It’s the second day now, and the first night with a proper sleep (with a futon). Past night was a sleepless one on a cramped economy class SQ flight to Fukuoka, and a subway train to Hakata station before a bullet train ride to Hiroshima station. We were supposed to take Hikari 554 according to the itinerary, but the staff recommended that we take Nozomi 22 instead, which is the super express heading towards Tokyo. Was kind of shocked when we actually did that against the written plan on the spur of the moment, but all’s fine since it didn’t really cost us more. One thing that struck me was how smooth the bullet train ride was, and the only few times the cabin shook was inside the tunnel. The bullet train had a lady with a pushcart selling snacks and drinks on board. Took the opportunity to buy some Pocari Sweat, and this was the first opportunity I had to use Japanese after arrival.

We ended up some 14 mins ahead of time, which was good. Met Ms Tsuru, the principal of Hiroshima Institute of Technology Polytechnic, as well as some of the students she brought along to greet us. Lunch was at some local ramen shop with a salmon onigiri and shrimp tempura sushi which was good. The rest of day one was spent on a briefing where I was quite amused on how the first thing Ms Tsuru brought up to us was how many couples have formed after the many years of interactions (since 1993 I think) between SP and HITP. She was showing us an official brochure which indicated 5 married couples (!).

6.19am now Japan time, yet it already seems like what it would have been in Singapore at 8+am. Either the sun here rises very early, or the double daylight saving time in Singapore has finally shown it’s effects.

Things like sashimi (one large box set 500 yen thereabouts) and ramune (93 yen) from the local supermarket are dead cheap. even after conversion to SGD. The internet access in the student’s hostel is uber fast too, with each apartment having it’s own VDSL line (yes, VDSL) of 15Mbps down, 8Mbps up. My broadband at home can’t even compare to this haha.

I don’t have much time now to post up the photos I took with my new Canon 500D (with 18-200 IS lens lol). Will do so later tonight, once there is free time. Today is supposed to be spent in formal attire, with the official visit to HITP, and a visit to the Hiroshima-Singapore Association who co-sponsored two Japanese language awardees from SP.

Itinerary list is now with me; seems like the trip contains a wide range of activities spread over ten days, including bullet train rides from Fukuoka and back as well as an overnight stay at a ryokan in Kurahashi island, complete with an onsen.

Really looking forward to it, but in the meanwhile, I’ve FYP and MST’s to tackle before I leave ~.~

I am finally making use of WordPress’s built in Gallery. Been uploading and attaching images the manual way all these years via FTP.

Cleaning my room a few months back revealed a few oddities

Japanese WWII banana money

Old Kanon wall calendar

A shot out of my class on a very hot day

Note the heavy yellow blooms

Singtel Tower in the distance

Network rack for NETF module, courtesy of D-Link

My trusty EEEPC on the rack. Rack fans are good coolers :P

Fedora 11 launch

A whole lot of professionals, students and enthusiasts

Fedora – FREEDOM, FRIENDS, FEATURES, FIRST

Free Live CD media FTW ^o^

• File permissions setting and changing
• SE Linux (using of restorecon, chcon)
• Creation, format and mounting partition and swaps including mounting beyond reboot using /etc/fstab
•  User and group creation and modification including /etc/skel
• Basic text editor (able to use them to create / edit a simple file), vi and nano
• Boot process (fixing boot problems such a expired password or missing /etc/inittab and /etc/fstab
• System monitoring (/proc , lspci, lsmod, lshal)
• HFS (where are the files kept)
• Basic command such as mkdir, rm, cp, mv .. (all those in the lecture slides)