Yesterday while at the office I received a phone call from a frantic Reiko who had returned home to discover Nozomi was happily chewing away on something forbidden. Then, on closer inspection, it turned out to be two things forbidden! One was the cord delivering cable to the TV, and the other was the power cord for the TV!

120 volts may not be enough to kill a human, but it could seriously hurt a small puppy. As you can see in the photos, she chewed clean through the one side and a good chunk into the second.  Luckily, she didn’t receive a big shock or start a fire. I’d hate to write her obituary after just five days ….

The cords have already been replaced and Nozomi received a good scolding so hopefully we won’t see a repeat, but we’ll get some cord protectors just in case.  The last thing I want to see after coming home is a bunch of gnawed USB and ethernet cables. Come to think of it, that’s the last thing Nozomi wants to see, too. I would be much harder on her about that than the Mrs. was for the TV cables.

Do you have an inquisitive and active pet? What kinds of surprises have you come home to?

Reiko has wanted a puppy for years, but we’ve never had the chance to bring one home for one reason or another.  While living with the in-laws, they didn’t want a dog running around for obvious reasons. While living at our home in Haba, we couldn’t have a dog because the landlords forbade it.  But here in Kashiwa we were lucky enough to find a place that had both decent rent and allowed pets larger than a beetle.

Welcome to your new home, Nozomi-chan.

Nozomi is a female miniature dachshund, born on May 7th of this year.  Although she’s only been a part of the family for three hours we already know the following things about her:

• she loves to eat human toes
• she loves to play
• she refuses to use the potty (despite being trained)
• she doesn’t eat food all at once, instead choosing to eat a bit before playing and returning to repeat the pattern

All in all, she’s the model for over-excited, energetic puppies everywhere.

Wonder how long it will be before we forget this paper-wedding anniversary. Hopefully it won’t happen until long after she and I have gone senile with age.

I’d love to take a look at the raw data that weather people use to determine the weather forecast.  Perhaps after a few weeks of analysis I could help them with a better algorithm.  Lord knows I’m not a genius when it comes to mathematics, but I can spot patterns in less time than most.  Regardless of the outcome, I couldn’t make the forecasts any worse.

Spam should be relegated to Facebook, not our Inbox.

While there is often a huge run of a particular electronic item at various times in its life cycle, this torrent of Apple products comes in a more predictable fashion than any other manufacturer’s product.  Naturally, this means that there are a large number of Apple loyalists out there who insist on using the most current version of anything The Steve puts out, which is great for Apple’s bottom line but potentially harmful to the environment.  That said, rather than dispose of the ancient 11-month-old devices, trendy people who regularly think different sell these near-mint machines at a great discount, saving millions of machines from the landfill and helping those less fortunate to own a newish Apple product.

For no other product have I ever seen this trend.  When the average consumer buys a Dell, for example, they use the machine until it’s deemed too old to be usable … which seems to be about seven to nine years of operation at the moment.  Here in Japan, I see people use cell phones for three to six years before replacing an incredibly worn out handset.  The same is said for televisions, kitchen appliances, clothing, books, and just about anything else we spend money on.  People buy something and use it until it can’t be used anymore.

But Apple consumers think different.

They’re not content to let their perfectly functional machines with smooth organic lines slowly decompose in a landfill or collect dust in a closet next to the exercise equipment they promised they’d use. No. They’d much rather see these items get used by as many people as possible, leading to potentially more Apple loyalists in the end.  It’s a wonderfully viral method ensuring the survival of the cult/religion, and one that other manufacturers would likely give their first born to achieve.

I’d love to see some numbers that show how often an Apple product changes hands in its lifetime compared to similar devices sold in the market.  I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find that the average MacBook was owned by four people before being scrapped compared to a person who bought a Gateway notebook, then handed it down to their child five years later.  Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any research along these lines anywhere on Google …

If you do have a link to such a study, please share.  It would be interesting to see just how different Apple consumers are from others.

Luckily, Twitter has no plans on charging us to use their services just yet, but this should also be seen as a prime example of how people feel about other online areas that are making the switch from free to subscription.

Yet the more I think about the results, the more I believe we already are paying to use Twitter … even though it’s not in any form of currency one might bring to a bank.  We spend untold hours communicating with people online via Twitter. We spend untold hours communicating with people offline about Twitter.  Developers have spent untold hours creating extensions and clients for Twitter.  What part of this is free?  It’s a huge investment in time on the part of every single user; and time is money.

Thanks to the millions of people who use Twitter, the people who created the service have been able to receive paychecks.  Some have become rich.  Some have moved on to greener pastures.  Some are happy doing whatever they may have been doing since joining the company.  But the fact remains … thanks to everyone who uses Twitter, they’ve received a lot of press and attention, which has been translated into funding.  While they may not yet have a viable means of driving revenue from the service, it doesn’t mean that the creators of Twitter are begging for scraps to pay this month’s rent.

That said, how much would I pay to use Twitter? How does $4.99 a month sound?  There’s one condition, though: I want a “Verified” logo next to my name like all the celebrities.

Would you pay to use Twitter? Would you leave if it became a pay-service?  I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Yes, it’s been years in the making, but the Mrs. and I have finally decided it was time to purchase our own vehicle.  I guess this means that we’ll be staying in Japan for the foreseeable future as this is also the first non-portable asset we’ve purchased since getting married.

It’s true that we were looking at buying a car last year; the Mazda Atenza in particular, but after witnessing just how little drivers north of Shizuoka pay attention to their surroundings, we decided that it would be better to buy something that is semi-disposable.  This is why we decided to buy a good, used Kei rather than a really nice, new white plate.

As for the price … we did spend about 150,000円 more than we had planned, but the purple paint job and excessive number of adjectives in the model name forced our hand.  Seriously … how easy should it be to get a Special Limited Edition Daihatsu Move in Pearl Purple?  We take delivery on August 1st and are looking forward to our first road trip.

Here are some more pictures if you’ve ever wondered what a purple Daihatsu Move looks like from different angles:

Now for the next financial hurdle … kids.

久しぶり.

Since moving to Japan, I have spent an incredible amount of time riding trains.  Normally this is the best time for me to study Japanese, as people tend to keep to themselves and ignore each other to such an extent you’d think the entire nation was full of anti-social citizens.  However, after a long day, there is nothing I enjoy more than to fire up a quick round of golf on the iPod Touch.  In this case, I’ve been playing a nice little game called, Let’s Golf.

The graphics are pretty slick for such a small computer, and the game-play is remarkably simple.  Select a club. Aim. Tap to get the amount of strength set, then tap again for accuracy in hitting.  Doesn’t get much easier.  But there are some similarities to the virtual game and my actual game; particularly when it comes to proximity.

It’s not fair, I tell you. So close, yet so far.  All of these pictures are from the same hole, on the same course, but taken at different times. Never will I get a HIO (Hole-In-One) so long as I live.

But then, that’s all part of the fun with computerized golf.

Do you ever play games on an iPod, cell phone, or other device to pass the time on the train? What kind of games have you enjoyed the most while commuting to and from work?

To make matters even more interesting, it looks like the server has no trouble giving MySQL over 125% of the processor … looks like I’ll have to kill this query before it finishes and write the darn thing better.

%h %l %u %t “%r” %>s %b

This isn’t quite enough information for my logs, but it’s a pretty good place to start.  Using just this default information we’ll get logs that look like this:

192.168.1.151 – - [06/Jul/2010:11:12:20 +0900] “GET / HTTP/1.1″ 200 412

So what can we do with this sort of information?  Why not throw it into MySQL and massage it into whatever reporting format your heart desires?  It’s much easier than you might think thanks to the magic of LOAD DATA INFILE (yes, I use a lot of caps in my SQL).

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS tmpApacheLog;
CREATE TABLE  tmpApacheLog (
.     remote_host             VARCHAR(20)     NOT NULL,
.     remote_logname          VARCHAR(45)     NULL,
.     remote_user             VARCHAR(45)     NULL,
.     time1                   VARCHAR(22)     NULL,
.     time2                   VARCHAR(7)      NULL,
.     first_line_of_request   VARCHAR(80)     NULL,
.     last_request_status     VARCHAR(4)      NULL,
.     bytes_sent              VARCHAR(10)     NULL,
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=UTF8 COLLATE=UTF8_UNICODE_CI;

Naturally, if you have more columns in your Apache log, you’ll need to adjust the table accordingly.  Don’t count on me to know exactly how you’ve configured your web server.

Once the table is made, the actual importing of the data is super easy; just three lines of code:

LOAD DATA INFILE ‘/your/log/directory/apache.log’ INTO TABLE tmpApacheLog
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ‘ ‘ OPTIONALLY ENCLOSED BY ‘”‘ ESCAPED BY ”
LINES TERMINATED BY ‘\n’;

Done and done … sort of.  For people that don’t want an explanation, you can stop reading.  For people that do want to know a bit more about this solution, please stay on the page.

You might have asked yourself why there are two fields for time, and it’s for two reasons.  First, each field is separated by a space and, as a result, the time field is split into two fields.  Second, even though we have OPTIONALLY ENCLOSED BY ‘”‘ to stop the %r from being split apart, we can’t ask the LOAD DATA command to do more than one of these instructions.  Because of this, the time field is split into two columns.

Data definitions:

• %h – The remote host. This is the IP address of the user connecting to the server.
• %l – The remote logname. This is not always present.
• %u – The remote user from auth (nothing if authentication is not used).
• %t – The time in a common log format.
• “%r” – The first line of the request, basically the method used (GET/POST) the URL that was accessed and the HTTP protocol level that was used. This is enclosed in quotes.
• %>s – %s returns the status of the original request request. For some requests Apache will internally create a secondary request, so %>s prints out the last request staus.
• %b – This is the number of bytes transmitted to the user.