Dr John Hawkins

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Time Difference
PDA

Time Difference

As I write here in Japan, I've just had my evening meal (to avoid any dinner/tea North/South confusion) which is odd as you lot in England have not long since had breakfast I imagine. I can't get used to the time difference. The day before yesterday, we had a whole nine hours worth of 2003 here whilst you lazy good-for-nothings back in England were still lolling around in 2002. More to the point, people on the west coast of the USA, clearly utterly devoid of any kind of enthusiasm, didn't get around to making it into 2003 for a whole 17 hours after we did in Japan. In fairness, it probably wasn't particularly worth hurrying. 2003 seems almost deceptively similar to 2002. That aside, I do find the whole concept of time differences very odd indeed. I wonder, if you owned a sufficiently fast plane, if you could fly round the world on New Year's Eve and enjoy midnight in every time zone on the planet. Or could you somehow take advantage of time differences to string out your birthday a bit longer?
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PDA

Yesterday the New Year sales started in Japan, and I found an advert in the paper for the Sharp Zaurus MI-L1. There were a limited number (just 20) available for the ludicrously low price of just under 10000 Yen. That's about 50 quid. Somewhat over excited, we sped to the store in question and snapped one up. The features looked fantastic for the price, full colour 240x320 TFT LCD screen, a little built in QWERTY keyboard, and, perhaps most important a CompactFlash slot. I had heavenly visions of a portable version of Photo Studio - I could take the card straight out of my digital camera, and write the comments for my pictures anywhere, anytime. The reality is somewhat different. It's all in Japanese of course. Very Japanese. I really can't work on whats going on at all, and it uses this slightly unwieldy proprietary operating system, not Windows CE as you might have hoped. Oh well, I suppose it's only fifty quid. At least it looks cool.
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