Ryan
Chasing greatness

Thats Latin. Means, “Dad.” Anyway, my Dad will be here around 8PM tonight. I am really pretty excited. Megan would normally be beside herself cleaning in preparation, but she burned out Wednesday for poker night.

On that note, Greg gave us a bottle of wine to present to the winner. So instead of people gambling their money, we had a tournament with 50 yen each. It lasted quite a while with Mami taking home the big prize. She said that she was sick the next day. I think from all of the excitement.

So the apartment is clean to me, hideous to Megan, and who knows how the father will feel.

I haven’t figured out yet what we’re going to do with my Dad while he is here. There are too many options really. Thankfully travel in this country is so easy, we can really be last minute in deciding. I just hope he has fun.

I have started to casually search for jobs, and my friends have been very proactive in sending me job postings in their home cities. You are all awesome for that.

I will say I was both relieved and distrusting at the job requirements. Many video game job postings didn’t ask for serious previous experience, only a strong desire and education in video games. I have that. They do of course prefer people with experience.

So when my Dad leaves, I really do have to get my resume in order and finish my stupid stupid video game.

In class we sometimes play a betting game. It works like this. First I take 2-4 cards that the kids are learning and place them face up on a table or special mat. Then I choose one duplicate of those cards and place it face down.

The face down card is of course the chosen card that they have to figure out. So the bet by placing chips on the face up cards.

I reveal the face down card, and pay the winners and take the money from the losers.

The challenge is getting the children to not only play with their own chips, but be willing to lose them too.

Today was unreal in that respect.

Normally the greedy little punks only bet one chip. I have a rule that if you bet one, you can’t lose it, but you will only win one in return. If you bet two or more and lose, I take them. However, if you win, I will pay back double. That is to say if you bet 5 and win, I will give you 10 chips as well as the 5 you bet. Not bad.

I put the cards down for their selection. then I told them to get ready, because the secret card was coming. I purposefully let them see the secret card on the way down.

They still only bet one or two chips. Everyone one. Confidence was boosted because they thought I was an idiot.

I congratulated everyone and started again. I told them to get ready, and put the next secret card down. Only this time I used some of my sleight of hand to switch it at the last minute. They thought they saw one card go down, but in reality a different one did.

Half of the class lost everything.

After another round of this, I decided to change the game up. I had lots of these cards, so I put a peak in them long ways so that when I laid them on the table, they looked like tents.

Then I showed 2 identical cards and one different. I told them to watch that different card and began to shuffle them on the table.

When I was finished, they started betting. Every kid won. They were excited at having to follow my hands so quickly.

Then we played again. This time I used a different sleight of hand to which 9 children, and one teacher, did not catch.

Those poor souls bet everything on where they thought the card was. One student said clearly that he didn’t think that was it, and bet everything he had elsewhere.

Everyone lost, but he got tons of chips.

Everyone was freaking out the entire class. They never accused me of cheating, they never got upset at losing, and they wanted to keep playing.

Kids are awesome practice for card tricks.

I never have bothered tagging my posts.  That effectively makes my blog unsearchable to the public.  I suppose that is fine considering I suck at writing and things can generally be pretty dull.  Still, sometimes I do tag my posts when I think they should be found by others.  That leaves some tagged and some not, and I can’t stand the uneven nature of it.  So I am seriously considering going back and tagging all of my 200+ posts.

Other than that I am using my friend’s Wii.  I got it hooked up to the wireless router and I am going to get my butt kicked in some games today!

I thought I would write about one of the awesome things Japan has that America could absolutely benefit from.

ATMs.

Now, obviously Japanese ATMs are different.  Otherwise you would think I lived under a rock my entire life and have just recently been exposed to things like ATMs, escalators, and conveyor belt sushi (Awesome!).  I haven’t been living under a rock.  They are different.

First off, instead of having a keypad and those 6-8 buttons along the side of the screen, they are almost all touch screen systems.  This is awesome for a lot of ways.  It means that if I go to a convenience store ATM it probably has my bank’s system in it because all it can just load up my bank’s interface and do whatever banking magic it does.

In terms of security its also better because things like keyloggers under the key pads are impossible because its a touch screen with different interfaces.

So we have a touch screen, and we have lots of banks at 1 machine.  Awesome.

Next up is the pin entry thing.  Know how you enter your pin on the keypad and you vaguely consider that someone is watching and you huddle closer to the keypad?  Kind of like when a guy pees at a urinal and suddenly gets “size conscious” and hugs up closer?  Yeah, well you don’t have to worry about that here because instead of the keypad being a 3 by 4 array of numbers, its a 4 by 4 array with the extra spaces padded with 0s.

Sound weird?  It is.  But in a good way.  See they randomize the keypad on the touchscreen every time you use it, so nobody can really figure out what your numbers are.  If you worry about it, you can hit a randomize button again and start over.  Pretty sweet!

Know what else is awesome?  Of course you don’t.  Let me tell you.

So when you want to deposit money in America through an ATM you put it in an envelope, write the total, and then punch that total in on the screen.  Then some time later that money gets counted and everything is cool.  That could take a while and I have no idea what happens if you are way wrong.  Like you put a dollar in and type in 1,000,000.

Well here, you can put all of the money in the machine without an envelope and it will count it for you and confirm the total before instantly crediting your account.

Are the waves of awesome rocking your world on the beach of amazement yet?  There is more.

I don’t care about my Japanese bank or its account.  I need it for utility purposes only.  The main one being that I want to send money home.  Well I go to an ATM, push the bank transfer button and it pulls up my bank transfer information.  It remembers everything and tells me the fees and as soon as I push the button, its done.  It isn’t quite instantaneous that the money is in my US account, but it is pretty freaking fast.

They also tell me the exchange rates so that I know when the best day is to go.

One last thing.  ATMs are never outside.  They are always inside.  Even if that means that they build a little booth that has the ATM and enough room for one person.  That one room is clean, well lit, and has AC.  I love it.

ATMs are awesome here.  Plain and simple.

So I still haven’t messed much with the 300 or so pictures I took in Thailand. Sorry about the delay.

Last night I went with Greg and the new teacher, Carl, to see the Watchmen. I don’t care what reviews said, I loved it. I read the comics and the movie was really faithful and wonderful.

I also got to wear my new suit that I had made in Thailand. I looked awesome all day long. All of the female teachers lined up to take pictures with me.

Big pimpin’.

Enough of that. This week is THE week that Sakura are in bloom. They only bloom for one week, and this is it.

I know now how over-rated things can be in Japan, but this is not one of those things. Sakura are life-changing beautiful. I want time to stop so I can enjoy it more. We’ve taken 300 pictures of this too, but we’re going to get out there for more.

Now I am meeting my own photographic inabilities head on, and I hate it.

Some fun little web game. I usually don’t care for these, but this one asks you for no information and is kind of cool too.

My Brute