I went war-biking last Saturday in Urawa, my home town. War-biking is just like war driving but waayyyy slower. It was pretty sad. After an hour of riding around in circles, I only had four access points to show for it, and all four were protected (had WEP enabled). All I want is a cafe with wireless and a no-smoking section near my house. Give me that, and I'm a fish in water. Seriously, only four? It really surprised me, I thought there was something wrong with my PC. Driving from Urawa to Akihabara (I was a passenger, naturally) I found over 200 networks, about 80% of which were unsecured. Well, Akihabara Urawa ain't.

Not finding AP's gave me some time to think. Assuming I can find some APs I'd like to start warblogging. No, not Warblogging I want to start a blog on which, each and every single post is done from a new access point. Never post from the same access point twice. I think it would be a cool experiment, though a little heavy on the, erhm, effort side of things.

I had another blog idea, litter-blogging. Usually I don't have an idea for blog entries sitting at a computer. And if I do, they are usually my crappiest entries. So, often times I'll write an entry down in a notebook and type it in later. This is really a kind of 'virtually live' blogging. The last blog entry I wrote (not posted yet) was written between two train stations. I took a digital picture and called it a live blog. I'll upload the picture along with the post, when I'm actually able.

The point is, it's interesting to bridge the virtual and real world. Maybe, wherever I old-school blog, I will leave a sticker that says: [DomDomo Live Blogged at 14:00 mm/dd/yy http://www.domodomo.com]. I would just assume leave the entire blog entry where I made it (post it to a trash can with some scotch tape?), but unless I made two copies (or maybe wrote on carbon copy) I would have to re-type the blog into my computer on the spot to save it for later upload to the internet. Which is really too cumbersome to work. Hmm, maybe the carbon-paper idea is doable though....
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One thing I had worried about taking classes in Japan is that they would extremely biased and pro-Japan. Maybe this is a stereo-type based on the Ministry of Education's treatment of Japan's colonialism before and during WWII (Nanking, comfort women, etc). I've been pleasantly surprised in that most of my professors have been quite critical of the Japanese government.

I just got out of a very interesting session of my International Development class. Our teacher is a smart guy and selects interesting readings. He encourages a very interactive class with lots of discussion (far from the norm here). He also worked for JICA (Japanese International Cooperation Agency) and is wonderfully jaded of the system.

Japan's official government statement on foreign development (in Ministry of Foreign Affairs documents and JICA charter) is not to help other countries. But to support other countries helping themselves. 'Needy' countries are supposed to come to Japan with their requests. But the reality is more something like this:

Maybe boring to you, but I think it's interesting to see the relationships of how these administrative entities work in reality. There is also constant jockeying for power within JICA itself between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Economic Trade and Industry, and the Ministry of Agriculture Forestry and Fisheries. JICA and international development is used as a tool to explore the interests of the individual ministries.

Nothing about development and everything about protecting departmental interests. In the end, no suprise.
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