so the way golden week is on the calendar means the amount of holidays each year varies significantly.  without going into detail, we ended up with only 2 days off out of the possible 5.  i guess its nothing to cry over, but i do feel a bit cheated :p.

that said, we have no real plans.  the general idea behind golden week is that being the only official consecutive work-free days of the year, the whole of japan decides to go ’round the mulberry bush, causing awful traffic on both the roads and public transport.  as expected, all tourist destinations are also the target of screaming kids and their parents.

my host family is going away tomorrow at 6am to avoid this rush.  they tried to find a hotel to stay in starting about 2 weeks ago.  they found nothing.  so with no accommodation, who knows if they will actually be able to stay overnight.. yet they are still going.  my mum called it a “mystery tour”. lol.

i took a few pictures in japanese classes this week which amused me.

daniel points out how insignificant our home city is.  and also if you look close, you can notice how much the coastline has been eroded by the ocean..  i’m surprised i haven’t heard about that on the news…

王さまと結婚するなんて、想像もしなかった！

paper maps are in the past right? but what do you do when you don’t have a net connection and want to see the awfully detailed internet map? i don’t know if that was quite what i was thinking when i started work on this, but that is my official justification :p

google’s mapping api uses some java applet, but behind it is just a massive collection of 256×256 gifs which are loaded as you scroll. so i began by taking the bounds which gave a full coverage of himeji city and its close surroundings.

this resulted in a large number of image files which i was left to join together. from the start i was planning on using imagemagick to do this task, since it is very scriptable and flexible in handling images. unfortunately it seems it wasn’t made to handle joining together this many images

so i had to break the task down.. to the point where i joined each row of images one at a time using imagemagick. this took roughly 2.5hours on psrv, and left me with 60 odd 19456×256 pixel gifs which are long enough to probably cover the length of perth city if printed (at a low dpi ^^)

leaving imagemagick to then stitch these rows together and form the final image resulted in an even larger problem. the segmentation fault that appeared after a couple of hours made me think imagemagick simply couldnt handle these dimensions. then i tried to copy a file and found out there was no disk space left on psrv..

imagemagick ate 4gigabytes with its tmp files.

i ended up getting another program and this time (wisely) running it locally on my vaio. all went smoothly. the process took only 1 minute 34 seconds after i decided to output to bitmap over gif format. photoshop would handle the conversion smoothly after all.

quite a big file.

quite a few pixels! 330,793,472 to be exact.

this is a very very zoomed out version of it. it was only after i got to this point that i realised the bounds i first set were a bit off.. and its a bit too far east than necessary ^^;. once i get a day off uni i plan on recentering it and then ill try and find a use for it.

to those that still ask WHY?

why not?

omake: my current desktop.  its been a while since ive posted a desktop image so :d

well they do say its because the charcoal gives food a nice flavour but suure.  the charcoal and newspaper flying into your plate and eyes before you eat is enough to cancel that out.  their portable heaters are butane powered so why can’t their barbecues be as well?

nevertheless, the food was quite tasty, but i was a bit disappointed with the takoyaki – i think the egg they put in it didn’t go so well .  there were a lot of interesting japanese people there, and we had some very…. random conversations to say the least.  i was a bit annoyed at myself when i realised i forgot to say goodbye to everyone afterwards :/.  i was too busy attempting to climb ladders and stand upright..  those chuuhai can drinks have a dangerous amount of sugar, and the alcohol doesn’t help either.

so maybe the barbecues are nothing special.. but japan has dancing dogs!  and bluetooth karaoke touchscreen remotes :d  that more than makes up for it in my opinion.

we also found out that even ambulance drivers need their daily mister donut.  car delivery service?!

oops? it seemed as though the driver that hit them was already gone though… the girl was breathing but the dog wasn’t as far as i could tell >.>

the bike seat of pain

university dance club. they were dancing to come rap music i guess.. the two guys both go to dance school and are pretty damn good at it. its a pity the music sucks, else i might’ve joined :p

well i can’t be bothered writing much today. thursdays consist of 3 classes consecutively with only 10 minutes break in between – thats 240 minutes of constant japanese study. quite intensive, but the teacher that takes all three of the classes is really cool and teaches at a nice and steady speed.

finally got up to the last level of ouendan… its hard to say the least. i haven’t got more than 30 seconds into the song yet. going to take quite a bit of practice!