I woke up to a nasty surprise this fine day — my home computer was bieng unresponsive. I knew its IP address and I had accessed it via remote desktop from Calgary just fine, but by the time I got to Tokyo and tried it nothing was working. I managed to get Jon back home in Edmonton to take a little drive over to my place, since thankfully I had arranged it so that he and my parents had the spare key to the place. He popped in to the apartment and found that the computer had turned itself off somehow, even though the router and microwave and everything was still on. Very mysterious. Once he powered it back on, I checked the event logs and found that it went off at 2:19 pm on the 21st (Mountain Time), but also found that there were no logs whatsoever that gave any sort of clue as to what had happened to it, which was slightly concerning, but I guess not as concerning as there actually being catastrophic error logs.

Jon also took the $15 Starbucks gift card that I had as payment for coming over, since I never visit Starbucks at all, so now I’m glad that the moving company had sent that together with their apology card so that I had something to give him for the trouble of coming over to turn on my computer!

I only had one gift card, but later in the night I found that the computer had gone dead again, and after a bit of cursory research I suspect that what is happening is that the computer is powering down into Hibernate mode after 8 or 12 hours, and Remote Desktop can’t break into that shell to wake it up. Next time Jon passes by the area and turns it on again, I’ll check those settings to be sure.

For some reason, plane tickets from Tokyo to China in general, but especially around the week that I want to travel down there, seem rather pricey. After doing some cursory research, I might switch around my itinerary so that I go to Taipei first, as flying Tokyo to Taiwan is something like 1/3 the cost of flying Tokyo to mainland China, and then spend some time there before heading down to Guangzhou (either directly, or via Hong Kong). Plus all those Tokyo to Taiwan flights are nonstop, whereas a lot of the ones to Guangzhou require a transit or two here or there.

Anyway, after waking up this morning, I asked Allen, my lodging host, about a way to make it so I could use my laptop more easily. He brought in one of these weird floor chairs:

The back is reclinable and goes down as low as flat on the floor and as high as needed, and the tray portion also can be lowered entirely to the ground to act as a legreset, or raised up to act as a table. I don’t actually like sitting in it, I find it really uncomfortable, but I moved the entire chair next to the head of my bed, and then put the table portion up and set my laptop up on it, and now I have a perfectly functional and illuminated table to put my laptop on at a suitable height, while I sit on my bed and type on it. So that’s good.

I also noted to them this morning that the floor 3 bidet was a bit broken, with a couple of the buttons being dysfunctional, and Allen came to look at it and said that they would work on fixing it but that I would be welcome to use the floor 2 or floor 4 bathrooms in the meantime if desired.

For breakfast this morning, I went out to a nearby bakery in the shoutengai (shopping street) and poached a piece of egg and bacon bread that looked weird but interesting, and some croquette-like pastry, fresh out of the oven. They were both delicious.

I dawdled awhile in my room, doing some blog work and also coordinating with Jon on that computer issue, before heading out for the day. I walked back to the nearby Higashi-Jujo Station and took the train to Akihabara Station from there, which was like 5 stops/15 minutes away. I got reacquainted with an old friend along the way, namely the train delay notifications board:

I spent a couple hours walking around Akihabara and going into various stores there, but I didn’t actually take any blog-worthy pictures of the place, I’d been there several times before and I felt like I was now familiar enough with both the station and the surrounding area that I could navigate the area fairly easily without referring to a map much. Also I had arrived a bit early (before 11 am) so some of the stores weren’t even opened yet. Also it was drizzling. Seriously. Of the 5 times that I have been to Akihabara in the past, it’s been raining 3.5 times, the three prior times being here, here, and here. The .5 was here, because it started drizzling after I left. And the only time it hasn’t rained was here. Since it was drizzling today, the score is now 4.5 to 1.5.

I wandered in and out of a few stores, in particular checking out Volks because I knew there was a Yuru Camp section there that I had taken pictures of in the past, and Quintopia wanted to know if it was still there so that he could make some time to swing by if so, as that was a series that both of us liked a lot. It indeed was still there, along with some Bocchi the Rock! merchandise and signage, another series that we both adore.

There was also a Yuuki Yuuna exhibit next to those two, which makes three of my top ten or so anime in a relatively small area, so that was nice. No plushies or anything tempting like that though, although I saw a bunch of Yuuki Yuuna character-based temple prayer book (goshuincho) there that I was very tempted by. The size of those books was a bit smaller than the book that I already had though, so I wasn’t sure if that was something that could actually be used in temples and shrines or not. It was also pricey enough that I didn’t bite on it. Instead, I bought a Yuru Camp clear file:

And besides that it was cheap enough at 440 yen, the reason I bought that was that this was my smartphone lock screen picture:

Same two characters, dressed in the same outfits and in the same location, though at a slightly different angle and posture. I did a double take when I recognized the picture on the clear file, decided it was fate, and grabbed it off the rack that it was on. I’m not sure exactly what the histories of both pictures are, but one is obviously inspired from the other, or both share a common third picture or scene as inspiration.

Anyway, although I did also visit a couple of second-hand CD stores, I wasn’t feeling it this visit and thus bought nothing else my entire trip there. I left just before 1 pm, deciding to walk all the way from Akihabara to the Tokyo Skytree, which was about 1 and a half hours across the city on foot. I passed by many big and small streets and different buildings along the way, and thoroughly enjoyed this leisurely walk away from the touristy areas of the city, although there was still a good amount of people wherever I went. I allowed the wind to blow me down this and that side road as I winded my way across the city grid toward my destination, and took a bunch of photos along the way to share.