However when I actually researched the data plans, I found that it was really cheap for Internet access. Vodafone Australia seems to offer a prepaid charge as you go option of 1gb for $15au that will last a month. Also if you recharge the credit before the end of the month the remaining unused data allowance is carried onto the next month of usage.

So I have been enjoying taking the iPad everywhere I go and it has replaced my old 2gb iPod nano as my main mp3 player. However it doesn’t seem to be the ideal platform for blogging. It seems there are only a couple of apps available to do blogging with, and the safari browser can’t display the rich text view on wordpress so I’d have to type in HTML which simply is too difficult on the onscreen keyboard.

I have discovered that the iPad is ideal for visual novel games and have found numerous game makers that have ported their games to iPad or iPhone. One of the big companies, nitrous and 5pb have released a few of the memories off series, and soon at the end of the year, they will release Chaos;Head Noah on iPad and iPhone. Although I already have the xbox 360 version of the game, I am very tempted to buy it again on the iPad because playing it was such an awesome experience.

I have bought a Gela skin for the iPad so it now has a K-on theme to it. I also have converted a large number of anime onto the videos playlist, so I can catch up on my anime when on the bus. I also have a number of light novels and manga that I have copied on it as well as some music sheets. As an ebook reader it is really good, although the online stores that sell ebooks seem to only sell them at the same price as the real paper versions, so it’s too expensive. Now my bag is lighter since I’m not bringing a whole library of manga and novels everywhere I go. I still bring a couple, but the ones I don’t read as often, I just bring an electronic copy.

I also am liking the built-in gps. I often fall asleep on the bus, so it is very useful when I wake up and it is pitch black outside, I can quickly find out where I am and how much longer till I get off, or how far I’ve gone past my stop (like yesterday!).

I am still on the look for a decent cheap Australian car navigation app using gps, however the ones i’ve seen aren’t really that cheap or what I’m expecting, so I’m holding off buying any of the current ones.

Since I use the iPad as a replacement mp3 player, I’ve ordered a wireless remote for the iPad, so I can put the iPad in my bag when walking to and from work and use the remote to skip songs or adjust the volume when I feel like it. At the moment I have to carry it around in a small zip bag so I can access the volume controls as the songs I have vary in volume.

I think I need to stop playing with the iPad too much though. It’s affecting my sleep, my piano practice and is preventing me on pursuing my other hobbies like blogging.

Posted from an iPad.

The plan for the day was to meet up with my dad’s friend to fly over Osaka in a small plane. One of his old work collegues is a pilot and pilots a plane every so often as a hobby. We all met up at Tenouji station in Osaka, and my dad’s friend’s collegue guided us to Yao Airport.

Yao Airport is a relatively small airport located in the country side of Osaka. It is a bit of a walk away from the train station, but the scenery around the airport was quite nice.

When we arrived at the airport, we went straight to the prep room where my dad’s friend’s college checked the weather reports and had us fill in some forms. The prep room was quite interesting as it had many maps and also many flight related photos decorated on the walls. It also had some interesting flight course planning instruments as well.

When we headed out to the plane, I took a few photos of some of the planes I passed by.

Spotted Pikachu!

Finally, we got into the plane. It looks rather difficult to pilot.

After the initial plane safety checks, we took off.

The destination was to the house of my home stay family that I stayed at on my first trip to Japan. So we headed towards Himeji. Since we sometimes flew into the clouds, some of the photos ended up a bit white.

Found the university that I went to in Japan!

Spotted Himeji Castle!

This is the new castle in Himeji.

My home stay family’s place is around this area. I tried to ring to get one of them to go outside and wave their arms at us, but they had absolutely no idea what I was talking about and in the end didn’t go outside. orz

Since there was a yellow building nearby, it was easy to figure out where my host family’s house was quickly. If it wasn’t there, it would of been very difficult to figure out which house it was.

On the way back, I also took the following photos.

We had a safe landing and arrived back at the airport. This experience was really special to me as it is most definately something that one would normally not be able to experience in a normal trip to Japan. I am really thankful to my dad’s friend’s college for the great experience.

After the landing, there was also a quick check on the plane before we got out.

After the flight, we headed back to Namba in Osaka. However, instead of going directly there by the subway, we decided to take the long way and stopped off at the Doubutsuenmae (Zoo) station on the Sakaisuji line and walked the rest of the way.

Walking back was actually quite interesting. I feel that I saw a part of Osaka that I hadn’t seen before.

We walked through a small market.

Spotted a Shogi and Go parlour.

I wonder if this place is a popular tourist spot.. there are a lot of insteresting looking stores.

We went to eat some Kushikatsu for lunch. It seems that Kushikatsu is one of Osaka’s must eat foods when you visit.

After lunch, we headed toward Namba again.

Slowly, the surroundings started to change into the Den den town part of Namba and I managed to figure out my surroundings. I ended up leading the rest of the way back to the hotel.

On the way back, I happened to pass by some Itasha!

And some maids!

We ended up arriving safely, and since we didn’t have any plans, I decided to do some searching around for a nice frame for the calligraphy art shikishi that I had made by one of the sign writers in the area. We separated from my dad’s friend’s college and managed to find some without too much trouble.

Since previously, I received some anime-related shikishi from k-book when shopping there last time, I bought some extra frames for myself so I can hang it in my room. I ended up buying 3 in total.

After the shopping, my dad’s friend separated from me and I decided to head to a fireworks festival. When I was in Himeji, I planned to go to Kakogawa’s fireworks festival with my old host family Yuuki, however unfortunately it was cancelled at the last minute. So this time, when I heard there was another fireworks festival on today, I decided to head straight there.

The fireworks venue was near the Nishinakajima Minamigata station. Since I really didn’t know where the fireworks festival was located, I simply followed the large crowd of people dressed up in festival clothing and yukatas. It was much more crowded than I expected. On the way to the grounds, there were many temprary stalls set up selling food and drinks. Fortunately I bought from these stalls beforehand as the price was cheap and the lines were short. At the grounds however, the prices were quite inflated and it was really packed. Also there was no where to sit as all the good spots had been already taken by everyone else. I ended up just giving up on finding a place to sit and decided to check out all the food stalls. There were a lot of really tasty foods there and I ended up buying heaps. Since I didn’t eat dinner before arriving, I was able to sample quite a few of the foods there.

Found a Bleach cosplayer!

After I finished trying out all the snacks, I headed off to find a place to sit and after walking for a while, I managed to find one. However, in the end, I simply just stood up for most of the fireworks show.

Since there was no wind, after a short while, the fireworks got blocked by the smoke and we couldn’t really see the fireworks very well. orz

Japan’s fireworks festivals are different from Australian ones. In Australia, the fireworks typically are syncronized with music meanwhile, in Japan, it is actually quite quiet. However, Japanese fireworks tend to do things like create fancy shapes and patterns using the fireworks that is quite nice to look at.

I always wanted to have some crepe in Japan. For some reason, I can’t find anywhere selling them in Western Australia.

It was really packed on the way back. Since I bought my return ticket early when I arrived at the station, I managed to avoid the long queue to the ticker machines and easily got into the train platform. I typically buy return tickets early for whenever I go to any events as it really does save you a lot of hassle later on.

I arrived at Namba station. I walked through Namba Walk to get back to my hotel. I left as soon as I arrived and spent the rest of the night at the arcades playing the UFO catcher machines till late. There were a lot of k-on goods there, so I spent a lot of time practicing and winning lots.

It was awesome day.

I’m happier with the composition session this time. It still needs a lot of work, but i’m starting to make it sound a bit more decent. I still don’t know how to put in the black keys, but I guess that will come in time. Perhaps when I learn more about playing in different keys.

Enjoy!

You intro from the anime Higurashi no naku koro ni

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Danny Boy accompaniment

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Alma mater Blues

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She’ll be coming around the mountain

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Walking with Billy

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Auld Lang Syne Accompaniment transposed to key of E

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Light of first dawning accompaniment

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Scarborough Fair accompaniment

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Greensleeves

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Light Blue

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Composition session

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When I tested out the piano, it was actually louder than I had imagined but was still fine. Although I am glad that I didn’t buy a piano with a larger cabinet, otherwise, It would be far too loud.

After finishing work for the day, I spent the rest of my time playing the piano for most of the day. The sound quality is most definitely a lot better than my digital piano’s sound. Because of the loudness of the piano, I doubt I’d be able to practice too late at night, so I’ll have to resort to using my digital piano for night practice. My parents also are quite impressed with the new piano.

Anyways, I am really happy with the piano and plan to keep up with my piano practice.

Recently I’ve been rather dissatisfied with the fake piano sound that my digital pianos use, so I have been quite tempted with the prospect of buying a real piano. The main problems I had with the digital pianos were that I wasn’t able to appreciate the songs I was playing as the sounds didn’t sound right (e.g. chords when playing blues songs) and I was not able to play on my teacher’s piano without having to spend a bit of time at the beginning getting used to the difference in the key action.

Anyways, since I have a holiday planned later in the year, I figured it wasn’t such a good idea to go to the piano fair, but I wanted to try playing on various brands and types of pianos (like the expensive grand pianos), so I ended up going.

It was quite easy to find the Australian Piano Fair location as there was a lot of musical noise coming from one particular exhibition hall which had a Yamaha grand piano that was playing by itself.

Although my teacher owns a baby grand piano, I never really got the chance to check out the internals of it, so I decided to take this opportunity to take a few closeups of this Yamaha grand piano.

Anyways, I quickly entered the piano showroom and was greeted to a lot of pianos mixed in with some fancy cars and fancy furniture from the sponsers of the event. I t looks like the pianos are all sold by Sound Centre, the same music shop that I bought my digital piano from previously.

There were also some famous pianists at the event, but I didn’t know any of them and was too busy checking out the pianos there to take too much notice. I think the photo below is a photo of one of them.

The Yamaha section for their digital pianos. I checked out their top of the range of their digital pianos, and honestly it could only compare to one of their cheaper models yet at twice the price in terms of piano sound and piano action. It seems they are marketing more on the features it has such as the “Styles” function, voices, auto-accompaniment, Mic input, TV out, internet connectivity, direct to wave file recording and similar other features on the high end digital pianos.

A look at some of the other pianos. There were many brands including Yamaha, Petrof, Story and Clark, Kayserburg, Richard.Lipp & Sohn, Kurzweil and Casio. Since I was only really looking at uprights I was only really looking at 5 of the brands.

Initially I wanted to try out the Story & Clark pianos because they were cheap and had PNOscan which enabled you to connect the the piano to a PC to record your performance or use it with MIDI software.

Unfortunately, I found quickly that I didn’t really like the action of the keyboard. It felt a bit too heavy for me and since all the Story & Clark pianos had the same type of key action, I ended up passing on all of those.

The next brand I tried was the Richard.Lipp & Sohn piano and I found that I liked it quite a bit. The sound and action was nice and the keys looked quite good too.

I also tried the Kayserburg and found I liked that brand too. I liked both the sound and action although I found the keys felt too plastic and cheap to me compared to the other brands.

I did play around on some grand pianos, and have to say that it indeed has a significantly better tone than the upright pianos, but I have to admit that the price difference doesn’t seem to be worth it for me. There were many cheap grand pianos around too about the $10,000AU mark, but there were some really expensive Petrof ones too that were really nice to play.

I really liked the Petrof brand, but their upright pianos started from $11,000AU which was more than I’d consider to spend on an upright piano.

More cars… or was it the same one.

I tried the Yamaha pianos last. I quite enjoyed playing on the U3 upright piano which I couldn’t spot any nagging problems with although that was also over $10,000AU. I did have an interesting episode with a couple who made me play a few more tunes on it when I was about to stop playing because they wanted to know how it sounded. (^^;

I tried out the various Yamaha pianos, and was quite interested in the cheapest one, the Yamaha C109, that was around only $4000AU. The keys felt right but after a bit of comparing with other pianos and trying various songs on it, I realized that the sound on it really sucked.

I then tried the next one up. the C113T which I also didn’t like the tone of, but the next one up from that, the Yamaha T121 sounded perfect and seemed to be just right. As for pricing, it was significantly cheaper than the next one up which was the U1 that only sounded a bit better but would of cost about $3000AU more.

So, although I wasn’t really planning on buying a piano, after playing this one piano for what seemed about an hour, I decided to buy it.

It will arrive on Tuesday! I can’t wait till it arrives.
Also, since I’m  VIP member of the Sound Centre store, I was able to use my VIP card and get a discount on this already heavily discounted piano and get it for $5,995AU instead of the listed $6,295AU. Although I am thinking the real reason they gave me the discount is because I paid in full rather than just putting a deposit down.

I now feel so poor but I’m also so happy!

I actually was recording myself play the piano at about midnight till 1am, so I was actually a bit tired but overall was quite happy with my performance. I did however feel intimidated by the camera. On the other hand, it actually helped me identify which songs I need to work on more as I ended up making some mistakes on some songs I thought I could play easily.

Fur Elise

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Minuet in G

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Alma Mater Blues

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Amazing Grace Accompaniment

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I’ll be there

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The Pipes (I totally screwed up this one!　orz)

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The Pipes

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Ode to Joy

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Composition practice (playing around on the piano)

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When recording, the area around the piano was quite tidy, but actually the rest of my room was a mess. (^_^;

By the way, after uploading all the videos, I got a pleasant surprise. The creator of the Simply Music piano method, Neil Moore, commented on one of my videos! I’m really happy about it.

I plan to keep up with the piano practice and work towards my goal of playing anime and game songs.
You can find my YouTube channel here. Please subscribe! (^o^)/

Also some big news from the last Otaku room competition about a year ago, although I didn’t win it, my room was actually selected to be published in a book called Otacool. Please check it out!

OTACOOL WORLDWIDE OTAKU ROOMS

Tim’s Otaku room tour in both English and Japanese:

Tim’s Otaku room tour English only ver:

The following photos are taken for Otacool 3, which I hope I can get my room in it as well.

Name: Timothy Koh
Age: 26
Country of residence: Western Australia
Main machine spec and OS: Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40Ghz 2GB RAM running Windows 7 64 bit.
Job title: Software Engineer
Web: http://timkoh.info and http://timkoh.info/jp
Any messages: My room needs to be 4 times bigger.

It took a while to find a teacher for piano. There were suprisingly quite a few teachers a reasonable distance away from me, although it seems that most of them didn’t do hours after work or during weekends which made it very difficult for me to find a teacher. Fortunately out of recommendation from  another teacher, I managed to find a teacher who lives close by and could do lessons on weekends or in the evening. It seemed that all of the teachers close to where I live all teach based on a piano method called Simply Music.

A quick google of this piano method didn’t really bring up much information, but from reading up on it on the website and from a few Youtube videos, it looked like it was some new breakthrough piano method that seemed to promise that you’d be playing songs with both hands from your first lesson.

Of course I was skeptical about it, but given that I finally found a piano teacher, I decided to give it a go and was quite impressed with it. It seems that the piano method teaches you songs by using patterns to help you remember the songs, and gets you playing from both hands as advertised. The reading music process is delayed until later on in the Simply Music program and emphasis is put on technique built up from playing the songs in the playlist.

The songs that you play are not childish and keep you motivated to practise because they actually sound good. The songs come cover many genres and although it seems almost every single song you learn has a reason why it’s in the playlist that you play. Some songs are finger exercises, while others focus on other skills like timing and coordination.

When learning with this piano method, I find that it can feel kinda slow to progress. It seems to move forward slowly which actually isn’t a bad thing. When I was self teaching myself, I would try to learn heaps of things and then end up bumping a brick wall where I couldn’t progress because it was too hard. But with the piano method, I have yet to hit a brick wall as it seems that everything is introduced just when I’m about ready to move forward.

Currently I am nearing the end of the level 2 booklet and accompaniment exercise (chords) book can currently play about 20-30 songs and have made about 2 compositions from playing around with the piano. I still haven’t started to learn to read music yet though, so I am a bit frustrated that although I can play some songs on piano, I can’t play the songs I want to play.

I have learnt bits of some songs from my limited note reading skills and from various song tutorials on YouTube, but I haven’t been up to the stage where I can learn an entire songs myself playing both hands.

At the moment it is either playing a portion of a song I like with both hands, or playing just the melody on the right hand.

I have been making some recording of songs that I have played on piano, and plan to make another set of newer recordings when I get the time. You can download the old recordings from here which were recorded about when I had 2 months of piano lessons.

I’ve also very recently renewed my interest in guitar and bought a cheap crappy electric guitar and amp to practice on. Since I don’t have the time to take more lessons, I decided to self teach myself the guitar. I have a couple of books I bought that teach the bare basics of playing a guitar including pages showing the notes on the fretboard, some simple basic chords and how to play scales.

One of those books also comes with a DVD that covers everything in the book. I’ve got a friend at work who is currently learning guitar with a teacher, so I often chat to him to get tips on how to progress in my self-teaching of the guitar. I so far have decided to just concentrate on picking notes on the fret and to leave chords later on. I’m currently aiming at playing the melody of piano songs that don’t use chords on the guitar so I can get used to the location of notes on the fretboard.

Last weekend, I was experimenting with playing the "Last Regrets" melody from the visual novel game Kanon on the guitar and piano and was quite impressed with the result. I still think that I need more work at the guitar at the moment, but I am happy that I can now play some music on it.

I should be receiving an adapter to hook my electric guitar to my PC so I’ll try recording direct to the PC and put it up on my blog when it arrives.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, apart from getting an electric guitar, I replaced my Kawai piano keyboard with a Yamaha DGX-630 digital piano (cost me $1600AU) and I also bought a Casio CDP-100 digital piano ($300AU) that I got cheap on ebay.

I find the Yamaha has superior sound over the Casio, but the Casio has better feeling weighted keys. I hope that I can use my current setup to not only simply play anime songs and video game songs, but also create my own music using the piano, guitar and software synthesizers. Then I can look at perhaps making my own game and compose my own music for it. Well thats the goal at least.

This year was particularly special as there was a special event where Eminence, a symphony orchestra from Sydney that specializes in performing Anime and game music, was invited to play at the event. As I’ve been interested in learning music lately, this was a great opportunity to check out professionals playing music from anime and games that I liked.

The orchestra is particularly famous as they performed and recorded the soundtracks for popular movies in Japan such as the upcoming Disappearance of Haruhi movie sound track as well as music for a number of video games.

In addition, Japanese composer Mitsuda Yasunori who is particularly famous for his compositions for Chrono Trigger and Chrono Cross also attended the event.

The first day at Waicon started waiting in queue to enter the event area. My friend and I bought the pre-sale tickets to enter, which ended up being a mistake, as it seemed that most of the attendees did the same, so there was in fact a larger queue than expected in the preorder ticket queue than there was for those that purchased the tickets on the day.

Ack! I guess I should of arrived earlier. orz

Anyways, I was waited in the queue with my friend, and we eventually got our entry tags to get in.

On the way in, I took a couple of photos of the entry gate.

When I got in, there was already quite few people checking out all the stalls.

Photos of a few of the stalls.

The pencafe stall where some of the artists from pencafe sold various goodies like doujins, posters, sketches, bookmarks, stickers and so on.

Some other drawing/art stalls. The sun was quite bright, so unfortunately the lighting in some of the photos didn’t turn out right.

After a quick browse through the stalls and meeting up with friends, I went to the gundam workshop to take photos of the Perth Gundam Competition entries hosted by Tokyo Underground.

There were a lot of really awesome kits on display and I was quite impressed at the level of the model builders in Perth. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from the competition but this shows that there are a lot of hardcore gundam modellers in Perth. Next year’s competition will be something to look forward to.

This Zaku is build by a friend of mine who ended up winning two prizes! Congrats Nic!

Here are some photos of the actual gundam workshop. It was free to participate and you were given a free kit upon entry. The session was an all day session.

A few more shots of the traders at Waicon. We has the first appearance of maids in the con. It seems someone started a group to try get a maid cafe happening at all the cons. In this con, they delivered roses and sold maid related outfit accessories.

There also were quite a few stores selling figures and other goodies imported from Japan. I had a good time checking out what all the stalls had for sale.

Cosplay Competition:

I took so many photos that I don’t know what to comment apart from the fact that my camera that I bought for my trip to Japan is really damn good in low light. I was suprised that many of the photos were usable despite how dark it was there.

The cosplay competition was as usual, the highlight of the con and the entries were very entertaining. There were a number of really talented people that practically performed on the stage as well as many really cool outfits.

A number of people from Pen Cafe are really passionate about Tekken 6, so when one of them spotted a Lily cosplayer, we searched everywhere around the con to find the cosplayer and ask for a photo.

She entered the cosplay competition on the 2nd day and it seems that it’s her first time cosplaying. I have to say it’s a really good outfit for a first attempt. Congrats!

Pen Cafe also has a few Higurashi fans too, so we spotted this cosplayer of Hanyu and asked for a photo too! (^_^;)

I spent the rest of the time walking around the con, talking to people, buying lots of goodies from the stalls.

After the first day of the con, there was a break for a quick meal before heading off to watch the eminence symphony orchestra. After it finished, I bought a couple of their CDs and managed to get signatures from the Eminence performers and Mitsuda Yasuda.

Although at Waicon I typically say that the cosplay competition was the highlight of the con, this time, the eminence performance was hands down the most enjoyable part of the convention.

This is my dollfie dream doll that I bought in Japan in August 2009.

I still don’t know much about dollfies, but quite like them. I used a wig from Parabox, a store in Radio Kaikai of Akihabara, and also the limited edition cat-ear maid outfit from the series Fortune Arterial that I bought at Azone International in Osaka.

It suits her doesn’t it?