so the day before i left for japan i broke an axle coming off the freeway, or at least i thought i did. i hobbled back to my mom’s place and figured i’d deal with it when i got back. it was in the back of my mind the entire trip, and i was dreading having to replace the axle (having broken it before racing a 350z (although i was driving the z and costin was in the integra =p)). anyway, i got back in town today and even though eric offered to loan me the xb, i figured i’d just get crackin’. i put the car on stands and as i’m getting ready to pull off the wheel i notice the lugnuts are lose. so i figure that maybe the axle wasn’t broken, and i was just lazy the last time i put it on. well that turned out to be true and false.

the axle wasn’t broken, which was good news. it was the fact that the wheel didn’t fit right (i just got new wheels in the front last week). apparently the rim didn’t fit completely over the hub and i hadn’t noticed it when i put them on. so the wheel was connected only by the surface area of outer hub, which is less than a centimeter thick, instead of the entire hub which is about the size of a cd. that little surface area was bound to break the lugnuts lose, and the damn wheel was “walking” all around the outer hub. it turns out that the scion hubs (my new steel wheels were from a scion), while having the same 4×100 bolt pattern, have a 2mm smaller diameter in the outer hub. 2mm doesn’t sound like a big deal, but that’s 1mm of 15mm thick steel around the entire circumference of the outer hub-hole. i busted out the pneumatic die-grinder and got cuttin’. it took about about 1.5hrs per wheel, but i cleanly milled out the new hole that fits over the honda outer hub.

here’s the wheel with a 2mm smaller-than-i-need-it-to-be diameter:

die-grinding… there were tons of sparks but i couldn’t capture them:

here’s the finished hole. afterwards i masked and painted the hole gloss black to match the wheel and prevent rust:

neighbor john told me a funny analogous story (it would be a perfect analogy if i had an american car) about world war II… apparently every almost every country used a .45 caliber bullet, so if they captured a munitions cache, they could use the bullets in their guns. the japanese, knowing this, designed and used only a .46 caliber bullet, so they could use the .45 bullets they captured, but no one could use theirs. crafty bastards!

now that summer is practically here, i can’t wait to get some mean boating in. eric’s buying a car that can tow the boat for fishing, and costin’s got a truck for the wakeboarding, so i’m looking forward to one helluva summer. i found all these super old pics on taka’s computer so i had to post at least one. the best thing about this pic is that i’ve gained about all the weight eric’s lost =p this was our first boat (that is if you don’t count the two motorized rafts that preceeded it ;)

it’s nice to be on vacation and not have anything in particular to do. usually i have people to visit and places i need to go when i’m here in japan, but this time we’re just hanging out and have been shopping and eating and being lazy.

check out this fake apple store in the backside of akihabara:

we ate dinner at this mongolian bbq restaurant where everyone wore  these goofy looking bibs. i refused to and have grease stains all over my favorite tshirt now :)

we’ve been spending a lot of time in arcades… i’m getting pretty good at those stupid crane games. here i am trying to play this dj game that i wasn’t particularly good at:

today i saw my first real movie in a japanese theatre. it was a pretty interesting experience with lots of key differences. first of all, the concession stand sells beer and fried chicken… that alone would be enough to blog about. movie tix are expensive $18 (or $15 for me since i’m still a student, kekeke). movies are shown in either english with japanese subtitles, or dubbed in japanese, we obviously went for the former. you purchase assigned seats like on a flight, so they show you a layout of the seats and you choose the exact seats to sit in. we were kinda late for the show we wanted to see and they said that “there’s only room in the first few rows”. thinking that it was like the u.s. i figured that just meant it was pretty full and would be hard to find a seat, but they literally meant that only the first 2 rows were available so we waited for the next showing. a few other weird things were that everyone stays and watches the credits. even the boring ass credits for the davinci code where it’s just names scrolling to some lousy classical music. also everyone collects their own trash! being the defiant american, i left my soda in the cup holder and spread the remainder of my popcorn around my immediate area.

the movie itself was dissapointing. the story line stayed very true to that of the book, and having read it only a few months ago, i found myself fantastically bored. there was nothing spectacular about any of the acting, or any other hollywood magic to make it anything more than an audio/video version of the book. i hate to be one of those fag people that say it, but i liked the book and the image i created of it in my mind more than the movie.

speaking of reading, last week i read anthem by ayn rand per ben’s recommendation, and i picked up a book called atlantis at the book shop at the airport a few days ago that i’m just about done with… so far it seems only to be an amalgamation of all four of dan brown’s books, but luckily i liked all four of those books, so so far i’m enjoying this.

so i was kinda dreading the united airlines filght i had to take, but like most things i fear, it was without good reason. the seats were the exact same, the blankets were better, the food was better, the english anouncements and movies were better, and on trans-pacific flights they have unlimited alcohol just like korean air, the ua flight was about $30 cheaper than the korean air flight i usually take, and united also has it’s own terminal, so check in and security was super quick. the 40+ year old flight attendants were a little less easy on the eyes, but i brought a sleeping mask and just wore it for most of the flight. so yeh, looks like i might be taking united from now on if it’s a flight takako’s not on, and pretty soon here that’s gonna be how it always is.

the weather’s pretty nice, a little cloudy with a bit of rain, but otherwise just like los angeles. last night after my flight we went out for dinner and drinking, and i got pretty fucking hammered. i love not having to drive home :)

making a few changes… big thanks to ben the resident blog guy for helping me out!

i’m still working on the header graphic and some other random functionality, so don’t start hating yet :)

edit: well, everything seems to be working right… still need to work a bit wit the styling, but at least i’m finally using the new version of wp.

some girl from the long beach parks and recreation finally returned my call about getting a schedule of special events at the stadium so we can plan accordingly. she said there wasn’t a published schedule (she sounded kinda fat and lazy), but read me off the currently closed dates, so before i lose them, i thought i’d post them here.

june - no closures :)!
july - friday the 7th, saturday the 15th, friday the 28th - sunday the 30th
august - monday the 7th - sunday the 13th
september - wednesday the 20th - tuesday the 26th

so mark your calendars biatches!

i completely don’t understand how airfare rates work. i bought my ticket for this friday, last friday for under $700 roundtrip on united from the small japanese travel agency i always go to www.iace-usa.com. i went to united’s site to see what their price was and it was $2500 for the same flight. today i went to their site to check flight times, and that same flight was $5400! out of plain curiosity, i called up iace and they said they still had seats available for the same $700 i paid. anyway, wack shit.

btw, iace has updated thier prices for october, but only out of john wayne… but they list the price for only $480 (+~$200 in taxes/fees), so that’s like $680, and john wayne is always more expensive than outta lax, so i’m guessing lax flights are gonna be $600 or less :)

and tv has saved the best for last. but i’ve been into way too many shows this season. it’s such a guilty pleasure, and i wouldn’t've been able to do it without the support of my dvr which i love dearly. jack bauer saved the day again, marissa cooper died, horatio cane’s wife of 5 hours was assasinated, michael and his brother escaped, lt. brass was shot but pulled through, house was shot and we’re not sure how he’s gonna do, grey had sex with her mcdreamy and all that’s left now is to see how season 2 of lost will end. they promise to answer lots of questions, but i’m sure they’ll ask twice as many. i actually haven’t watched the last episode of csi:miami (i only saw the first half of the two-parter), and i haven’t seen the last csi:ny but i’m gonna throw them on my psp and have something to watch on my long ass flight this weekend.

i was looking for an ebook to read, and ran across this how-to-get-rich book “the automatic millionaire” that looked interesting so i actually paid for it. the thing that caught my attention though was the fact that it wasn’t like “get rich by flipping properties overnight” or how to invest, but more just money management principles that are sound and simple. i’m only half way through the book, but it’s pretty interesting and more than anything it’ s made me realize how poorly i manage and how little i save. strangely enough, most of the examples though are of a 27 year old making $50k/year, which is just about me.

i won’t bore you with all of the different things they talk about it, because if you’re interested, i’ll just give you the ebook, but one thing they mentioned that if at age 27, you put $3000 into a well-managed 401k each year, that by 65, you’d have $1.4million in the account. now that’s $1.4million in today’s dollars, so 30 years from now, that’s not going to be the same money as you think of it today, but that’s if you only put $3000 in per year. $3k/year is only $115/2 week paycheck, and at my company they do matching up to 5%, so if i was aiming at only the $3k, that’s only $57 (before tax) per paycheck deducted. anyway, i’ve already been contributing close to this for the past 10 years, but today i doubled my contributions, so at this rate, by 65, i’d have over $3mil in the account (and that’s assuming i never get a payraise in the next 38 years since contributions are a percentage, not a flat amount)

the ideas behind all of his money management tips are to make it automatic. budgeting doesn’t work. advertising is too strong… i’m too weak. but if these deductions happen before i even see my paycheck then i have no choice. if you “pay yourself first” you’ll be able to save. if you pay off all your bills first then look to save the rest, you likely won’t. under that idea, i also opened up a savings account here at my work today, and modified my direct deposit to pull out $150/paycheck, which if i never see, i won’t likely notice, and i’ll “automatically” save $4k/year. i was also sure to not sign up for an atm card, or online/phone banking for the account, so that i’m that much less tempted to use the money. and i’ll continue to put savings into my normal savings account whenever i have extra money to do so, but at least now i have a more sound savings plan going on in the background to give me some breathing room.