The Half Arsed Traveller: 2015-05-29: Up Stumps Time Soon, Need to lose weight

Soon we will be leaving Japan for a trip through Canada and The US. This will be less static than our stay in Nagoya so we will be carrying our worldly possessions with us a lot.
I do a lot of IT work and need vast quantities of reliable storage so I use a NAS. It has 8 disks, 10TB of storage, can suffer 2 dead drives and keep going.
It also weighs 15kg.

Selling or buying I don't care, is cool.

There is a new one on the market which only weighs 5kg so I have grabbed one of them. This has been an exercise in patience and creativity on both sides of the transaction as my Japanese certainly does not extend to technical terms.

Jaunty cigarette holding not allowed

For some ungodly reason I have to keep the box it came in for warranty purposes.
For some other reason Japan charges insane taxes on incoming technology. At least that is why I am told the NAS costs about twice what it costs on amazon.com.
The 10kg saving will probably pay for itself in overweight luggage fees I hope.

Cultural Observations: OH&S

The habit of letting people do pretty much what they want so long as they aren't dicks about it (i.e. drinking on the train, smoking in restaurants) has another less attractive side to it. If people are going to be responsible for their actions then there is no real need to baby them along.

Hopefully I would hit the wall before my feet got to the hole

Gutters are often quite large and deep here, stumbling into one in a drunken state would be fairly painful (I haven't yet). Many side roads have large ditches with no barriers and not really enough room to make a mistake, I have never seen a car stuck in one of them but I can see it happening all too easily.

I realise this is a bad example but i took the photo because it had the railing and so stuck out to me

Especially if there are Japanese that are as half arsed and haphazard as me.