously hard, although after the first two nights, I didn’t need to crack my back for the rest of the trip. A unique experience was the onsen (hot spring spa) in Atami where you literally go butt naked in the public bath. If you thought you were self conscious, no need to fear because there are old people butt naked bathing as well.

Good news. The Xbox 360 fall update includes DivX/XviD support! As I found on engadget, you can now stream your illegally downloaded movies and tv shows from your PC to your Xbox 360 and watch it on your sweet 50″ plasma tv. Okay, you can watch it on my sweet 50″ plasma tv (no more Dexter on the 15″ screen!). Don’t have a PC? Are you an Apple Fanboy? Don’t worry. There’s Connect360, a program that automatically indexes your iTunes and iPhoto libraries and shares the to your Xbox 360. You can then use the Xbox 360 Dashboard to browse and play your media, organized in the exact same way that it is on your Mac.

So I had to immediately ditch work and go home to test this out. Sure enough, my pirated copy of Transformers plays awesomely on my tv. Can’t say the quality is as good as if I had actually put in a DVD (looks slightly pixelated), but at least I can lie on the couch in the living room rather that sit upright in my desk chair in the bedroom.

I look forward to watching the last two Dexter episodes on my TV finally.

Some Facebook gifts I have received from a certain someone I think I know. Read from bottom up.

This video is totally sweet, and you can read up on the article here.

But I still wouldn’t buy a Wii.

For some time now, I’ve been thinking about the problem of how to have a relationship without having a commitment. I thought I came to a solution when I was in Egypt, but I think CAD’s recent installment of Luke’s and Kate’s relationship encapsulates the concept: