I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before or not… nah, who am I kidding? I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before. I’m a great fan of the so-called “Japanese toilet seat.” It’s actually most commonly referred to as a woshuretto woshuretto in Japan (or “washlet” in English), after the name of the original introduced by Toto. These are toilet sets which, at their simplest wash your rear-end somewhat like a bidet, rather than using toilet paper.

Fancy models will detect your presence, open the seat for you, warm the seat, spray you with warm gentle oscillating water, dry you with warm air, evacuate the “swamp gas”, flush the toilet and close the lid. (And, of course, they’re self-cleaning and made of anti-microbial plastic.) These toilet sets, at one level or another now account for over 50% of all home toilets in Japan.

In 2001 we went to Japan and our hotel had one in our room. As someone who has, for most of my adult life, had a somewhat… umm… rapid processing digestive system, I immediately recognized how wonderful these things really are.

Irene wouldn’t let me buy one, but after her pregnancy with Michelle, she agreed that we had to have one before we had our second child.

On our next trip to Taiwan, we purchased a National made model. (National being the name used by Panasonic in Taiwan and Japan at that time.) It was a basic unit, controls on the tank, warm seat, warm water (front and rear) and adjustable pressure. It lasted about 2 years before the tank sprung a leak. We replaced it with a Panasonic (National having changed their name in Taiwan to the more worldwide know Panasonic.) which was slightly more advanced, in that it had a pulsating action for superior cleaning.

Recently that one has also sprung a leak and I have begun to wonder if the Taiwanese versions of these toilets simply cannot withstand the water pressure in the US.

So, despite the increased cost, we decided to go with a proper Japanese manufactured one, sold in the US for the US market.

I thought to myself: “Self”, I said, “You never get to buy the latest Apple product and post ‘unboxing porn’ on the net. Why not be the first on the net to photograph the unboxing of a hi-tech Japanese washlet?”

And so, without further adieu is a pictorial which I’ve entitled, “Our New Toilet Seat”

• To start, this is the old toilet seat. Note the primitive controls situated actually on the seat.
• This is the Washlet box
• The friendly welcome printed on the inside flap
• The basic contents of the box. Note how the Toto engineers have left detail untouched. The instruction manual is conveniently placed for ease of finding and reading.
• The seat itself, wrapped in a hi-tech polymer, tantalizingly calling out, “Sit on me!”
• The plumbing kit, packed in its own secure section of the box.
• All the pieces laid out for inspection.
• This is the connection point for the seat to the water supply. Note how this is a superior approach than our previous seats. The pervious ones tapped off at the water supply cutoff. This one installs a split at the base of the tank. It includes a cutoff valve and a water filter.
• This is the mounting plate. I like this a lot better than the previous seats. The older ones required that the seat be mounted to the bowl like a regular seat. This is problematic when you want to clean them or need to perform maintenance. The Toto unit has you install a mounting plate, and the toilet clicks in and out of the mount when needed.
• The seat, in position.
• Water supply lines, hooked up.
• A mounting plate is also installed for the remote control.
• The control panel, installed.
• The finished installation.
• Now if they could just get William Daniels to do voice prompts for the seat, this would be better than the new Knight Rider TV movie. Come to think of it, it’s already better than the Knight Rider movie.

Gigantic new pliosaur find in the Artic. Can you imagine a creature 50 ft long?

The 150 million-year-old specimen was found on Spitspergen, in the Arctic island chain of Svalbard in 2006.

The Jurassic-era leviathan is one of 40 sea reptiles from a fossil “treasure trove” uncovered on the island.

Nicknamed “The Monster”, the immense creature would have measured 15m (50ft) from nose to tail.

Link: BBC News => Sea Reptile is biggest on record

Technorati Tags: Natural Sciences, Paleontology, Science

Well, I’ve only been waiting 24 years for this soundtrack to finally become available: Airwolf

Available in iTunes and a few other places. You can also sample and/or buy at the producers Airwolf Themes page.

Technorati Tags: Music, Soundtrack

Saturday night we left the kids behind and went to dinner at Kyoto, a Japanese restaurant in Scottsdale.

Irene takes James and meets with friends there for lunch on a fairly regular basis – principally because their lunch specials are cheap. (Lunch deals are somewhere in the range of $4.) Personally, $4 is more than I’d pay for all the (authentic) Japanese food in the world, but Irene likes it.

I can’t help but remember the words of one of my Japanese language teachers.

“Whenever I return from Japan”, she said, “The first thing I do is go out to eat Mexican food, to have some food with flavor.”

That notwithstanding, I can tolerate teppanyaki steak, which is hardly authentic Japanese food and, in fact, I’ve had some very good teppanyaki.

I was a little concerned about the crowds heading into downtown Scottsdale on a Saturday night and, although we got there early enough, I was right to be concerned – but for the wrong reasons. It would seem that, while catering to a sedate lunch crowd on weekdays, the Friday and Saturday night crowd is somewhat different. According to several online places, Kyoto is experiencing a bit of an upturn because young club-goers like to go there, do Saki bombers and get good and drunk before they hit the nearby nightclubs.

We should have known something was up when, as we were being seated at the table with five twenty-somethings that they warned us that, “…if (we) aren’t liberal, (we’d) better ask for a different table, because (we’ll) be offended pretty fast.”

The disadvantage, to me anyway, of teppanyaki is that you get stuck eating at a crowded table with people you don’t know. That’s not my strong suit. Stoic indifference to strangers, that’s my strong suit.

On the other hand, sometimes you get a floor show.

I was never offended by the other people’s politics. In fact, they never came up, but as they tried to make conversation with us (at first, anyway) we got such fascinating tidbits as how long some of them had been dating before having sex (and in what type of car it happened), who had slept with whom and one even pointing out which one (her fiance, as it happens) she’d lost her virginity with.

Since they started with a saki bomber on empty stomachs, they progressed to drunk quite quickly, and their happy personal relationships were literally deteriorating before our very eyes. I felt sorry for the two couples that were engaged, it was clear they stand no long term chance whatsoever.

Still, it was all I could do not to try to screw with their heads. It would have been so easy – they were completely defenseless, but they didn’t seem like bad kids.

Technorati Tags: Commentary

“I’m foolin’ ‘em with my funny footprints.”

If you haven’t figured out what the obvious outcome of this series had to be then this review contains a major spoiler.
Continue reading →

Back on September 18th we were in a car crash.

Today, 5+ months later, we received an insurance settlement from the offending vehicle’s owner’s insurance company. The car was minimally insured and there was another vehicle damaged in the accident so we received approximately half of the total insurance coverage, about $5,000.

I wish I could say that even remotely covers the expenses we incurred, but it doesn’t. Still, it’s far more than I ever expected considering the driver’s criminal record and illegal alien status.

Technorati Tags: Commentary

I’ve been wondering if the Fresh & Easy concept was faltering before it hit the ground. Initially, they announced a large number of locations around Phoenix metro and indicated that they would all be opening in November. However, the one nearest me hasn’t even begun building up yet, and the ones that were under construction seemed to languish as if they were intentionally slowing down.

Now they finally seem to be kicking into high gear. Not long ago one opened about 8 miles from us, but it’s 8 miles in completely the wrong direction. It’s nowhere near anywhere we ever go. About 3-4 weeks ago, they opened one 9 miles from our house, but immediately next door to a restaurant we frequent and on the way to Michelle’s Chinese school. Still inconvenient unless we’re in the area.

Finally, this week one has opened under 3 miles from our house, and construction is finally moving along on the one under a mile from our house. When that opens, it will be within walking distance.

Fresh & Easy isn’t exactly a place to do all your shopping – that is if you’re stocking up – since most of their foods are low on preservatives, they all have very short shelf lives, but they do have several items that are uncommon. Irene and the kids are practically addicted to the unpasteurized orange juice, which, everyone we know who’s tried it agrees, is the best tasting orange juice they’ve ever had. They also carry the imported butters and English back bacon, which is almost unheard of here in the states. It makes a nice change of pace.

Technorati Tags: Commentary

More construction along my route home, more bad signs…

On the right, you can see the street sign for “Thomas Rd.” On the left, you should be able to make out the warning that “Thamas Rd.” will be closed… Seriously, don’t these sign boards have spell checkers? This is just embarassing.

Technorati Tags: Commentary, Phoenix

I love Arizona, I really do. I’m a desert-dweller and there’s no two ways about it, but, I’ll be the first to admit, there are bits of Arizona that are pretty darned desolate.

Gila Bend is one of those places.

Dry, parched, flat and desolate – just exactly the sort of place for one of the world’s largest solar power plants, which is what was announced today.

Arizona Public Service (APS) the electric company that supplies my home, has announced the building of a $1 billion, 280 megawatt solar transfer power station. The station will use tracking parabolic mirrors over 3 square miles of the desert, concentrating sunlight on a petroleum-based liquid, heating it to over 750 degrees. The heat from the liquid is used to boil water to turn steam turbines. The plant also uses molten salt to continue to produce heat for several hours after the sun goes down. At peak operation, it can power 70,000 homes.

The plant will be operated by the Spanish company, Abengoa Solar, and should be operational by 2011. This joins a second 250 Megawatt station that was recently jointly announced between a trio of Arizona power companies.

Read more about it here:

centredaily.com => APS Announces New Solar Power Plant, Among Workd’s Largest

Technorati Tags: Solar Power, Science, Technology

So, I’ve had the iPhone for 7 days, and I’ve been around home and on an out-of-town trip. I’ve used it a lot.

I love it!

Any shortcoming notwithstanding, I love it.

Let’s get a little background out of the way. Since the iPhone came out, I’ve been telling my wife that my next phone will be an iPhone. In my mind that meant something like November or December 2008, after they’d worked the bugs out and after my wife goes back to work.

My old phone has been hurting since the day it went in the pool. Even with a new battery now, it’s standby time is barely 8 hours. That has caused some problems and so, it was with that in mind that my wife decided to buy me the iPhone. I was gobsmacked, to say the least.

I got it, just hours before we left town for our trip, so I had very little time to prepare and it bespeaks well of the iPhone that I didn’t need any preparation.

Irene gave me a gift card for the amount of an 8Gb iPhone (with instructions to buy an iPhone) so I went down to the Apple store at lunch and asked them for a 16GB model. I took along $100 in cash to pay for the difference. They wouldn’t take my cash! I had to pay the balance on a credit card. In retrospect, I suspect that was an overstatement of fact, I probably could have paid for some of the balance in cash and just used the credit card for a token amount. If not, how would I have been able to purchase an iPhone if the gift card would have covered the full price?

I wanted the 16Gb for a couple reasons, first, it’s twice as much storage (duh) and I have over 20GB in my music collection. Second, I knew that the 16GB models must be the latest revision hardware, whilst an 8GB might have been an older on that has been on the shelves for a while.

I didn’t have AT&T for my cell carrier, but when I went home and plugged in the iPod, the process of converting my number from one carrier to another went smoothly. The only thing that I noticed was that, first I received a warning that it might take 6 hours. Soon thereafter I received a notice that everything was complete, and, indeed I was receiving calls; however, I didn’t receive any text messages (except those directly from AT&T) until the next morning, although I was able to send them without difficulty the whole time.

I doubt I have anything particularly insightful to add to all the thousands of iPhone blogs on the web, but I’m generally pessimistic about these things, so perhaps there’s something to be said.

I’ll run through the software first, staring with the four major functions.

The phone. Actually, I have trouble hitting 100 minutes of phone time per month. I’m not a typical cell phone user. The phone is the least important feature to me, all I care about is that I can receive calls if there’s a problem and make one when needed. In that respect, it works fine. I’ve received one visual voicemail, and that worked. Neat idea, but I rarely have enough voicemails to make it difficult to sift through. I have notices a slight difficulty hearing the ringer, so I might get more voicemail than I used to.

The e-mail client. Works well with my .MAC and GMAIL accounts but can only poll them every 15 minutes at the least. The push mail to my Yahoo account works best, but I really hate using my Yahoo account. Maybe that will change. I can’t get it to recognize my lonelocust.com domain IMAP mail from hostmonster.com. I wish I could change the new mail sound, which is identical to the default sound in OSX mail. It’s not loud enough when it’s on my hip, and my holster insulates me from the vibration.

Safari browser. Most places it works great. The lack of a flash player has only bit me once or twice so far. I do wish they’d fix that sooner rather than later. Strangely, I cannot use it to log into my work webmail (Outlook web access) but looking on the net I see that some people have a problem with this and others don’t. Just my luck. Having the full web pages is great, but I do find myself bumping the wrong link with my fingers unless I zoom way in. Landscape mode works better than portrait mode.

iPod mode. In 16GB, I was able to load my entire Japanese soundtrack collection, my James Bond soundtrack collection and my entire selection of pop music rated 4 stars or better and still have a couple GB to spare. I can live with that. I haven’t played with it much, but one time when I did, I was confused when a song started to fade out right in the middle, until I realized it was an incoming call. Nice. Videos look good, really good.

The rest of the stuff is the little widgety things.

• SMS – text messaging, in a sort of iChat way. Works. I wish I could send MMS messages, or send a single message to multiple people. I love that it keeps the old conversations until I delete them. This makes it really easy to send a message to someone I regularly SMS with without having to address to them. I just grab my last chat with them and start typing.
• Calendar – it’s a calendar.
• Photos – Nice. I sync the last couple months work of my photos and they look great.
• Camera – It works, and it takes a decent picture.
• YouTube – I was driving down the freeway to Tucson (I was passenger) watching an episode of Fusion Patrol on my phone, over the cell network. If someone told me 10 years ago I’d be doing that, I’d have laughed at them. Otherwise, as with on the Apple TV, this is a stupid, but somewhat fun function.
• Stocks – Who owns stocks?
• Maps – The Google Maps on this thing kicks ass and takes name. The faux-GPS functionality works well, and the maps, even in satellite view mode are responsive. The freeway traffic conditions were accurate most of the time, too.
• Weather – So you don’t have to go outside to know if it is wet.
• Clock – World Clocks, Alarms, Stopwatch and Timers.
• Calculator – Basic, Non-RPN, Non-Scientific calculator.
• Notes – Notes to yourself, in a comic book font. Can’t seem to do anything with them, like saving them to a computer or loading them from a computer. Makes them less useful than they could be.
• Settings – Yeah. Stuff like that.
• iTunes – Haven’t tried it.

So what about the big picture? The hardware and the OS (if that’s the right word for it.)

I’m sure the whole world has seen the iPhone by now, and it’s a dandy little device. It’s about the right size to hold, and to hold to my ear as a phone.

The touch screen works well, but I find that the left side of my left thumb doesn’t activate the buttons. It’s as if there’s no electrical contact with that part of my thumb. Should I see a doctor?

The onscreen keyboard is too small for me, but it works. The auto correcting is truly frighteningly accurate at times, but if you’re typing non-standard words, it’s a real pain to have the system not correct them. (Accepting auto corrected words is as easy as hitting the space bar. In fact, you can type the entire message without ever looking and the auto correction goes on normally. But if you type something that you don’t want corrected, you have to actually reach up and dismiss the suggested spelling up in the text where you’re writing.)

WiFi and the Edge network. Connecting to WiFi networks is Apple-typically painless, and when you’re connected, it flies. The AT&T Edge network, on the other hand, ranges from tolerable to glacial, with no obvious pattern. When it is good, it’s really not that bad. When it’s bad, though, you’ll be reminded of the dark days of 9600bps modems on a busy Friday night. Still, even a slow connection is a great thing when you’re in the field.

Everybody mentions the physical ringer off switch on the side, and I’m no exception. What a brilliant idea! If I walked into a staff meeting and then realized I’d forgotten to silence my old Motorola phone, there was no way to turn the sound off without making a bunch of noise. How stupid is that?

Finally, I come to the area that I’m so far disappointed with. Battery life. It’s a new toy, and I’ve been using it at every opportunity, and there have been days, especially when we were in Tucson, where I’ve run the battery almost completely down before the day is over. As I’ve gone back to work I haven’t run the battery down, but I still drain about 50% of the battery down. Letting it go overnight without a charge doesn’t seem to be an option.

So, for all it might sound like I’m picking on the iPhone, it’s an absolute joy to have with me. I can easily imagine a time when people will consider such devices to be indispensable. I know my iPhone already is.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, iTunes, Review