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“ The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” – G.K. Chesterton

Thursday, 24 August 2006

Photos of the aparto

That's the Japlish word for apartment. Or perhaps that's how they say apartment in Japanese. I don't really know. But anyway, we have a lovely 2 bedroom apartment, spacious kitchen and a toilet seat with an inbuilt heater (have not tried it out yet). These are photos I took on the day we arrived in Ukawa (it looks more 'lived in' now - i.e. messy). Almost half the apartment are tatami covered, the other half is hardwood. Our apartment is really spacious compared to what a lot of other JETs get, especially those poor souls in city placements.

The kitchen


The living room


The tatami bedroom - those are the edges of the futons we sleep on..


The view on the way home from my school
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7 comments:

  1. hunter00630 August 2006 at 19:02

    See, I could live in something like that. Basically everything I need is crammed in to one room at my new place. I'd be happy with something like that for sure.

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  2. expatgourmand30 August 2006 at 19:34

    Hehe, yeah the accommodation is pretty sweet (better than our ex-apartment in Highgate). Hope that you've settled into your new place.
    On another note, Rob has been trying to download Yakitate Japan for me but bittorrent sucks (can't play the downloads for some reason that Rob cannot figure out). Did you download your episodes, and if you did, can you pls give us a heads-up on where to download? Thanks!

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  3. bobstopper31 August 2006 at 17:34

    Yeah, I tried downloading from Anime-Empire via Bittorrent but the files aren't working. BT seems to download one file at a time and puts them in a directory. I waited until one was done and tried opening it but no joy. I opened it in a hex editor and it doesn't look like an AVI file.
    I originally thought it was a codec problem. I've downloaded every conceivable codec as well as installing the latest development versions of mplayer (thinking it might be a subtitle issue). I spent the whole day on it but I think it might have been a wild goose chase.
    I'm just going to let bittorrent download it all and hope that it's just a small chunk at the beginning that's missing which will be completed once they're all downloaded. At least it'll give me a 42hr break before I have to look at the problem again (bittorrent's usually horrendously slow for me for some reason).

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  4. hunter00631 August 2006 at 18:10

    Hey man, you're in .jp. You shouldn't have any problems whatsoever downloading stuff. They have kickarse internet. I don't know why you are getting one file to download at a time, but it sounds like a client problem. Perhaps try µTorrent, since that's a standalone executable that you can download. Really small download, and will answer your question if it's a client issue or not (if it downloads more than one file at a time, then you know it's a client issue - and you can choose to continue with µTorrent or not).
    If all else fails, install mIRC and download it from IRC. It's damn fast, and they don't usually have any queue's there so it should come down pretty quick.
    My mate also suggested it could be your modem. I've heard of some funky things happening with modems, e.g. catching fire and stuff (D-Link 604). Also, if you're using a standard port, change that too - some ISP's firewall the usual port out. Apart from that, I can't think of anything. Best of luck!!

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  5. bobstopper31 August 2006 at 20:39

    Heh. We're turning poor Jeannie's blog into a tech support forum :P
    Sorry, I don't think I was clear. I'm downloading a batch of files (episodes 1-25). BT fires up using the .torrent and connects to whatever peers it can. It then downloads the content of that .torrent from whatever peers are seeding the .torrent. So it's the one download, but the one download consists of many files. I was just surprised that it downloads the files in order since I'd have expected it to just download whatever random chunks it feels like and put them together at the end.
    I've got IRC but it's a burden downloading individual episodes. I wanted to just get a big batch.
    Yeah, I've had my share of modem/BT issues before. My old ADSL modem used to freeze up whenever I used BT. It only did it when I was using BT. The modem was even connected to a separate computer I was using as a firewall. I don't know why it was picky about BT traffic when it was fine with everything else. Very weird.

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  6. hunter0061 September 2006 at 10:33

    Hehe, I'm sure she won't mind.
    That is very, very strange behaviour for a BitTorrent client. You're right in that it should be downloading random chunks and whatnot - could be a setting somewhere. Generally if it can grab whatever random chunks are available at the time, rather than doing it in sequential order, it will go MUCH faster (has to do with availability).
    I used a leech script, mainly copy and paste with a few tricks thrown in for IRC, so while it was a bit of a burden initially, I just let it run and when it was done it shut itself down, and I can understand wanting to get a big batch at once.
    I'd still go with what's faster, rather than what's more annoying to achieve though.

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  7. expatgourmand2 September 2006 at 10:04

    Hey man, I don't mind as long as I get to watch my anime! Oh, and by the way, thanks for your help - Rob got it working and we're watching the first episode..

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