I'm so glad my netbook came with Windows Vista!

I needed a light, cheap computer to take with me to Canada for work. What I really wanted was the exact same laptop I got 4 years ago for about $750, a cheap HP laptop with a 40GB hard drive, 1.6ghz processor and a 750 megs of ram, but in a smaller package (the current one weighs a ton) and for less money. Seeing how fast technology moves, that shouldn't be a problem, should it? AFter all, 4 years prior to that, I paid three times as much for a dell with a smaller screen, half the processor power, a 1/4 the hard drive space and 1/8th the ram.

But cheap computers are hard to come by in Japan. Stores push $2000+ monstrosity laptops with HD screens, and almost seem to deliberately not stock the low-end computers that dominate the market in the US. It's true netbooks have introduced a new, low-end market, but they seem like overkill on the form factor end of things. How much work can you really get done with a ten inch screen and a 5-centimeter track pad?

I went to Yodobashi camera and finally found a "Dell mini" which is halfway between a budget notebook and a netbook. It has a 12" screen, big for a netbook, a 1.33 processor, a 60GB hard drive, and 1GB of ram. In other words, it's about what I got for 750 4 years ago, but small and light...about what I was looking for going in the store.

But for how much? The one with XP was $600, a bit out of my price range. But there was an otherwise identical notebook with Windows Vista which was $400, making it easily the cheapest in the store. I asked the clerk if I could just get that one without Vista, and he told me Vista was the whole reason it was so cheap. They couldn't sell any.

I told him I would take my chances and got it. It was easy to see why no-one wanted it- the thing barely moved. Just turning it on ate up close to 80% of the RAM. So I wiped it clean with a copy of XP from my old computer and now it works great.

So in the end, Vista knocked the price of my computer down by a third. Thanks, Microsoft! Vista rules!

New Place

Wow, it's been so long I don't even know where to start. Got into a Phd program. Taking lots of stats classes. Preparing for finals with the classes I teach rather than take, and getting the curriculum set for next semester. Busy in a way I've never really known...when I get free time from my job I get excited because I can read up on fit statistics and test equating. Yay! That's what counts as downtime now.

Anyway, I'm moving in with my girlfriend and we got a bigger place. Its near Takamiya, in the same range of hills I live now, but a lot bigger. Here's a floor map-

Looking at it now, it wouldn't be a big deal in Canada. But by Japanese sizes, 90m2 like this is enormous. Most places like this in the city go for at least 1000 a month, on the low end, and up to 2500 and 3000 on the high (and those are Fukuoka prices out in the Kyushu wilderness. In Tokyo? Forget it!)

We had one thing going for us though...one, its 25 years old, which in the lifespan of Japanese apartment buildings is ancient people want to live in places no more than 10. In the 80's, it was probably a really swank place. It has an electric toilet with a warm seat, bidet, etc, and a professional gardener comes by to work on all the plants surrounding it. But it's been rendered obsolete by the newer steel and glass buildings with electrically heated floors, and so down goes the price.

More importantly, some houses had been built in the area behind this building, blocking the incredible view and casting the east end into shadow. And the tenants, who as far as I can gather are mostly old people with a lot of time on their hands, FREAKED OUT. They put up protest signs outside their balconies threatening people thinking of moving into the houses and telling them to contact their lawyers. It doesn't seem to have done much to stop the building of the houses (which is totally legal), but they did an excellent job keeping new tenants from moving in to their own building. This new place has been vacant over a year.

The original price was 900 a month, probably down from 1000 earlier. It was a bit out of our budget, so I asked for 800, and they agreed. To top it off when we said we wanted to move in August, they said "Well hell, its vacant now, so you might as well start moving in in July, a free month of rent on us!" So that saves us the stress of having to move in on the very last day of our current leases.

Its gonna be great, shaded back yard or not. I actually like the privacy it gives. See that long balcony on the left? I want to put out beach chairs and little tables for coffee, and lie there in the morning reading the paper on my laptop. We've got a proper living room for guests, a master bedroom, a den for the projector when we do some serious movie viewing, and a guest room when people come in from out of town.