Just for the record, I did not fall off the edge of the earth. I made it safely to my destination and I’m happy and in one piece and enjoying the strange wonderfulness that is Japan.

I’m still in the process of setting up my home, and so it will probably be a while until I have a note worthy of posting. For now I’m relying on my office for Internet access — it would be another month to get a phone line, and then possibly another month to get DSL. So for the mean time, I have borrowed a decrepit secondhand laptop to check my e-mail and mind shop over the in-office wireless network.

And what a wonderful laptop it is — an ancient Sotec 450Mhz K6-2 with 256Mb, a 5Gb hard drive (that whines incessantly) and an expansive 1024×768 screen. Almost 10 minutes to start up, including the login prompt. This was made for me.

Right now it’s hopelessly bogged down with Windows XP (legitimate copy? I don’t want to know), but it’s just screaming for a Xubuntu installation. My goal now is to be the person who always uses it, so when I say, “Why don’t you just give it to me?” … Anyway, you can see my plan.

For now I’m learning where the apostrophe and quote marks have moved to, deciphering the occasional error message (that I can’t read … yet) and how to avoid the hiragana, katakana and kanji character sets that seem to pop up at random times when I’m typing. And the k and g keys are sticky. And it is so incredibly dirty. …

Yup, this one was destined to be mine … all mine. …

Cheers, and thanks for the positive notes. More soon, when there’s more to tell.