Neil Hopcroft

I think I might have overdone the hot food over the last few days, a shame since its so nice, but my stomach is now complaining :( …anyone got any ideas for calming it a little? Preferably ones that don’t involve trying to make myself understood in a pharmacy.

Our little friend “TOMTO” use magical secret-power for delicious BREAD that. Well enjoy in next morning. Children who living in NORTHERN EUROPE tell us secret that just baken BREAD. Yes……TOMTE’s secret. HOKUO as. BREAD country SAPPORO is very similar with TOMTE’s land.

End of the week

Now that the festivities are over its time to think about what I should be doing with the rest of the time I’m here – I’m getting a desire to travel some more now, but don’t want to clash with anyones visit over here…so…
Let me know when you’re coming to visit

Just by Meguro station today was a bobby giving out flyers. Which seemed both completely normal and extremely strange all at the same time. It got me thinking about the last time I saw a UK policeman abroad.

It was a strange holiday, it was a beautiful sunny day, Caroline had driven down from Lincoln to Northampton, where I was still living at the time. We’d hit the M1 heading south among the traffic. Taking it gently, its gonna be a long haul today, I look in my mirror and recognise the shades in the sports car behind, so I phone minusbat “Hi Pete, you’re behind me, where you heading?” “Paris, where you going?” “No way! We’re heading there too! I’ll let you past now, see ya on the ferry”.

We never caught up with him…

On the way back, after a lovely weekend with Laurence we encountered a UK police car driving back up the French motorway, the natural instinct being to slow down (they *probably* don’t have justristiction here, but almost certainly have friends in the Gendamerie (sp?)). As we’re passing theres an AA van too, strange, must be some kind of convoy. Then theres a couple of London black cabs. Carrying on for a bit thinking nothing of it, we hit the convoy, we pass taxi after taxi after taxi, about fifteen cabs in we start thinking we should have been counting.

At this point it became obvious that we weren’t going to pull over for the break we had planned at the next services, pressing on, past taxis, taxis and more taxis, there are a few more UK police cars blocking the sliproads joining the road preventing anyone breaking into the middle of the convoy. After miles of passing cabs, there must have been hundreds, possibly a thousand, of them, the road was absolutely clear – they were travelling at a steady 60mph and hadn’t let any other traffic onto the road while they were passing. Time to put my foot down and dash for the ferry in the hope of catching the one before they arrive at Calais.

Todays quick wandering around trialling the wifisniffer (wiffer?) suggests that urban Tokyo is roughly half covered with pockets of 2.4GHz rf which may or may not be active wireless networks. More exploration necessary, and perhaps more gadgetary too.

The Meiji shrine was pure crowd yesterday, there was a frantic feeling in the air, a need to get there and welcome the new year with a thrown coin and a prayer. Portashrines are obviously no substitute. There was a temporary two storey Koban keeping an eye on everything.

Around the corner, the park was a bit busier than I’d normally expect for this time of year but it was quite a pleasant day, the kind of day we’d all go to the park in case it was the best bit of summer we got. The grass there looked a bit shabby, like ours does after a long dry summer.

Best of all there was a skatedog. It had its own little board and everything, its owner had taken it down to were the skate kids hang out (which was all a bit crowded ‘cos the beautiful people were there too since the bridge they normally hang out on was being Koban’ed and shrined) to show off what it could do – it was quite profficient at getting onto the board and rolling along but I couldn’t help feeling it didn’t quite understand momentum – sometimes it just got on and looked kinda surprised it wasn’t moving. Cornering was something else beyond its understanding, but that didn’t matter too much.

January 19 is Penguin Awareness Day

(from )

Hey, razornet, I got a morbid fear of being chased through a red light district by a tiger in a flower arrangement, thats gotta be worth something?

Christmas shopping today, finally got myself some toys…it was a bit touch and go, cos I couldn’t find anything I wanted apart from a camcorder but then there was a nagging question about whether that was PAL or NTSC and I decided it wasn’t worth spending that much to find out that it wouldn’t be much use when I get back home anyway. Not that it makes *that* much difference ‘cos mostly anything I do film will be shown on computer, but I need to know that its going to be OK, whatever I get.

Yesterdays trip to Akihabara demonstrated that actually it is not the cheapest place in Tokyo to get such high-end devices anyway, sure theres lots of shops but for the camera I was considering (Panasonic NVGS70ENT/K/B, dunno which version) they’re about 20k (100 quid) over the price you’d pay in Shinjuku. Then the PAL version is another 40k on top of that, its 1.7MPixel rather than 1.2, but is it really worth paying nearly twice as much to get one that’ll work back home?

So todays exercise was to find something else cool that I could call a Christmas present to myself. First up was a WiFi network finder, which will be very handy if I ever hit the road with this chunky old laptop…it transpires theres coverage in my flat, but its a bit intermittent and I can’t work out which direction its coming from… might be worth a Wifi dongle just to see… maybe someone heres got DSL I could piggyback.

But thats only got one button and three lights so thats not very satisfying as toys go. I figured I’d do a trial run with the video camera and got myself a cheap (~80 pounds) solid state video camera which records mp4 .AVIs onto an MMC or SD card. It comes with a 128Mb card which should be good for about 25 minutes of reasonable quality video.

So far I’ve only had a quick play with it but the quality looks OK considering its cheapness and you can hook it straight to a TV. And plugging it in to USB it automatically gets recognised by WinXP and mounted as a drive, no messing about with drivers or anything.

Expect some more serious video footage once I’ve figured out how to use it a bit more.

Oh, and its not normal to be followed down the road by someone dressed as a tiger in a bunch of flowers with a ghetto blaster on their shoulder, is it?

Oh good…

What Famous Leader Are You?