Tim’s Ramblings

Yup.

Once again, I needed a break. I took an hour break today to go grab an early dinner and after doing some shopping, oh look, an arcade.

…sooooooooooooooooooo once again, I ended up at the crane game section. I can’t help it. If I see that I can drop it, I want to drop it.

Here’s my winnings for today. Yes…no luck at the candies this time around (in the past I dropped a LOT – http://www.timarai.com/blog/2007/03/25/my-winnings-from-today/).

A red bloody Gloomy Bear X-mas version. Another doraemon for a friend. The cylinder on the left contains a bright red towel with a very manly saying by a famous Japanese professional wrestler, Antonio Inoki (…this is example #1 of me not particularily wanting it but got it for just 100yen or about $0.89 because I could). And in the middle is a…um…microwave potato chip maker. It doesn’t use any oil. It comes out crispy in the microwave. Um…yeah…I saw it, and I got it for 200yen (basically just 1 try). That will probably go to mom if she wants it.

So yeah…I’ll DEFINITELY be shipping this stuff home.

Now for #2.

This is a display I saw today at Tokyu Hands in Kawasaki. Can you guess what it is???

You sick perverts.

It’s not THAT!!!

It’s various brands of hard shell (and soft up in the upper left) banana cases!! Yes. A hard plastic case specifically designed for bananas. Not only that but this has quite a bit of research put into this. The bananas you see along the bottom and and also loose on the very bottom came out first ealry this year. They actually figured out the best average curve to the banana and also the best curve that would fit MOST bananas and also the average thickness. So MOST bananas will fit perfectly in the case and you can take it anywhere without any fear that your banana will get mushed.

Yes.

Banana case.

Apparently it was quite a hit when it first came out.

But I will be honest. It does look a bit…um…”interesting” eh? (^_^)

Ok. Back to work….wooo…

I think I’ve lost it….

I’ve finally lost it.

Just now, during the lunch break, I read a blog post by Joi Ito (venture capitalist and other stuff) about how he has joined the board of directors of Sanrio Digital. And then I found that he now has an e-mail address at Hellokitty.com. And THEN I read that I can get one too!

…so I got one.

Hell, after all the HK crap I’ve bought for other people over the years, the least I can do is get an e-mail address!

So yes…you may now e-mail me at timarai-at-hellokitty-dot-com!!!!

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

You can get one too!! Go here: http://www.sanriotown.com/main/index.php?lang=us

One warning…you have to pay for e-mail forwarding…. So needless to say, this account for me is for pure novelty and nothing else as I will not be going to Sanriotown on a regular basis to check my mail.

But still.

I have a hellokitty.com address!!

Bwahahahahahahahahahaha!

….*sigh*….I so need to get out more…

I think I’m coming down with a cold. I don’t feel all that good. I ate tonight but after eating I didn’t feel so good. I still don’t feel so good. Grrrrr…. MUST FIGHT IT OFF!!!

Anyway, so many people ask me what I do for stress relief when I’m here in Japan. After all, it’s not like I can drive home and sing all the way home. When home, I don’t have my TV or my games or anything really….

I’d love to say that I go blow my money on alcohol, drugs, and whores….buuuuuuuuuuuuut we all know I’m too much of a p&$#y to do that…and honestly, that’s not really me…. Karaoke that I wrote about before? Maybe…but I haven’t yet and that takes too long especially for this week where I’m pretty much on call with the guys on site at a customer’s production site…

Nope. I go to the game centers here. After all, nothing makes you feel better than spending money. And nothing is more fun at speding money on that gambling. But pachinko is not for me. Too loud. Too smoky. Instead, it’s off to the crane games :) Of course most of you know this already.

This trip, I’m doing pretty good. As usual, most of what I have won so far is not for me. Here is my winnings so far (minus one figure in a box that I forgot to photograph….).

I’m typically pretty sucky at winning the plushies but I’m on a roll this trip. What you see here is my winning from just 2 trips to the game center. I’m not doing so well with the candy but the plushies are dropping like flies. Ok…that’s a bit of an overstatement. Some was a pain to win. BUt to get all of what you see here cost me juuuust about US$45. Not bad.

Alas, almost everything you see there has been assigned a home already. I am only keeping one. The rest are going to others and they all know who they are.

(^_^)

Now to go back to work…more post coming soon.

Went home to do laundry today and while sitting around doing pretty much nothing (other than unlocking mini-games on the DS for my mom who bought the eye training game), she pulled out a can of beer.

The smallest can of beer ever.

A whole 135ml which comes out to 4.56 oz. What the hell?

My first response was “…um…is it for a child?” to which she responded “Of course not!!!”

But really…what else is it for??? They have an 8oz can of coke and such but….4.5oz?? What can you do with 4.5oz? It’s a shot of beer for godsakes!!!

Anyway, it caught my eye. Weird… Anyone have any thoughts to it’s use??? …well…other than for kids (^_^)

So, only a few of you readers have ever been to a karaoke box here in Japan. In the US, karaoke is a group thing and a very public thing. Typically it’s at a bar or something and you get up on stage and sing in front of everyone.

However, here, though there ARE places like that, the more typical way they do karaoke is in a private room. You go there with a few friends (you can go alone too but I will talk about that at the end) and you rent a room. The room is typically pretty small unless you go with a big group. Depending on the time of day, whether it’s prime time or not, the cost per hour changes per person. But basically it can range anywhere from around US$4 to $8.

You go in, and there’s a table with song books on it, 1 or 2 remotes depending on how many karaoke systems are in the place, a TV, and a sound system. They will give you the microphones at the front desk. You sign in with your name and how many hours you want along wtih the number of people in your party and they assign you a room.

The one we got was nice. A bigger corner room for the 3 of us. They had a setup too where lights go out and these dark lights come on and the room walls are painted to glow. Cheesy but it sets the mood.

The system is controlled by a big remote the size not unlike that of those trivia machines at some bars like BW3′s. But this one has a full color touch panel. You select your song (this thing is connected wirelessly to a server somewhere) and it beams it to the machine and the song starts with the lyrics up on the TV. The mic had some serious reverb on it so you SOUND good if you try. :)

This place had 2 systems though they both had pretty much the same selection. I swear they had like 100,000 songs if not more. Granted, Japanese songs were the majority but the book for foreign songs were pretty damn thick too. If the Japanese song list book was the size of a typical big yellowpages, the foreign one was the size of the whitepages with the paper just as thin.

They didn’t have Garth Brooks (CTO wanted it). But they had tons of others. And they even had Spanish and Chinese and Korean songs too! The selecton was huge.

The insurance woman didn’t sing. The CTO sang the most (mostly ballads from the 70′ and 80′s…yes…even Journey…oh, and a few Billy Joel too). I sang too though!

Hell, had to get into the mood right? And they even had punk songs too!

I am not ashamed to say I sang 2 Bad Religion songs, 2 metal ballads by the Japanese metal group Seikima-II, Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name” and “Dead or Alive”, went cheesy a bit with Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight” (hey…the CTO sang some cheesy song so I had to follow suit), the ending theme song for Cowboy Bebop, ACDC’s “Shook Me All Night Long”…and I think that’s it. Maybe.

And did it all sober too! Yes, we ordered drinks but I didn’t drink enough to even get buzzed.

I have to admit. Just letting go and belting out “SHOT THROUGH THE HEART AND YOU’RE TO BLAME” is pretty damn therapeutic. It’s a great stress reliever. I was dead dead tired when we got to the karaoke place…we got there at 8:30pm thinking of staying maybe an hour…we left at 11….

Now, up until recently, going to karaoke was a group thing. But recently, starting from around 2005 or so, people started to go to the karaoke boxes alone. Called “hitori karaoke” or “single karaoke” (shortened to “hitokara”), it’s actually pretty popular these days apparently. People just want to go let off some steam in a private room, by themselves, without having to listen to someone else sing off tune or worried that you are doing a bad job. You never have to wait for your turn. You can start a song and decide you don’t like it and stop it and move on.

I can see the draw. I really can. Go in, order a drink, check out the songs, and then, for about an hour or an hour and a half just belt out some tunes.

See…in the US, I do this in the car. Driving home from work, if it’s a particularily long day or late night when NPR is not doing their news stuff, I will toss in a CD and sing all the way home. But here…you can’t really do that when you commute you know? So this is the way to do it.

Will I ever do it? I don’t know… But I can definitely see the appeal. And if I’m having a long day and I happen to walk past a karaoke shop…who knows?

So yeah. For people who come to Japan with me and you really wanna sing, I now know how the system works :) If you don’t mind hearing ME sing, then I won’t mind hearing YOU sing (^_^)!!!

For godsakes….

How many times do I need to be affected by typhoons this year????

Yes…for those of you too busy watching California going up in flames, a typhoon has breezed past the east coast of Japan today. It did not make landfall but it brought with it and incredible amount of rain and insane winds. It has not stopped raining since last night…and it’s after 6:30pm now! Today all day it was just POURING but not much wind. That all changed around 3 when the winds started picking up. Now, outside of my window, it’s gale force winds (I had trouble walking straight) and torrential downpour. Eeeeeeeeeeesh…..

So this would be #3 for me this year. #1 caused me to not leave New Jersey a few months ago. Then last month a typhoon made landfall smack into Tokyo while I was here. And now today, it has made my one and only full shopping day into one incredibly wet one….

Yes…I wanted to get shopping done and I did to a certain extent. But as I said, it did not stop raining once and remember…in Tokyo…you WALK everywhere. My jeans were soaked. My jacket was soaked. My shirt was soaked. I have a big foldup unbrella but it’s not big enough…. It was just wet. Wet wet wet.

So…to people that ordered stuff. I will TRY to get them for you. I got some and to those people, they got an e-mail already. Otherwise…we’ll see as tomorrow I’m off to my parent’s place so there won’t be much shopping.

Anyway, other than that, I am exhausted. Especially yesterday.

Overall, the show went very very well. We got some good interest and the 2 talks went incredibly well. Got lots of meetings in there too along with customer visits and it was very very productive.

BUT, this also means a hell of alot of talking for me. On Friday, we had a talk from 10:30. I was translating for the CTO. The presentation was literally finished the day before and I got the translated version from Y at the office that morning (she ROCKS). But this also means I was pretty much doing this blind. He knows what he’s going to say since he wrote it. I had the morning really to look over the Japanese words and look over the presentation to make sure there are no issues. Of course, there was a crisis going on that morning so I really only got to look through it once.

But this is where experience counts. I’ve worked with our CTO for over 10 years now so I know where he’s going and I know his quirks when giving presentations. That helped since he tends to go off on tangents that are not on the slides during talks. The room was packed. Well over 100 attendees. And afterwards, we got some very good responses and even some pretty big organizations coming up after the presentation literally telling us that they weren’t thinking of putting in a software system like ours until this talk and now they want to work with our partners to get it into their organization.

Who knew a talk (albeit a very well done talk) about optimizing imaging would get such a response!

Anyway, that was a full hour and a half. Then we went to lunch with a few guys from our partner office…which meant more translating for me. Then a sales meeting with a potential at 1:30 until 4pm…and that is literally NON-STOP translating…and I was translating for lots of people this time (there were 8 of us including me)…7 people to be exact.

By 4, I was beat…but wait! No rest yet! Another technical meeting from 4 to 5….so more translating there. And then a high level executive business meeting from 5 to 5:30… AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

I was beat. Thankfully my CTO understood and pretty much left me alone on the long walk back to the train station…. It was nice not to talk :)

Then, though I was exhausted, it was him and our industry specialist’s last night in Japan and he wanted to go to a Karaoke box. BUT, that will be another post (this one is getting too long so I’m breaking it up)

(^_^)

Too tired. Past 11pm. Long long long long week already (will get into that when I have the energy to post…let’s just say it involves airports, visas, Chinese embassy, and shoes….) and I have a 1.5 hour presentation to give in Japanese with our CTO (I am translating and runing the demo). So yeah….need sleep.

(This post is being put aside right now as on TV they are doing a game show/variety show on new shortened Japanese words…and these are messed up)

But I feel like I need to post something…sooooooooooo here’s a preview.

Once again, it’s food. Mmmmmm food.

#1. Dessert! We’ll start with dessert first. Behold, “ground black sasame icecream”!!

You’d first look at it and go “ew…” but to be honest, the ground black sasame’s strong flavor, nutty-ness, and slight bitterness went really really well with the sweet vanilla ice cream. I’d eat it again. It was really good!

AAAAAAAAAAAAnd #2. The one that MOST Americans would go “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA” if it landed on their table at the restaurant….

Split and grilled fish head. This one was a type of snapper I think…but they do this with mackerel, tuna, and many others. Why? Because the meat in the fish head is one of the best pieces of meat on the fish. Alas, there’s only a little bit compared to the rest of the fish soooo it’s a bit more difficult to get to.

Oh, and the eyes are the best part. Very soft, full of gelatin, and yummy…though if you accidentally bite down on the lense you can crack a tooth… :)

Yes. I had the left eye. Quite tasty!

Anyway, more pictures and such to come. Some from TV, some from dinner, some from other things.

Oh, and my CTO approved of me buying a “portable” printer. It’s small. Very small as printers go. But still not as portable. But I got it since I needed it and I can keep it at our partner’s office when I’m not here and other coworkers, when they come here, can use it too!

http://www.usa.canon.com/consumer/controller?act=ModelInfoAct&fcategoryid=184&modelid=14723

This is not really for home use. But I printed 28 pages in about 10 minutes in grey scale. Not bad really. Now I can print out more accurate maps off the internet and not get frickin’ lost…..

Anyway, now, it’s 11:30 and I need to send off 2 work e-mails and go to sleep.

Good night!

Yup. In my desperate effort to stay awake (it’s 8pm now…I don’t want to go to bed until 9pm…that way when I get up before 7 tomorrow I will have my body adjusted to my work hours in Japan) here is one of those “mash-up” posts. A little bit of everything. Oh, and I apologize if some of the sentences makes no sense…remember…no sleep….

So…first, a picture from the nearby department store.

Yes. A giant jack-o-lantern. In Japan. It’s funny since a bunch of people asked me before I left if we did Halloween in Japan and my answer was “Noooo. People know about it but you don’t really see it around much.” Obviously I was wrong. We don’t do any trick or treating here. But the marketers sure picked up on it. Never underestimate the power of the marketing departments. Eeesh.

Now, there are still tons of pics including the new Kit Kat flavor, Japanese rice balls, and TV shots. Click on the link below for the entire post!

Continue Reading »

Just checking in.

Made it back to Japan safe and sound. The plane ride was relatively uneventful. Watched CSI and Die Hard 4. Alas…I couldn’t find my Bose headset…might have left it at work? Not sure… So I broke down and bought one of those Sure ear buds. It’s not really noise cancelling like Bose. More like noise blocking like those foam ear plugs. I like them. They do a great job blocking the airplane noise. Unfortunately though…since it goes in your ear, you can’t really keep it in for 13 hours at a time… With the Bose, I can pretty much have it on the entire trip but with these it started to get uncomfortable after about 6 hours.

…though I suppose most people won’t keep them in for that long…

Anyway, other than that, ate Cliff bars and avoided airplane food. Breezed through customs and immigration. And got into the hotel around 4pm. Going to take it easy for a bit and then head out for an early dinner, buy some drinks, and then chill for the night. Didn’t sleep much Thursday night and I think I slept a total of about 2 hours on the plane in 30 minute shifts so I’m pretty beat.

Tomorrow is a bit insane. It is NOT a relaxing Sunday…. I’m off early morning…probably around 8am…and head to my parents as they have my undershirt, socks, underwear, and my laptop bag. I also have presents from my sister to mom, things for my dad, and our family dog’s ashes (…very sad….). BUT, I can’t just relax at the parents as my CTO gets into Japan around 3pm. So I have to go back to the airport to meet with him and then head back to the hotel. Then my job as translator/guide/employee starts. Got meetings starting early Monday and got a presentation to give in front of 150 and 250 people on Monday and Wednesday (eeeeeeeeeek). Oh…and I have nothing to show. Dear god…. Yeah…no pressure….

It’s been over a month since I was last here. Kinda weird actually. I got used to living back home again. :) But I got the same room as before and I know I’ve been here too often when, as soon as I got in, I was like “oooh, new comforter and new art on the walls!”. (-_-)

Anyhoo, that’s that. Hope you all have a good weekend! Go Indians!!

Well…almost 10pm. Soon the other programmer will be here to join me.

Yup. Once again it’s another late night. Though this time there was an added bonus of being here at 7am to work with the Japanese partners too! Woooooooooooo (please read that “woo” with sarcasm).

But we’re making progress. Which is good as the deadline is approaching.

Alas, I am missing the baseball game. As we are not allowed to do streaming audio, I am resorting to the auto-refreshing scoreboard page on MLB’s site. Indians up 2 games to 1. And right now, it’s the bottom of the 5th and we’re up 2 to 0. Nice!

Sorry Japanese pitchers on the Red Sox…this time I must cheer on Cleveland :)

One bummer today though… I went to see a townhouse today at lunch with my sister and the realestate agent. It was…it was BEAUTIFUL. 2400 sq. ft. $245K. Corner unit. $20K less than what the rest of the people who were selling wanted and those were middle units. Huuuuuge kitchen. Big living room. Great 2nd floor. 3 bedroom. 2.5 baths. Nice right? Too good to be true right? This house was a relocation so they were trying to get rid of it. Only on the market for 5 days.

I wanted it. I really really wanted it. But since it wasn’t the owner selling it they needed a loan pre-approved (not prequalified) and with a contract. I didn’t expect to find a place I loved so soon. So I started to see what I can do to get preapproved before I leave for Japan on Friday. Even going so far as to tell her to tell them that even if I’m only prequalified, I will be willing to put down %20 or more on down payment to see if they’ll go for it.

But…my dreams were dashed. Someone beat me to it and they took the contract. 5 DAY ON THE MARKET!!! In this realestate market? Unbelievable. Booooooooooooooooooooo.

So alas….back to square one. But it’s ok. Gives me more time to get my loan approved and take some time to look. Still a nice 1850 sq. ft. one available. Even a BEAUTIFUL 1700sq. ft. ranch (though it’s close to $300K sooo..maybe not…and only 2 bedrooms). There’s also a pretty big one that’s built but the inside is still being constructed for aroud $275 but it’s a middle unit so…we’ll see. And of course there is more that I haven’t looked at either. And with winter coming, the market will be in my favor.

But still…arg….I wanted that place. I feel like I lost a bid on eBay or something… But as my sister repeatedly pointed out to me…”THIS IS NOT LIKE BUYING A TV!!!” :D

Ooooooh. Holy crap..we’re up 6-0!!!! WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

Ok…back to work. :(