Korean omiyage

Our French exchange student went to Korea and brought back a cell phone stand as a present. It can be used in several different ways and is pretty cool.

Furry cell phone

When I stuffed my fairly large cell phone into my not so spacious pocket, the protective film got stuck to the inside of my pocket and proceeded to glue itself to my pocket and remove itself from my cell phone for about half the length of the phone. Removing the phone from the pocket and putting folding down the film again did make it stick to the phone again, but with large amounts of cloth fibers stuck under the film. Not a great look. I ended up buying a new protective film with the points I got from the store when I bought the phone. This film is extremely expensive, by the way... 1700 yen.

New phone

I broke my phone. It fell out of the place in my yukata where I put it (yukatas do not have pockets) and half of it got wet in the pouring rain. The screen stopped working. The rest of the phone seems to work fine, so the phone keeps telling me that there are new messages and new e-mails etc.

It is possible to connect the phone to my computer, but the phone then says you first have to unlock the screen to be able to get access to the files. Since the screen does not work, unlocking is not possible. I asked my cell phone provider if they could get the files for me, but they said they do not copy data, I have to do that myself. I said that since I just explained to him that the screen is dead it is not possible, he said that I was right.

I asked if they can fix the screen, and he said that they can. For any type of repair, they wipe the data from the phone and reset it to the original state, though. So he recommended that I copy all my data first. Which I again pointed out was not possible. He agreed.

Since it is technically possible for them to access the data on the phone, I asked if they have some data recovery plan or something where you can pay them to do that for you but I was told they do not.

They also told me that it is cheaper to buy a new phone than to fix the old one. If I had broken it four months earlier, they would have fixed it under warranty, though.

Since any repair would wipe the data, I just bought a new phone. Which was not cheap. Most of my data was backed up by the regular backups, but apparently the e-mail backup program had done its last backup in May. It had weekly backups until then, though. Not that I read my old e-mail very often, but it was a bit surprising.

I have backups of my photos that I keep on my computer, which were much better than the backup restore of the phone software. The backup retrieved all my photos, but put all of them in one folder, which was not great. The backup of the address book was fine, though.

The calendar data and the WiFi networks (passwords etc.) were not backed up, apparently. So I will have to put in the birthdays of my friends again.

It took three days before I had time to go buy a new phone (since I work a lot). During these three days, apparently the old phone kept downloading messages and e-mails and told the server that those e-mails were no longer needed. So there were some e-mails that I never saw. Probably only one, from my Swedish friend who told me about the e-mail when we met, though. I also lost all the LINE chat application history. Which is not a big deal, but if Facebook can keep all the chat history of their chat app on the server, LINE could perhaps do that too? LINE is what all the hip people here use.

The new phone looks nice. The keyboard app that comes as default is different from the last one I used, but I will try this one out to see if it is better. Neither the new nor the old seem very good, but that is what a small touch screen gets you I guess.

Rain, lightning, landslides, floods, evacuation, and no sleep

A few seconds without lightning.

In the middle of the night a few weeks back, there was a great thunder storm passing through Sapporo. The lightning was impressive, very loud and very bright. The rain was also very heavy. For the first time since I came to Japan, there were emergency broadcasts on the cell phone net because of rain.

I have experienced emergency broadcasts that warn of earthquakes a few times. When a big earthquake is registered there is an automatic system that broadcasts to people in areas not reached by the quake yet that they should prepare themselves for an earthquake. This usually means jumping into the bathroom, I am told. If you have more time, you should also make sure there is an escape open for you even if the walls and door frames get bent out of shape by the quake.

This time, there were first warnings that people in the parts of city on the mountain sides or near the mountains should evacuate because there might be landslides. In fact, one man was killed in a landslide caused by the rains later.

There were many emergency broadcasts, though. The first one came in at around 3 in the morning on the night between Wednesday and Thursday. These warnings make your phone shout very loudly, so most people were woken in the middle of the night. Then there was a total of 15 emergency broadcasts coming at about ten minute intervals, until slightly after 6 in the morning. So I was a bit tired at work the next day...

The broadcasts kept expanding the areas where evacuation was recommended. There were also broadcasts about rivers overflowing, and anyone living near the rivers (which towards the end covered very large parts of the city, with about 600,000 people living in the affected areas) should evacuate to the second floor or higher in the buildings.

Lots of lightning kept the sky brightly lit most of the night.

I live on the 9th floor, and far from the mountains, so I was already as evacuated as necessary. One friend on Facebook was woken up and noticed that she was right on the border of the "evacuate because of landslides" area, on the "safe" side. But since the areas kept growing, she was wondering if she should evacuate too. She said something like "and I am not even wearing underwear", and many of her friends commented that she should probably at least put on underwear in preparation for evacuation.

Another of our friends commented that she should put on underwear and evacuate to this friend's house, since it was out of the risk zones. This friend lives across the street from me, so I added that she could also evacuate to my place, which has the benefit of being on the 9th floor and thus pretty flooding resistant. Also, there is no requirement that you wear underwear here, I added. They thought this was funny, and commented along the lines of "So Jonas does not wear underwear at home". I added that I was in fact wearing funny underwear (Superman underwear), but that it was not a requirement. They thought it was funny and said that the next time we meet I will have to show them my underwear... I have not run into them since then, but now I have to wear funny underwear every day, since I run into these people by chance quite a lot...

Five day holiday starts with laundry and shopping

From Saturday I have five days off from my university job. I spent the first day doing laundry and then going shopping. I wanted to find a white yukata for a costume party event, but did not manage to find that. I did buy a t-shirt in the "samurais of the sengoku period"-series of shirts; namely the Maeda Toshimasu shirt (because of the visuals, I do not know enough of these samurais to selects shirt based on how cool the samurai himself was).

I also bought a pair of trousers that had phoenix embroidery. One on the front of the left leg and one on the back of the right leg. There is also some nice embroidery on the back pocket. Sadly, they only came in white. All my white trousers get dirty really fast (from riding a bicycle on rainy days, for instance), so they look a bit less cool than when you originally buy them...

I also bought two projection mapping boxes. You put your smart phone on top and play YouTube movies (there are QR code links to the appropriate movies on the side of the boxes) and this causes the plastic model parts to be projection mapped with moving pictures. Pretty nice. They are super cheap too. I bought one with a model of a Japanese building and one with the Sapporo symbol Hatsune Miku singing and dancing.

Conveniently sized phone

One of my colleagues have some new toys. He has an Android tablet and an iPad. The Android also actually works as a cell phone. A very conveniently sized phone.

Pokemon strap

If you buy yuzu taste juice at our coop you get a Pokemon strap. There are six different characters that you can get, but I know nothing about Pokemon so the only one I recognized was Pikachu.

Funny iPhone case

Yesterday I saw a funny iPhone case.

Really small cell phone

Today a guy showed me his cell phone, which was really really tiny. The only thing you can do with it is make calls (no e-mail etc. that all other Japanese phones let you do).