Jodie’s laptop had always been prone to becoming completely unresponsive. I assumed that a process was running away, eating all the memory and thrashing the rather large swap drive to death. How wrong I was! After trying to limit memory usage for several weeks, I discovered that the problem wasn’t too much swap space, but none at all: somewhere along the line I had accidentally disabled the drive entirely. I think as soon as the memory filled up the kernel tried to unload vital bits of program text, which would need to be immediately read again from disk.
I wish it would just kill the process instead, but there you go – swap space is useful after all. Since re-enabling it it’s been running perfectly, using just a little more memory than was available in RAM.
I assume most people join it to communicate. Yet how can you build a community on something so closed? It requires you to sign up before you can read people’s profiles. I don’t doubt it provides some authentication, but in the end you’re trusting your information not just to a service with questionable ownership, but to the suppliers of whichever add-ons you inevitably install.
And to think we live in the age of wikis.
I’m mid-way through the last chapter of my Japanese text book. After a year of studying in Japan I definitely understand more, but I also appreciate how much more there is to learn. Consequently I feel like it’s just difficult to use as ever. I suppose my improvement is an achievement, but I wish I was more fluent. What will happen when I return to Australia? I intend to continue studying, if only so that my effort to this point hasn’t been a waste. I guess my exposure to Japanese won’t be much less back home (given that I’m forbidden to use Japanese at work). I should make the effort to go out more while I’m here.
Last night we went to see Rob’s band perform in Shinsaibashi. They rocked pretty hard. I didn’t even know Rob could sing! but indeed he can. It was also my first time to see an electric cello. To my untrained ear it sounded just like a regular cello, but I suppose it has more potential to have effects applied to it.
The opening act was far beyond interesting. They were a highly experimental band of two gaijin, who made all their own instruments except for a clarinet and saxophone. One of them played something like a sitar that consisted of a pole, one string and a coke can used as a sounding box. The string had a weight on the far end that was used to vary the pitch.
Their show was very visual. There was usually video playing behind them, and for one song (the Homeless Dance) they wore harnesses that allowed them to control puppets as they played. In that song even the puppets were instruments – the doll jumped around being generally percussive; the house had strings in the window that were plucked. More impressive than all this was that Rob, who has seen them a couple of times now, says each of their shows is vastly different. I’d like to know where they draw their inspiration from.
Every so often I think too much about Australia and end up really missing it. Today I particularly miss the west side of the Blue Mountains and the drive to Oberon, and my uncle Andrew’s house. I’ve only been there at most a couple of times a year, but it has left quite an impression on me. I seriously think it’s the coolest house I’ve ever seen. Quite a vertical design with several floors, each connected by broad steps. There’s a big verandah overlooking some beautiful bushland – the path up to it from outside carefully sidesteps a massive gumtree.
I can’t wait to come back. It’s a shame that we won’t be living close to the Blue Mountains, but perhaps we can find some nice places near Melbourne.