Google Earth now has layers for Japan Tourism and Kyoto Tourism, linked to pictures and English text provided by JNTO. Good stuff, although of course the national-level layer is pretty sparse. Fortunately, we’re going to Kyoto.

My deepest fear is that someday these Amazon recommendations will turn out to be right.

Looks like Pixy’s empire has temporarily vanished from the net; I can’t get response from either of the mee.nu/mu.nu nameservers. One of them is pingable, but not answering DNS. I’d send email, but, well, y’know.

[Update: all better now]

While giving me a tour of their new place, Beth sat down to play with Google+ for a few minutes, and said, “uh-oh, new 7.0 earthquake in Japan”.

We spent at least five minutes hunting for details beyond what the USGS site had, veryifying that it was indeed off the coast of Sendai where the monster had hit, but unable to get any solid information on possible tsunami impacts.

Five minutes after that, the story reached CNN. They knew less than we did.

[Update: tsunami heights of no more than 50 centimeters were predicted for the region, with the actual results being closer to 10cm in several port cities. Good news for now, but the big one in March had a 7.2 foreshock two days before, so keep your fingers crossed for a week or so.]

Please hire someone to clean up the hilariously bad computer-generated translations on your US web site. Trust me, there are plenty of recently-graduated liberal-arts majors eager to work with prose more complicated than “do you want fries with that?”.

When the pipe is running, you are holding in your hands every now and slowly count to six. If you succeed you can safely continue to smoke a pipe, otherwise you must stop until the pipe cools. Long waits are not necessary: it takes typically a few seconds of interruption and in most cases not even need to turn on the pipe. however, if the pipe were to be shut down, never mind: you again. Many burns are caused by smoking because they fear that the pipe goes out and then suck up too often.

I’d like to improve the quality of the recommendations I receive from you. Unfortunately, it’s been clear for a long time that I’ve given you Too Much Information, causing the system to produce basically random results.

The Real Reason For The Civil War because of Slow Cooker Revolution? Amusing. Bacteria-filtering disposable face mask and a watch toolkit because I buy Cajun salame? A bit odd, don’t you think? Hemorrhoid cream because I bought a folding screen? Downright peculiar. Murder on the Links and The Photoshop CS5 Book For Digital Photographers because I bought Soups and Stews 2011? Uh, yeah, right. A ten-year-old Sony 5-disc CD changer because I own Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook? WTF?

And that’s just today; I’ve seen far worse in the past. There’s still some wheat mixed in with the chaff, so I haven’t given up, but every time I use the system, I mark more items “not interested”, and make the problem a little bit worse:

I wouldn’t mind cleaning that list up a bit, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to go through 1,353 pages of recommendations in reverse chronological order. By the way, while writing this, I added another 300 items to the list, so make that 1,373 pages…

[Update: a SOG Tactical Tomahawk because I bought rechargable batteries! Paco Rabanne Lady Million perfume because I own a 1 TB external hard drive!]

…has a romanizing button.

Remind me not to order anything else until things stabilize enough over there for shipping costs to come back down. Ow, my aching wallet.

Also, WTF with the limited edition of the Dream Morning Musume album? It was never up for pre-order, and on release day, by the time I finished getting through the checkout process, it was out of stock and only available through Marketplace dealers who won’t ship to me.

[Update: my order was split into two shipments, with 6 items coming from Osaka and the other 24 from Tokyo. They managed to reach Hong Kong two minutes apart, departing four hours later for San Francisco. I figure I’ll see them Tuesday morning. Annoyingly, the limited-edition DoriMusu album is once again in stock and orderable, grrr. I didn’t want to risk it suddenly disappearing again, so I quickly finished the order and had it sent alone. Ouch.

I understand that you can’t treat limited-edition items as normal back-orders, but they frequently don’t even handle pre-orders well. My suspicion is that the problem is a flaky distribution chain that isn’t reliably delivering the quantity that Amazon orders, and not just for limited editions. Note that this is not a “big quake” issue. I’ve been seeing it for quite a while, so I think Japan’s well-padded and obsolete distribution system is reacting badly to Amazon’s success, and this is similar to the legal obstacles that keep them from offering deeper discounts.]

[4/25 3pm update: DHL delivered them today. So while the price was painful, the service was excellent.]