Where in the World?

Somehow the oddities of our 21st century world seem exaggerated here. In Tokyo, we just got used to the idea that people were online and on the go all the time. But even there, I don't remember being quite so surprised as I was by a couple of phone calls last Friday....

First, Meg called her dentist. She just wanted to make an appointment for a regular checkup, for both of us. When he answered, I heard her apologise for calling -- and learnt later that he was on holiday. Reasonable enough; it's a bit unusual anyway for him to have given out his mobile number. What was quite a shock was to learn that he was on holiday in Angola! Hmmm... For all its technology, Japan still hasn't got a decent level of compatibility between its mobile phones and those in the rest of the world. And here we are, calling Angola without even realising it...

A little later our friend Miguel called. He lives in Lisbon. But he was calling to ask me about a second-hand Mac he was looking at in a shop I recommended -- Yodobashi Camera in Shinjuku! Now how did he do that? I don't know if it was with a European phone that he carried with him or from a public phone. When he gets back I'll have to ask him! Either way, it was the second rather surprising call of the day.

Still, all of that is no stranger than what I'm doing as I write this from our house in Tábua. A background window on my Mac display is showing a server somewhere in Tokyo (I don't even know where!) on which my latest database is to run. I'm uploading a new version of the database and preparing it for some testing on Monday morning in Japan using Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection (via a secure VPN). All the data I send is being encrypted for passage through the public internet then decrypted at the other end. This makes it rather slow -- and that's why I've got time to write this post! (I also had time for half an hour of tai chi while the files were uploading...)