It's once more time for the host of assemblies and ceremonies accompanying the restart of the school year in Japan, and the welcoming of the new students. I was going to write a long discourse on the ceremonial, assemblical start to the new year, but I realised I'd already done that before. Could it be I am running out of material?

The major point of interest this year is that I have met all but a handful of Icchu's new first years this time round: they are from Medeshima, Fujigaoka, and Tatekoshi elementaries - the elementaries I have been to visit. Though I mentioned it to them before, I think the kids are still very surprised to find me here in their junior high.

The cherry blossoms are blooming, which is lovely, but it's been raining for the last several days. It's not particularly condusive to going for long romantic walks under the flowers with my fiancee. I'm very concerned that our hanami with Saito tomorrow will be rained out, though I imagine we can find something else fun to do if it is, maybe go to Iwanuma for soba.

Jen and I purchased, for Jen's use, the niftiest little gadget I have seen in a long time. It is called an eee pc, it's a bite sized laptop with all the features of its full-sized cousins. The one we got has a 630mhz celeron proc, 512mb of ram (upgradable), 4gb of solidstate hard drive, and a 7" monitor. It weighs 900 grams, has 3 usb ports and a wired ethernet port, great sound, an integrated webcam and mic, and a useable keyboard. All of what you're reading now has been typed on it, and at barely less than my normal typing speed. On purchase it came with Japanese windows XP and a 4gb SDHC card for extra storage; we wiped XP and replaced it with a specially designed Xandros linux build the next morning. I am not that impressed with Xandros though, it is a bit too proprietary and featureless. It could also be IceWM, the window manager, that I am not impressed with. Either way it's up to Jen, but there's a good chance I'll teach her to use Linux more by guiding her through a reformat to replace the OS with another custom linux, eeeXubuntu.

All in all I am phenomenally impressed with this little machine. With a price tag of about 400 canadian dollars, it performs admirably and is amazingly usable at its small size. It runs older games (the main kind one finds in Linux) very well, with the exception of games that can't be forced into less than 800x600 resolution. It's extremely hardy, portable, and well engineered. I highly recommend one to anyone who wants a little laptop they can carry around; it's the first laptop I have used that genuinely feels portable.

Now I just have to sell my big laptop and get myself one of these!