In the past seven hours, I have received 490 pieces of spam. One made it to my inbox. One almost made it to my inbox. The rest were caught by SpamSieve, with no false positives.

So, yes, I’m pretty sure that the catchall mailbox at jgreely.com is working again. :-)

I moved one of my parked domains to a new account at Pair, the hosting side of domain registrar PairNIC. They offer clean multiple-domain support with catchall mailboxes and sophisticated filtering, secure IMAP and SMTP, and a full range of scripting languages and libraries under FreeBSD. Once I’ve tested everything out with that domain, I’ll move jgreely.com over, as well as the J-E dictionary I’m currently hosting on jgreely.net.

It will be a while before I can resume the blog upgrade work I started a while back, so dotclue.org won’t move to the Pair account any time soon, and neither will my old high-volume picture site (which survives because of bandwidth-throttling firewall rules). All of the non-blog CGI will probably end up on jgreely.net once that domain is migrated off of the flaky old Shuttle sitting in my closet.

The ISP I’ve hosted jgreely.com at for a long time is now bouncing all of my incoming email. It seems that they silently decided to disable the wildcard delivery feature of their mail server, so of the hundreds of (something)@jgreely.com addresses I have, exactly one of them was being accepted as a valid mailbox. And that’s not the one I use…

Verio: just say, “blow me”.

[Update: naturally their support is business-hours-only, so I’ve had to reconstruct the core list of a hundred or so useful somethings and manually add them to my account.]

[Update: so after all that, there’s no explanation of what happened, or why I still have no control over this feature on their control panel. The support guys seem like nice guys who know how to do their jobs, but I’m still dealing with the fallout from this, with no idea of how to prevent it from happening again. It looks like their updated software looks through your configured users to see if one of them has the full name “catchall”, and if not, assumes that you want to bounce everything not directly addressed to configured users. Which would be fine, if this were A) documented, and B) they’d reviewed account configs before the update to make sure it wouldn’t bite customers who’ve been with them for more than ten years]

I’ve heard mixed reports about the various companies that act as reshipping agents in Japan, allowing you to order from companies who only ship domestically. Danny Choo recently had a prominent link to Tenso, along with a contest where the prize included shopping and shipping. There were relatively few comments about the service, but they were positive. I haven’t found many other comments about them, either, but I thought I’d give it a shot.

Several times a year, I place large orders with Amazon Japan. They only ship by air, so the order needs to be large to bring the shipping cost down to a less heartbreaking percentage of the price. They won’t ship software or consumer electronics internationally, and the marketplace vendors won’t ship anything overseas, so it’s been a limited-but-useful way to get stuff.

Tenso ships EMS, charging by weight, and in some cases this may end up being higher than Amazon’s air shipping; now that I have a few invoices to compare, I’ll have to figure out when it makes sense to use them for new goods, figuring in the cost of Amazon Prime to get free domestic shipping to their warehouse. For this test, I took advantage of Amazon’s free one-month trial of Prime. [Update: found Amazon’s rate page again; ¥1700-2700 shipping depending on the contents, plus a fixed ¥300 handling per item]

For used goods? No contest. A lot of marketplace dealers charge a nominal ¥1 + handling for used books and CDs that aren’t in high demand, and I found a single dealer who had three items that I wanted, -azb-アマゾン店. Their handling charge added ¥1020, and Tenso charged ¥2350 for shipping and handling, for a grand total of ¥3373. The original retail cost of the three items? ¥4819. Speed? I ordered on the 12th, Tenso received it on the 16th, shipped it on the 17th, and it was waiting for me at the office today, the 21st. It may actually have arrived yesterday; I was out.

Setting up my account with Tenso was easy, except for the credit card. Neither my Visa nor my Mastercard were accepted, despite having used both with Amazon, but my American Express card worked fine. The error page for this was the only place I noticed where their mostly-competent English was replaced by Japanese, and some of Danny Choo’s commenters reported the same difficulty, and ended up using Paypal. They give clear instructions on how to enter your personal address on online stores, and promptly notify you when you need to approve a shipment.

Will I use them again? Definitely for used goods through Amazon, likely for software/games that Amazon won’t ship directly, possibly for other stores if I find something I really want.

Were the three used items worth it? Hell, yeah.

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Ethernet over coax. I knew there was a reason I kept these things around. :-)

For the first time in a long time, I had to pull out my other electronic dictionary. Why? Because the short essay I was trying to read was filled with place-names. On the DS, I had to write one character at a time, hope it was used at the start of some word (Kanji Sonomama doesn’t have a true kanji dictionary), and then type each one in on my Mac and look them up in Enamdict.

My other dictionary, a Sharp Papyrus, has clumsier stylus input and a generally less useful interface, but a much wider variety of dictionaries, including names and places.

Even with both handhelds and my JMdict search tools, it’s still a tough slog, because Ikuma Dan writes in colorful, literary language, using pre-war orthography. For instance, 眼 for “me”, 筈 for “hazu”, 儘 for “mama”, 未だ for “mada”, 又 for “mata”, and my favorite, 何處 for “doko” (處 being an obsolete variant of 処).

It’s been an interesting experience, but one I won’t repeat any time soon; in the time it takes me to decipher two pages of his writing, I could read thirty pages of a children’s or young-adult book.

I seem to have finally gotten my Amazon profile into a reasonable state, because the top 15 items it recommends for me are: 6 books on grilling, 7 fan-service anime DVDs, a Scalzi novel, and a Grimjack collection.

It won’t last, I know. A few days ago I had to delete 30 “classic horror” films from the list, because my purchase of the comedy film Dead Time Stories convinced it that I loved slasher flicks.

[update: I don’t know why I read 魔装 as 魔法; I guess I just assumed it was 魔法少女, and didn’t realize that it’s a created word, masou, with a meaning like “dressed as a witch” (from 和装 “dressed Japanese-style” and similar)]

A little something recommended by Amazon: 「これはゾンビですか？」 volume 1, 「はい、魔装少女です」.

25 years ago, I dropped out of a class in Mandarin Chinese. I had no problem with the tones, I just lacked the dedication and discipline to spend ~20 hours a week studying.

Our textbook was a work in progress quick-print, and I threw it away a long time ago. I lost the C-E dictionary in a move some years back. Every once in a while, though, I’ve stumbled across one last piece of evidence: an index card with the Chinese name they assigned to me: 高橋模, with the Pinyin reading Gāo Qiáo-mó, and a note that 橋 means “bridge” and 模 means “the paragon” (高 of course meaning tall/high).

Obviously, I stumbled across the card again today. If you read it as a Japanese name, the first two characters form the common family name Takahashi, and the third is usually Mo, the same sound it has in Chinese. The “paragon” meaning never got to Japan, though; there, it means imitation or copy.

A lot of characters changed meaning going from China to Japan, but this one seemed odd, so I searched through some Chinese web sites, and found a video of a group of engineering students working on a 橋模; sure enough, it was a model bridge. Technically, a paragon is a model or example of something, but it doesn’t match the actual usage.

So my Chinese teacher named me “Big Toy Bridge”. Call me Mo.

(side note: Google indexes the page with 橋, but the character actually used is 桥, the Simplified Chinese replacement)