Herro Flom Japan

• I bought a 30GB iPod yesterday to replace the one I lost. I also bought a new pair of Sennheiser CX 300 earbuds ($40 and they're the best I've ever owned). With the store points I collected from that purchase, I picked up an expensive and beautifully crafted and designed leather case for a mere 45 yen.
• For the first time in ages, tonight I'm having dinner with my best friend and her cousin. That might not make you happy, but it sure makes me happy.
• The book publisher for whom we're going to produce a podcast is mere centimeters away from approving the budget. Boy, will you be surprised when I can finally announce the company's name.
• As previously mentioned, my home computer is fixed, and I didn't lose any data.
• I'm going to take the kids to the International Tokyo Toy Show over the weekend, and the above-mentioned best friend and her daughter might come along. I think I'll be able to bribe the kids into helping with a videocast, on the condition that I let them do it in Japanese.
• Life is boring, repetitive, lonely, soul-draining and tedious for me lately, but it won't be that way forever, and things could be a whole lot worse. I just need to make an effort to crawl out from under this rock.

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Yesterday on the train ride home I was smooshed up against a middle-aged man with a head full of dandruff the size of corn flakes.

But that's not the gross part.

The rotating ceiling fan was blowing them off his head and onto other commuters. I was this close to shrieking like a little girl.

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Nothing too interesting here, but I managed to fix my home PC this morning. I guess the C drive is starting to crap out intermittently. It probably got stuck or overheated, and when the machine rebooted the BIOS couldn't find it and promoted the next drive on the list to startup. All I had to do was designate the correct drive as the boot drive and it worked.

I warned you, not interesting.

Speaking of not interesting, lately I've been spending all my weeknights in a Starbucks somewhere, reading the Japanese translation of Catcher in the Rye. Had I not lost my iPod I probably wouldn't have bought the book. I use my retro-cool Sony Clie as an electronic dictionary (it kicks the Nintendo DS's ass eight ways into next Thursday) and footnote all the new words and phrases in red pen. On the train home (usually the last one) I re-read everything and try to think of ways I'd use in daily life the phrases that are new to me, so that I'm "owning" them instead of just trying to memorize them.

The company I work for is in negotiations with a major international publisher to produce a podcast for them. One of the biggest publishers in the world by far, but you'll never guess in a million years which one, and when I can finally tell you you'll smack yourself in the forehead. I can't even give you a hint. I won't be the voice, just the producer, and when you find out who the publisher is you'll understand why. If all goes well, it'll start in July.

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Booting my home PC by using an Ubuntu live CD shows that all my drives are OK. The problem is that Windows XP isn't booting, as if either the C drive's boot sector is toast or the system directory is somehow corrupted. All I see after the BIOS boots is a black screen with a flashing cursor.

Does anyone know of a utility that might be able to fix the problem?

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