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Dreamed that as I was going to bed, I saw a mouse, so I cornered him and grabbed him with my hand. He had weird little sparrow wings and after I petted him he calmed down but his limbs started to stretch and mutate, Tetsuo-style. I put him in a paper sack and found that there were two other mice downstairs, along with other weird creatures like 16-legged mouse-shaped insects and little beetles that looked like pineapples. As I attempted to clean this mess up, emergency alarms blared in my ears and I wondered if a tornado was coming.

Day 2 started off with an early train to Kyoto. I was oddly queasy on the Shinkansen, unlike during my previous trip. When we arrived, we got on the bus to see the Kinkakuji, known less well in English as the Golden Pavilion. There’s a lot to write about it but the structure that exists now is impressively gold and sits in a very nice area just behind some regular-looking shops and houses.

Also, the old dude directing pedestrians outside had a rad goatee and ponytail.After we were done appreciating the craftsmanship, we grabbed some Häagen-Dazs from the vending machine near the exit and walked back to the bus.
Creepy top hat guys in the subway station for extra atmosphere.

Next we were off to the Kyoto Pokémon Center to get some necessary Slowpoke items. I saw some rad buildings on the way.

These also existed:

Near the Pokémon Center, Sammy Davis Jr. was there to sell us some men’s whisky.

In our attempt to get back to Kyoto station, a series of miscalculations by my phone led us in the opposite direction and we ended up at the gigantic Higashi-Honganji Buddhist Temple which was awesomely free of charge to enter. I was super impressed at the intricacy of design and their determination to build the temple 4 times after each previous construction caught fire and burned down. I bought a book to learn more about it.

It even has an awesome underground theater room to tell you about the restoration and rebuilding of the temple.

After we checked into our guest house, we needed some food so we had a nice walk to Que Pasa, which I had heard had the best burritos in town and they did not disappoint.

They even had vegetarian and vegan options available and were easily on par with anything in the US. I’m sure we will visit there whenever we come to Kyoto.

On day 3 we were on our way to the southwest end of Kyushu to Kumamoto, to visit someone who did a homestay with us last year. It was a long 3 hour trip from Kyoto but I felt less nauseous than the day before. Kumamon is everywhere.We visited the outer grounds of Kumamoto Castle, still under repairs from the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake.

We were able to walk around and see the cranes and scaffolding well as the cracks in the walls resulting from the quake. I’ll have to go back when the repairs are finished. There’s a grand unveiling next month for the castle but I can’t imagine people will be able to visit the inside yet.
We visited a museum and a shopping area near the castle, and as we were leaving we noticed a museum about the history of the castle. Intrigued, we looked around and while we were inside a massive thunderstorm started outside. We bought umbrellas but still had to wait 20 or 30 minutes to be able to start moving in the torrent.We stopped into a game center where I played a round of Mario Kart and then we went to a Tsutaya where I got a Tempalay CD I had been wanting.

After that, we went to the very cool Ninja Restaurant. Down the long stairwell into a door that seemed to swing open by itself, we were ushered in and sat in a booth with a screen that was lowered every time the ninja waitress left. Let me talk about something really great in Japan. Everywhere you go, there’s mood music. In a mysterious ninja restaurant, coming from the streetlamps in Tokyo, in the bottom of a stone mine museum, there’s always the proper musical accompaniment instead of silence or piped-in pop music, and I really appreciate that. In this case, the music was something you would probably find in a pseudo-historical Japanese TV show or video game about ninjas.

On day 4, we went to Suizenji Jojuen, a gorgeous traditional landscape pond in Kumamoto. It was very hot but worth the trip since the landscape was amazing.

After that we said our goodbyes and moved onto our next objective which was to cross under the ocean at the Kanmon tunnel footpath between Kyushu and Honshu. And we would have made it there too, if not for our camera somehow getting left on the train when we got off near the tunnel. Half an hour later, we got word that the camera would be in the lost and found office at Shin-Osaka Station. Having not much time to lose, we opted to put the Kanmon tunnel on our to-do list for next time.

After reclaiming our camera, we headed to Dotonbori to check out the Glico sign.

Not sure why Spider-man is selling Kobe beef.

Mega Don Quijote!

There we go.

The night of day 4 we checked into another Hotel Nine Hours capsule hotel in Osaka’s Nanba area. In the locker room there was a guy carefully arranging dozens of packed food items (and nothing else) into a suitcase. Exhausted, I went to bed.

We got to Tokyo around 4:30 PM and immediately proceeded with festivities

Popped into Lawson to get tickets for the Mass of the Fermenting Dregs concert this Saturday. Extremely excited to finally see them live.

Then we went to our hotel. Never stayed in a capsule hotel before but it was super chill and it had an amazing shower. There were lockers to keep luggage in and all you had to do to open them was scan the QR code on your “room key” (which incidentally was not required to open your capsule.)

The bed and pillow were a little hard but surprisingly I’m less sore than when I sleep in my own bed. Maybe that’s a sign I need a stiffer bed at home.

Other than someone quietly, maniacally giggling every couple minutes when I was trying to sleep around 10PM, it was an extremely relaxing stay.

Now we’re on the Shinkansen to Kyoto for the first leg of our journey.

Dreamed I was in a vast countryside/farm area. I knew from reading a report from the future that a small dog was angry with me and would pick up a large chunk of concrete, stand on my car, and fling it into my windows. A car-sized meteor hit the ground and bounced slightly, leaving a large impression. I put the dog in my car with a now dented passenger window and went to look for the meteor. When I found the meteor, the area rapidly became midtown and I was having a hard time parking. The meteor had been built into an alcove on the outside of someone’s house with a chair and a fountain.

I like Ben Heck’s idea for custom a AV switch, but the CBT3244 bus switch chips don’t have enough bandwidth for analog signals. Loud audio clips and bright video blanks out. I’ve just had to go back to manually plugging in one SCART cable at a time (everything is RGB now) unless I can find a method that allows this many inputs without losing quality. It seems like using a method designed more with these issues in mind is much more complicated and maybe out of my realm of expertise.

There were creatures with slightly bulbous heads and black eyes with red outlines. If they touched you, you froze in place forever or became one of them. They weren’t quite like zombies but kind of reminded me of them.

Somehow I and some people I knew had been captured and put in a place that was like real life but I got the distinct impression that I was asleep. There were giant red letters in the sky warning us of the fakeness of our environment, but the end of the message was garbled and only a few new letters were added every day. Some people in the building where I was kept had figured out how to trick the drink machines into giving out more than water. I was trying to figure out how to manipulate the machines as well but I was suddenly outside, watching a Jeep tow another car with a chain. However the Jeep jumped the median and went against the flow of traffic, while the towed car was still in the right lane. They came up on a light pole and collided due to the chain.

I was back in the “real world” because we had to get supplies at a really dark and creepy grocery store. An epiphany suddenly came: Maybe the sleeping people were all these pop bottles moving around on a conveyor/sorter thing I saw! Not knowing how to free the sleeping pop people I went with the rest of my party and exited the store, always mindful that if one of those red eye creatures touched me, I was toast forever. In our hotel room we pondered how to escape.

I couldn’t find a whole lot of information on this. My HDTV (a Magnavox 37MF331D) had developed the nasty problem of not turning on when the power button was pushed. The power LED would flash green for a while and then go back off. I had to try turning it on several times before it would finally come on. This seems to be a common problem affecting a lot of HDTVs; it’s not even a brand-specific problem.

After much research, I determined that my problem was blown capacitors on the power board. By repeatedly turning it on, they gradually got warm enough to hold a sufficient charge to let the TV turn on. There still wasn’t much information about how to actually fix the problem, aside from a couple of YouTube videos that show you approximately where the affected board is inside the unit. So, I figured I would share what I learned. There are 4 capacitors that should be replaced (two of mine were showing damage but since they’re all the same brand it’s probably good to change them all out). I guess TV companies just like to spring for the cheapest components they can find. There’s also a larger capacitor further down the board, but that usually doesn’t need to be replaced.

This is what my blown caps looked like

and this is the nice new ones ready to not explode.

I got Nichicon for the smaller ones; I don’t remember what the larger one is but hopefully it’s long-lasting as well.

You need one 1200µf 35v, one 2200µf 25v, and two 1000µf 35v caps, all should be high temp (125°C). And of course, you can use higher-voltage caps if necessary. Try to get a good brand and not something gross like CapXon. Whoever they are.