So, today (Tuesday, March 31 here in Japan) was my first official day back at work. As mentioned previously, my hours are 11 p.m. to 8 a.m. local time (which maps to 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Pacific) so I went to sleep at about 5 p.m. local time yesterday, and woke up at 10 p.m. to get my day started.
The day did not start auspiciously. When I tried to log on to my work email I got this notification, which was pretty hilarious:
After an hour on the phone with my company's help desk (which is not knocking my company's help desk, they do an awesome job) we determined that the best course of action was to set me up with a new virtual machine. This is, as an outcome, preferable in every way to how I was doing things before (which was basically just using web access for everything.) All the documents that were stored locally on my work laptop (which is sitting in a computer bag in Portland, Oregon) are now accessible to me via the network backup. That's the good news.
The less good news is that restoring the whole system from backup meant that most of my day today was spent dismissing old Outlook calendar notifications from the past 6 months.
Also, since I have, like, eighteen ZILLION documents stored locally, I had this syncing notice sitting on my screen all day, getting in the way of everything (for whatever reason, you can't background it):
The only other minor problem I've been having is the standalone keyboard I bought here in Japan is ... unsurprisingly ... a Japanese keyboard. I haven't quite figured out how to get all the keys to actually type the characters they're supposed to type. That is, the characters printed on the keys don't map to what shows up on the screen. If I close my eyes and touch-type, everything comes out fine. If I look at the keys, things come out wrong. So I guess I just need to type with my eyes closed.
Other than all that (and Nora coming out at 1 a.m. to groggily complain that the walls in our BnB are too thin and my call to the help desk was keeping her awake--sorry Nora) the process has been pretty seamless. I couldn't be more impressed with how easy the adjustment has been. My virtual machine is identical to my work laptop, I have all the programs and documents and everything. And since I have a wired connection, it's reasonably snappy too. So, win!
Other minor Japan wins:
1) I found house slippers that fit me, at Don Quijote
2) I found a warm zip-up coat for ¥500 with an awesome label:
3) Zima still exists in Japan.
That's all for today. I'm off to bed in a bit (I mean, it's almost noon and all!) 😂
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