Life2go.net Get a life ...to go.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

The Acrylic Cowboy (DC-ACSP1), made by the Japanese company Digital Cowboy, is a 4 in 1 external hard drive case that takes IDE (PATA) drives and connects to the computer using either USB or FireWire.

It's a box made out of transparent acrylic. You put one to four hard drives in it and connect it to the computer. The drives will then show up as individual external drives or concatenated, using the co called JBOD (just a bunch of disks) method. If you put four 250 GB drives into it, it will look as one 1 TB drive to your computer.

The Buffalo TeraStation does the same, but also includes sophisticated RAID modes for data integrity in case one drive fails and connects using gigabit Ethernet to all computers in a network.

The Acrylic Cowboy, however, is a LOT cheaper, only 80 Euros without a power supply and disks. This is an interesting alternative for the do-it-yourself (DIY) enthusiasts out there.

You just add your own standard ATX power supply, a 120mm fan and one to four ordinary 3.5 inch IDE hard drives. Or so I thought.

I found it in a DIY shop in Akihabara, Tokyo, and because of the price it was something I could buy without getting in trouble with the customs back in Finland. It also came unassembled in a very small box like IKEA furniture so it would easily fit in my suitcase. And since Japan uses 100V, it was just as well that it came without a power supply - this way I could make sure I got a 220V/50Hz PSU suitable for Finland.

The 120 mm fan at the back of the case, which is mounted to take in air and blow it straight on the hard drives, is not included in the package either so I went looking for a suitable fan in Akihibara. I found one for only 10 Euros called S-FLEX made by Scytche that uses Fluid Dynamic Bearings made by Sony. This particular model was an 800 rpm one as well and the noise level is supposedly less than 9 dB - this has got to be some sort of record. Because the fan is mounted only 1 cm from the hard drives and blows strait on them, they stay cool even under full load despite the fan being a mere 800 rpm model.

There is really only one problem with the Acrylic Cowboy: once you add a modern ATX PSU and the IDE cables for four drives, even this fairly large box is simply a bit too small. With SATA drives and cables it would have been a bit easier.

But it works. I know have a 1.2 terabyte external hard drive for a total of 300 euros and two old hard drives that I moved to this case. Perhaps not worth the trouble - I'm getting too old for this DIY stuff - but now that I have it, I'm quite happy with it.

I read the "Linux Café" is a great place in Akihabara / Tokyo if you are looking for WiFi to go with your refreshment. Unfortunatelly, the place seems to be out of business and has been replaced by "Caffe Solare" that has nothing to do with Linux and does not offer free WiFi, only a commercial "mzone" WiFi solution for DoCoMo customers, and it is not even possible for tourists to become customers.

Where it now reads "Caffe Solare" on the wall outside the café, it used to read "Pronto" back when they offered free WiFi.

I entered the McDonald's to grab a burger to go and just continue on my sightseeing walk. The person at the counter greeted me with a sentence that to me sounded like one long sound - I could not make out any individual words and not even figure out what language it was.

"I'm sorry", I said, and she repeated her question, or perhaps it was a statement.

"I'm sorry", I said again, and smiled to enhance my apology since I still did not understand her. Once again she repeated her phrase and although I tried to repeat it in my mind, I could still not even make out if it was English or not.

"I'm really, really sorry, I just don't understand", I said and felt embarrassed.

She repeated herself for the fourth time and by now she was clearly annoyed - that much I could make out but nothing more.

"I'm sorry, I don't understand I word, I'm really sorry" I said and walked out to avoid further embarrassment.

So ended my attempt at ordering at McDonald's in down town Los Angeles, California.

Compared to that, McDonald's in Tokyo scores high on my "McDonald's experience" scale. I have visited a McDonald's three times now, and every time, the sales person has been able to formulated comprehensive questions and answers and pronounce them in such a way that I have understood them on the first try.

"If you intend to go to Tokyo, you need to learn at least some Japanese" one blogger recently wrote, sharing his experience about travelling to Japan.

This person obviously only speaks one language and is unfamiliar with the concept of "learning a language".

In one discussion forum, I recently read "can you go to Japan if you know little or no Japanese?". Japan would have very few foreign tourists if that was a problem, and the same goes for most countries in the world.

Sure, having learned a few phrases from a pharsebook doesn't hurt, but communication limited to a few phrases is only marginally better than not communicating at all, and there is no risk of that - every person I have needed to communicate with has spoken English very well or at least well enough to get by.

If you only intend to spend a week or two as a tourist, there is really no major city in the world where you will not manage with English alone and Tokyo is certainly no exception.

Officially, there is no WiFi in this hotel room, but using a WiFi dongle and a 3 meter USB extension cord - and VERY carefully placing the dongle in this position - I am able to get some sort of connection.

Not having a connection in the room and having to rely on internet cafes was becoming very unpleasant and got me to buy this dongle and start experimenting. I guess a PCMCIA card with a connector for an external directional antenna would be the best solution - or just choosing a hotel with WiFi.

A salesperson at the iriver shop in Tokyo, Japan, answered a verbal question using a web page with a Japanese to English translation system. She understood the question but was not able to formulate the answer in English, so she made use of this web based translation and wrote the answer in Japanese and then showed the automatically translated English text. This is machine translation in a real world situation and it works well.
And the result? Well, regardless of this answer, I'm now the happy owner of 2 GB iriver t30. Nothing spectacular, but it plays my Ogg Vorbis audio files.

View from my favourite internet cafe in Tokyo. Ok, the only one I know of, but I sincerely like it. It's in Akihabara, the "electric town" within Tokyo where all the interesting tech shops are located. This is a great place to go for some refreshments and WiFi after having walked up and down Akihibara. Todays findings included a USB WiFi dongle, a LED flashlight (I have absolutely no use for one, but I still could not resist one at this price) and a pair of headphones/earbuds: "Sony NUDE EX monitor" or MDR-EX90SL to be precise. I don't know if they are any good, but they have that irresistible brushed metal finish...
I still haven't found a new GPS though, nor have I seen any laser pointers - and this is something that would actually be useful as I spend most of my time (at work) in meetings looking at projected computer screens.

Blu-ray discs (BD-R) on sale in Akihabara, Tokyo. TDK, Panasonic, Fujifilm, Sony, Maxell...
Blue-ray 5.25" drives for PC:s are available for well under €1000. I'm considering buying one, but I will probably wait a while still, I'm hoping the price of a drive will come down significantly soon and reliability and compatibility will go up. As an early adopter of CD-R and DVD+R, I'we been burned when it comes to these issues.
I have not seen any HD DVD discs or recorders and the whole HD DVD standard seems "outdated" with its 15 GB per side compared to Blu-ray and its 25 GB per side.

The observatory deck in the Tokyo Tower offers a nice view of this part of Tokyo, or rather would if it was not for the fog. No open-air areas as in the Eiffel tower either, making photographing less interesting - now you end up with reflections in most images.

Local food. Friday evening. No chairs. Drunken locals.

A year ago, I was sitting in another hotel bar at the top of a skyscraper in Shanghai, China. There are many similarities between these two Asian capitals of commerce, surprisingly many considering the fact that Japan is an established industrial nation - one of the richest in the world - and the fact that China is still considered a developing country.

I like Tokyo, I like the order, I like the politeness and I like the peace and quiet. Yes, really. People reserve seats in cafeterias by putting their bags on the chair and then walking to the counter. When people park their bikes they don't lock them because they don't need to. And when people enter shops there are special "umbrella wrappers" that wraps wet umbrellas in plastic to prevent you from accidentally rubbing your wet umbrella against someone.

This is one of the biggest cities in the world with all the services you wuld expect in such a city, but there are almost non of the problems usually associated with large cities. This is what a society with a virtually 100% employment rate looks like.

The view is from the Peak Lounge & Bar at the top of the Park Hyatt Tokyo in the Shinjuku Park Tower skyscraper, a bar familiar to those who have seen "Lost in Translation" - as central as it gets in Tokyo.