Thursday May 15
 
11:00
 
Ignore At Your Peril?

When I first moved to Korea, one of the things that surprised me was that South Koreans are completely unconcerned about the fact that they are still technically at war with North Korea. Outside Korea, almost the only news you hear of the Koreas is the threat of North Korea - but inside the country, people only care about being reunited with their families. The risk of North Korea never crosses their mind. They don’t even see it as a risk. In the words of one Korean friend: North Korea would never invade South Korea.

The frequency and severity of the earthquakes in Tokyo has been increasing recently. Being stuck in a room while it shakes like crazy is pretty scary, believe me. Being up 20+ floors working and suddenly feel the building lurch to the side certainly is pretty scary also. What would it take for the buildings to crumble?

The Japanese seem to have no fear or concern for earthquakes at all. Partially I can understand that, because in my first year or so in Tokyo, I had a “North Korea” attitude to earthquakes: I didn’t really see them as a risk. But the last couple have been freaky. To say I no longer have concern would be to tell a lie.

My company doesn’t help things, continually sending out “Earthquake Training” notices. (How you can train an earthquake, I don’t know.)

The news in China doesn’t help things.

My vivid dreams don’t help things.

And my Japanese friends don’t help things either: “Osaka was hit by an earthquake 10 or so years ago where many people died,” one of them told me, “All the houses in our street were destroyed, except my parents house. So after the earthquake, people were coming to our house to use the shower, gas,..”

The BBC report the incident here, noting:

Japan is one of the world’s most earthquake-prone countries and experiences thousands of minor tremors each year.

But the Kobe earthquake was one of the worst in the country’s history - 6,433 people died.

Nearly 27,000 people were injured, and more than 45,000 homes were destroyed.

The total cost of repairing the damage was estimated at more than $100 billion.

Japanese scientists have since tried to improve prediction of quakes, but seismology is an inexact science and it is extremely difficult to forecast when and where quakes it will occur.

Kobe struggled to overcome the huge impact of the 1995 earthquake.

New office blocks and malls were built to attract back the 50,000 people who left after the quake.

The fact that Tokyo is “due” another big earthquake has been discussed here before (see comments). No-one knows, of course, when the next big earthquake will come. However all around me at the moment, everything is shouting “Earthquake!”, and I can’t help wondering whether they are warning signs of the next big earthquake that I shouldn’t ignore.

Thursday May 8
 
23:34
 
Sleep N Shake

Last night was the worst earthquake I’ve felt in Tokyo. Again, it was during the night and it woke me up - and it seemed to last forever. Just when I thought it had stopped, a few minutes later it would start back up again. It was very scary.

My computers seem to be having similar ups and downs. After the problems with the Acer, today I was playing with my Kohjinsha SA1 - increasing the Video RAM in BIOS and plugging in an external monitor - and I managed to bluescreen it. Continually. As soon as Windows started, it would find a new USB peripheral (why?!), then crash. Thankfully after switching it off and leaving it cold for 15 minutes, it recovered. I guess after allocating more memory to the graphics card in bios, some garbage must have been left in memory somewhere that caused problems. Who knows.

Then I came home, and as I was playing with my LG laptop (LW25), I noticed that the fan wasn’t on. I tried toggling the fan speed and no joy, so I turned it over and looked at the fan. There looked to be a little bit of dust, so I got a toothpick and pulled out… what can only be described as a hairball.

There’s a cat living inside my LG.

The fan started to whizz away again. I wonder how long it has been like that? I noticed it had been getting hot lately, but I thought it was just normal heat from being switch on all the time. Now that I feel the laptop being cool again, I wonder what damage I - or the cat - has done.

Spurred on by a bit of success, I decided to take a big risk. My LG has 2GB of memory - 2 x 1GB. According to the online documentation and everything that I can find on the LW25 on the internet, the maximum memory is 2GB - but then again, the online documentation says my computer has a Pentium M, and that’s poppycock. It has a 2GHz Core Duo.

I read elsewhere that some manufacturers specified “maximum RAM” not by what the BIOS or motherboard actually allows, but by what chips were available at the time of machine launch. Since I have a 2GB module hanging around from the Acer - the one that I bought to put in the Acer - I thought I’d whack it in the LG and see what happened. If all went well, I’d have 3GB (2GB + 1GB). If all went tits up, I’d have a burning mess.

With my luck with computers lately, it probably wasn’t a good thing to experiment with - potentially blowing up my long-time-reliable PC - but it worked. I now have 3GB running quite happily. It’s also a relief because I did wonder whether the 2GB card was dodgy and had caused the Acer problems, but since it’s working fine in the LG, I know that the card is OK (I also used ran the Microsoft memory test program that comes on the Vista DVD to verify the chip was OK in the Acer and it gave no errors - but I still had slight worries until now).

My experience with the Acer was annoying - I thought I’d be left with a non-refundable 2GB memory chip, as well as the time I wasted - but as things have turned out, it’s thanks to the Acer that I realised I could upgrade my LG to 3GB, and my Kohjinsha to 1GB. So even though I lost 3+ days out my life, I’ll hopefully gain them back slowly through increased computer performance ;)

Friday April 18
 
00:03
 
He’s Flying High

My brother is currently on a plane flying from Britain to Japan. I don’t know why, but there’s something weird about the fact that he’s actively doing something at the moment, yet I’m about to go sleep.

But then it has been a weird day. Last night I was shaken awake at 4am by a huge earthquake.

In the ~18months I’ve been in Japan, there’s been about 6 earthquakes that have majorly rocked my apartment or office.

Three of those have been in the last month or two.

That freaks me out. I’ve heard that Tokyo is on the “brink” of a major quake. People here don’t even think about it - just like South Koreans don’t think about the fact that they are still technically at war. But the recent rise in the number of earthquakes has certainly brought the fact to my attention.

I ended up going back to sleep and having a huge nightmare about a catastrophic earthquake hitting Tokyo, with buildings toppling down like dominoes in Shinjuku and surrounds, and me just escaping with my life.

Thankfully I have no “sixth sense” that I’m aware of, so I don’t regard it as any premonition. I just hope I sleep better tonight - in 6 hours time I have to get up and take the Narita Express to the airport to pick up my brother.  I’m not looking forward to the 6am rise.