mission.japan

It’s 3:30 in the morning and we’re multitasking in Okayama—waiting for Germany/Italy to start on the TV while I keep track of Discovery’s launch and write a journal entry via the internet.

After a mostly clear day the forecast on channel 11 (complete with all sorts of nifty graphs and data and background music by Do As Infinity) calls for rain over the next several days. Rain is annoying, but I definitely prefer it to sun—at least when it’s raining it’s not as hot. The high temperatures recently have been around 32 degrees, which Google says is more or less 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Maybe to the Texas/Arizona people back home this doesn’t sound so bad, but the humidity runs the feels-like temperature up to around 100 degrees. “Tangible” is quite appropriate to describe the atmosphere on some days, particularly right after it rains.

This might be a good time to point out that central air conditioning is a thing reserved for large buildings. Homes and apartments (and the church’s room) rely on wall-mounted units that typically have enough power to cool a single room. A/C naturally results in a spike in your electric bill, so there’s an unwritten rule that you should wait as long as you can in the year before resorting to using the air conditioner, and even then you should use it as sparingly as possible, maybe for just an hour or two during the hottest part of the day. Portable fans are useful for beating the heat without the A/C, so thanks to the fan I have in my apartment I’ve been able to avoid using the A/C thus far. It definitely gets warm in here, though—my laptop normally runs around 41 C internally, but conky tells me that I’m at 46 C right now (remember, it’s the middle of the night now).

In other news the church web site is getting close to a minimally acceptable state, so look for things to switch over soon once everyone here approves of the layout and such. I don’t know exactly how the transfer will work—one solution is to put everything on the current Geocities site, since it’s built with plain XHTML. Another (better) option is to keep everything on my TextDrive server and purchase a domain name for the church. The benefits of using my server (besides being able to use TextPattern in the future) would be to take advantage of scripting or at the very least SSI. Either way I’d like to have complete control over modifications to the site so I can make sure that my clean markup stays nice (I’m kind of picky about clean markup).

Well, looks like Germany/Italy is about to start, so I’ll sign off for now. A lot of my English students picked Germany over Italy for this game, so we’ll see who’s right after a couple of hours.