5

NB: This happened Tuesday. It would have been posted then, but I had about ten minutes worth of not running when I finally made it to YVR, which wasn’t really enough time to yank out the computer and type. I have fudged the timestamp accordingly, but have no idea what LJ is going to do to it. Also, I am continuing to have problems with emacs even though I have an honest-to-god IP connection right now, so stayed tuned to this location.

It turns out that the smartest thing I did all day was bring my cell phone.

I had toyed briefly with the idea of leaving my sexy new phone at home. After all, it doesn’t work in Japan and even if it did Telus would charge me ass-raping rates to roam. I made arrangements with Vodafone over the weekend to rent a phone while I was in Japan — pick it up, and drop it off, at Narita. So why bring my own? So I could call people from the airport in Vancouver during my long long layovers? Sure, that made sense. For a variety of reasons, mostly relating to the fact that I find being with my phone unpalatable, I brought it along with me. Fully charged, the battery should hold out two weeks if I don’t turn it on, and really, how much calling would I be doing during the layover? YVR has 802.11b. I don’t need CDMA access.

Yeah, not so much.

The past couple of days have seen dense, thick fog descend over Victoria during the late afternoon and evening. I left J.’s house in the middle of the afternoon yesterday and we could see whisps of fog floating over Esquimalt; driving home, I could see it sitting out over the harbor. I went out around 18:30 last night to run some last-minute errands and my car’s headlight beams were visible as I drove down my street. When I went to bed, Victoria was socked in.

A warning sign?
You tell me.

When you get to the airport and discover, among other things, a very long lineup and many hoarse Air Canada employees, and that you cannot see the terminal building, you start to get a little antsy. I wasn’t worried — I build my flight schedules with enough flexibility in them to allow for this kind of screwup. After losing one too many bags in a short connection, I have resigned myself to inhabiting airport departure lounges waiting for other flights. Hey, I’m smart; I know how to deal.

What I hadn’t counted on was Air Canada announcing that all flights out of Victoria were cancelled. Until noon. At 08:15, staring 9+ hours of air travel in the face, I stood in the check-in hall at Victoria International Airport and contemplated my next move. First, call back my ride. M. was good as his word and flipped back around the airport to pick me up. (I had, in a fit of silliness, said, “Just drop me off; I’m running a little late, and I’ll be fine.” Hah! Famous last words.) Next, shag the numbers for both Harbour Air and Helijet and start making calls. Helijet had departures, but they were booked solid. Harbour Air didn’t have anything — the fog was affecting them, too. (I paused briefly to consider how, exactly, fog can affect Harbour Air but not Helijet, given they operate less than a kilometer apart — Ogden Point’s weather isn’t dramatically different from that at the foot of Wharf Street.) That left one option only.

I’ll bet you know where this is going.

This would explain why my journey of a couple thousand miles and half a world away started with me standing in the departure lounge at the goddamn ferry terminal, my cell phone glued to my ear. Regular readers know how much I thoroughly hate the ferries; starting a trip to the other side of the planet by riding the big white boat was a proposition that oscillated between stupid and enraging. Maybe the only way this could have been dumber might have been if I hitchhiked out to the airport.

Meanwhile, I spent fifteen minutes on the phone with JAL. The Japanese — or JAL’s customer service representatives at least — I’m sorry to say, have made passive-aggressiveness into a fine art. The representative was sympathetic, but ultimately unhelpful: She took my name (maybe the only time in North America I haven’t had to spell it over the phone), my cell phone number, and said, “I’ll pass a message along to the airport staff, but it won’t do anything.” What are my choices if I don’t make this flight? “You’ll have to talk to the airport staff about that.” Can I get my seat assignment now, so I’m not fighting for one of the three middle seats on the 747 (which is inevitably what’s going to happen)? “No, you’re too late for that.”

I felt a hate crime coming on. The problem was, I didn’t know who the victim was going to be. Even more infuriating was that I couldn’t be mad at anyone: I’m used to being enraged when I travel, and I’m used to hurling invective at opportune targets (never the customer service people, you understand, only the supervisors). This incident having involved Air Canada, I was working up a good head of anger — as I said the other day, Air Canada always seems to find new and amazing ways to piss me off — but then realized there was no point. Who am I going to get mad at? The runway was below minima. It’s not like they planned it this way or anything. So far as I know, anyway.

The high point of this otherwise miserable day came when I went into the bathroom on the ferry. On the back of the door was a sign about not throwing stuff in the toilet (because these toilets have a tendency to clog, being marine toilets and all). The sign has a big black hole on it and it said something to the effect of “this is how big the pipe is.” Someone had graffiti’d the thing. The end effect?

Goatse.

I categorically refuse to speculate as to why this cheered me up.
But it did.

This would be funny if it were happening to somebody else

A fuller, more complete accounting of the events of the past 24 hours will have to wait until I am somewhere with a proper Internet connection but: JAL economy class sucks, the this-place-has-no-street-names problem that Tokyo has is vastly underrated, and 6.0 earthquakes are absolutely no damn fun at all.

The hotel PA is system is busy making announcements of which I only understand every fourth or fifth word (and those words seem to be “please” and “thank you”). I am trying to decide whether I want to try going back to bed or not.

I suppose there is another way to look at it: this is as authentic a Japanese experience as I can have without, you know, going back in time.

Is this an omen? Is God trying to tell me something? Or am I just that unlucky?

Last minute freak-out

Note: Cross-posted to Under A Blackened Sky.

I spent most of yesterday scouring the net looking for hotels. Yes, I am aware that it isn’t that big a deal, that I’ll be able to find a place to stay thanks to the fine folks at the JNTO, but it’s still a worrying thing. My entire professional life is predicated on dealing with problems and being, essentially, a type A++ control freak, so leaving these sorts of things to chance is never a positive thing, nor is it something that’s likely to result in happiness and mental well-being. In the end, I managed to find a place to stay in Himeji and Nagasaki — which leaves Kyoto, Hiroshima, Miyajima, and Fukuoka for when I hit Tokyo tomorrow. Well, Wednesday. Whenever that happens, I mean.

Speaking of Miyajima — that typhoon last month? Yeah, it apparently damaged Itsukushima shrine. Itsukushima and Miyajima have been more or less the highlight of my trip that doesn’t involve drinking booze in class bars. The Miyajima tourist people are saying that repairs are ongoing and that they hope to re-open the shrine to the public by mid-October; cross your fingers and hope that “mid-October” really means “before the 17th.”

Bedtime now. Up at 0600, airport by 0800, YVR by 0930.

Nighty night.

Bending over backwards

Most bloggers — I’m willing to bet the vast majority, in fact — update their sites by doing exactly what I’m doing right now: Feeding text into a form on a Web page and then banging the “submit” button at the bottom of the page. This is how Blogger, Blogspot, Moveable Type, and the rest of them work by default. Effective and available everywhere.

I don’t use a content management system at my other place. The entire site is maintained by hand with the One True Editor. It’s gotten bad enough that I have serious problems working in non-emacs editors. I don’t particularly like writing inside a Web browser; I’d much rather compose text in emacs and then import/export as necessary. And, true, you can get elisp modules to allow XML-RPC publishing of blog entries, but I could never get them to work properly (probably demonstrating that my m4d hax0r sk1llz are sorrily overrated).

I update my blog using emacs’ “edit locally, save globally” strategy. emacs has a nice built-in FTP client that will pull files off remote filesystems, allow you to edit them on your machine, and then dump them back to the server when you’re finished. It’s not perfect, but it works pretty well, and I’m only moderately paranoid about the security implications. Unfortunately, it only works when I can get an IP connection to my laptop — which is surprisingly frequently, but isn’t always guaranteed. I’ve been stuck in places before where I could get Internet access, but it wasn’t direct IP (i.e., “here’s a Web browser, don’t unplug the computer”).

Why does this matter? Because I’ll be in Japan for most of October. I’d like to blog the trip/keep a journal while I’m on the road, but while I’m reasonably confident of my ability to find Web access most days, I’m not at all cofident of my ability to find IP access, wired or wireless. (This won’t stop me from trying, of course, but you know how this works.) So the emacs update trick won’t work.

I think the plan for the moment is to use this LJ as a holding pool for those updates I manage to post while on the road, then back-hack the entries into the main blog when I get home — kind of like what Beth did on her vacation (except I’m not writing them by hand, that’s stupid).

My transformation into a 14 year-old girl continues apace!

Aw, crap.

So I was thinking about the best way to continue writing while I’m away in Japan next month, and I realized that maybe the simplest solution would be to, um, start a LiveJournal. After all, I can update it from anywhere there’s a Web browser, and, um.. well, that’s about it. The other place kind of requires an actual network connection to update properly; I can’t count on finding Emacs living on Internet cafe machines. And though hallie is coming with me, I also don’t anticipate finding a whole heap of wireless access points for my use.

But now I have an LJ. Holy crap, do I ever feel.. like a 14 year-old girl. Ugh. Next thing you know, I’m going to be hanging out on MSN and squeeeeing at my friends. (Whoops, too late.)