Herro Flom Japan

I'm supposed to blog when something interesting happens to me, right?

This morning as I was passing through Shinjuku Station, I saw a woman take a dive down a short flight of slippery stairs and lie crumpled on the wet ground with a quickly expanding pool of blood under her head. (That freaked me out.) I've lived here long enough to know that you can't assume someone else is going to help so I rushed down her, tore off my headphones (and my glasses–oops), grabbed a towel from someone who pulled one out, knelt down and held the towel to her head while resting her neck on my thigh. She was talking, which was a relief. She was saying, "Don't worry about me, if you need to get to work, please go because I don't want to make you late." I told her to just relax and asked her if she was hurt anywhere else. She said she hurt her leg a little, but it didn't look broken, although I wasn't about to let my hand off her head to check. Man, she was really gushing blood. It looked like someone had slaughtered a dog on the sidewalk.

I got blood all over my jeans. Not a good pair, but these days none of my jeans are a "good pair." I can't buy my size in Japan, so I only have a few old pairs left that are still wearable. In other words, I trashed about 20% of my wardrobe right there.

Someone else called an ambulance on their mobile phone. It was nice that so many people stopped to ask if someone had called one. I like to see people care about total strangers, but day to day I don't see it often enough. Either people don't want to get involved or they just stand there dumbfounded.

There was another women there who vaguely knew her because they work at the same company, so she stayed with her to wait for the ambulance and I left to get washed up. She kept saying that she didn't want to make anyone late, and by that time she was sitting up and not bleeding as much so I figured it was OK to leave. But it's never easy to know if it's really OK to leave in a situation like that. She wanted me to, so I left.

And now I have to spend the rest of today wearing blood-stained jeans. I don't mind, really. It doesn't look like I've been through a massacre, but the stain is definitely noticeable so I'm a bit self-conscious.

Update: When I got home tonight my wife gave me a ziplock baggie full of some magical blue powder to put on the stain. The jeans just came out of the washer and much to my surprise the blood washed off completely without a trace. I told the story to both of my kids. Tony (the older one) wanted to know every last detail of the ordeal. Andy wanted to know why the heck would I volunteer to help a complete stranger.

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And no, I won't tell you where it is. It's super-secret.

Every time I see a woman doing her makeup on the train, I wish I could pull a battery-operated shaver out of my pocket and do my face. That's an old joke, isn't it. But today I really did forget to shave.

It got laughs.

I wonder if anyone has ever been seriously injured while doing their makeup on a train. Seems  like there's a strong possibility of poking out an eye with a mascara brush or choking to death on lipstick. Wouldn't that be fun to watch. How much do you want to bet that nobody would help.

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From now on in my podcasts, I'm going to ramble, stutter, sniffle, repeat myself, etc. in homage to my new hero, Maria, the world's most horrible singer.

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I'm going to tell you a story that might not be very interesting, but who knows, it might come in handy someday.

Here's the short version first: Whenever there's a technical problem, check the wiring before you do anything else. Even if your intuition tells you otherwise, ignore it. They actually teach you this in networking courses. Really.

OK, here's the story. On Saturday, our home Internet connection went out. (or "went off" or however you say it. Couldn't connect to the Internet.) This happens every so often, so I waited for it to fix itself and kept checking the router syslogs for any good news. (About 100 times in eight hours.) In the meantime, I configured my laptop to leech off the neighbor's wireless. (Don't worry, it's OK, I scanned their network first and found out they didn't have any PCs using it at the time.)

Day two: still no joy. I can see in the syslogs that the router is dialing out over and over but the other end of the line isn't picking up.

Day three: Tony's going through some serious Counter Strike withdrawal and Andy's whining because he can't play Gary's Mod. Not to even mention what it's doing to my sex life. (Ha ha, just kidding. Well, OK. Not just kidding. But yeah, anyway.) So I decided to check the wiring. First, I checked the phone line that we use for ADSL. Well whaddaya know, no frikkin' dial tone! Just for kicks I unplugged the splitter (the little box that splits the incoming phone line into two: one that goes to the phone and the other that plugs into the ADSL modem) then plugged the phone directly into the wall. Voila, we have dial tone!

At this point I'm guessing the splitter is broken, although I can't imagine how some stupid little box with no moving parts or power supply could break. It just sits behind the desk collecting dust bunnies and splits the incoming frequencies (or is it bandwidth?) into to separate streams. But whatever, so I hop in the car, buy a new splitter at the local home electronics store, bring it home and plug it in. So now the phone works when it's plugged into the new splitter.

But still no Internet, dammit. However, since my laptop still works thanks to the involuntary generosity of my neighbor, I give up for the night.

Fast forward to this morning. I want to update my podcasts, but I have to do it on my desktop PC, not the laptop, so I check the wiring again and discover that last night when I plugged the phone into the new splitter, I forgot to plug in the $%$# modem!

Moral of the story: Check the wiring first. And then, check it again.

P.S. The only reason I'm telling this story is because I haven't written in a while, but nothing interesting has happened lately. Truth is, I spent most the three-day weekend just studying Java, pulling weeds, doing laundry and horsing around with the kids. For excitement, I installed Ubuntu on my laptop via Wubi. Hey, what can I say, I'm a real fun guy.

[tags]anecdote, geek stuff[/tags]

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There's a definite pattern to events when Oliver and I meet up.

1. We eat till it hurts.
2. We drink till we're about to burst at the seams.
3. I fall asleep outside of Koga station.

Oliver has a superpower I wish I had: the ability to strike up a conversation with anyone, and optionally get them to buy him free drinks if he's thirsty. Perhaps you can guess by the fact that I haven't put out a podcast since it was -10 degrees outside, but in real life I'm a very quiet person; the diametrical opposite of gregarious when there's more than two other people around. It's been almost 40 years and I still can't decide whether to embrace my neuroses or take up some kind of heavy addiction to counterbalance them. (It would have to be something inexpensive. That's what makes choosing one so difficult.)

We ended last night in a crowded basement bar that had a touch screen MP3 jukebox, on which we took turns trying to play the worst song ever. I actually broke the machine with my selection. It would play Barry Manilow's Copacabana all the way through, crash, reboot and play it again. And again. And again. It was the sound of victory.

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