Well, I’m back up and running after being offline since the beginning of the week. I could not access my blog and at first it seemed like my Internet connection was intermittent but the problem turned out to be much worse. The firewall router for my network had died which is hard to deal with when you are half way round the world. There is a well known but as yet unformalized rule that all people who deal with technology for any length of time knows “Stuff breaks when it is most inconvenient for it to do so”. Many thanks to Miranda for buying a new router, configuring and installing it and for dealing with Shaw, ARP caches and the like. Thanks to her I’m back and will try to catch up on posting in the next few days.
The other issue that I have been fighting with is connecting to the Internet via my cell phone. I arranged to rent a SIM from JCR Corp before I came to Japan. This was so that I could use the online services that I wanted to have available. When I picked up the SIM at Narita I found that while I had my envelope the contents were for someone else. I contacted JCR and was given the option of keeping the SIM that I had instead of somehow swapping it for the original which presumably the other guy had. This seemed simplest so I said OK. What I had not been told was that the SIM that I had did not have the unlimited data plan that the original one did so a week later the Internet slowed to unusable speeds. I messed around thinking that it was an issue with my setup but eventually wrote an email to JCR and was told that I had exceeded some limit and had been rate limited as a result. They shipped out a new SIM (which I just received) and it seems like finally I may have the service that I ordered. I’m on my 4th phone number now so its a good thing that I am not using the phone for much. When the service works it’s great but ot sure has been a headache for what should have been a simple rental.
It’s Friday night and I’m off to dinner with my host family. For the weekend my textbooks and I will be visiting Takayama. Too bad that I just missed the famous matsuri there but I didn’t want to skip school and it was only on for 2 days during the week.