(As
in "Thundercats, Hoooo!", hot as in, "Yo, be mah ho,
bay-bee!)
I
got my internet up and running today -- no more smoky internet cafes!
Kayo had to call about ninety different places, and even after we
settled on So-net she had to make a several more calls (filing taxes
is easier than signing up with a Japanese ISP, apparently). Had they
asked for fingerprints I would not have been surprised.
I
also had to switch my modem setting all around, in weird ways, and
running the English version of Win98se didn't help (but I'm not upgrading
until all the bugs are out of WinXP, which means, I'm not upgrading
for at least a year!) (Side note: the lead singer from Sekima II appears
in Japan's Windows XP Office TV ads. Why?!)
This
has nothing to do with jrock, except for the fact that there's lots
of jrock on the net, and THIS is on the net, and so I figured I'd
share.
There
are free services; livedoor.com, freejapan, and others. But getting
So-net (a subsidiary of Sony) offered some great customer support
-- without which I'd STILL be tooling with my dial-up settings.
Basically,
you're looking at $20/mo for dial-up. But on top of that, there's
phone call fees -- every call in Japan gets a per-minute charge (Y10
every 3 minutes for most local calls in Tokyo. That's $2/hr!)
But
NTT (the AT&T of Japan) offers Telehodai -- for $20/mo,
you can dial two phone numbers (your main and backup ISP numbers,
usually) without per-minute charges... IF you call between 11pm and
8am.
So
for $40/mo, you've got unlimited night-time access. There are also
tiny little 10-hours-a-week-for-$10-a-month kind of things, but screw
that, I need "unlimited-ish" access.
So-net
also has DSL. It takes a month to get. It's $60/mo, without any limits.
But there's also a $200+ fee up front, partly to pay for the hardware...
I wanna get it, but there's some sort of weird difficulty around who
owns the phone line (in this case, my father-in-law), and the owner
has to pay directly or some weird shit... christ, at this rate the
internet will NEVER fully hit Japan.
And
one last thing about slow technological progress in the fastest-n-techiest
country in the world: unsigned visual bands still only make demo tapes!
As in cassettes! Was is this, 1987?! CD-Rs are the same price here
as in the States, let's get wit' da program, mah ho's!
Went
to get my Alien Registration Card at the local city hall. Went pretty
smoothly, you just have to fill in a form with the typical name, addy,
passport number, etc. type stuff -- I managed to do it all by myself,
since Kayo had to go register (for other stuff) in a different section.
In two weeks I go back and pick up the card, and I'll be an officially
registered ~alien~!
Still
have to get a spousal visa, but I have to renew my passport first;
I can do it by mail, cooly enough.
I also
managed to secure a ticket for the Mad Family concert, which is gonna
be 8 visual bands playing at Y2K, a Roppongi club, on July 8. The
only one I can remember now is Piass, but the othes seemed cool too...
and at only Y2500, a veritable bargain! "Indubitably!" Thanks
to Cam for suggesting it!
And
tomorrow, Kayo and I are going to the Tokyo Dome for the premiere
of Pearl Harbor. Ben Affleck will be there, but Josh Hartman,
much to Kayo's lament, will not be.
We've
already seen the movie, in New York, but Kayo won tickets in some
online contest just after we got here, so off we go again. I'm looking
forward to seeing just how my presence at the event will be recieved...
World War II is a still a big awkward thing here. What I'm not looking
forward is the sound -- the Tokyo Dome being a shitty place to go
to hear anything. All that concrete, you'd be better off just walking
around with 6-foot PVC pipes glued to your ears! The place even made
X Japan sound bad!
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