As some of you know, AFF runs on top of a service called CloudFlare to help protect the site against internet attacks of various kinds. It seems that AFF was down at several points during the day which stems from issues on CloudFlare's network. They released a postmortem blog post detailing what happened at http://blog.cloudflare.com/todays-outage-post-mortem-82515 which basically just boils down to a technical failure that they managed to fix. Some users in some parts of the world may still have issues accessing AFF but it seems to be resolved for the most part.

So I get PMs and wall posts every now and then letting me know of a plagiarism issue or problems with another user and I always tell them to use the site's contact link. The reason for this is because I'm not on here all the time and I'm probably not even the best person to go to for these. If you use the site's contact link, every moderator will see the issue at once whereas messaging one of us personally will not guarantee a resolution. Only come to me directly with technical issues since these are problems no one else can solve other than me.

Anyway, I've been in Japan for about two days now and I'm still seriously jetlagged. A few things I've learned in my short time here is that Splenda isn't common at coffee shops. So if you're diabetic and like your coffee sweet, you'll have to bring your own Splenda packets. I'm not diabetic but I avoid sugar. I just learned to enjoy my coffee black.

Another thing is that everyone encrypts their wireless points so it's not as easy to hitch on an ensecured network as it is in the U.S. I'm impressed actually. Good for them to be so security-conscious but not so good for me since I have yet to sign up for service and I just bum off connections from friends with portable 3G hubs. If you don't see me around much for the next few days/weeks, then you know why.

Food is good. Better quality than even some upscale Japanese restaurants in NY so it's worth the trip.

Lots of TV infomercials for weight-loss products based on dubious science. Same as in the States. At least they don't have the Shake Weight here.