i woke up to a phone call this morning. this usually is not a good sign. it turns out that dell wanted to wake me up early in the morning (i know early is subjective, but anything before 10AM is early to me) and informed me that my order is backordered…still.

i’ve been patiently waiting for the last three weeks for my order to come to me and they said that it could be up to another 4 weeks before my new computer comes.

4 weeks.

i’ve had mixed experiences with dell’s backordered shipments. but this is just getting ridiculous

so i’ve read about how you can get video on the ipod nanos (the old ones, not sure about the new ones that were just released) and so i thought it would be SO COOL if i could do that. so i went and installed iPod Linux on my nano and started to re-encode movies to fit the size of the screen on the nano. oh yeah, by the way, it can only do uncompressed video…well, it can’t be THAT big, i mean, the screen size is only like 176×132…that’s tiny! or so i thought.

no one told me that a 30 minute sitcom will end up being 1GB big. that’s TOTALLY not worth it for me anymore to reencode videos for the nano, regardless of how cool it is.

what really pisses me off about this whole thing is that i JUST REMEMBERED that i have an epson p-2000 image tank that can playback video. it has a larger screen, larger hard drive, AND supposedly does DiVX playback too.

sheesh, and here i was wasting time trying to get it to work on my little ipod nano…

i was surfing the good ole information highway and stumbled across this game while reading david’s page. 1000 blank white cards looks like a game that could be incredibly fun. you make the cards. you make the rules. and you can make up cards during the game. sort of reminds me of the game mao…come to think of it, no one liked the game of mao. now that i think of it, i haven’t played one of my favorite card games in a long time: squarez.

oh well, i still think it’d be fun to play.

studio 60 on the sunset strip is every bit as good as i was hoping it would be. it definitely has a bit of a west wing feel to it, but i really liked the premiere.

speaking of new shows, eureka on the sci-fi channel is a great show, too. definitely more sci-fi than i usually watch, but i love the ideas for the story lines.

how i met your mother wasn’t as great of a season premiere as i had hoped, but that’s probably mostly due to lily’s absence.

i’m still trying to make up my mind about stand off. i like it so far, but i’m not sure if it has the staying power.

bones also doesn’t have as much of an appeal like it did, but it’s still a show that i watch.

and, unfortunately, i caught a little bit of dancing with the stars. man, that show is just awful. awful, awful, awful. let me say it again…awful.

i met up with angus in shinjuku where we checked out the headquarters for many camera manufacturers. we went to the pentax forum as well as the canon showroom. i had big hopes for the canon showroom, but it wasn’t nearly as big or as impressive as i had hoped. i was really hoping to be able to play with all of the lenses, but they had them locked up in display cases. poo on canon for that.

we first met up at a big department store where we went to the basement to eat. the entire floor is food and we were pretty overwhelmed with all of the choices. shinjuku is supposed to be one of the best places to buy camera gear, but i think that the yodobashi at akihabara is just as good. i didn’t really see any great deals at any brick and mortar, though.

we went to the capital building where there is an observation deck and got to see buildings and buildings sprawled all over the place with no greenery anywhere to be seen. it was a little shocking to see how jam-packed this city really was.

while i was in japan, i stayed in the ginza area of tokyo. being japanese, i thought that i wouldn’t really be hit with much of a culture shock. i’ve heard stories about what life is like in japan and i’ve been watching japanese tv with current news all my life. what i was not prepared for was the conditions of japan. it is typical in an office to have rows and rows of long desks where each person has about 4 feet of desk space sitting next to each other. there is no sense of privacy.

i think the biggest thing that bothered me while i was there was the definition of personal space in japan. it is completely normal to pack yourself into an already crowded elevator. where i would ordinarily think you can only fit 10 people in an elevator, they squeeze in 15. i guess it all goes with the packing of people into trains. it makes for an uncomfortable ride, though. the elevator starts to get really warm with all those people in there.

with that, though, if you are walking in the street and someone clips you, that seems to be a pretty normal occurence. if you bump into someone, they just keep walking on by.

the other thing about tokyo is that it must be the neon capital of the world. how they manage to cram so many neon signs in such a little space, i’ve got no idea, but there were definitely some places in ginza where it was just as bright at night as it was in the day because of all of the neon signs competing against each other for your attention.

tokyo is shockingly packed with buildings. it wasn’t until i got a view from an observation deck did i really appreciate just how big and crowded tokyo really is. buildings for as far as you can see.

i’ve been burned out for a while now. last week was a busy week preparing for a big tradeshow for the company. the week before that i was in japan pushing 15 hour days that week. the week before that was another busy week prepping for the tradeshow so that, in theory, i wouldn’t have had to do anything after i got back jet lagged from japan.

so, anyhow, i’m burned out.

but i have SO MANY pictures from japan that i want to process and share. i think that i’ll start working on breaking up the pictures i took by region…

i just watched this movie and i have to say that i really enjoyed it. after i popped it out of the netflix envelope, i asked christi if she had heard of the movie and she had said that it was a total chick flick and sounded sort of surprised that i got it. surprised or disappointed, i’m not sure now… =P

i originally got the movie because it had alexis bledel (of gilmore girls fame) and amber tambyln (of joan of arcadia fame). but the movie was quite good, it sort of reminded me of joy luck club for some reason.

if you are into heart-touching dramas, give it a look, it’s definitely worth the rental. i hadn’t even heard of the movie in the theatres.