Parsed Participle

I swear that's what it says! Have a look!

Last week, (February 15th) marked the passing of 4 years since the day I landed in Tokyo.

There are two things that I remember most clearly about those early days - one was that it was cold. I flew in straight from Chennai, India, a city known for it's winter-less, almost year-round hot-wet climate. It turns out that mid-February is the coldest time in Tokyo. The other thing was this sense of realization, this feeling of the gravity of the situation I'd put myself into; this big, yet ignored, "WHAT HAVE I DONE!" ringing loud in my subconsciousness.

I'd traded in a well-paying job, a life of comfort and familiarity, in the name of adventure. Not that there is anything remotely adventurous really, about spending your days in long meetings, not understanding a word being said around you, and having to work insane hours everyday. But in the beginning, all that was different. It really was an adventure, as anyone who decides to hit the ground running will attest to.

Every time I felt cold enough or hungry enough to ask myself why on earth I was roughing it out like the way I was, the only answer was that I did not want to let myself get further ensconced in the familiarity of the same old streets I'd known for a quarter of a century. Now put it like that, and you convince yourself that that's enough contempt bred to warrant an escape - And I had life so good back then in Chennai, in a way that one simply cannot appreciate, out of utter boredom.

But an adventure it was; in all the good senses of the word. I loved Japanese food, (and still do. Who doesn't?) revelled in observing the needless automation around me, the over-engineering, the attention to detail, the sheer number of things to see. One gets bored, or course, but my eyes were biased to technology, to details, constantly imagining how all those servo motors and hydraulics keep themselves hidden. I would write these massive, long emails about everything I was seeing and doing in Tokyo, cheesy writings that I am probably ashamed of right now, in the way that people who've lived in Japan for a few years mock newly-arrived, suitably bewildered Gaijins. I haven't written any of these mails now, ever since, in the fear that they might get discovered and laughed at.

This post is 3 days late, but that's because I was too busy watching video clips of The Police, mostly from this tour, earlier (relatively ancient) tours and also a lot of interviews.

Like I said, I'm a fan.

About the concert: Needless to say, it was a fabulous experience, the only real downside being that it's now over.

This was the first really big concert I've been to. Big in the sense of the whole Arena Rock sort of thing (not that one can label The Police's music itself as 'Arena Rock'; for the term has negative connotations) - I mean, I simply did not realize how far from the stage we were going to be until we actually walked into the Tokyo Dome - that place is huge. My first worry as soon as I laid eyes on the stadium was not that the band would appear as barely perceptible miniscule dots; it was the fact that the (a) It was going to be very loud and (b) However good the sound system turns out to be, clarity, dynamic contrast and sonic detail would suffer thanks to the physical constraints of having to fill such a large venue with sound. At least, that would be the case from where we were sitting (well, we only sat as long as we waited for Sting, Andy and Stewart to arrive). I instantly regretted not having sunk the cash for whatever premium tickets were being sold. Perhaps the sound would have been much better closer to the stage.

The opening act was Fiction Plane, and since I didn't know right then that the singer/bassist was Sting's son, I actually wondered for a moment why there was something vaguely Sting-ish about him. Unlike his Dad, though, it appeared that he put in quite a bit of time with his Japanese.
The band itself was OK, but the biggish-ness of the sound began to worry me. Since for the most part, I listen to Jazz these days, Rock, especially when played really loud (and that's usually at a level beyond the threshold of pain), sounds lacking in detail and feels hard to listen to at such volume levels.

But the sheer excitement of watching the band that wrote some of the most memorable songs of my childhood (though I really began to listen to them more closely past the age of 16) walk onto the stage, and break into 'Message in a Bottle', sans the big video displays (they came on only during the next song, "Synchronicity II"),

lasted long enough, through the entire show. It was utterly brilliant. And it would still have been, even without the help of all that light and sound power.

Message in a Bottle itself seemed like a bumpy start, performance-wise; (but like I said, it didn't seem to matter) I mean, the main guitar riff sounded muddled, and as is the case with so many big concerts, the first song ends up feeling like a sound-check - levels of this and that kept going up or down till they find their optimal position.

I've always thought that Synchronicity II was rock-anthem material, sound-wise at least, and performance-wise it was awesome. I'd picked up a copy of the programme, and in it it said that The Police had sort of worked out their mix of improvisation while keeping the songs as familiar-sounding as possible. This they got right. The improvisations were awesome (so long as you had not already seen them on those YouTube videos of earlier shows on the tour - these seemed to be rehearsal-time improvisations, not performance-time); During Synchronicity II, when Sting sings,

Grandmother screaming at the wall...

I was instantly reminded of Vasanth, an old friend from school, who also played bass and sang at the same time - the wall.. part of that line sounded so similar to something Vasanth would have done with his melodic improvisations (Vasanth, as I remember his, was also famous for improvising with lyrics, since he could never remember them. At some times, it would end up being pure Scat).

Stewart Copeland was utterly amazing. While Andy Summer's guitar sound did take a hit or two in terms of detail loss, the percussion was clear, precise and super-tight. Well I suppose it's one of the inherent difficulties of playing live as a 3-piece band - for the guitarist, I mean - you can lay down tracks in a studio, but on a stage a guitarist sometimes has to drop a solo or improvise in such a way that things do not sound empty. Look at any live performance of The Police from the 80's and you'll see what I mean. Maybe too high levels of sound really take away more than they give. Maybe even at the Tokyo Dome, the sound was probably superb on stage, coming out of the monitors.

Another thing is the song-writing value. Sometimes you know a song for it's lyrics; which have a certain context, an interpretation (that you may or may not even be right about). Some of this feels lost when performed in uniform, stadium-filling rock-anthem spirit: many of the Police's songs are in my opinion subject to this slight skew - when performed with an energy and spirit not really connected with the song. Let's face it: So many Police fans simply love the not-so-upbeat lyrical twist to the songs, which in their studio versions are laid out with sparseness and precision, preserving all the cynicism, imagery, and sometimes outright darkness. I suppose that these things, highly subjective that they are, are especially hard to get right, even if one so wishes, in a large adrenaline-charged concert.

He walk unhindered through the picket-lines today
He doesn't think to wonder why

... another Vasanth-esque improvisation on the 'why' ...

Well I may sound confused and self-contradictory, but man, was it a brilliant show or what. Nothing feels sadder at this moment, than the fact that it's over and there's nothing quite as great to look forward to.

During my initial days in Japan, I spent much of my time and money (both of which, owing to my job, were not exactly plentiful) shopping for hardware at Akihabara. In those days, hardware was a big part of my computing life. Today, I don't seem to care much about how fast my laptop/desktop or even PDA really is, much less bother with fiddling/tweaking individual components for the sake of it.

It turns out, programming is far more fun.

At least, I think so now. But back then, I was poor hardware-wise; and the desire had sort of evolved.
So, after a really long time, I found myself shopping for a Wifi card. I've always felt relieved that I've avoided messing around with Wifi. Relieved - in the sense that any decent new laptop usually has wifi working, and even a semi-careful Linux user will only buy laptops that have fully supported hardware. Anyway, it all began when I decided it would be nice to sit up in bed with my laptop (which incidentally, is an old NEC LaVie with a puny sub-gigahertz Duron processor, gifted to me by my previous landlady's partner), when I realized that I didn't have a long enough LAN cable. I then biked up to the nearest BIC Camera in Shibuya, 40 minutes before it's closing time, equipped with a very rough, barely legible scribbled list of names of Linux-supported Wifi chipsets. This is what I do whenever in doubt:

# cd /usr/src/linux
# make menuconfig

... and then copy off the names of all the hardware listed under Wifi drivers. The expedient thing to do would have been (a) wait a day longer (b) read up about wifi (c) find some ways to map products names/models to chipsets!

But my old impatience with hardware-shopping came back and got me. (have I ever mentioned the time I purchased a 21-inch IIyama monitor on the spur of the moment while waiting for a friend at Akihabara?) So given just 20 minutes before closing time, and my list of chipsets I started scanning the available products on the wireless section of BIC Camera. Now there are several difficulties in doing something like this:

1. Everything is in Japanese. And I only read a small subset of the Language.
2. Every card says it works with Window Vista, XP and 'even' 2000. (nothing else)
3. The actual hardware that a certain product uses is usually not mentioned on the packaging; (Unless it's Intel or something) so even if I know that a certain Realtek-based card is likely to work, it's no good unless the packaging mentions that the card is based on a something-or-the-other Realtek chip. (there are exceptions: Graphics cards always have explicit chipset information, or at least, the marketing name-space is mappable to what's inside)

In the end, I just went with the only card which said "Powered by Atheros" - though it did not say which Atheros chip exactly, my cursory pre-shopping googling seemed to indicate that Atheros is well supported and the card ought to work on Linux.

('Atheros' also rang more than a bell; In at least one of my previous jobs, there was a project that involved the development of an Atheros driver. Needless to say, it wasn't a Free/Open-Source driver, and though I myself never worked on driver development, I actually remember integrating it (the kernel modules) into the base-system of some embedded router OS. Again, some product that we (our company) got paid for, but probably didn't go too far since it wasn't Free.)

Anyway, to return to the card - it turns out that it does work - all I had to do was recompile my kernel and build 'madwifi', which is the project that provides super-good support for all atheros-based wifi cards.
The only real painful part is that I'd forgotten how slow the old laptop was. Out of shear laziness I skipped the usual time-consuming process of pruning unwanted kernel features and drivers, and even after 3 hours the build hadn't completed!

I think I have to agree with them ;-).