Goodnight Tokyo

I am at the Haneda airport in Tokyo getting ready to catch my flight back to the United States and thought I would try to kill some time. I was only here a month ago and it is funny to see the same crew that checked me onto my flight last month is here again this evening. It is probably pretty sad that I recognize them. I don't even recognize the gate agents in Salt Lake nor Oakland and I fly there almost every week.

This has been a tough trip for me. I have been waking up at 5am each morning so I could work with people back in the States before starting a full day at the office in Tokyo. At about 8pm, I am ready to crawl into bed and have been asleep before 9pm each night. Right now it is close to 11pm and I am dying. All I want to do is get on the plane so I can fall asleep.

While here in the airport I have been talking with an older gentleman who makes an annual pilgrimage to Tokyo where he was born. He then spends 2 weeks hiking around one of the Japanese islands. This evening we have been comparing notes about mobile phone coverage. As mentioned earlier this week, I have kept my personal phone on airplane mode and so it hasn't been used. My work phone is with AT&T. My new friend has a phone with Verizon and he has remarked that coverage this year was not nearly as good as last year. As I have spent most of my time in Tokyo, coverage has been great and I can't complain.

There is always the option of renting a phone when you visit a different country. It is generally less expensive than trying to use your own phone as long as you are using it for data and local in-country phone calls. If you travel internationally frequently, you may want to consider adding an international plan to your phone. Either that or do like I do with my personal phone and turn it off for the trip. You might just enjoy the silence.

Score a Point for iPhone

I am back in Japan only a month after I was here last. I love coming to visit but this was a bit of a quick return trip. Fortunately it is because of a new project that needs some coordinating instead of something bad.

I decided to try something a bit different on this trip in that I have left my iPhone in airplane mode instead of turning it off for the week. That means it won't try to connect with the very expensive phone network here in Japan. As most of the apps on an iPhone are worthless without data connectivity, I have turned on my WiFi network while still keeping the phone in airplane mode. One benefit of that is that I am still able to send text messages to other iPhones. That is because iPhones use iMessage when both parties are using Apple products. That allows you to get text messages on your iPad. I can't send messages to Android or Windows phones, but as my wife has an iPhone, it doesn't matter.

This has been great because Skype has really been awful lately. On Mother's Day, we tried to use it to talk to our daughter in North Carolina. The calls kept getting dropped and we kept having to reconnect. Here in Japan, I can only get about 30 seconds of the call before it gets dropped.

It is kind of nice to still be able to keep in contact with my wife via text messaging even though I am so far away. While iMessage isn't perfect, it is working. I have to keep the phone awake to keep the WiFi signal going, but I am not sure if that is because of the hotel or how WiFi works in airplane mode. I will keep playing with it to see what magic makes it work.

While I enjoy my Android phone and think it is better for certain tasks, I have to give a point to my iPhone for communication use on International travel. At least for those of us paying our own wireless phone bills. For those with employer provided mobile phones, it doesn't matter as you never see the bill.

Online Updates

This morning I looked at my Android phone and noticed that it automatically updated 2 of my applications. Then I looked at my iPhone and noticed there are 7 applications that should be updated. Then I turned on my surround sound system and noticed it needed updating and so I did that. Once my surround sound completed, my son told me my PlayStation 4 also needs an update. I feel like I am in a never-ending cycle of updates.

I think it is great that all of these applications and devices can get updates when they are needed. I do think it is getting out of hand though. It seems like I can't turn on an electronic device, play a video game, or make a phone call without being told there is an update that needs to be installed.

I think I am going to read an old-fashioned book with real paper for pages. It may be outdated technology but it doesn't require any time to power up. It never runs out of batteries. Most importantly all major updates were included at time of printing, long before the book entered my house.

Creating a PowerPoint Template

I have to give a presentation in about 6 weeks and needed to create a new PowerPoint template. Normally a company will have a standard set of templates to use, but my presentation will be given to numerous organizations and other presenters will have the option of using the template that I created today. So none of our existing templates seemed like a good choice.

At first I thought creating a PowerPoint template was going to be easy. I looked at a few of the standard ones I have used but quickly realized none of them were going to work for me. So I started with the blank white template that comes with every version of Microsoft Office. There was a company logo I wanted to use and so I added it from one of my other templates. Then there were some graphics that I copied over from others. Finally I pulled in a background that I like as it does a good job of representing large amounts of data, which is what my presentation is all about. Unfortunately the graphic was just too colorful and nobody could read any text placed on top of it regardless of the color or font. PowerPoint provides a few tools to lighten up the graphic and so I did to the point where black text was easily recognized and actually looked good.

I was pretty happy with the few sample slides I put together and called over one of my coworkers to let me know his thoughts. He thought it looked pretty good except for the font. Naturally I listened to his advice changed the font to something I have liked in the past. It was amazing how the presentation popped off the page with such a subtle change.

I must say that I am pretty happy with the presentation so far. It took me about five times as long to put together the template as I expected and probably am not finished. Remember that if you have to put together any presentations and want to create your own template. There were a lot of trips between "Master Slide" view and my presentation, but in the end it turned out pretty good.

A Tale of Two Projects

This past weekend I spent time digging a giant hole in my front yard looking for a water main break. Fortunately I found the problem on my first hole as there were two likely places the leak could have been. Once I found the problem but before fixing it, my son decided he would try and resolve a problem with his car. In the process he learned that you never start another project until one is complete. As the water was off in the house, he couldn't wash his hands after working on the car until the first problem was completely solved. He also managed to break both his car and my other son's car in the process and so at the end of the afternoon, we went from having one project to three.

My son's problem was actually fairly simple. In the process of replacing the cylinder head on his 1996 Jeep Cherokee, we broke one of the temperature sensors that screws into the the engine. My son wanted to replace it with a new one and so he went to the auto part store. He immediately broke that sensor in the process of trying to put it in. Naturally that was the only one the store had. Fortunately he was able to bring it back, get his money back, find another sensor at a different auto parts store, and break the new sensor. Another trip to the second auto part store and he got another one. Yes, the temperature sensor is incredibly brittle and breaks easily. One would think they would make them a bit more resilient.

The 1996 Jeep Cherokee actually has two engine temperature sensors and the one my son kept breaking is the one that sends information to the temperature gauge on the dashboard. Unfortunately the new one told my son that his engine was overheating and so my son couldn't go out with friends that evening. He was pretty bummed. When we popped the hood and checked the engine, it didn't seem any hotter than normal and didn't have the usual signs of the radiator boiling over. So we needed to determine if the engine was really overheating or if the temperature gauge was bad.

I'm a firm believer in the saying that "A man with one watch knows what time it is, a man with two isn't quite sure." In 1997, the engineers at Jeep decided the second temperature sensor in the Jeep Cherokee was superfluous and removed it. Fortunately for us, our job was to tap into the second sensor on my son's Cherokee and see if it was giving the same high-temperature results. All we needed to do was to tap into the car's OBD-II computer. Fortunately my son has a code reader that is a little more sophisticated than mine and it reads various parameters that include the engine temperature. The only catch is that the car has to throw a check-engine code first. My son tried unplugging various sensors only to have the engine keep running without any problems. He even tried unplugging one of the spark plugs with no luck. Finally he pulled the plug on one of the fuel injectors and the car threw a code immediately. He checked the code and the engine parameters and discovered that the engine was in its optimal operating temperature. That means the gauge sensor was wrong and his car really wasn't overheating. We now know why the engineers at Jeep took out the separate gauge sensor and just use one now.

The weekend is over and the hole in my front yard is now filled in. My son's Jeeps is running fine and the erroneous temperature gauge seems to be fixing itself. My son has also fixed the problem that arose on my other son's car. It took a couple of days, but things seem to be back to normal. At least until the next weekend.