Neography 2.o  -

Today's breadmaking adventure: Raisin Bread. Breadmakers are dreadfully cool, the procedure is simple and fast: insert ingredients according to list. Put tray in baker. Starto!! It's surprisingly fun watching it first mix the ingredients, then beat up the dough. Come back in an hour, and add some raisins. 3 hours after that come back and eat bread. Nothing to it.

We did a rush-bake of some super-rich Milk Bread the other day. Super-delish bread in 2.5 hours. Excellent stuff.

Zumi is, as I'm sure you can imagine, hugely pleased.

Zumi, long a champion bread eater, bought a breadmaker the other day. A few questions were answered:

Q. Why breadmakers the size of large, upended toasters?
A. Because most Japanese homes don't have ovens.

Q. Who's this no-name company MK that made our breadmaker?
A. They're the Japanese company that invented it. All other manufacturers sell licensed makers.

So our adventures in breadmaking were filled with excitement. Zumi somehow got it into her head that 140g of flour was equal to 140ml, so we put in about half as much flour as we should have. Wait until morning for the sweet smell of fresh bread, only to find a half-sized misshapen loaf of disappointment in the machine.

Last night we tried again, making sure not to press the wrong button and mix some of the yeast in too early like last time, and also using the proper amount of flour. Fast forward to this morning when we enjoyed delicious fresh-cooked whole-wheat bread for breakfast. Woo etc.

Check out an unmade zumi examining her new toy.

So we tried the atkins diet to roaring success. Seven kg in about two weeks were lost by me (that's 15+ lbs) but then, as warned, there was a plateau. Zero weight lost since then, a full week of zero weight fluctuation, so fuckit - probably going back to the crappy food we used to eat, just 'cause it's so damned convenient. pizza + vanilla coke here I come!!

Our first month after I was granted a PIN to download cellular phone games cost us nearly $125 CDN. A lot, considering the amount of our normal bill. The most recent Dorimaga shows the download fee for Namco's Ridge Racer to cost nearly Y1,100 - Y500 for the basic game, and Y600 for the packet fees, a mere 256kb in this case. Regular users pay through the nose compared to AU's all-you-can-use 800kb/s service, a mere Y4,000 / month. That still astonishes me.

There was an interesting bit on cloned cellular phones on 6ch news tonight, where users are being billed for packet charges they deny are theirs.

In one case a teenaged girl had her phone locked in a drawer for 30 days and still racked up nearly Y20,000 in charges. The phone company's (Docomo) response? "Parents today are often unable to tell if their children are lying" and other similarly rude statements.

Another user, carrier unknown, was charged the equivalent of several thousand dollars for a months' packet charges, including a one-hour segment where he allegedly sent over four thousand messages. The speed typing king or what?

The end result is Japan's first lawsuit against a phone company. The girl's family is seeking Y60,000 in packet fees to be refunded. The girl apparently made the choice even knowing it would cost nearly 10x more for the lawsuit, in order to clear her name. Interestingly Docomo refused to release detailed information on the packet charges.