I wonder if Macintosh makes iBleach. After so many months, my palmsweat's starting to colo(u)rize my laptop. AND ANY COLOR OTHER THAN WHITE IS IMPURE.
Got a cellphone today. A slider. It's like totally sweet. And mysterious. Nobody in Japan--foreigner or native--can seem to tell me the ins and outs of cellphone charges. At any rate, I know I can call other SoftBank users for free (except between 9pm and 1am, where I'll be charged a regular fee per 30 seconds of call-time), that it costs 10.5 yen every 30 seconds to call folk using another company, that sending texts (or e-mails, as it were) costs a little bit if I write small sentences, and costs $30 more if I write long sentences. Nobody seems to be able to tell me where the dividing line is between short and long. Also, and potentially most importantly, is that I can receive calls from anywhere for free. So if you're a friend from the States and feel like footing the long-distance bill, gimme a ring sometime. My phone number is E-MAIL ME AND INQUIRE.
It's also gold. The phone. I could've gone for a more refined silver or black, but--and try to follow me here--I wanted to do something outside the chic look. Gold presented itself as a symbolic color because of its history among white folk. Namely, when the colonialists of yore saw it, they went crazy and did everything they could, not excluding genocide, to get them some a dat purdy metal. I guess it made them happy, or made them dead. Having no conscious lust for the color or the metal myself, I picked it up because it seemed like a funny, completely out-of-context reference to the history of intercultural communications that only I would understand and because of that it would, upon occasion, make me happy (or DEAD), and therefore be good (or BAD). Either way, it'll make for an interesting story.
Or a mildly creepy one. I report, you decide.
1 comment:
Kind of late, but I thought you might appreciate the light of knowledge. Data use charges are based on "packets", and a packet is 128 bytes. Generally speaking, any character is one byte, so a message of 128 characters is one packet. Various data plans give you various numbers of packets per month and charge you a set amount of money per additional packet or group of packets.
Packets also apply to looking at pictures or using the internet -- there are about ten packets in a kilobyte, so you can figure that things would get expensive quickly.
I just pay around 6000 yen a month for an unlimited data plan, honestly. I send enough e-mail and use the internet enough that it's worth it.
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