On Thursday July 15 at around 3:30 a.m. Japan Time, Kuro passed away.

In many ways, he was a very special hamster. He was not only my first pet along with Shiro, but he was also affectionate, curious and adventurous.

Out of all the hamsters we've had, he's the one who managed to escape the most. The first time it happened, he kicked a pile of sand into a dune, climbed over a cage wall and landed on top of an open bag of sunflower seeds. Since Hero Material and I were both asleep, we didn't realize what had happened until the next day…when we found a little bits of shells all over the living room. With several hours of liberty, Kuro even managed to get into the kleenex and made himself a lovely nest under the couch.

Another time he got out and crawled inside a sub-woofer speaker through a hole near the bottom. He couldn't quite get out on his own, so we had to feed a belt into the hole to give him something to climb out on.

When Shiro became very ill and lost a lot of weight, she became rather stinky due to wet tail symptoms. Kuro never refused to share his warmth with Shiro. He always welcomed her into the nest and let her lie on top of him, which seemed to make her feel better.

Before Kuro took his last breath, he held Hero Material's finger in farewell and affection. I think it was his way of saying don't be sad because Hero Material was crying. We both knew Kuro wouldn't be alive the next day.

We buried Kuro near Shiro, under a willow tree, so they can be together again.

I hope he's in hamster heaven with Shiro where there is plenty of delicious food and lots of amazing places for him to explore.

Most people think I listen to some really upbeat and/or tense tracks from action movies or something, but actually I listen to something like this when I'm working on the final fight scenes. The current WIP, which is going through some heavy revision, has a knife, a garrot, a gun, lots of blood, tears and a body.

BTW — I adore the lyrics, though I will not translate them because I think it takes away from the meaning of the song for me. You can take a look at YouTube video subtitles, but the translation there isn't the best, either.

But the title means (in case anybody is wondering… and some Korean people don't seem to know exactly what it means either) “the wind at the end of heaven”. (You can also call it “the wind that reaches the end of heaven” but I think it's not as poetic.)

Only in Japan would the Prime Minister think it's a fantastic idea to talk about doubling the consumption tax (Japanese equivalent of U.S. sales tax) three weeks before the national election.

Obviously his party lost control of the Upper House. It remains to be seen if he's going to resign over this, which BTW is the standard MO for 99.9% of Japanese prime ministers. He took over in June 2010. (No, that's not a typo.)

Outlook is a marvelous piece of software that not only takes care of emails and contacts, but also manages to-do lists and various appointments and tasks.

However, if you don't do some basic maintenance on your personal folders files (*.pst), you'll experience a significant degradation in performance even if you don't have virus or other issues on your computer.

In order to keep your Outlook running optimally, you should do the following regularly:

• Compact the pst and ost files. (Compacting the ost files isn't applicable for people who aren't using an MS Exchange server.)
• Scan the pst and ost for errors and repair them. (Again, the instructions on ost files aren't applicable for people who aren't using an MS Exchange server.)

Hope this helps!

Some people have asked me what my rating on Goodreads mean, so here's a quick cheat sheet. (This applies to fiction only.) I also put the baseball analogy in brackets.

1 star — Goodreads interprets this as “didn't like it”. I give 1 star to books that had mechanical, character, plot and/or craft issues to a degree serious enough that that I couldn't overlook them. They're obviously DNFs (did not finish). [Out]

2 stars — Goodreads interprets this as “it was okay”. I give 2 stars to books that were just okay. Many books that get 2 stars from me end up being DNFs as well. But others may enjoy the stories I rated 2 stars as they don't have any glaring issues the way 1-star rated books do. [Got on base, but may or may not come home.]

3 stars — Goodreads interprets this as “liked it”. I give 3 stars to books that were enjoyable enough, but that didn't have anything that would've elevated them to something better / more impactful. Basically they're the kind of books that did the job, but didn't do much beyond that. [Got on base, then made it all the way around to come home.]

4 stars — Goodreads interprets this as “really liked it”. I give 4 stars to books that were not only enjoyable but had that special something that elevated them — beautiful prose / style, clever plot twists and/or some other elements that made me go “wow”. [Wooo…some exciting plays, possibly a 1- or 2-run homer.]

5 stars — Goodreads interprets this as “it was amazing”. I give 5 stars to books with stories so well told that they shut off my internal editor. They're virtually flawless. [Grand slam, baby!]

Please note that individual tastes differ, and my 2-star books could be somebody else's 5-star rated titles. :)

How do you rate the books you read?

I don't even like cats that much (am very allergic), but this video made me want to get a Scottish fold kitten…