Sapporo Snow Festival 2009

You can see some pretty awesome snow sculptures at the festival!  I got to go twice, once during the daytime on Saturday, then again on Tuesday evening with Alex, but a mix up in meeting and communications meant I didn’t meet Alex in the end, but still got to see a few of the sculptures all lit up…  The ice ones look much better by night!

Last Wednesday, a Public Holiday here in Japan, a Singaporean student at the language centre (Wan Jee) arranged for us to go to a Singaporean buffet-banquet at a hotel in Otaru.  It was delicious and we all ate far too much!  I had to leave slightly earlier than the others to prepare to give a speech on Friday morning.  The others went to the Otaru candle light festival in the evening.  My speech went well on Friday, it was all about electrocuting myself when I was little.  We have to do speeches each time we finish a section of the course in front of all of the students and teachers at the centre!

Then just the other day my internet began working!  The NTT (Japanese equivalent of BT) came and put in the line a couple of weeks ago, but it took Biglobe (my provider) a little longer to get it up and running.  The line is an optic fibre link to the exchange which promises a maximum ability of 100Mbps, but in reality it is giving 12-15Mbps downstream and almost as much upstream at the moment…  Which isn’t the 100Mbps, but still isn’t bad for a consistent connection speed.

The final bit of news is I am on Twitter!  If you are on twitter you can follow me at flat3d, I’d love to follow you too…  I’m building up my links (it’s all about the links…)
For those who aren’t or don’t know what it is, it is a bit like facebook’s status updates, but made viable.  In reality it seems to be a bit more like one huge chatroom, with a whole lot of conversations going on at once, the nice thing is it sort of tunes in your friends and tunes out everyone else, so you can follow conversations.  It’s also possible to use it to simply let people know what you are upto, which might sound pretty dull or dim, but I like the idea that I can communicate daily life to folk and friends at home.

The big surprise for me is that it is actually pretty big in Japan.  It seems to be filling (bridging?) a gap between the all out geekiness of IRC (internet chat) and the more mainstream social users of Mixi (sort of Japan’s answer to myspace or facebook…)  At the moment I am much to illiterate to make much use of it in Japanese, but as I learn more hopefully it will be a valuable resource in learning about the tech world/culture in Japan and even help me with studying the language!

I will sometime link it into the site here, a twitter updates jobby or something, but I am not sure the best way to do it yet, or even if it is actually worthwhile…  Some more thought required I guess…

Anyways! Yes it is nearly Christmas!!!
I have been thinking about Christmas quite a bit this year.  I had a Christmas party in October at Steve and Emma’s place, organised by my friends in good ol’ Norn Iron.  Then in Singapore they were lighting up their Christmas decorations – it is hard to believe a month ago I was in 30 degree heat, sweating profusely while soapy, fake snow was blown upwards to sting children’s eyes and make them wonder why people think avalanches are dangerous…  And now it is this week.  This is the Sunday before Christmas.  Traditionally at this hour (6:30pm) I should be practising carols with the band at church and getting ready for the (super heated) service in the church buildings…  School or uni would be over, exams would seem far enough away to be insignificant, many Christmas dinners would have been consumed with the best yet to come, Indiana Jones and James Bond would feature heavily on the week’s TV schedule, the GCD day of Halo 3 would be fast approaching (a 2 year tradition for me, but a good one none the less)…

This year only one of those is true.
School has finished and we are having a party tomorrow…  But for most, Christmas in Japan is pretty much a normal working day, sure there is a commerical hype, but it feels like the same kind of hype that mother’s day or father’s day might get - people trying to make money from products that under normal circumstances would see them sell nothing and lose their lively hood because of their foolishness in buying bulk lots of winter scene greetings cards, small plastic trees and red socks…  But on Thursday in Northern Ireland kids will be up early to see what they got from Santa, mothers will be up putting a turkey in the oven while everyone else will sleep in.  Here everyone will be up early, kids going to school, business men to the office, shop keepers will open their shops as normal…  Banks, post offices, buses, trains, pretty much everything will run as normal!

So it got me to thinking what the big deal was about Christmas?
Christians here celebrate Christmas for the same reasons that Christians at home do - Jesus coming into the world for our sake.  Christmas is like Easter.  It’s about Christ.  Sure there is a slight secular commercial blitz around it, but it really doesn’t seem to attempt to link itself to a meaning of Christmas.  But in the west, it is also about family, goodwill, sharing, giving, receiving, eating, drinking…… etc.  The true meaning kind ofhas competition.  Sure they are all good things…  Many of them even stem from the true meaning, but for too many people they expand and replace it…  Why is that?  And what about me, why is Christmas always such a more prominent event in my mental calendar than Easter?

Well…
Christmas in the UK is much more than simple commercialism for non-Christians.  It is a big festival in winter!  At Christmas time the depressing shortening of days has come to an end and they are going to get lighter from now on!  It is a holiday after such a long spell with no bank holidays or public holidays…  The last time everyone had a weekday off was in August!  And it is a time to let go for a bit and enjoy rich food, warming flavours, heartening traditions, family time, fun with friends, giving and receiving presents even when its not your birthday… etc etc etc…  When I really thought about why I like Christmas so much I realised that it isn’t just as a Christian that I enjoy it.  But I love all of the other aspects as well.  Well most of them!

So what about Japan?
Well in Japan they have another winter festival.  New Year is a huge thing here, people get several days off work (a big deal here!) go home to their families, spend time together.  There is a religious aspect to it, people going to shrines and temples etc.  But I will happily ignore that side and focus on the chance to have fun with friends, eat good food, give and receive etc…

I guess the bottom line is that Christmas is about Jesus, but the rest of the stuff (within reason) isn’t necessarily wrong or bad unless we allow it to push Jesus out of the picture, or we don’t have Him there to start with.  I think for me, being in Japan will mean that it will be easier to keep Jesus at the centre of Christmas…  The paraphernalia can wait til New Years…

It’s turned out kind of like an interview hasn’t it?  hmmm….

I have arrived in Japan!  The plane landed in at around 5pm, I got through immigration and customs, Met Wolfgang Langhans (the Field Director here) and we arrived at Japan HQ at around 7:15pm!  Now one very tasty dinner (with Wolfgang and Dorothea) and a short dander around Ichikawa later and it’s almost time for bed…

It’s great to be back in Japan, the train ride back from the airport already brought back the sounds and smells of Japan!  And some of the sights, even thought it was dark…

Leaving IHQ wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be as it was early so my brain wasn’t working yet!  OC was something I would rather have done without when I was looking forward to it.  But in reflection it was a very useful time, getting to know people who are going to different places, getting to know OMF as an international organisation (getting to know the bit inbetween the homeside and fieldside) and getting to kow the people who are working at international HQ

Tomorrow Emiri and her parents are coming!  Emiri is in Ibaraki at a friend’s wedding and she is going to come to morning worship at the Chapel of Adoration here tomorrow! They are going to arrive here quite early and so I will leave it at that and head to bed!

In preemptive preparation I have been doing a bit of organising etc.  Today I got Office 2007 (Can’t find the discs for the student edition of 2003 I bought, so I’m taking the excuse!).  I got the “home and student” edition simply because it is ridiculously cheaper than the other versions, and was glad to find it has powerpoint (the home version didn’t have power point when my brother got it, or when my dad got it…hmmm) but also found it didn’t include outlook.  Now this is no big loss.  I had used Outlook for my calendar with it syncing to my phone and, recently, my iPod Touch but thought it would be a simple matter of telling things to sync to Windows Calendar or something.  No such luck!  For all their ease of use and anti-Microsoft following, Apple have decided that the iPod and iPhone can only sync with Outlook (2003 SP1 and above).  So I started to dig!

While digging I realised that I should get all my contacts together and store them safely (having experienced the misery and difficulty that missionaries experience when their harddisk or similar crashes and contacts are lost or even just temporarily unavailable for a week or two).  I reckoned that a cloud solution may be what I’m looking for.  I already use GMail and Google Reader, and am quite fond of the intrusive, privacy neglecting, big G so seeing as they already know everything about my email and browsing habits, I may as well give them my contacts (most are already in GMail) and calendar too!

While scouring the net for potential, I happened upon this nifty site which can be used to set up an in-the-cloud Exchange service that is able to provide Exchange style access to (among others) Google’s online services, designed specifically to give people mobile access to these services through Windows mobile and Apple handheld devices.  It’s in beta at the moment and can allow pushing of calendar and contacts, with plans to introduce email making use of GMail’s IMAP service.  Once set up I can access my google calendar and contacts direct from my iPhone syncing via Wifi and no need for Outlook or other expensive stuff!

Following that success I decided to look into laptop access.  So that I can still get at my calendar on my PC, make appointments, get contact info etc when I’m not in range of a usable hotspot.  So I tried a few things, mostly unsuccessful, until coming around to something I should have thought of at the start.  Mozilla Thunderbird.  Well truthfully I downloaded Mozilla Sunbird and set it up for my google calendar (with the relevant addons) then downloaded Thunderbird to do contacts (and IMAP gmail… maybe…) and realised I should just use the Lightning extension with Thunderbird.  So I did that.  And it works!

So now my calendar and complete contacts have joined my email in the Cloud!  But I still have a synchronising copy of each on my laptop!  Marvellous…

And that’s just a sub-narrative… I mean a sub-plot, sorry… too much dissertation…