1. The Board. I picked this up cheap from the winter sports festival in Kaihin Makuhari two years ago. It’s served its purpose of being a beginner board for me. Ill be investing in a better board come next season.

2. Bindings. My original set came with the board, but these broke after one season, so I bought the Burton Freetyle bindings for this year. Much, much better than the previous ones.

3. Boots. Again, I started out with a budget pair when I bought my board. These were fine but would cause immense pain around my ankle bone after an hour or so. So I bought a new pair last month. It was a toss up between Burton (cheaper) and Head (More comfortable) – I went with the Head BOA Classic Black.

Unfortunately the Head insole/liner (inner boot) seams split after the first time down the mountain. Kind of  inexcusable for a new pair of boots. I contacted the Head guys over here and they were happy to repair them but I would have been happier if they replaced them with a new pair.

4. Gear. Just a standard set of clothes and some protection. I have Knee pads, Helmet, and ass pads for protection. Clothing wise, its just a standard snowboarding jacket and Burton Poachers for pants. I also bought some cheap wrist guards for the big jumps, but haven’t tried them out yet.

Looking forward to going again this weekend. Hopefully it will snow sometime this week.

And here is my sub-woofer.  Note – you wont be able to hear the low frequencies due to the camera microphone.

Included with the kit was a 18-55mm lens. Many people have indicated that a 50mm prime lens is essential for good quality pictures. It might be a while until I can afford some decent lenses, but I can play around with what I have for now. I also ordered some lens filters to play around with. I got a polarizing filter and a macro filter (I know a lens is much better, but I can’t afford it) from DealExtreme.

Went out over the weekend to take some pictures of the surroundings – uploaded some to iStockPhoto. Hopefully they will be accepted and I might be able to make back some money.

It’s a 1995 Volkswagen Jetta (Vento in Japan). Done around 45,000kms and is in relatively good condition. We flew all the way from Chiba to Wakayama to pick it up and drive it home. The drive was about 8 hours long.

A few days afterwards I noticed the front passenger footwell was soaking wet. Upon removal of the foot mat I was surprised to discover a  large mold patch.

Not sure where the water was coming from I spent the next few days researching the problem online.  The forum at vwvortex was pretty helpful. It seemed to come down to three possible causes. One: The heater core was leaking, Two: Rainwater was leaking in through the drain for the windscreen or Three: The air conditioner drain pipe was blocked.

Long story short, I never did figure out which one was causing the problem, but I did double check the air conditioner pipe was clean, then sealed the area where the pipe goes through the firewall. I also ran sealant along the base of the windscreen. Hasn’t leaked since. The heater core is most likely fine as the water level in the radiator hasn’t dropped.

So after ‘fixing’ the problem, we spend a weekend removing the seats and carpet from the car, replacing the base mat where there was mold, shampooing the carpet and replacing it. Obviously it would have been better to replace the carpet entirely, but for an older car that we will only use for three or so years, its not really worth the effort.

What is worth the effort though is the sound system. I will write about what I have installed in a future post.

Oh, and for those of you who own Volkswagen cars in Chiba – The Chiba-Kita Volkswagen people are really nice. They have reset the car computer, shown me where the air conditioning drain is and checked a few other things for me for free.

The Windows 7 Whopper is basically a Whopper with seven pieces of meat. It wasn’t much of a challenge for me, as I have no problem with my usual order of a Double Whopper and two Double BBQ Bacon Cheeseburgers. Surprisingly however, there were at least three other Japanese people eating the burger. One small girl had eaten about a quarter, and seemed to be writing about it in her notebook.
The other two had divided it into two and were eating it with a knife and fork.

Other than the fact that it is the Windows 7 Whopper with seven pieces of meat, there is nothing special about this burger.

Forgive me for the quality of the video. My wife does not know how to set the video quality on her phone.