robertliu.com

Just got the results today and I don’t believe! I actually passed the JLPT 3 exam last December. Actually, I had an idea that I passed when I saw I had a “Do Not Bend” envelope sitting on my desk hinting to the fact a certificate was enclosed. My scores do reflect at how much I didn’t know as I did say I guessed A LOT of the exam. I got 90% for JLPT4 so just managed to scrape through on this one. Here’s a breakdown:

Writing-Vocabulary – 60/100
Listening – 87/100
Reading-Grammer – 126/200

Overall – 273/400 (68%)

I don’t know if I’ll be ready to take the new N3 exam this year. I’ve bought the text books but haven’t opened them yet so got a long way to go. Would be good to become fluent in Japanese.

Quite pleased with the Mac so far. It’s just an overall better experience than Windows – even the learning phase is fun.

Just installed Windows 7 with VMware Fusion. Having run Windows 7 now for the last 30 minutes, I’m reminded immediately of all the things I disliked about Windows!

The main thing is that it’s slow! OK, I might be running it virtually but still it has more resources assigned to it than my old laptop ever had yet it still seems to want to chug away with zillions of hard drive read/writes even though I haven’t told it to do anything! When running the OS X alone everything just seems to work; loading at a touch of a button and doesn’t freeze everything you’re doing and the hard drive doesn’t seem so stressed.

I’ve only installed Windows so I can do Windows things without having to wait 5 minutes for my laptop to start up and another 5 minutes for the web browser to open.

Since getting my new Mac mini I’ve started the process of migrating my files from my Windows laptop over to the Mac. Not only is it a learning experience, to understand the Mac OS and file system, various applications and getting used to the user interface, it’s also a good chance to do some digital recycling. Having just finished copying all 77.45GB worth of photos onto my new Mac mini, I’ve got some 31,127 photos and videos to organise.There’s bound to be 1000’s that are just rubbish which I can just delete.

That’s some number come to think of it. It’s like taking 15 photos per day!! Imagine the cost of that if we were all still using film cameras. In fact, let’s work that out. Let me see… an AGFA ISO 200 36 exposure roll of film is going for £6.30 on Amazon. Developing a 36 roll film (+ free CD and delivery!) costs £6 from Fujifilm. So works out at £0.34/photo which means 31,127 photos would have cost me £10,583.18 if I were to have taken all of them using a standard 35mm film camera. Ok, those numbers are probably slightly inflated as I spent a whole 1 minute searching for them on google but digital photography has allowed me to explore and fall in love with a hobby that I would probably not have taken up if the costs were really that high.

My Mac mini arrived yesterday!! I had been pondering over whether to buy a Mac for over a year now. I almost bought a MacBook Pro in Japan but was put off by the expensive Yen. My latest attempt to get a Mac was almost derailed when I tried to purchase a Mac mini off ebay – well, that never turned up. Good thing for Paypal buyer protection. Eventually I gave in to the temptation and just purchased one from a trusted retailer at a nicely discounted price.

Now there are various models to go for but I had one requirement which was that it had to have 4GB of RAM. If I upgraded the basic model that shipped with a 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of RAM and a 120GB hard drive, then this would cost an extra £80 on top of the base model (£480 with Education discount). Interestingly, this bought it to within striking distance of the next model (£622 with Education discount). With 4GB ram as standard, a faster 2.53Ghz processor AND more than double the hard drive capacity at 320GB, it seemed reasonably cost effective to go for this higher model. Given that I had a better hard drive (see below) to put in, I could sell off the 320GB drive for a higher price than the 120GB. So the better Mac mini was ordered, paid for and it arrived next day!

Apple’s packaging has always been impressively clean and simple. Here’s the front:

OK, after lifting out the manual/installation DVD’s, you are presented with the Mac mini, cleanly wrapped in a piece of plastic. It’s now I start to find out how hard it is to take a picture of a white object. So, apologies for my photos not being the best but can’t be ar$ed to photoshop them.

Underneath the mini are the accessories, the power adapter (brick), DVI adapter and…. well that’s it. It doesn’t come with anything else as you’re supposed to bring your own keyboard and mouse. Oh and also monitor.

Here’s the mini out of the box. Hasn’t even been turned on yet!

Now I mentioned above that I wanted to replace the stock hard drive. It spins at 5,400rpm but I wanted a bit better performance so I got a 500GB drive that spins at 7,200rpm. The faster the disk spins, the faster the computer responds, in theory. I needed to upgrade the hard drive so how to go about opening a computer that has no screws?

The Mac mini is one compact machine and Apple didn’t design to be easily modded. Google brings up loads of articles where people have used a putty knife, cooking spatula and even wires!! Well, I had to get in there some how, so after failing with a Swiss army knife (too small) and various credit cards (too flexible and too thick) I dug around in the shed for a putty knife. It was a little bit rusty but it seemed thin and strong enough to be able to pry open my new Mac mini!!

After perhaps 20 minutes of struggling and thinking how on earth is this going to work, I had progress!! Here, my Ikea membership card is being put to good use – it’s holding the front open as I work on the other sides!

After perhaps 30 or 40 minutes, I’m finally in!! The superdrive (CD/DVD) is in the way of everything.

To get to the hard drive, I had to carefully unscrew the 4 corner screws that holds the drive enclosure down and also remove the 3 antennae without losing the springs, peel back 1 sticky tape and also unclip what I believe is the SATA ribbon cable that connects the drives to the rest of the computer.

I can’t believe how small they make things these days. Anyway, here’s the Mac mini stripped bare. The big black thing on the right is the heatsink sitting on top of the CPU. The modules on the bottom left is the 4GB of memory. Rumour has it that you can put 8GB in here though Apple don’t say this officially. Not sure what the middle heat sink is covering, I’m guessing the graphics.

Here’s the drive enclosure (underside). The hard drive is the blue thing on the right and well, the left side is just space to suck out the heat.

After a bit more fiddling and unscrewing, I’ve finally got the hard drive out. Out with the slow Fujitsu drive and in with the new Seagate Momentus 7400.4 500GB hard drive.

As I was piecing it all back together I noticed something soft and odd looking – it’s the internal speaker!! Good thing I didn’t press too hard on it because there was some soft foam around the fan which I thought this was at first. Looked interesting, so here’s a picture of it too:

Quickly plug in the power and check the drive works before putting the lid back on. I formatted it and checked the status. All seems ok!

After re-installing OS X – Voila! My new Mac mini all set up and ready to go (excuse the embarrassing wallpaper my parents put in when I was in Japan).

First impressions? Love it and don’t regret buying it. Need to spend a lot of time with it to get used to it though as I’ve never used a Mac before. Still need to figure out how to transfer my iTunes from my old laptop and slowly move everything across.

Although not directly related to the Mac mini, I also purchased the Magic Mouse at the same time. It’s quite a neat gadget to be honest, featuring the touch sensitivity on the surface of the mouse that you get with the iPhones. It doesn’t do “pinch” but I have a feeling this just requires a bit more programming from Apple. The mouse has only one button yet I can left click, right click and scroll like any regular mouse! Magic!

• Mac mini MC239B/A (Late 2009 model)
• 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM (2×2GB)
• NVIDIA GeForece 9400M 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM (shared)
• SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
• Seagate Momentus 7400.4 500GB SATA hard drive (upgrade)
• Airport Extreme Wi-Fi (802.11n) and Bluetooth
• Apple Keyboard + Magic Mouse

That’s right, I got a Mac. A Mac mini in fact. All I need now is some regular fries and a coke.

Why? Blame Microsoft for morphing a half decent Windows into Vista. Windows 7 may have improved on it but there was nothing to entice me to upgrade to 7. Also my growing fondness of anything Apple and the fact that my 5 year old laptop is struggling with simple things such as web browsing.

…of my latest gadgets.

Full “review” to follow

It’s almost coming up to 8 weeks post LASEK operation and I had my check up this morning. I could read better than 20/20 but I’m ever so slightly long sighted now. Ultralase said that those who were previously short sighted will find that during the healing time the vision will tend back to short sightedness so I might be lucky and it will all zero out in the next month or so! Good news at least and I can definitely see an improvement in my vision. I’d say about 75% of the time it is now better than when I had glasses. My eyes are still healing and still using the eye drops. Right eye feels a bit gritty occassionally. I was given more anti-inflammatory drops because I ran out when I was in Japan so need to make up for 2 weeks of drops.

I’ve booked another check up in 3 months.

I was pleasantly surprised to see this letter on my desk when I arrived home this evening:

Enclosed was my pension handbook that I had when I was in Japan and a “Notice of the Lump-sum Withdrawal Payment (Remittance)”. The icing on the cake was when I read the contents and noticed that the refund was five times larger than what I was expecting it to be, even after deduction of 20% income tax. Now I don’t feel so bad as when I left Japan and I was hit with one years worth of Resident’s tax in my last month – that left me feeling poor. Very poor.

The amount refunded is higher than expected because it appears I was contributing to an Employees’ Pension rather than the National Pension. I’m pretty sure I filled in the forms wrong (to claim the lump-sum), considering it was mostly Japanese and the English equivalent was pretty dire. At least the Japanese Pension agency knew what to do with it and has given me, what I would say, a fair refund of the contributions I had been making into a pension system I would probably never be able to receive any benefits from.

I did apply for this all the way back in July 2009 so it’s taken 6 months to process but I have a feeling that they waited until the new calendar year for the (resident) taxes to sort themselves out and to confirm my (non) residency status. The system is quite mysterious if you don’t understand Japanese.

For those in a similar situation, you should check if there is some agreement between Japan and your home country before applying for the lump-sum withdrawal. For example, your home country may allow those contributions you made in Japan to count towards your pension back home. As far as I know, the UK doesn’t have this agreement yet. The only agreement between UK and Japan is that I don’t need to be liable to taxes/national insurance contributions to both systems at the same time.

Now I just hope I gave them my correct bank details!

It’s been a little while since I last blogged, so hope you all had a nice Christmas and are enjoying this new decade. This might surprise some of you but I celebrated the new year in Japan only to return back to the snowy and cold UK. It’s been a pain trying to clear the snow off my car in the morning and driving has been dangerous so I’m quite glad to see most of the snow melt today.  My parent’s home (yes, still living with parents) is freezing in this weather  so hoping to get some insulation installed soon – should have been done long ago.

I’ve never been in the habit of making new year’s resolutions but I decided at the end of last year to try and pursue an MBA (Master of Business Administration) to improve my managerial skills. It just seems like an appropriate thing to do at this point in my career, even if I may not be in a position to be a manager. I also want to improve my Japanese and possibly take the new JLPT N3 exam next December – still waiting for results from my last exam. What else…try and save money for my own house (been doing this for years and getting no where) and just to enjoy life e.g. travel.

My eye sight is pretty good now about 7 weeks post surgery. I’ve been glasses free, well, ever since surgery. My right eye doesn’t seem to be as sharp as my left but with both eyes combined, I can see pretty well. Been relying less and less on the eye drops which is a good thing and have another checkup this week!