Drinking in Japan

On July 11 The Family took me to Yamada Denki to buy a new home computer. The computer they bought about 5 years ago was taking about 5-10 minutes to start up. This is usually a sign that it needs a good defrag, virus check, spyware check and some house cleaning. I would normally offer to do this, but I am mostly useless with a Japanese OS. They also wanted to switch their desktop for a laptop, so off we went.

I wandered the store while The Family did their shopping. I got to see a display of the new 4K TV, which has twice the resolution of a 1080P HDTV.  It looked fantastic, but I don’t expect that I will rush out and buy one when I return to Canada. I also looked at kitchen appliances and was amazed at row after row of rice cookers all with different features and functions. The rice cooker that The Wife and I use in Canada is a $60 Superstore special. It cooks rice, which is exactly what we need it to do. I guess that if I lived in a culture where rice was the staple food, I would appreciate some of the additional bells and whistles.

After about an hour of amazing myself with new technology we returned home with a new computer, a new internet plan, a new TV package and a new phone service provider. Up-selling is alive and well in Japanese consumer electronics.

Returning home we turned on the new computer and were amazed at how easy to use and fantastic Windows 8 was. It was an easy adjustment from all of the other Microsoft operating systems, and all of the new features are wonderful and are no doubt loved by all. Having to get a Microsoft account to use any software totally makes sense and should have been implemented long ago. Also, Windows 8 is simply a pleasure to use without a touch screen. The new start screen absolutely doesn’t look like it was designed by children. During the setup, nobody was cursing Bill Gates in either English or Japanese. We then won the lottery and celebrated by climbing aboard our majestic unicorn to fly to the moon for lunch.

Just in case you have trouble with sarcasm, everything in the last paragraph after “we turned on the new computer” is not true.

In the afternoon The Wife and I took our first trip out of the house without The In-Laws. The goal was to check out some used clothing stores near the station. We ended up getting distracted and spending our afternoon in more enjoyable ways. You may notice that there are no pictures attached to this particular blog entry. No, this isn’t that kind of blog.